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From a journal—August 1, 1951
PENSIÓN MONTSERRAT, BARCELONA
Glad we came here for my birthday. Different from Madrid or Seville. Isabel's right: Barcelona has even less in common with those two cities than they have with each other. I wonder why. Most people hate Franco here, but people hate him everywhere. Something about this region of Catalonia itself is special, can't tell what yet. Isabel can't either, and she's from Madrid. She keeps telling me that Spaniards from other provinces sometimes feel like aliens here.
Why don't I? Barcelona feels like home.
From a journal—April 23, 1960
HOTEL COLÓN, BARCELONA
Broke up with Isabel in Madrid last week after helping get her brother out of political prison. Glad I don't have to stay on in Madrid; I still prefer Catalonia to Castile. Wrote most of my first two novels in Barcelona (or Majorca, a night's ferryboat ride away), mailed them in. Dreamland reviews, but didn't go back for book-tour publicity either time. It's nine years now since I've been back to the States. Booked a flight out of here six months ago and canceled it the next week. Not for any high-minded reason. I was scared to leave, and I was right—Barcelona is my home. Still don't know why. I'll have to be in New York when the play goes to Broadway—that's soon enough—and I'll come back here as soon as I can. I always will, I think. What in hell is it about this place?
From an essay—January 3, 1969
HOTEL RITZ, BARCELONA
There's something in the city that comes to life in the early winter days, when walking in bad weather is worth it because the quality is magnified in the rain.
I went to a restaurant in the medieval Barri Gòtic ("Gothic Quarter") one night last month when the first chilly winds came, cold but not brutal, the wet air lapping in soft waves over the old city. It was only cold enough for a trench coat, and I'd walked through the dark stone streets of the quarter once before, between high walls and arches, gray inside gray, stone over flat stone: walking there, you're followed by echoes of footsteps that never seem to be your own. I came to the mouth of a small stone patio that had a dead fountain at the center, with two disgruntled-looking ferns standing stiffly on either side like underpaid mourners. There was a light coming from somewhere on the far side of the patio and I followed it, but when I turned the corner I almost knocked over an old woman dressed in black coming from the opposite direction. "Hungry?" she asked, then, reaching behind her as if into the wall, pulled out a little girl who was eating a sandwich. The girl was dressed in stone blue with big ornate earrings that looked awkward next to her face, and the old woman tore off a tip of the sandwich and pushed it at me. "Something for the rain," she said in Catalan, and the two figures disappeared around a building. I went on to the restaurant, a few streets more, and on the way ate the bread she'd given me.
The restaurant was small, only eight tables around an open hearth, with a fire exuding waves of warmth that seeped into the body as though by osmosis. Afterwards I walked back past a window display of meat turning on spits that seemed themselves to radiate heat out into the alley, and when the rain started I put up my umbrella and stood under the stone eaves of a narrow building. Across the trembling mist, on the other side of the street, was an image set in flat stone on the opposite wall, visible only because of the mutilation of light through water and probably aided by my own winter dreams. The carving in the stone was magnified and distorted through the rain, worn away with weather and time, but you could make out the figure of an old woman with her mouth open, standing next to a little girl with big earrings.
Winter doesn't wane in Barcelona; it ends abruptly—and spring appears to be wiping the sky with light as . . .
April 15, 2003
CAN MAÑO, BARCELONA
...gardens begin to produce new life, sap rising, the hard earth shot with threads of pale green, tentative and tender in their reach. Even the sea looks green this time of year, and there are young vegetables strewn in an ocherous circle of patchwork farmland, glittering in the hills around Barcelona until the city seems to bristle with spokes of light. April evenings are candescent and glowing, stung with the sharp iodine smell of the sea filtered through the buds and needles of the Mediterranean pines that proliferate at the water's edge all the way up the Costa Brava to France, dotted here and there in spring with the ridiculous pink of a wild rose.
