The Barcelona Inside Me

Robin Becker

Give me, again, the fairy tale grotto with the portico-vaulting overhead. Let me walk beneath the canted columns of Gaudí’s rookery, spiral along his crenelated Jerusalem of broken tiles, crazy shields. Yes, it’s hot as hell and full of tourists at the double helix, but the anarchists now occupy the Food Court, and the arcadian dream for the working class includes this shady colonnade cut into the mountainside. I’ve postponed my allegiance to the tiny house movement, to the 450 square feet of simple, American maple infrastructure and the roomy mind suspended like a hammock between joists. Serpents and castle keeps shimmer, and a mosaic invitation to the Confectionery gets me a free café con leche on the La Rambla,

where honeycombed apartments bend on chiselled stone and host floating, wrought-iron balconies. I think I’ll move into Gaudí’s dream of recycled mesh, walk barefoot on his flagstone tiles inscribed with seaweed and sacred graffiti from pagan tombs. O, Barcelona of chamfered corners! And chimneys of cowled warriors! From Gaudí’s Book of Revelations, I invite the goblet and the stone Mobius strip to a tapas of grilled prawns and squid. Gaudí’s book of Revelations.