Call Me Zebra(40)

The Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation had oxygenated my mind. I walked down Passeig de Gràcia. There it was: Casa Milà, that vertiginous building designed by the very same Antoni Gaudí who had designed Park Güell. I stood on the street gawking at its undulating facade, at the spiraling figures of rock that emerge from its curved roof, which resemble medieval knights and soldiers wearing gas masks. I thought to myself: According to Benjamin, martyr of thought, we must always be prepared to confront the adversities of outer life which sometimes come from all sides, like wolves, the brutal winds of the future through which the dust of the past will come blowing back. My solitary walks, I reiterated to myself, are designed to resurrect the past. In other words, I am a Flaneur of Death, walking through the city, examining the palimpsest of time.

Farther down the Block of Discordance is the Casa Amatller, designed by the hairy-chinned Josep Puig i Cadafalch. I inspected the floral and neo-Gothic motifs, the stained glass windows, the intricate tile work, the ochre shutters, the peach and white and red tones, the Arab-and Sephardic-inspired asymmetrical wooden doors engraved with a star-shaped design, and again I thought of that word—star—and how it is only one letter different from the word scar, and I cried a little. An old banner, faint, weather-beaten, barely legible, hung from the terrace of the building: BUSH NO GUERRA NO SADDAM NO. The banner looked abandoned, a relic of the past. After briefly protesting the war in Iraq, the rest of the world had moved on while hundreds of lives continued to be eviscerated every day. Those who survive the long war, I thought, will carry on with their hearts extinguished. Like me, they will spend the rest of their days gawking at the world as if they were already dead.

I stood there, alone, reflecting. My father, who had been quiet for some time, sounded out his old warning: Child, there is nothing worse than dying a stranger. It occurred to me that my father’s maxim will remain true as long as the world is full of Cerdàs and that the Casa Amatller, which had belonged to a chocolatier, a man who knew how to find pleasure in life, is a rare disruption in the pragmatic and utilitarian project of a global society that is always lying to itself, trying to outrun the past. I felt a deep calm wash over me as I continued to meditate on the building because, despite containing a plethora of decorative elements, despite drawing on so many architectural styles at once—Romanesque, Gothic, Flemish, Nordic, Catalan, Arabic, Sephardic—the Casa Amatller exudes an air of serenity. Then I thought, no, not despite but because. Because, by virtue of containing various architectural traditions, the Casa Amatller offers us a view of the infinite dizzying pluralism of life; it is a material manifestation of both the interconnected fabric of being and also of the nothingness that contains everything. Not unlike my father’s transcriptions. Satisfied, I moved down to Casa Batlló—Gaudí’s House of Bones,which is to say his House of Death—weeping and laughing in turns.

A gaggle of tourists stood in front of the building, lifting their sunglasses to look up at the House of Bones. The fractured mosaics of the building’s facade were shimmering in the light of the afternoon. The scaled blue roof and the range of colors—aquamarine to gold—and the undulating facade, its smooth ribbed stone interrupted only by oval windows, gave the building the impression of being both fish and sea, animal and element. I felt my body turn inside out. The House of Bones looked like the ridged surface of a beach after the waves have receded and left their imprint on the sand and, simultaneously, like a brilliant undiscovered fish. The tourists moved on. The awe the vertiginous architecture had awakened in them sank below the surface so blithe indifference and automatism could rise again.

“Procession of fakes!” I yelled after them. They were all the same person. It was as though they had read a manual on travel etiquette in order to blend in with one another, in order to form a Free-Floating Nation of Tourists: a thoughtless mass drifting along a grid.

I felt a sudden urge to follow them like a detective. What they lent and denied their attention to, I decided, was a barometer for measuring universal levels of alienation from death, and therefore, I carried on, from literature.

I pursued them all the way to La Rambla. People strutted between the rows of plane trees. They observed the living statues. I sounded out their gait: taa-taa, taa-taa. I sat down on a bench and kept an eye on my specimens. They congregated around a bloody heap. I got up to look. They were taking pictures.

An overthrown trash can, with its contents spilled out—beer bottles, an old bouquet of flowers splattered with blood, food wrappers, pages of a torn and tarnished book—came into view. Gradually, a man, his limbs curled over the severed frame of a bicycle, materialized. His head was missing. He had been decapitated. The bloody stump had rolled away. The tourists I had followed were holding their phones at arm’s length. They were taking selfies. Like apparitions in a nightmare, their nylon lips were spreading into synthetic smiles while in the background a living statue was miming death.

The idea that the world had been duplicated in the virtual plane left me somber and repulsed; I hated that the virtual dimension had been linked to its physical counterpart to form a single continuum and that people had started to move between the two—the physical world and its hologram, the Internet—with the same ease they would exit a highway only to reenter it on the other side of the overpass. I watched the tourists post their photos online and marvel at their image, at their fake selves smiling back at them from the virtual plane. It was as if they needed to duplicate their image in order to affirm: I exist, I exist, I exist. I was bored to death with them.