Gaudi Afternoon (3 page)

I produced soothing noises and promised to find her another hotel if she wanted. Frankie, stage trooper that she was, struggled to cheer up. “Americans abroad, we're pathetic, aren't we?”

And I liked her again.

We ordered more coffee and I decided to have another croissant. The tables outside the Bar del Pi were full this morning: three Germans telling each other travelling stories, a couple of young women in black with art portfolios at their feet, a mother and her grown pregnant daughter, both looking quite pleased with themselves, and a lone scientist with a flight bag on the seat next to him. The flight bag was imprinted with the words EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION.

Frankie took out a scrap of paper from her huge purse. “Well, we might as well get started,” she said briskly. “Here's the phone number I called. What you need to do is get the address and give it to me.”

“How do you suggest I do that?”

“That's up to you.” Her tone was curt, then she remembered the charm. “I have so much confidence in you, Cassandra. Don't mind me, it's probably jet lag.”

I took the piece of paper and went into the bar to use the phone. I would use the only ruse I could think of—I'd pretend I had a wrong number.

“Hello.” A man's voice answered the phone. He was speaking Catalan with what sounded like an American accent.

I asked, in Castilian, to speak to Isabella.

No Isabella lived here, he answered, switching to Castilian.

That was impossible. This was 99-67-73 and Isabella must be there.

She wasn't, he repeated, and made as if to hang up.

I got worked up. That was completely impossible! Isabella had given me this number herself! Was he saying that Isabella would make a mistake about her own number? Then he didn't know Isabella!

He admitted with some irritation that he didn't know Isabella.

This was 99-67-73, I accused. Isabella lived there, right on València, number 34. I had been there, I knew.

This wasn't València, he said triumphantly. It was Provença.

It wasn't València? I allowed a small hint of doubt to creep into my voice. Not number 34?

“Provença, 261,” he repeated, and put down the phone.

I returned to the table. “It's on Provença Street, number 261.”

Frankie looked shocked. “They told you, just like that?”

“No, of course not. I used subterfuge.” With real pleasure I surveyed the little square, the sooty church, the leisurely bustle of mid-morning. “You want to go there right now?”

Frankie lit another cigarette and finished her coffee. “Could you order me another one?”

“The man I talked to had an American accent,” I said. “But he spoke both Catalan and Castilian.”

“Ben only speaks Spanish,” Frankie said.

“Castilian
is
Spanish. Catalan is what they speak in Barcelona.”

“They don't speak Spanish here? Someone should have told me. No wonder they didn't understand me at the hotel desk when I tried to use my phrasebook.”

“They do speak Spanish as well,” I explained patiently. “But Catalan is their language and many people refuse to speak Castilian on principle. It goes back to the years when Franco tried to eradicate the Catalan language and culture. The first time I came to Barcelona, over twenty years ago, all the signs were in Castilian, and you could be fined for speaking Catalan on the streets.”

Frankie was uninterested. “Well I'm sure Ben doesn't know Catalan.”

“Do you have any idea who it might have been? Has Ben ever mentioned a friend in Barcelona?”

“If he had I wouldn't have had to employ you, would I?” snapped Frankie, then she murmured apologetically. “Sorry, I'm not myself this morning. I just don't want to be rushed, that's all. I mean, at least now we know the address, that's the important thing.”

I restrained myself. Obviously I was in a rush, but whether it was in order to collect my two thousand dollars or to overcome the doubts that were beginning to form, was hard to say.

Frankie smoked and drank another cup of coffee. The lovely spring sun beat down upon us and the German tourists departed to be replaced by a woman with a baby in a stroller.

“Look,” she said finally, “It's a little more complicated than I let on yesterday in London.”

Somehow I wasn't that surprised.

“It's not that Ben and I aren't good
friends
,” she said. “But––in actual fact—we're divorced. Everything else is true,” she hastened to assure me. “About his being gay and his family not knowing and us needing to keep it a secret—”

“If you're such good friends,” I broke in, “why would he be upset to get a visit from you in Barcelona? Especially if you're trying to give him something to sign for his family.”

Frankie sighed. “Ben is such an independent person, it's hard to explain. He's independent and… irresponsible. He just gets it into his head to do things… sometimes against his best interests….”

“The paper is something he might not want to sign?”

“Oh no,” Frankie dismissed that idea with a rattle of bangles. “Not if he's approached in the right way,” she amended. “He hates to feel pressured.”

“And he might feel pressured if he thought you had flown halfway around the world to get him to sign it.”

“That's not it at all,” Frankie pouted. “And there's no point in you being so antagonistic.
After all
, it's not like we know it's even Ben you talked to. I just want to know what kind of situation I'm walking into. Isn't that reasonable?”

“Yesss,” I said. “So how do you want to go about this then?”

“I want you to go over to the place he lives and just watch and see who comes in and out the door.”

“Dozens of people probably live in his building,” I protested. “Do you have a photograph of him?”

Once again Frankie seemed inappropriately taken aback. “Oh, ah, no. I should have thought of that.”

“Well, is he tall or short, what color is his hair, what kind of clothes does he wear?”

“He's… medium-height… regular-looking… short hair… He wears, I don't know, normal clothes. Jeans.” Frankie was floundering and I had no idea why.

“So I'm supposed to stand outside this building and look for a regular guy with absolutely no identifying marks?” I rebelled. “I think it's pointless, I really do. How am I going to describe him to you?”

“We'll get you a camera,” she said. “You can take photographs of everyone who goes in and comes out.”

“That should make me really inconspicuous.”

“A small hidden camera,” Frankie said, taking out a gold American Express card.

That cheered me up somewhat. If she had a gold card she wasn't hurting for money. But I added one condition:

“I get to keep the camera.”

B
ARCELONA IS A DIVIDED CITY
. Below the Plaça de Catalunya, a vast square enlivened by fountains and marred by stretches of artificial grass, the streets are ancient and narrow, gradually twisting their way from the modish leather and shoe shops, gorgeous patisseries and restaurants of the Barri Gòtic down to the tenements by the port, to the Chinese Quarter or Barri Xines— a warren of seedy hotels and squalid
hostales
, with bars on every corner and long strands of laundry draped back and forth across streets where sunlight never comes. There are social divisions all the way down the Ramblas to the statue of Christopher Columbus on the sea front—the streets above the Plaça Reial are richer than below, the left side of the Ramblas is much safer than the right—but they are differences of degree, not of scale.

Above the Plaça de Catalunya Barcelona is almost another city, built on a nineteenth-century plan, not a Gothic one. In the Middle Ages grandeur meant the cathedral and later the gloomy palaces along Carrer de Montcada; in the nineteenth century the wealthy industrialists and bankers wanted enormous boulevards for their carriages, and opulent banks and shops where the ceilings were twenty feet high. Thus the Passeig de Gràcia is less like a street than an enormous thoroughfare into the architectural imagination of the previous century. Even the sidewalks are wider than most streets in the old quarter, and tiled with slate blue stones covered with swirling shell and flower patterns.

The address the man had given me, 261 Provença, was in the nineteenth-century part of Barcelona, not far from the apartment that Ana had inherited from her wealthy grandmother. I walked unhurriedly up Gràcia, past bank after bank, shop after shop. There was one of Antoni Gaudí's buildings, the Casa Batlló, with its shimmering greeny mosaic facade and rippling rooftop, all curves and waves. Its roof has been called the “reptile's back” for its vertebrae of ceramic pots, joined to make a closed gutter. As I passed it in admiration I realized I wasn't far from La Pedrera, another famous Gaudí construction on Gràcia. It was on the corner of Provença. Some guidebooks call it Casa Milà, but its official nickname is La Pedrera, the Stone Quarry.

Provença. 261 Provença. Ben was living in La Pedrera.

I sank onto a white-tiled, curved bench across the street and considered how to approach the task Frankie had given me.

It's a massive thing, this gray-white, five-story apartment building that dominates the corner with its porous stone facing, thick columns, cave-like windows, and serpentine balconies decorated with thickets of wrought-iron vegetation. Undulating like the reflection of a stone sculpture in water, La Pedrera has a three-dimensional feel that goes beyond architecture; it doesn't give the sense of having been constructed from building materials according to blueprints, but of having risen up from the depths of the ocean.

It would be impossible to photograph everyone going in the main door on Gràcia. There were six tours a day and a constant stream of tourists with cameras walking back and forth. I got up and went inside a music shop to see if I could spy on the Provença doorway from behind a stack of cassettes, but the windows facing the street were covered with posters. I bought a half-price cassette of Gregorian Chants from Medieval Transylvania and went back outside and crossed the street.

Both entrances were wide open so that ostensibly anyone could enter. But in order to actually get upstairs you would have to use an elevator located directly behind the
portero's
desk.

Inside the main entrance I had a chat with the
portero
, who told me that La Pedrera had recently been bought by a bank that was working on restoring it and eventually opening up at least one of the apartments for viewing. At the moment the tour only went to the roof. Who lives in the building now? I asked. One of the original owners, an old lady who bought in when Gaudí was still alive, he told me proudly. And other tenants who've been here a long time, decades. And there are the businesses of course. Any Americans living here? I asked. Oh no. He sounded shocked.

I said I'd come back for the tour a little later and went out again and sat down at an aluminum table outside a bar called La Pedrera. From here I had a clear view of the doorway. I ordered a mineral water and a
bocadillo de tortilla
, and took out my copy of
La Grande y su hija
and my notebook. The camera was on a strap inside my Japanese shirt and every time I saw a likely suspect I snapped his picture.

There weren't too many likely suspects and I didn't know if that was good or bad. The tourists were obvious of course, their cameras a dead giveaway. They walked slowly, with their necks craned up at the enormous glass doors, leaded into amoeba-like shapes that seemed to bubble up from small to large. There was what appeared to be a private school on the first floor, and teenagers came and left at regular intervals. There were workmen in blue, the inevitable cigarettes dangling, and a stone-faced woman who was vigorously sweeping the sidewalk in front of the door.

I had another mineral water and some Sevillana olives and translated from Chapter Twelve:

As the years progressed Cristobel took on the name
La Grande
because of her enormous size. In her youth my mother had been considered almost too frail and small to survive and it was only by eating far past her capacities that Cristobel had managed to hang on to survival so that, in the years to come, whenever Cristobel felt the least panic about death, her own or those near to her like Raoul first and then Eduardo, she would begin to eat as if possessed: ordering enormous meals of corn and potatoes dripping with butter, whole pigs wrapped in leaves, thick fruit drinks and entire bakeries of bread and pies. I, who was never to outgrow my childhood appellation, the Miniature, was revolted and strangely moved by stories of my mother's gross appetite.

I began to get hungry myself and rather bored. I found myself wondering if the man on the phone had said the first address that came into his head. If so, I was in for a tedious afternoon.

Still, it was Frankie's money, and if she wanted to waste my hundred-dollar-a-day fee stationing me outside La Pedrera, it was up to her. It wasn't as if I hadn't had many slow afternoons in my life: waiting for a ride in Afghanistan with two teaspoons of water in my canteen; waiting at the Romanian border while the police went through every single article I owned; waiting in a dusty jail in Tucson when I was sixteen for my mother to show up and claim me as a runaway.

I took photos for two hours and then I ran out of film. I saw mothers with children, well-dressed Spanish secretaries and bosses, workmen in blue and lots of students. I saw couples and families but mostly individuals just going about their business. Almost everyone who went in came out again, until around two when the businesses closed for the
siesta
and some of the residents of La Pedrera came home for lunch.

I didn't see a “regular” American-looking man in jeans, though I saw plenty of teenagers in pre-washed Levis and more than a few tee-shirts and sweatshirts with words in English.