From time to time, I suppose due to maternal inheritance, I compulsively and arbitrarily get up with a sick frenzy to get rid of objects and papers. It is a demented custom that has led me to get rid of tons of useless documents, books that perhaps had moved me but that I will not have time to devour again (I leave them in the Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, to sweeten the eternal martyrdom of our patron saint) and all kinds of souvenirs. I keep practically no photographs of myself, of friends, or of my ladies (not even of my quiet days in Harlem); I adore the past but I don't want to stuff it into trunks so as not to fall into nostalgia and, when I breathe my last, all that will remain of me are thousands of articles in the virtual cloud managed by a few Jewish geeks. Perhaps that is why I feel a secret fascination for people who have enough patience and tenacity to guarantee us memory in their wardrobe.
Archivists are, basically, the apotheosis of this kind of endearing little animals that save our indifference by keeping as many things as possible. This past week, Barcelona celebrated the Setmana Internacional dels Arxius 2026, and I took advantage of it to escape the unbearable papal sausage (in a somewhat half-hearted Olympic version and, as such, notoriously socialist) towards the peace of its documentary cemeteries. Thanks to Glòria Gimeno, director of the Arxiu Municipal Contemporani of our city, I was able to glimpse a beautiful exhibition of original urban plans by Antoni Gaudí. I greatly enjoyed seeing how, with the passage of time, documents that our genius presented to the administration as a simple condition to obtain a building license are now authentic works of art. Thus, for example, the original plan of Casa Milà, a tremendous smoke that ---seen from above--- looks like a cloud full of restless sweets.
Reviewing Gaudí's work in the archive, I am especially engrossed in Mr. Antoni's projects that never came to fruition, Romanesque-style lampposts and Proustian kiosks that Barcelona's bigwigs must have received with as much incredulity as the Viennese received Beethoven's last quartets. Amidst so much beauty, I stop kneeling before the document where Josep Batlló commissions the integral renovation of a house that everyone now knows (and through which the inhabitants of the Eixample can no longer wander, because there are always herds of Japanese and other animals touching their picarols). This is a brief essential document, a witness to an industrious bourgeoisie that addressed the world in Catalan and had no fear in promoting the most daring architects of its time, a clear contrast with today's rich people, Castilianized, proudly illiterate, directors of absurd newspapers.
Barcelona has a splendid series of archives and very dedicated but excessively entrenched professionals; this is not their responsibility, but also due to our idleness in discovering the treasures they guard with such science. In the case of the present archive, the Municipal provides advice for an astonishing total of 15,000 documentary consultations each year and, if all its archives were lined up, we would reach 23 kilometers of paperwork. Their task is not only to weave a wardrobe of very important patrimonial interest, as certified by the case of urban plans (which accounts for 85% of user consultations in the city), a type of document that serves as the notarial act of urban planning that should always be regulated by power. The Municipal archivists have had their work cut out for them, because the digitalization of urban plans arrived in 2019, certifying that the administration foresees innovation in adagio sostenuto.
The International Week closes today at the Canòdrom with the V Conference on Historical Research of the Neighborhoods of Barcelona, a meeting of patrimonialists that should not only be a den of experts in the field, because there they will discuss the documentary resources related to the city that the City Council has (it must be remembered, they are available to all citizens!). Before going to an event of this type, one thinks that everything discussed there does not concern us; but when I visit the archives with other fellow citizens, I always find common people very interested in our urban, architectural, and so on past. For next year, I still have to discover the district archives, which have also opened their doors (unfortunately and necessarily, for small groups) and where they surely must keep treasures like these beautiful Gaudí plans that were almost forgotten.
Today I sing "Archives, Oh, Archivists!" to vindicate the hidden work of people who are not like me, a compulsive squanderer and hoarder of transcendence, and who guard things for us so that, having overcome so much laziness, we have the kindness to get off our butts to admire them and celebrate the luck of being able to consult them. Love them, fellow citizens, the factotum of this your Punyalada commands you.