In Barcelona there are many gentlemen, but not everyone can be a gentleman of Barcelona. This category fits few people, it's like a tailor-made suit, it comes by nature like the porcine condition and too many aspirants fail because they confuse it with being a dandy. Lluís Permanyer displays this balanced plebeian nobility, this neighborhood aristocracy, more powerful than a royal visit, because there is a type of dignity that would make an emperor kneel. Permanyer is like the ignoble and at the same time sumptuous materials of modernist palaces, the shine of a bottle bottom in a trencadís or a lobby with porcelain railings: secret weapons that hold everything together, that work with what they can and that still give meaning to the city.
I hadn't seen him in a long time: it was on the 6th, in the conference series La Barcelona incómoda (debate sessions on memory and public space) in the Modelo prison, where Lluís Permanyer gave a lesson in elegance, intelligence and humor to the sectarian, obfuscated and tendentious inaugural conference. Mr. Permanyer spoke of Cinc d'Oros square (formerly Victoria, República, Pi i Margall, Loro, Lápiz, Juan Carlos I) to demand that the sculpture Flama, by Josep Viladomat, be reinstalled there, instead of maintaining the current Monument to Nobody: a fact that he associates, at least, "with a performance like those that are occasionally done at the MACBA", but which to me seems an exact portrait of what Barcelona is: an uncomfortable silence.
It does not happen in any other city that has also had a conflictive or warlike past: one only has to see the monument that presides over Maidan square, in Kyiv, which is why it is called Maidan square (look it up in the dictionary) and not Nine of Clubs square, nor Rotring square. You can win or you can lose, you can have monuments to those who fell for one cause or another, but this equidistant, inoffensive and sterilizing tie that Barcelona embodies empties it of meaning and transforms it into a chronic Forum of Cultures. Time has stopped here, no one wins or loses here and it is better to turn the page: the Diagonal itself has preferred to keep its boring and geometric name embodied in the Pla Cerdà, after having tried to rename itself too many times.
Sometimes the city council does decide to demolish statues accused of being slave owners, or to remove royal busts that later (these ones, yes) are put back, but what a gentleman like Pemanyer does is something else: removing and demolishing is very easy, but placing and building costs a little more. You can be very anti, you can have perfectly identified the villain of the movie, but once you have expressed your phobias, it is always appreciated if you propose your philias: what are you in favor of? Really, is the idea to leave Antonio López's pedestal empty for a long time? And if we finally tell Columbus to come down from his high horse, what will we erect a monument to facing the sea? To Liberty? But if we said there is no liberty without justice, wouldn't a monument to Justice be a priority? Oh, no, too many problems, too much black court silk. Okay, then, what if we make a monument to America, which is a concept that encompasses indigenous people, Hispanics and Latinos and Afro-descendants, and those from the south and those from the north and those from inland and those from overseas? Oh, but, we can't be so Western-centric, can we? It would be too similar to having a Christian temple as the city's icon: too unbearable for those who would prefer a rose of fire in its place.
The result of these mental entanglements is that today Barcelona's most central square erects a very erect, nameless, sterile and onanistic obelisk, half republican, half Francoist, half nothing, as anonymous and unsettling as the monolith that appears to the monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey. At most it has a replica in the shape of a shadow in els Jardinets de Gràcia, a work by Frederic Amat, in homage to Salvador Espriu and, evidently, in the form of a hole in the ground, because in this city we are too ashamed to raise anything. Even the five lampposts by Pere Falqués that gave the square its name are now placed in my neighborhood, on Avenida Gaudí, and there are not five, but six. I think I must like the Sagrada Familia so much because it is the only thing we dare to propose vertically today.
It's not just the monument's sculpture, Mr. Pemanyer: it's this absurd message of not betting on anything, of not having the courage to express things, and that leads us to have airports with unchosen names, winter Olympic projects with little popular enthusiasm, third runways that are perfect if they exist and perfect if they don't, downtown trams that no one has ever voted for but will be built anyway, museums from Russia that we don't quite see clearly, that is, that Barcelona ends up not betting on anything due to a misunderstood moral perfectionism, a chronic misunderstanding with popular will and an even worse understood culture of peace. There is a way to disappear that is even sadder than defeats: not having dared to bet on anything. And this not only leads us to have a Monument to Nobody, but, in the long run, to a city of nobody. I suspect that, for some, that was already the point.