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Sundays are always bustling, around the Sant Antoni market, among the thousands of literature lovers browsing old books at the Sunday market and the children exchanging trading cards on the opposite sidewalk. If we also add that, due to holidays, the market opens on Sunday and the stallholders are frantic selling seafood and other delicacies, one can imagine the commotion there was on December 23rd, when ambulances and fire trucks began to appear at the intersection of Tamarit and Comte Borrell.
Humans are gossips by nature, and if the spectacle catches us idle, well, all the better, so the epicenter of the emergency filled with curious onlookers, while a hardworking urban guard kept them away, stretching a plastic "do not cross" tape to mark a security perimeter. Questions, of course, floated in the air. What the devil could have happened? It can't be a fire, because no smoke is coming out of any balcony, a retiree reflected. Some held the suicide hypothesis, but someone dismissed it, because the funeral home people would have come. "This is because they've already killed another one," said a passing girl.
Even the Jehovah's Witnesses, who usually preach and place Bibles right there, watched the events carefully, forgetting, even if only for a few minutes, that the end of the world is just around the corner.Cyclists, dog walkers, morning retirees on the bench, and parents with boisterous children: the crowd grew in parallel with the questions. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses, who usually preach and place Bibles right there, watched the events carefully, forgetting, even if only for a few minutes, that the end of the world is just around the corner. The fire truck's crane stretched and stretched, until it faced a specific balcony. Attention was at its maximum: couples from twelve o'clock mass watched it alongside an African boy carrying a wheelbarrow full of scrap metal, and a Japanese couple, still with their suitcases at their feet, took out their cell phones to record everything.
Finally, two or three firefighters take a kind of portable stretcher out onto the balcony and tie it to the crane. It takes them a good while, lest it fall into the void. The head of the operation speaks with the person lying on the stretcher, who is therefore conscious, and suddenly the crane begins to lower the four or five floors, at an extremely slow, exasperating speed. Speculations continue. "Perhaps it's an obese person, one of those who can no longer fend for themselves," says one. Finally, the crane lands at street level, and the dozen firefighters, paramedics, and municipal officers, who until now were watching, become active again, even if it's just to show that they too earn their bread, because it's been exactly half an hour since they've only been watching and commenting on the play.
From the crane to the ambulance, the operation will last less than a minute and will end with applause from the neighborhood. Of course, no one will see if the patient is a man or a woman, old or young, and that, unless they have dedicated themselves to opera, they can assume they will never have gathered the attention of so many people.
As I leave, I bump into a lady returning from shopping with a full cart who seems to have been informed by reliable sources. "They told me it's a lady who fell to the ground and couldn't get up," she tells a neighbor. "Since they couldn't bring her down the stairs, they had to call the firefighters." "That's what I like," the other tells her, "that when they don't have work, they help with these things." And the farewell, now without a trace of epic, returns Sant Antoni to tomorrow will be another day: "How about you, all good?" "Yes, look, getting by."
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