Delphi in the middle of l'Eixample

I have met an Argentine arch-poet for whom, apparently, the word impossible does not exist. He claims to have read my cards, the tarot, yes, before meeting me in person. By telepathy, he says. We will have to see if his predictions come true. Hopefully, because they were all very good things…

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But the quality control is going to be extreme, because in my life there is a before and an after the tarot that a very special person was reading for me for years in a very special bar in Barcelona: Les Gens Que J'Aime. A bewitched modernist cocktail bar in a semi-basement on València street, an exquisite rogue corner hidden among the most inflamed corners of the Eixample. Llir entre cards. I used to go there in search of moments of rare anachronistic beauty and also to see Jeannine.

For years I enjoyed having a private witch and seeing the faces people made when I told them. Warning to sailors and incredulous readers: I do not intend to spend a single atom of energy convincing anyone whether this tarot thing works or doesn't work, whether it's pseudoscience, whether it's suggestion or whether it's superstition… Let's just say I don't question manna when it falls from the sky or the law of gravity when an apple dents my head. Jeannine "divined" everything for me with an even unsettling level of detail, end of discussion.

Besides, I liked going to see her for the sheer pleasure of her company, of talking to her. Imagine a Frenchwoman advanced in years, in flesh and in children (she had ten, from more than one husband), who earns a living reading cards for people but who, otherwise, is Cartesian and a freethinker to the utmost. It was a hilarious contrast. Far from adorning her profession with seven veils of mystery, she spoke and acted like the most unbelieving being on earth. I even wondered if her rare gift (because the gift, I tell you, she had it…) was not a macabre joke of karma or even a more elaborate cosmic perfidy, comparable, let's say, to poor Cassandra of Troy, condemned to prophesy everything but without anyone believing her.

Years and cities passed in my life, you go to Madrid, you go to New York, you come back from both places, and not always, but many of the times I passed through Barcelona, I liked to escape, almost almost sneak away to Les Gens Que J'Aime, to see Jeannine. The world was rapidly becoming less magical but she was still there, occupying her strange, solemn center, where clairvoyance and the sharpest reason, witchcraft and the Enlightenment, shook hands.

Many times I went to see her out of habit but sometimes I really needed to ask her something. I was left with a painful disappointment when, a few years ago, I went and not only was she not there, but they told me she would never be there again. That she had retired to some village in inland Catalonia, already old and too sick to continue being the oracle of Les Gens Que J'Aime.

She was replaced by another pythoness, or card reader, or tarot reader, or whatever you want to call it. Professional titles are increasingly fluid, for example, a writer friend of mine found out that the Tax Agency has him registered as a "newspaper delivery person"... Back to the point: Jeannine's successor was a good woman, and I would even say she was good at what she did. Thanks to her, I got rid of a sack of potatoes I had as an almost-boyfriend back then. Etc. But I suppose that at certain points in life, no matter what you do, there are complicities that you already have. In my life there was room for one Jeannine, and I can't imagine making room for another.

A few months after my last visit to Les Gens Que J'Aime, the new one, Montse, called me. I had asked her to let me know if she found out anything about Jeannine. Well, she found out and let me know: Jeannine had died.

We cried together on the phone, and it was something heartbreakingly sweet, clean, and definitive. That's why I think two and three times before questioning someone's ability to read cards by telepathy. Because I've seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…right now.