For weeks, I had been feeling what the corny call burnout; writing the daily article felt like a mountain, tabs accumulated in the endless cascade of Mac windows, I felt as if my brain was falling asleep at every corner, and even the most exciting leisure caused me sudden laziness. Apart from all this, and as happens to many fellow citizens, I was angry with Barcelona; the guiris have returned en masse to Ciutat Vella, we have the whole neighborhood under construction (a reminder of the year we have left until the municipal elections) and, when you enter a shop in El Call and say "bon dia", you feel like an alien. Often you get angry with the city and (there is nothing more disgustingly Barcelonian) you go to your second home to disguise yourself as a runner and breathe fresh air, hoping that what you call rural life, which has nothing of a peasant, will cure your crises and help you meditate on the future.
It had been a long time since I had left Barcelona for a week. Doing so, I have confirmed, for the umpteenth time and with an idiotic face, that vocational Barcelonians, no matter how much we disdain the city and enjoy criticizing its tolls, are incapable of doing anything good outside its streets. Life away from the city is anesthetizing, ideal for justifying naps and reddening the skin; but indigenous Barcelonians are incapable of living beyond the seas (perhaps only in cities like Manhattan, which are also a grid) and when we wander through the Empordà we all make that face of a badly walked dog that strives to breathe pollution again as soon as possible. Getting angry with Barcelona (criticizing the works on Via Laietana and believing that I would have organized them with much more skill than the mayor) is part of our ethics and the favorite sport of any urbanite: I complain, ergo sum.
For months, even years, we Barcelonans have felt especially uncomfortable. This is a city that has grown with fairs and Olympism, and I would say that the lack of an anniversary makes us lack mystique. At the same time, I believe something as simple as we are getting older and we enjoy grumbling. Indeed, it is hardly credible that millions of people visit Barcelona annually if our city were such an unhealthy, unsafe, and unstimulating place. Many of us have the feeling that Barcelona is losing momentum in the ranking competition of the world's most innovative and livable cities, it is true, but I often think that we wouldn't want to live in a European Silicon Valley either, and that, deep down, if Barcelona became one of those cultured, clean, rich, and sleepless northern cities... we would end up fleeing from here, tired of so much civilization, good manners, and the first world.
A week ago, I even thought about whether I should imitate many contemporaries and friends who have left Barcelona and who sing to me the joys of living in the provinces; everything is cheaper (it's not very difficult) and, after all, you can live like a raja teleworking and returning once a week to the capital to remember how awful the traffic is. I have often thought that my colleagues were right and that I could do the task of writing just as well while contemplating a much bluer Mediterranean. But today, when I went out to the Liceu stop, although surrounded by oceans of helpless tourists and with desert heat, just seeing the Church of Pi and the beauty of its square, I was so happy that I was tempted to hug the group of Italians who, as usual, were making a procession before the effigy of Santa Eulalia, preventing me from entering my house. Afterwards, I smoked from the balcony, bathing the ancient stone of the neighborhood in smoke.
Finally, I heard the incorrigible urge to write La Punyalada. In Barcelona, of course.