Flowers, flowers, flowers

Walking along Las Ramblas, now, is another thing. You no longer bump into waiters (who are also bodybuilders) dodging cars with trays full of liter beers in hand, to reach the tourist sitting at a table in the middle of the promenade. The signs with the various pre-cooked paellas (including the one with frankfurters) are piled up in some warehouse or in the bathroom. Pickpockets can no longer camouflage themselves among passersby. The human statues, who knows where they are.

Walking along Las Ramblas now causes me "vicarious nostalgia", which would be a pleasant variant of "vicarious embarrassment." Vicarious nostalgia is a nostalgia by proxy. Nostalgia for what you haven't experienced. I would have liked to live in that time when buying flowers was the most normal thing. At the beginning of the 20th century, when women and men pinned a small bouquet to their clothes, as if it were a jewel. The era of songs likeNardos ("They don't cost money and this is the first thing to convince") orThe Violet Seller ("buy me this little bouquet, to wear it on your lapel"). I like the florists' stalls, so small and cozy, full of furiously colored flowers.I like, when invited to dinner at someone's house, to give a bouquet of flowers as a gift. I love to see how the florist prepares it, just as I love, when I go to the stationery store to buy notebooks, to see how the clerks wrap them, with such skill and custom.

There are two writers, very different from each other, whom I like very much: Mercè Rodoreda and Dorothy Parker. Both have something in common: they share a taste for flowers that is always present in their pages. From Dorothy Parker I always remember the story A Fantastic Permission (Pedro Almodóvar, let's say, "paid homage" to it in  The Flower of My Secret). The woman waits for the man, who is at war and will come home on leave. Despite the scarcity of food, the woman buys flowers to decorate the house. This gesture she makes, full of guilt, is what makes me fall in love. To her, it seems more important to have fresh flowers in the apartment than food. Because her flowers are beauty. Because her beauty is civility.

Woody Allen came to Barcelona to shoot that movie where the characters lived in La Pedrera and the painters, when they went out for a drink at Els Quatre Gats, still wore their paint-stained shirts. The first thing he did, for the scene on Las Ramblas, was to ask the prop masters to empty it of tourists and fill the flower shops with flowers. With many more flowers. I always forgive drivers who double-park to buy from the flower shops on Valencia Street. When I go to the Mercat de les Flors, at the theater, I always think of this name, which indicates the original use of the space. I don't know if the saccharine movie Notting Hill (some pronounce "Nothing Hill", as if it were The Hill of Nothing) was also full of flowers. They say that Covid takes away the sense of smell. When all this is over, we have to return, disciplined and very joyful, to smell flowers.

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