I usually celebrate the Diada by travelling mentally to the other side of the Atlantic (even more so this year, when my fellow citizens have decided to spend the eve of the holiday doing their utmost to whack each other over the head like a bunch of yokels in the Fossar). When I arrived in New York, four years after the 9/11 attacks, I lived for a while in a residence on William Street, in the heart of the Financial District, just a few hundred metres from Ground Zero. In the mornings I barely spent any time in the neighbourhood, which was teeming with a kind of wild bustle, but at night everyone cleared out, and I loved walking around the former site of the Twin Towers. It is hard to imagine now, but you could literally wander around the area alone, watched over by two or three sleepy cops. The clamour of the dead still echoed there (their remains forming a sinister stew of dust that the authorities had dumped at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island), and even a people accustomed to mourning little and rebuilding quickly, like the Americans, barely knew how to conceive the pharaonic memorial designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.
I returned to New York a few times (in fact, I would say only once; I would love to walk its streets again, but leaving the place makes me cry and feel like a failure), and I never went back to my old neighbourhood to see the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Maybe it is a yokel's way of coping, but I find relief in preserving the memory of that hellish hole that kept me company on so many nights, that genuine symbolic-traumatic cave from which, according to some distinguished philosopher colleagues of mine, the twenty-first century was born—a time that would slowly turn its back on globalisation and bring about a revival of distrust between powers and, above all, between civilisations.
"Selfishly, I remember only the icy breeze caressing me as I crossed the graves, making my way towards Battery Park"
I learned all of this later, because what I discovered with my own eyes was the infinite power of terror and how difficult it is to erect mausoleums in places where the wound is still bleeding. When I think of Ground Zero, I do not remember only the heroic firefighters, nor the falling men hurtling like bullets towards the base of the Towers; selfishly, I remember only the icy breeze caressing me as I crossed the graves, making my way towards Battery Park.
Now that twenty-five years have passed since the attacks, I often think about that neighbourhood where I once lived, before moving on to my beloved Harlem. Commemorations leave me pretty cold, because the only thing that has truly shaken me with pain is the realisation that it has been four decades—or something like that—since I last returned to New York. This is what happens in the world of phenomena, because mentally—despite living in this Barcelona which, although as wonderful as ever, is going through an appallingly disgusting present—I still feed off the energy of the most beautiful city in the world, and I still consume its magazines, podcasts and other such cultural paraphernalia. But above all, today I feel like writing that, twenty years on, I still walk through Ground Zero every night; even more so on the Diada, as I write this article and can perfectly well sniff the stench of the dust and blind myself with the lights that once guarded the silence. It is amusing that this hole should share a certain kinship with the country where—unfortunately—I have ended up living, because, as everyone will know, there is a great fraudster who pretended to be a victim of the tragedy... and she was Catalan!
I do not know how much time will pass before one day, when nostalgia becomes irreparable, I finally allow myself to return to the city and walk to my favourite spot to see the silhouette of the Towers transformed into water and light. For now, I resist the temptation; besides, the poverty of the self-employed helps me enormously, because my friends in the city tell me that Gotham has become a metropolis accessible only to millionaires. A bit like ours, overflowing with guiris and expats, and bearing the enormous wound of being the capital of a stateless tribe, with no ministries, secret services or army. Perhaps that is why, above all, what I remember of New York is the rubble and the ruins; perhaps it is because, for all my sorrows, I was—and remain—horrifyingly and insistently Catalan...
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