I usually celebrate the Diada by travelling mentally to the other side of the Atlantic (even more so this year, when my fellow citizens decided to spend the eve of the holiday doing their best to trade blows like yokels at the Fossar). By the time I arrived in New York, four years after the 9/11 attacks, I was living for a while in a residence on William Street, in the heart of the Financial District, a few hundred metres from Ground Zero. In the mornings the neighbourhood had little life to it, a kind of untamed hum; but by nightfall everyone cleared out, and I loved walking around the old site of the Twin Towers. It's hard to picture now, but back then you could wander literally alone around this ghostly place, watched over by two or three drowsy cops. The clamour of the dead still echoed there (their remains forming a sinister salad of dust that the authorities had dumped at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island), and even a people as unaccustomed to lingering grief and as quick to rebuild as Americans barely knew how to conceive of the pharaonic memorial designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind.
I did go back to New York once or twice (in fact, I'd say only once; I'd love to walk its streets again, but leaving the place makes me cry and feel like a failure) and never went back to my old neighbourhood to see the 9/11 Memorial and its museum. Maybe it's a yokel's instinct, but I find relief in holding on to the memory of that infernal hole that kept me company on so many nights: that genuine symbolic-traumatic cave from which, according to some illustrious philosopher colleagues, the twenty-first century was born — an age that would slowly renounce globalisation and bring about a resurgence of mistrust 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 this later, because what I saw with my own eyes was the boundless power of dread and how hard it is to raise mausoleums in places where the wound is still bleeding. When I think of Ground Zero, I don't remember only the heroic firefighters, or the falling men who plunged 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've often thought about that neighbourhood where I lived for a while, before decamping to my beloved Harlem. The commemorations barely register with me, to be honest, because the only thing that has genuinely pained me is realising that it must be about twenty years or so since I last set foot in New York. Physically, that is, because mentally speaking, I'm still feeding off the energy of the most beautiful city in the world and still consume its magazines, podcasts and other stray ends of culture, even though I actually live here in Barcelona which, wonderful as ever, is going through a dreadfully grim time at present. But today, more than anything, I feel like writing that, twenty years on, I still walk through Ground Zero every night; all the more so on the Diada, as I write this piece and can perfectly well sniff out the stench of dust and be blinded by the lights that once kept watch over the silence. It's funny that this hole shares a certain kinship with the country where, unfortunately, I've ended up living, since, as everyone surely knows by now, there's a notorious fraud who passed herself off as a victim of the tragedy... and she was Catalan!
I don't know how long it will be before the nostalgia becomes unbearable, and I let myself drop back into the city and walk to my favourite spot to see the silhouette of the Towers rendered in water and light. For now, I'm resisting the temptation; besides, the freelancer's poverty helps enormously, since my friendoes over there tell me Gotham has become a city only millionaires can afford. A bit like ours, brimming with tourists and expats, and carrying an enormous wound of its own: being the capital of a stateless tribe, with no ministries, secret services or army. Maybe that's why what I remember most about New York is the rubble and ruins; it must be that, for my sins, I was and remain horrifyingly, insistently Catalan...
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