The (supposed) trend of Staycation, which consists of staying home during the holiday period and acting "as a tourist in your city" while saving (that is, the poor man's golden cage), is not the same as the very sad, sordid, and always surprising experience of the Rodríguez. "Aka," the furtive trips back to Barcelona while leaving the wife or relatives in the summer resort, and one takes the opportunity to fulfill some work obligation or some other commitment (not always confessable). When, for one reason or another, you have to go home, even if only for one night, you have the opportunity to directly discover the city's underbelly and its most gloomy, most unkempt, and abandoned version: not abandoned due to the vacation exile of a good part of the population, but abandoned in the sense of neglected, of someone who gives up, of someone who gets lost. Barcelona in August is a lost junkie in an after-party who still doesn't know if it's daytime and can only pretend to still look a little pretty and walk a little upright. But no, I've known you from way back. I've known you from before you left just a couple of weeks ago, and this isn't you. Come on, I'll call you a taxi. Yes, don't worry. Yes, me too. Yes, still.
Rodríguez means night. Basically. By day, Barcelona is just the shop window we all know during the year, but more given over to the invasion of foreigners, to "quality tourism" that is of such quality that we only know how to quantify it by the money in their pockets. But the Rodríguez territory is at night, when it gets dark and the party concentrates exclusively in Gòtic dives or Irish pubs, and the city streets expel their inhabitants to wander with more cockroach or rat-like behavior. The asphalt is empty, the silence is like a coronavirus pandemic where you can hear a sneeze four streets away, and the ground is so overheated from nothing, so burned by loneliness, that both the trees and the lampposts and the benches and chairs seem to have to stick to you with a kind of omnipresent rum and coke.
People walk slowly and reluctantly, sometimes with a fifth in hand, sometimes just conversing about the most trivial trifles, it could be a cliché to say they look like zombies but it really seems like they have lost their soul and only act or speak by a mechanism of diabolical inertia. Four American women head their outfits towards the hotel, the pizzeria waiters roll cigarettes on the table of former customers, and a cat reminds us all of our orphan condition. A Rodríguez is, even if only for a few hours, a lost child from the Peter Pan story or a hooligan transformed into a donkey from the Pinocchio story, a kind of restless soul with a ticket to the Greek islands, or a kind of homeless person with a second residence.
A Rodríguez is a kind of restless soul with a ticket to the Greek islands, or a kind of homeless person with a second residenceThe ass of Barcelona, as long as we don't see it because we turn towards the Upper Empordà or towards the rest of the world, turns out to be dirty and lifeless and sticky, and so lacking in grace that it could be as much the ass of Naples as the ass of Martorell.The night is already dead in Barcelona during the year, now that it is no longer ours it appears as the true queen of the cemetery.An immense theme park that has gone bankrupt, a desert with red neon light and an endless bar where you can make half a joke with half abarmanthat I would close right now if it weren't for the fact that you're drinking the most absurd beer on the planet.Rodríguez is ordering a pizza and sitting on the sofa in your underwear, not exactly because you feel like it but because Barcelona is doing the same and you can only mimic it.
You would almost stay, to loaf around without a job or benefit or place to go, believing that the city is yours or that it's much better when everyone leaves. The city has gotten a fat ass while your belly grows at full speed, and so you go on believing that you have found the perfect partner with whom to grow old while there are those who, deluded, prefer to find perfect places to feel young. They can talk about summer loves, but you are a summer snake and you know that Instagram has a trick. You have no filters, you have no sweeteners, you are bitter like the stones of the city and you know that having hope is not much use. And in that militant abstentionism you discover the long journey of bad mood, of bad temper and of our inevitable destiny underground with the worms. And you behave like this undoubtedly because Barcelona, for the first time in the whole year, offers you no symptom of wanting to resemble a home. Your home.
Tourist in your city? Bingo loser in an unknown and mediocre city. That's why, with your permission, I'm leaving. We'll call each other, but we both need a little fresh air.