When people ask me, what do you miss most about Barcelona, I don't say the sea, nor Las Ramblas, not even Escribà's chocolates… I always say: the schedules. The personal, professional, and social distance.
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Journalism is a dog's job if you don't like staying up late and, above all, if you don't like staying up late with the same people you've been dealing with all day at work. Even so, I remember my years as a journalist in Barcelona as a relatively placid bubble. It wasn't like in New York, where, unless Lehman Brothers fell or Bin Laden was captured, by five in the afternoon all newsrooms are already empty. But in Barcelona, be it ten or eleven at night, it's possible to turn off the computer and rush home, to see your family, your partner, or your cat without having a beer or a wine with anyone you don't want to.
In other cities in Spain, it's not that they force you by putting a corkscrew to your neck, but we understand each other: either you're in everything, or you're not in everything, and if you're not in everything, well, that comes at a price. Advantages: with charisma, people skills, and, above all, a good liver, you can get much further than one might expect or assume in more rigid contexts. Disadvantages: being well-liked can become much more important than working well, let alone being right…
I have always thought that, say what they may, remote work is unlikely to prosper massively and sustainably in Spain, because that would require overturning an entire culture, an entire work ethic, based on having coffees, on walking the halls, on conspiring… Much more than on everyone doing what they have to do, as best as possible.
I honestly believe that this whole confinement trauma has tested our socio-labor culture. Also our cunning. For example: what excuse is there for the AVE to have eliminated, not just the cafeteria car and of course the trolleys that offered something to eat and drink, the newspapers and even the headphones for listening to music and movies, which, by the way, have always been dispensed in perfectly individual sealed bags? Could it be that with the excuse of the virus, costs are being cut, by the way, without lowering the ticket price in the slightest?
At Sants station, in the name of Covid, the left-luggage service has been closed. The logic escapes me, unless we start to enter the treacherous world of subcontracts of subcontracts, where it is well known that nobody knows anybody…
Not long ago I found myself in this distressing situation. I arrived at Sants around noon, after spending the night in Castelldefels. I had a meeting and lunch in Barcelona and a train back to Madrid in the afternoon. Obviously, I wasn't planning on dragging my suitcase up Passeig de Gràcia and down Diagonal, but rather leaving it in left-luggage. What was my surprise -- and my horror…-- when they told me: there isn't any.
My mind traveled terrifyingly back in time. Specifically, to a morning in 2005 in Madrid. I had to do something at the United States embassy, on Serrano street, and there I went with a backpack on my shoulder that, after an hour and a half of queuing to get to the door, they told me with complete nonchalance: you can't enter here with a backpack, the backpack cannot enter here. No detector for this, nor for that, nor a locker to leave it, nor anything... It hadn't been that long since the 9/11 attacks…nor the 3/11 attacks, for that matter.
What do you do in the middle of Madrid's Salamanca neighborhood if they won't let you into the place you were going because you're carrying a backpack (with all your personal belongings inside), but they also don't want to store that backpack anywhere? Do you throw it down a sewer? Desperate, I asked in several bars and shops in the area, in vain I opened my backpack and offered to gut its contents in front of anyone. Many knowing smiles and much "fend for yourself," but absolutely no one helped me…
With such a trauma on my back, never better said, you can imagine my desolation at finding myself in the middle of Sants station with a suitcase and no left-luggage. Now what?
I looked to the sky for inspiration, like in Serrat's song… And I remembered the Barceló Sants hotel, right above the station, where I sometimes stay overnight when I'm in the city. That wasn't the case that day… But off I went, with my best smile on the outside and the procession within. After all, what is hysteria and civil distrust after a terrorist attack, compared to everything that Covid has unleashed…
Let's see. I won't say it was easy. To begin with, the hotel reception gentleman, very correctly and politely, warned me that what I was asking for was impossible. Not even by paying. That they couldn't take luggage from anyone who wasn't a guest. This and that... When I insisted and pleaded, asserting my status as a recurring hotel client, I read in his eyes that he was not authorized to make an exception even in that case.
.... But I also read that, don't ask me why, he was going to make it. I saw him check the register, verify my last entry, and at all times I was very acutely and very gratefully aware that all of it was a comedy, a charade, that this good man was performing, not so much before the hotel rules, as before himself.
Sometimes it's infinitely appreciated to find less good vibes, more social distance... And a greater desire to do things well. Without the need to like each other or know each other at all.
Because yes. Because decency exists.