Summer Camp Hypnosis: Pau Casals Avenue

Pau Casals Avenue is reminiscent of the Jardinets de Gracia, but on a smaller scale. Everything is a bit more modest and less busy. The grass rectangles, the sculpture, the spaciousness of the avenue... At the top, it holds a surprise, Turó Parc, a green gift that seems incredible to exist less than half a kilometer from one of Barcelona's busiest roundabouts, Francesc Macià. Between Diagonal Avenue and Turó Parc, lies the avenue named after the formidable cellist, who is honored with a discreetly sized and softly shaped sculpture located at the bottom, a work by Josep Viladomat.

We leave behind the mega-roundabout of Francesc Macià, where all possible transports dance a dizzying waltz (apart from the more orthodox ones, scooters, bikes, Bicing bikes, motorcycles, Segways, electric scooters...). We head up the avenue: having greeted the master Pau Casals, one must stir to scare away the pompous pigeon colony that lives there. Some neighbor must be habituating them badly, because the colony threatens to become a plague. Flying rats, a friend of mine calls these urban creatures. The pigeons make you look at the crumbs on the ground too much, but they also have the virtue of making you look up from time to time. I notice an arboreal detail that draws a lot of attention in this condensed point of Barcelona: what is planted on both sides of the avenue are pine trees and orange trees. In parallel, buildings with a slight neoclassical essence and a few high-standing establishments and businesses are aligned. Some make it more evident than others that there's money here. There are prominent offices that go unnoticed.

Next to a parking entrance, halfway down the avenue, I come across a group of high school teenagers who seem to be finishing the last days of what must be a kind of summer camp. I would like to sit on the closest bench to observe them carefully, but it's already taken: a man is looking at his camera inside out and doing all kinds of tests, oblivious to the young people's game.

—You can't dodge it!— shouts the monitor, indicating the rules of the game. I would say it's a game of gestural imitations and tag, based on the reference of the monitor's bag located about four meters away. I don't quite understand the rules. I never went to a summer camp, I didn't.

—You can't dodge!— shouts the monitor indicating the rules of the game. I would say it's a game of gestural imitations and tag, based on the reference of the monitor's bag located about four meters away. I don't quite understand the rules. I never went to a summer camp, me.

The monitor seems easygoing and to have authority over the group. I mean, you can tell they listen to her. Two teams are formed. One from each group runs towards the bag. One stops the other and the other has to repeat the gestures of the first one. A shouting match erupts when one beats the opponent by a hair's breadth. Or a comical scolding when someone breaks the rules they've learned by heart and which I still haven't quite grasped. They are concentrated on the game as if their lives depended on it. A couple of tie-wearing gentlemen pass by, looking at them smiling, with a certain indolence. Such is the heat and the contrast of being encased in those suits. Perhaps they too are trying to unravel the rules of the game.

—One, two, three, go...!

It's nine-thirty in the morning at the end of July and I realize I would stay all morning watching them. Them, playing. The man with the camera, practicing positions. And me... me taking note of infinite time, the limitless summer into which those teenagers are poured. Me, feeling like a notary who records a past time, the nostalgia for what has not been lived or for what, no matter how hard you try, will never return. I feel like a notary and I don't feel like one, because the notary records with the mechanical air of cyclical, unappealable repetition. "The laws are the same and they are like this, we can't do anything." The notary does not feel the vertigo and the mystery of the passage of time, of the roller that does not stop and that in the end makes you ask: why me too?

I follow them, hypnotized. The group seems surrounded by a magnetic field that, far from repelling me, attracts me, like honey to bees. When will they realize that the game must not stop? When will they realize that they have stopped playing?

The small square that gives access to the park has the shape of a small amphitheater without steps. Only a row of benches on both sides of the entrance. In the shaded part, three or four people take shelter. One, stretched out. If it were in France, the square would have the archetypal ostentatious monument dedicated to the dead of one of the great wars. This one remembers them, but it is more modest, as is the avenue. And the monument, of ostentatious dimensions, is well away from any warmongering. Also dedicated to Pau Casals, a work by Apel·les Fenosa, flutes and angel wings stand out, and a poem by Espriu serves as a colophon. The teenagers have already left, further into the park, and a strange silence has fallen. It is as if they had taken their youth and a piece of mine.