Growing up partially consists of loving everything you had disdained as a youth. For many years, perhaps due to my urbanite and notoriously anticlerical condition, the persistence of the sound of bells in Barcelona's churches seemed incomprehensible to me. I understood that some nostalgic person might want to maintain such a sonic abnormality in the villages and most remote places of what the pretentious call "the territory"; but it seemed to me a dreadful habit to preserve that obsessive and noisy cling-clong in the civilized neighborhoods of a Mediterranean capital with first-world pretensions. I even remember some adolescent (and therefore idiotic) article I had written when the Govern, or some other instance I don't remember now, had proposed the country's bell towers as candidates for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. You tell me if one can be so foolish.When I landed on the streets of El Call a year ago, I persisted in error. At home, we live surrounded by a true symphony of bells: from the Cathedral, we hear the sound of Eulalia, Honorata, and Tomasa; I can also hear –in a temporal/tonal lapse that would have delighted my beloved Viennese avant-gardists– the gongs coming from Sant Felip Neri and Santa Maria del Pi (a sonorously extraordinary place that is one of the most extraordinary masterpieces of our Gothic art). The orgy of rooms and hours not only configures a perfect ordering of the day, a ruled paper on which time passes from an agonizing indeterminacy to the exact mathematics necessary to live; fundamentally, the sound of the bells is a perfect companion to distract oneself, write, and let the passage of time become reverberating sweetness.Even at night, when by the grace of my prejudices I had most feared the sound of the bell towers, its solemnity accompanies my rest as if the Virgin Mary herself filled the pillow with air. I considered citizens who said they needed the presence of bells to fall asleep crazy; not only do I certify the demand, but I can affirm that the neighborhood bells have given me much more peace than my beloved Diazepam and Fluoxetine. In an increasingly noisy city, with a nauseating and lethal acoustic pollution (caused not only by automobiles, but by the persistent obsession of fellow citizens to shout and share with pedestrians their dreadful music or, even worse, their telephone conversations),the bells are such a strong source of order and peace that not even the communists in the City Council have been able to annihilate them
The neighborhood bells have given me much more peace than my beloved Diazepam and Fluoxetine.
The sound of the bell towers has nothing immaterial about it: it is of a solidity that can be chewed and causes a well-being as essential as the skin itself. As I write La Punyalada, the neighborhood chimes play in a sequence of semitones that even Schönberg himself could not have imagined. I hope that all of them, whom I have never seen (I like to keep the mystery of a disembodied voice), someday not too far away if possible and without bothering the neighborhood, will ring something just for me.
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