I. One last meal at the family table, before we part ways. Noodles bathing in a boiling pot, I unwind lines of wisdom my grandfather leaves
me. "You are more talented, have always been more talented than you would tell yourself. I saw this when you were young, when beneath the lush mango groves
I didn’t know what to expect of Barcelona before I arrived. All I knew was that it’s Spain’s second largest city; that it lies somewhere on the western edge of the Mediterranean; that its residents mostly speak Catalan; and that it’s home to one of the world’s most successful football clubs (which is, of course, mès que un club). Granted, this is probably more background info than I would’ve needed to explore the city regardless.
Now that we’ve been here for two days, though, I realize that everything we’ve seen—well, almost everything—resembles someplace else I’ve been. Like the train ride here from Madrid, I keep experiencing déjà vu, seeing sights and features in Barcelona that look as though they’d been transplanted from another of my travels. The Arc de Triomf? You know it’s spelled with a -phe, right?The Passeig de Gràcia? Isn’t that Catalan for “Champs Elysées?” That beautiful wrought balcony—haven’t I seen it in Brussels before…
And on it goes, with almost every passing moment, until I start to wonder: what if Barcelona were a city of mirrors? Or better yet: what if it were a city of metaphors—a record of reminders where I’ve been, a sprawling repository of familiar sights in new settings?
It’s such a strange structure, this tower built by the ‘archi- tect of God,’ that the mixture and mess of wrought sculpture defying every law of nature conceals what’s in the picture and isn’t—the birds.