The Dream of the City Read online

  The Dream of the City

  Andrés Vidal

  Translated by Adrian West

  The great temples have never been the work of a single architect.

  —Antoni Gaudí

  The seven exterior columns of the porch of the Glory Façade will symbolize the seven attributes of the Holy Ghost; at the bases will be the seven deadly sins and at the capitals, the virtues that are opposed to them.

  —Isidre Puig Boada

  The Temple of the Sagrada Familia,

  Barcelona, 1986

  PROLOGUE

  Legend has it that when the devil tempted Jesus Christ on the summit of the mountain, the two of them were in fact situated on that elevation that rises up over Barcelona.

  “Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoravens me,” the devil said. “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

  The idea of betraying his principles never crossed through the heart of Jesus. Nevertheless, the Latin expression left its name upon the mountain: Tibidabo, “I will give thee.”

  Saint John’s Eve was approaching, and that Monday in 1904 had started off sultry and overcast. Juan Navarro was driving the streetcar on the line that joined the Plaza Urquinaona, in the very center of Barcelona, with the Plaza Ibiza in the neighborhood of Horta. From there Tibidabo could be seen in its proper proportion, neither so close as to distort the perspective nor so far away as to lose the sense of detail and prevent Juan from once more recollecting the legend. Without a doubt, it was the greatest story he knew concerning temptation and the strength to resist falling into it. Sin or virtue, the eternal choice.

  Juan Navarro liked to let his mind wander while he piloted the machine contentedly. For him, getting a stable job as a streetcar conductor, with a salary of three and a half pesetas per day, had been an achievement. The grueling days stretched on past eleven, but he didn’t care. He had left his hometown of Teruel—he would say, sardonically, that he had fled—to escape the job of itinerant farm laborer and a life of poverty and hunger. To be the conductor of a means of transport as modern as the streetcar was more than he had ever hoped to achieve. In fact, as a child, he had dreamed of being a carriage driver. Now, at forty-two years of age, he felt he had fulfilled that childhood wish. He didn’t transport goods, but people. Lots and lots of people.

  From the beginning of his life in Barcelona, Juan had sensed that something magical, some sort of angels or benign beings, had taken care that so many people could find a way of living without any conflicts beyond the small scuffles he saw around him from one day to the next. Some time later, after he had stopped driving flesh-and-blood vehicles—that was what people called the omnibuses and the little horse-drawn riperts—and began to pilot those mysterious electric monstrosities, he nearly became convinced that his madcap idea about the celestial spirits was true. How else was it possible to speed up and slow down a vehicle that hauled so much weight without doing harm to the passengers? How else was it possible that even the movements of the carriages, bicycles, and pedestrians ceaselessly crossing the tracks appeared coordinated? In the village, a cradle of ancient superstitions, they used to talk about the souls of earlier generations: maybe that was the answer. “Respect your ancestors,” his aunt used to say. “They watch out for you.”

  “Good day, Señor Juan,” a peculiar young man said, taking off his beret. Juan smiled and raised his hand to his visor.

  “Hey, Genís, heading to work already?”

  The boy nodded with a smile and showed Juan his shoeshine’s box. At sixteen, he talked like a little kid. Many people in the neighborhood treated him as such, but not Juan, and for that reason, every time he got onto the streetcar, Genís would walk from the back up to the front, positioning himself by the ticket taker.

  “You’re looking good,” Juan said to him with a sidelong glance.

  In spite of his heartening theory concerning guardian angels, he couldn’t take his eyes off the street: The Barcelonans had begun to lose their fear of the streetcars and would cross the tracks almost without paying attention. Juan had a quite respectable record: Only once had he run over a young cyclist who had ridden in front of him without looking. The resulting wounds were no more than a bit of bruising and the witnesses all came to the conductor’s defense. Still, every morning, Juan prayed for the protection of his guardian angel and encouraged himself to avoid any misfortune.

  “My father says the same, you know?”

  Genís smiled again. A thin thread of saliva fell from the corner of his lips, and he cleaned it off quickly. Juan knew about the boy’s mental disability; his condition was a malady far from rare among those who lived in the poorer mountainous regions. Genís’s family had moved to Barcelona in search of the sea and iodine, which could contribute to an improvement in the boy. If he hadn’t been treated, he could have been worse. Some people said the boy would never recuperate completely, but for Juan, that didn’t matter; Genís was one of the best bootblacks in the city and he worked as many hours as necessary. He could use a good bit of encouragement.

  They were already coming up on the Plaza Urquinaona. In that area, Juan had to be doubly cautious: the masses, the horse carts, and the first automobiles flooded the city’s center. Genís said good-bye and stepped off in search of his customers. Other regulars followed his example and bid Juan farewell before getting out. Little by little, new passengers replaced the ones who had arrived at their destinations. After a moment, the streetcar was again nearly full. Juan whistled; the heat was still bearable at these hours, but he knew that soon it would be intolerable. The breeze was barely blowing, and the slow pace of the streetcar didn’t help.

  He started on the way back toward Horta, enjoying his observations of the city as the streetcar whizzed past. When they headed into the Ensanche he could see how the weave of the streets was evolving, many of them still without houses or apartments. They reached the Calle Mallorca and there, he took the opportunity to gaze over at the Sagrada Familia from his seat.

  The Nativity Façade of the Expiatory Temple—it was called that because it had been built thanks to the contributions of the faithful—was growing bit by bit, but already there was something about it that overwhelmed the onlooker with feelings. The thin pillars over what would become the apse pointed to the sky like deadly arrows; undoubtedly they left neither the Creator nor the pedestrians who passed by there indifferent. It was said that the eighteen irregular towers that were one day to crown the temple would reach infinitely higher than those pinnacles, but now, in 1904, nothing could be seen of the four that would later surge up from the Nativity Façade but the bases and the scaffolding surrounding them.

  Juan couldn’t imagine how those masses of stone piled one atop the other could remain balanced for what was destined to be an eternity. The construction was rife with gaps: some looked like simple apertures, others enormous lancets of light. On one occasion, a passenger educated in material sciences explained to him that the temple was attempting to extol the figures of those saints who had once ascended to heaven, and at the same time evoke the spirits of the angels from the earth. That reaffirmed Juan’s thoughts and led him to conclude that it was, without a doubt, the most sacred work that was being constructed in Barcelona. For him, this Gaudí was a genius, no matter how much everyone disliked him.

  “Juan, Thursday is the fair. Have you been thinking about where to go?”

  The person asking was Señora Luisa Requena, a widow who had been fishing for an opportunity with him ever since she had learned he lived alone with his son. Her flirtations, although devoid of any ill will, left him uncomfortable. As much as possible, he tried to kee
p sorrowful thoughts at bay; despite the setbacks in the past and the uncertainty of the future, Juan thought it was right to live life with a bit of happiness. And with great courage, his brother, Raúl, would add.

  “Well, Luisa, I’m not yet sure. I have to see what my son says. But with the little we earn …”

  “Enough, enough,” she said, coquettishly touching his forearm. “Two grown-up men on their own need to save their money, no?”

  A smile lit up Juan’s melancholy eyes.

  “You can’t imagine, señora; it’s hard enough paying the rent on the apartment.”

  “That’s because you don’t have a woman in the house taking care of the bills for you. …”

  Juan coughed and rang the bell to alert the inattentive pedestrians to his passage. Actually, Señora Luisa didn’t look so bad. She was always elegantly dressed, with a kerchief or a shawl over her shoulders. Although she was no longer young, she was well preserved. Nothing like the women in the village, whose hard work made them change from young girls to old women overnight. The men, too, he corrected himself.

  “Well, you should know that in the Modern Theater in Gracia, for fifty cents they’ll be throwing a nice event with music and dancing. I’m planning on going with Agustina, my sister. She’s on the lookout for a husband!”

  As she unleashed a soprano laugh, Luisa covered her mouth. Juan scratched his forehead under his hat. He imagined the two sisters must be peas in a pod. The woman reminded Juan of the festival’s time and place before she got off.

  He sighed, relieved, as he watched her go. Since he’d been single he hadn’t felt the desire to get close to another woman, and that had been for ten years now. … As far as the festival, he wanted to talk to his son to see if he’d like to go to the cinema. He’d looked into the prices, and that day they were preparing a special series of events for one peseta. It was a lot, but Luisa was right, they should treat themselves a bit. Everyone was talking up the new invention of the cinema and he wanted to see it himself. But it was possible that his son, a strong-headed eighteen-year-old nonconformist, would prefer to go to some dance without his father. If that was the case, he wouldn’t hold it against him; despite his youth, Dimas had been working several years now already, and Juan didn’t mind doing something on his own.

  In this, Juan agreed with a parishioner from the tavern where he normally dropped in to have his glass of wine at the end of the workday, a schoolteacher everyone referred to as “the professor.” He always said they were in a time of changes, of grand inventions, asserting: “Don’t be mistaken, my friends, these inventions are here to stay, these aren’t just passing fads, believe you me!” Juan liked the guy, since he was the first one to come out in defense of the new electric trolleys. Around 1899, when they first appeared, a lot of people resented them. Electricity, an invisible force that created sparks from time to time, frightened more than a few people. They feared sitting down in the trolley the way they feared those terrible chairs the Americans had invented, the electric chairs.

  Juan’s day passed by placidly, with nothing worth remarking upon save the suffocating heat and the clouds that would not move aside to permit a glimpse of the sun. The dim light affected his eyes at the workday’s end, but since there was nothing he could do to change it, he shrugged his shoulders, scratched the back of his neck, and rolled a cigarette that ended up going out as it hung between his lips. On his way to Calle Mallorca, he entered the neighborhood of El Campo del Arpa. He glanced from one side to the other, looking for his son, who normally came home around this time. Though he worked in the streetcar depots close to Horta, on the Calle Camino de San Acisclo, Dimas preferred to walk back, to stretch his legs.

  Juan felt happy: He was working as a conductor and his son as a mechanic, making three pesetas a day. But often he got the feeling that it wasn’t enough for Dimas. He supposed it had to do with his youth; he himself had decided one time to break with his uninspiring fate. To be a mechanic seemed like a great job, a position Dimas wouldn’t lose so long as he attended to his obligations and that might even allow him to move up in time. “These inventions are here to stay,” Juan had once repeated to his son over dinner. A job in transit guaranteed your bread and a roof over your head, regardless of the harvest, the weather, or the whims of some snot-nosed boss.

  All at once, despite the humidity, a shiver ran down Juan’s back, which was damp from the heat. As he readied to make the turn on the Calle del Dos de Mayo, he was struck with foreboding.

  At first, he wasn’t sure where the feeling originated; it was like not being able to identify the source of a sudden noise. He even imagined a distracted angel, its back turned to him, its attention centered on anything except what was about to occur. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the movements of two boys who had hidden behind an acacia. The way they looked at the tracks gave them away: lots of kids put coins or stones on the rails to see what would happen. If they were coins, they were flattened and that was that. But if they were stones … Juan had to decide right away, and he thought it was best to brake. Too late.

  The trolley began to wobble. Time seemed to sop. The clattering was followed by a movement in the front part of the streetcar that shifted it to the right. Juan tried to shout at the passengers to shift their weight to the left to counterbalance it, but everything happened so fast, some began to jump out the doors. The brake was useless now. The wheels on the left side had risen up and those on the right side had jumped the tracks and were stalled. Juan grabbed the controls, like the captain of a sinking ship who refuses to abandon his post. He sensed the distracted angel had returned to him with exasperating slowness and, despite its providential gesture, could only raise its arms to the sky and impotently regret what was about to happen.

  A dull and irritating noise flooded the street, followed by screams and unexpected wailing as the streetcar tipped. In moments, the dust of the tramway rose up, forming a spectacular cloud around the overturned vehicle. Neighbors came over to help the passengers, who tried to get out as best they could. Inside, a number of bodies lay there, immobile. Juan Navarro was among them.

  Dimas came over when he heard the racket and still had time to see the cloud of dust. The trolley from the Horta line had overturned, the very one his father drove.

  With his temples pounding, Dimas ran to the crowd that had formed. Thanks to his tall, strong build, he managed to shove aside the gawkers, many who were praying, and throw himself into the tangle of boards and iron that were what remained of the streetcar.

  “Father! Father! Are you there? Father, it’s me, Dimas!”

  He looked from one side to the other, terrified, searching for his father in the streetcar to see if he was all right, if he had made it through the danger.

  “Father!” he cried when he saw him.

  A policeman helped Juan out, dragging him by his left shoulder; the right was coated in blood. He was still alive. Dimas crouched down and took Juan’s face in both hands: his father’s skin was cold, with a slightly gray color, and he had an absent gaze, seemingly gripped with fear. Dimas tried to calm him down; he took off his jacket and put it over him. Juan cried out and closed his eyes for a moment when his son touched his wounded shoulder. Dimas went on talking to him while he looked around for help. Another policeman tried to get him to move.

  “Let’s go, kid, let us do our jobs,” he told him, taking him by the elbow. Dimas pulled away brusquely and freed himself from the policeman’s grip.

  “Don’t touch me! He’s my father!”

  At this outburst, another policeman came over, his club in his hand. His companion made a gesture to calm him down.

  “Easy, Officer; the kid’s upset,” he said. Then he turned to Dimas, trying to get him to move away. “Don’t worry, we’ll take him directly to the Holy Cross Hospital. You can go there.”

  Juan seemed to react. He looked numbly at his son and said in a th
in voice: “I’m all right. Listen to the officers. Don’t look for trouble, just go there now. …”

  Dimas’s eyes were on fire and he clenched his fists in rage. He watched, powerless, as the two officials picked up his father without any special consideration and put him in the carriage. Inside, another man with head wounds waited there, sitting upright, and a woman lay there unconscious.

  The sun, in the meanwhile, began to set, casting a red glow on the clouds festooning a section of sky over Barcelona. Thus arrived the evening hours of the city that had inherited the tibi dabo, where good and evil spirits frivolously threw down their cards.

  It was possible that the army of angels Juan Navarro imagined did exist. If that was so, then on that afternoon, one of them had gotten sidetracked, allowing its infinite whiteness to be stained little by little with the shy gray that discolored the clouds. And perhaps, with that simple transmutation, a story rose, the story of the sins and virtues surrounding two families.

  I

  DILIGENCE (SLOTH)

  The failure to do things well is often motivated by sloth, the nature of which is more often intellectual than material.

  —Antoni Gaudí

  CHAPTER 1

  Ten years later, the big city, darkened with shadows, passed again before Juan de Navarro’s eyes. It was a winter evening in 1914 and the streetlights of the main streets downtown glimmered like fireflies above the cement. Streetcar line 46 was moving toward Horta. The pedestrians were indifferent to the machine that would shoot off the occasional spark. Juan found it impossible to look away from the passing landscape; how it had changed in recent years. In the meantime, the streetcar continued gliding over the iron tracks almost without a rattle. That day, the first of March, was coming to a close, with little light remaining on the horizon where the beautiful, jagged massif of Collserola rose up. Juan remembered then the Sundays in the past when he used to go up there, amid the smooth, slanting limestone and the cane apple trees, to enjoy a picnic in the countryside and the glorious view the location offered. When his family was normal, of course.