Barcelona
September 21st 1995
Autumn Equinox
I'd been sleeping really late the last couple of days - till midday at least, but that morning i woke up before eleven and went out with Joanma for a coffee before going to have a look at En Linea LLiure, the computer bulletin board system, or BBS, which was based not far away. I had a bit too much coffee that morning, and nothing to eat except some olives, which was never a very good idea, as it made me extremely edgy for the rest of the day when i did things like that.
We spent a few hours at the BBS. I checked it out a bit and Joanma copied some files off it onto floppy disks for me to copy onto my computer. By the time we left, i was feeling mildly spun out from the combined effects of the coffee and staring at a computer screen for a few hours. We went home and had some food, which helped, but as the day went on i felt weirder and weirder.
Later on, around dark, feeling increasingly deranged, i went out for a walk, not really knowing where i wanted to go. In fact, there was nowhere i did want to go, but i just couldn't stay in doors any longer, as the claustrophobia was starting to seriously warp my mind.
So i ended up wandering around in a daze in the nightmare concrete maze of Barcelona. Then i thought, it's the equinox, i want to be in the bush, surrounded by trees, not in the city surrounded by concrete, electricity, motor cars and hundreds of thousands of crazy people, trapped in their city madness. I was stuck there though, as there wasn't really any easy way to escape at that time of night. I thought of going to a park, but it didn't seem very inviting, city parks were a bit depressing in their own artificial and imprisoned way. I decided that more than anything i needed to get drunk. That wouldn't change much, but it seemed like an appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. If i couldn't celebrate the equinox in a more appropriate place, then at least i could celebrate it as far away from this place as it was possible to get without actually leaving it. I'd buy a small bottle of spirits and go to the beach. That seemed like a reasonable idea.
But it wasn't an easy thing to accomplish. It was getting late and most of the normal daytime shops were closed. I wandered around looking for a small bottle of spirits, but they just didn't seem to exist. It's possible they don't make anything but full bottles there, i don't know, it was so long since i'd spent much time in that part of the world. Anyway, it had started to rain in the meantime and it wasn't looking like the best idea in the world to go to the beach, but i wasn't too worried, somehow working out what was wrong and deciding what to do about it had begun to clear the craziness out of my head anyway. I still wanted to get pissed, but it wasn't out of desperation any more, more out of the desire to celebrate the equinox. I walked down one of the narrow streets on the other side of the Ramblas from the Barrio Chino, looking for a shop i'd seen before that sold alcohol and was open at that time. I didn't like it over there, it had been seriously gentrified in a sort of way, and was very brightly-lit, full of tourists and expensive restaurants and nightclubs.
While i was walking through that area, a man walked up to me acting weirdly, repeating something incomprehensible to me, more or less under his breath and making strange movements. He lifted one knee up, in a kind of mock attack and i glanced down at it to see what he was doing. As i looked up again, i noticed out of the corner of my eye that he quickly withdrew his hand from the top pocket of of my shirt. At that point i just carried on walking, giving up trying to work out what he was up to, as i knew now. You'd have to be mental to carry anything of value in that pocket, and fortunately i'm not that kind of mental! I suppose he must strike it lucky enough to make it worth trying though. The funny thing was that normally i don't look like the sort of person it would be worth trying to rob, but Veronica had given me a bright and newish-looking Guatemalan shirt last time i'd seen her, as i was down to my last shirt and she'd wanted to get rid of some of her stuff before she left the country, so i was looking a bit less of a derro than i normally did!
Anyway, when that happened, i realised it was one of those nights. A night that would be much more safely and happily passed indoors. It was looking like the rain was going to get heavier anyway, so i turned around again, not for the first time that evening and headed in the direction of home. On the way, i walked up and down one street quite a few times, trying to find somewhere that sold smaller bottles of alcohol than whole litres, but i didn't succeed. In the end, i settled for a bottle of white rum and headed back to the flat.
I wasn't really intending to stay indoors, as the place was getting too claustrophobic to stand, but i didn't want to carry a whole bottle of rum around with me. Instead, i decided to transfer some of it into a small plastic mineral water bottle i'd picked up on Chamartin railway station in Paris and filled up from the toilet tap there and had been carrying with me ever since. This was a lighter and less obtrusive container to carry around the streets with me.
Anyway, not long after i got in, the rain got stronger. And the effects of the rum, combined with the air-cleaning effects of the rain and took the edge off the desperation that would have made me go out into that wet weather and wander around the streets with just a bottle of rum for company. After a while, i heard a sort of clattering noise coming from the hallway, which i assumed was Joanma coming in the front door. But after a little while, when he didn't appear and the weird noises were getting louder if anything, i went to investigate.
It was hail flying through the kitchen window and beginning to cover the floor. I closed the window and just as i did so, i rush of water came down the flue above the water heater. Holy shit! i thought, this is turning into a bit of a storm. I quickly closed the hall window, which, although it was at a completely different angle to the one in the kitchen, was letting in a shower of hail too. Back in the living room, it wasn't quite so bad, although a small ammount of rain was coming in the double glass doors, which looked as if they should have led out onto a balcony, but had a railing on the other side of them, a few feet in front of the vast concrete wall, which provided the whole of the view from the flat.
Well, i thought, i might just go down and stand inside the street door and watch the rain. I poured some rum into my plastic bottle, put my jacket and bush hat on and went down stairs. When i got to the bottom, i was surprised by the sight of a large puddle of water flowing under the street door. I stopped and looked at it for a while, a bit bemused by this development, and then walked through it and opened the door.
The sight that met my eyes when i opened that door was incredible and i really wished Joanma's flat was at the front of the block so i could have watched that scene all night. The road was like a river, with fast-flowing brown water filling it over the top of the gutter, which was quite a deep one, and stretching between the walls of the houses and shops on either side of the street. As i watched, a couple of silver metal chairs, obviously recently standing outside a cafe up the road somewhere, washed past on their sides. It was this river that had been making the puddle grow rapidly as it flowed under the door. Of course, with the door open, it rushed into the building at a much faster rate. As much as i would have loved to watch this river flow down the road all night, i didn't feel like wading around in it for very long and nor did if feel i should keep that door open any longer than i needed to. It wouldn't be me that had to do the clearing up afterwards, and i didn't really want to contribute to the work of whoever it would be.
I'd never seen anything like it before though. It was a cheering sight for me. Here was nature, making a very definite impact on this horribly artificial environment that had been constructed to keep it at bay. This storm and the flood it had brought on had changed my mood entirely. Well, the rum might have helped, but whatever it was, the deranged, lost confusion i'd been feeling before the rain started was completely gone now.
I went back up to the flat and thought i'd like to listen to some music. But i was just on the point of putting a Pogues cd on when the power went off. Yahay! this was getting better and better. Fortunately, i always carried a lighter, even though i didn't smoke, as i was used to being in places where there was no electricity and you needed to light candles all the time, and i'd noticed some candles around somewhere earlier on that day. I lit a candle and sat there in the low light, feeling happier than i'd done for days. This was better, the pissing rain and a power cut. The city can be bearable at times!
My computer had its own battery, which it would run off for a couple of hours, and to amuse myself and satisfy my warped sense of humour, i got it out and wrote a bit of email. In 1995 the idea of sitting there in candle light, in the middle of a power cut, and writing messages on a computer while the city flooded around me had a certain strange appeal.
A bit later, Joanma came home, soaked and breathless, having just run four blocks through the deluge. A drop of rum was just what he needed too, after that, and we ended up pretty well finishing the bottle between the two of us and sitting up talking for quite a few hours. I had no idea later what we were talking about!
- - -
The next morning, i was still drunk when i woke up, which wasn't really much before afternoon, i don't think. I'd decided i wanted to go to Parc Güell that day, although i didn't particularly feel like doing anything. But then i didn't particularly feel like not doing anything, either, so it didn't really make any difference! I eventually got round to getting out of the house and i caught the metro to Lesseps, which is the nearest station and walked the kilometer or so from there to the park. On the way, i passed an anarchist community centre, i don't know it's name, but it looked like a squat, although it might not have been. It was quite a big building and there was a poster outside it which stuck in my mind. It said (in spanish):
If work was a good thing, the rich would keep it for themselves.
That kept me laughing for quite a while!