Three years in: a fire, a death
Dispatch from life in Barcelona
My phone rings, it wakes me up. It’s 6 a.m. My phone shouldn’t be ringing.
I roll over and look at the number. My girlfriend’s sister, Ester.
She asked to have my phone number last week, for emergencies.
I roll over and turn it off, forgetting in my sleepy haze the do-not-disturb rules I set up years ago, and which have never, in all that time, been triggered: if someone calls once, it’s silent; if twice in a row, one right after the other, it goes through.
I close my eyes again. But then my girlfriend’s phone buzzes. She’s in bed next to me. Normally, she would sleep through this kind of thing. She rolls over, answers: sí?
A few seconds pass, and then she sits up. Jesus, she says, in English. I’ve never heard her say that. I’ve also never seen her sit right up after a 6 a.m. phone call. But of course, we’ve only been together three months—there’s probably a lot of things I haven’t seen.
Mid-Afternoon: It is deathly hot outside.
I bring Cooper for the minimum possible afternoon walk: two blocks away, to Plaça Sortidor and back, past the school with the giant colorful mural, el barri és casa—the neighborhood is home. His little paws are starting to feel the hot sidewalk at this time of day. I’m careful to hug the old buildings and stay in the shade.
Back at my desk, I text the technical architects who are now helping me oversee the renovation in the countryside to check on progress since I’ve been visiting family in New Mexico the past month. Not surprisingly, the builder keeps cancelling meetings at the last moment. Progress is assumed to be at a standstill—again.
I haven’t climbed outside in a month, and a small handful of gym sessions do not suffice to keep my body from degenerating. I tell myself it’s fine to rest the joints and tendons through the Summer heat. But meanwhile, it affects my mental health, this lack of movement. And I refuse to become a gym rat. It’s just not in me. But there’s at least half the Summer still ahead in which I’ll have to find some solution.
Voy, ahora voy, she says, and hangs up.
I’ve never seen her move this fast. She is standing at the foot of the bed, looking at me. I’m awake now, definitely awake.
What is it?
I know this is a sensitive subject for you.
What? It’s ok, tell me. I didn’t know if it was gonna be ok, but whatever it was I’d handle it.
It’s that—well, my aunt set fire to the apartment and committed suicide.
If I’d been more awake, I might have reacted more. My girlfriend knows about my best friend who killed himself. It was a long time ago, but we had just talked about it a few days before. I wrote a chapter in my book about him just a month ago, in a very long, emotional day of writing. I cried when I wrote about it, and cried when I told her. I’m still angry at him, I think, even twenty years later.
But I wasn’t at all thinking about that. I was thinking about her.
She leaves the room, goes to the bathroom, I hear her turn on the sink, start getting her things together. I get up also, go pee, go into the living room, where she is putting together her backpack.
I’ll go with you. I’ll take Cooper.
Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure. I’ll just walk with you.
I leash the dog, grab my shoulder bag, and we walk out the door together toward my old neighborhood and hers.
My first apartment three years ago was in Sant Antoni, just a ten-minute walk from where I am now. Sometimes I miss it there: the tiny little balcony overlooking Comte Borrell, the light on both sides, the mercat diagonally across the street. The noise of the festivals passing directly underneath the window.
At the time, I thought the whole Barcelona thing would be temporary. But the city ensnared me. Me enamoré, I told people in year two, explaining why I wasn’t moving to the countryside after all, wouldn’t be focusing all my time on the old stone ruin there. I fell in love.
Here, I found my people. I found a city that is easy to commit to, because it promises so much.
I try to focus on client work, grateful for my air-conditioned home office, installed at the height of last Summer’s heat. It’s been a year here, and three years in Spain all told. Do I have any great insights to share in that time? Something that won’t lurch into a clichéd list of lessons learned, challenges overcome? Something that cannot be summarized as: it was hard, but it’s worth it?
We can see the police lights. We can smell the smoke. We’ve just passed my old apartment on Comte Borrell, but I didn’t notice, like I always do whenever I pass by.
There are two police cars and a large, white city services van parked on the sidewalk.
Those are for us, she says. The lights are flashing.
My girlfriend walks up to one of the police officers standing outside the building, starts speaking in Catalan. I hear the word for ‘granddaughter’.
It is her grandma’s apartment that has been burned to ashes, burned down to the bones. The aunt was just living there. The aunt was mentally unwell. The grandma had to move out—my girlfriend took her in—but the aunt stayed. Now the aunt had set it on fire and jumped from the sixth-floor balcony.
My girlfriend is ushered over to another officer, who asks, “Are you family?” and she nods, and they seat her in the van, with the side doors open, where I can see the rest of her family are already sitting: a surviving aunt, uncle, and cousin. Her sister is not yet back from camping along the coast with the kids.
One of the officers gently puts his hand on my back, says lo lamento. I’m sorry.
I take a seat with the dog on a nearby curb. The sidewalk has chunks of black, charred debris littering the space underneath the balconies. The fire has been put out. This is the near aftermath.
There is a woman talking to everyone in the van. The city’s emergency services psychologist. I can see my girlfriend answering questions, speaking clearly and directly. The first week we were together, she told me she’s good in an emergency. I saw it on our second weekend together, when we went climbing, and someone was injured nearby.
But this is entirely different. I know she has had a lot on her plate. A lot, a lot.
The grandmother fell last week, had been taken to the hospital. Was supposed to be discharged that day, in fact discharged to this very apartment. The aunt was supposed to vacate. We were supposed to move her grandmother’s things this morning.
Instead, this.
I try to nap, can’t. I think about starting one of the many books stacked on the floor, don’t.
I think about writing. There is no way to summarize three years of living in a new country. For some reason, the day drinking and endless croissants piece keeps popping into my mind—written just two months after moving. It was peak European romance:
The question is, if you don’t do things the locals do—day drinking and eating chocolate croissants are simply the most tempting—aren’t you then missing out on the best parts of living there?
But then came the bureaucracy, the construction delays, the culture clashes, the language learning valley of despair. Then the ticket from the police and the realization that I would need to get a Spanish driver’s license FROM SCRATCH.
I never thought about moving back to the U.S., but for sure the uninhibited romance wore off. Eventually, I passed through some vortex of trials and tribulations and came out the other side, still grateful that this was my life, but less rose-colored about it. I wrote Europe could fix you, actually. And last year, after buying an apartment in the old neighborhood of Poble Sec, I wrote Crying on the streets of Barcelona, my ode to everyone in this city, local, expat, or immigrant, who goes through difficult times.
A lot of people seem to be crying today. A girl on a city bike, in full sob mode, careening past me down Ronda de Sant Pau. Another sobbing on the steps of her building at 8 a.m. as I came back from the fire.
I’m sitting on the curb waiting as three police officers exit the building, one of them with a shell-shocked look on her face, as if she’d just seen something new and disturbing, even for someone in her line of work.
My reporter hat is on. Sometimes I feel it’s never off.
In my youth, I worked for three years as a newspaper reporter, a job as well suited to me as any. The hardest story I ever covered: a drunk driver going the wrong way on the Interstate outside of town, plows headfirst into a minivan carrying a family of six. The parents and three of the kids die; the middle child and the family dog survive.
Late at night, I had to call the girlfriend of the drunk driver to ask what kind of man he was. “He was a good man,” she said, sobbing, and then hung up the phone. My editor told me to call her back and try to get more. I told him no fucking way.
A little green city of Barcelona trash truck shows up. A man in overalls gets out with a broom and starts sweeping up the debris on the side of the street. After he shovels it into a black plastic bin and dumps it into his truck, he sprays the street with a high-pressure hose, washing it of soot and whatever else is on the pavement.
A woman comes up to me and asks in Spanish what’s happened.
There was a fuego, I tell her, and her eyes grow wide—un fuego?—repeating the word to herself a few times before puttering off. Later, I realize I probably should have used the other word, incendio.
Later that night—after her sister has returned from the camping, after her cousin has been discharged from the hospital for smoke inhalation, after I’ve done some client work and we’ve both had a short nap—we walk back to her grandmother’s apartment. She wants to go in, to see the damage, to see that it was all real and truly destroyed.
After that, we go for pizza. I’m craving the hole-in-the-wall place that kind of tastes like the pizza in New York, the pizza from my childhood.
That’s down a block, she says. I know, I was born and raised in this neighborhood.
It’s still hot and humid, even at 9:30 at night. We laugh, we make jokes. It’s exactly three months since we met; and nearly three years since I moved here.
Damn, Russell - this is hard-hitting and extremely well written.