2023. 7. 8 Sat
After going through about fourteen rows, finally fished out the only bilingual book I could find at La Central. I sit under the sunshade in the courtyard with palm trees and a mossy rock with water running down from the top - pigeons around the puddle of water underneath seem less urbanised, less repellent - and start to read Lorca; ice cubes melting in the glass of tonic water at the side.
Slowly the sound of the language is rekindled from distant memories. The simplicity and the beauty of the things said are striking. ¿Por qué nací entre espejos? Y la noche me copia en todas sus estrellas...
I’m standing there for quite some time motionless, a staff comes up to me and asks, do you like it? I say to him, I can’t explain it, I find it simply mesmerising. Now I will try to explain.
Mercury is alluringly quaint; its Greek name meant the living form of silver and the ancients used it to brood the elixir of immortality. But what’s truly startling in an empirical sense is to watch it move. It beads up and falls away from any surface due to its uncanny surface tension not allowing its particles to break ranks; but not being “wet” in the sense that water is (I’m thinking of Teshima’s water). Elemental mercury is highly unreactive and at room temperature can evaporate to become an invisible, odourless vapour which will paralyse our nerves. All of this is demonstrated by Calder’s fountain, now on the other side of the glass unlike at the World’s Fair in Paris 85 years ago. A deadly beauty in the genuine sense of the words.
One sees splashed droplets of shiny silver everywhere around the base. Myriads of tiny little islands, each a perfect dome all glowing like the brow of estrellas. The metal’s swift fluidity is remarkable, and yet it’s mindboggling to imagine that an anvil would float like a leaf in that basin of silver. How many atoms of poison have now accumulated in the silent air around the intricate sculpture, on which an endless thread of gleaming snakes runs? After a close observation what dawns on me is an ineludible sense of eternity trapped in a serpentine locomotion. The fountain of living silver will never dry out as a fountain of water is destined to.
Tapas at Cal Pep again, this time in the evening and since I’ve been too relaxed, the line is already long when I arrive. As I finally get seated, the person who sits next to me is also on his own, a man maybe in his early fifties resembling mildly the English actor Ian McShane. He’s friendly with all the cooks and barmen at the bar and we start to talk. I tell him I used to live here for a year as a student and that now I’m working in Berlin. He says, architect? and I to him, yes I’m trying to be. It turns out he is also an architect, a Catalan who’s never lived elsewhere, now teaching construction at UIC. He’s fluent in German too so we keep switching from English to German and then back to English. He asks simple questions in Spanish and I try to answer with broken vocabulary.
He tells me it’s almost impossible to come to these old places anymore now that there are tourists everywhere and there is always a line. The owner Pep who was still at the bar ten years ago has now passed away, his philosophy of offering simple ingredients cooked in simple ways lives on still.
We talk about Jordi’s summer workshop in Cuba. He says the funny thing about its structure is that students cannot be in the same team if they are from the same country. So every team is always a compound of several ‘diplomats,’ each a sole representative of their own language and culture within that circle. I say to Jordi, “Rather like the people who built the Tower of Babel,” he shouts “Exactly!” and laughs. I’m deep in thought.
How can the architecture of the Tower be interpreted? Is the problem of translation of language synonymous with the problem of language? As much as reading is automatically writing and vice versa... And just how decisive was the problem of langue to the (in)completion of the Tower?
I’m too full after all the omelette, fried seafood, clams and tartare. I walk to Plaça del Rei to exploit its surreal night space.
I realise that I’ve drawn that Mirador into my library island.
