In Search of the Musketeer

The Musketeers, the ghosts that help you to be yourself, to mark your own territory, to live in it, are not one, or two, or three, like the three musketeers (of which there were four): they are countless. What matters is knowing how to look for them – a drink, a smile, a look, a gesture, a cry, a tear, a song… – and once found, not letting them get away, sticking together with them, all turned into authentic residents of the neighbourhood, local barcelonins.

One has various identities depending on where one is. In Barcelona, when I go down to La Rambla to buy a sea bass at the Boqueria, nip into Gimeno’s to stock up on cigars, stop at the Carolinas flower stall to pick out a bouquet for my wife, have a drink at Boadas and then hop in a taxi to get home for lunch, I am, I feel, a Sagarra through and through. In Paris, where I was born, I have no surname; I am Jean-Pierre, as it says on my birth certificate, a son of Paris, a Paris gamin, like the Roman cats are sons and daughters of Rome. In the Ferrera Valley and in Tarragona I am a Castellarnau and I proudly stroll down Carrer Cavallers, passing by the mansion that was the birthplace of my grandmother, the Tarragona native María Filomena de Castellarnau i de Lleopart. And in Girona I am a Devesa, son of my mother, Mercè, and grandson of the sculptor Celestí Devesa, son of Olot. And in Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, Catania… I am, I feel, Mediterranean – pure and simple. And in Casablanca, needless to say, I am Rick, and in Trieste an il­legitimate son of Joyce, and in Prague a more or less Kafkaesque iguana escaped from Rudolf II’s curios cabinet…

The fact that my Barcelona identity, which makes me feel a Sagarra through and through, like my father, the poet, or my grandfather Ferran, the historian, is centred on the Rambla is no accident. If when my parents came back from France in the early 1940s, we had gone to live on the right or left of the Eixample, or in Sarrià, or in Gràcia, or in the Born or the Raval… things would have turned out differently. But we moved into a newly constructed building in Plaça de la Bonanova, opposite a church partially destroyed by the Civil War. As a child in Barcelona, I did not have a life in the neighbourhood, or the feeling of living in a neighbourhood. The only things I remember about that Plaça de la Bonanova are a sweetshop run by Senyor Cortacans, the “geperut” haberdashery as they called it (the owner was a hunchback), Senyor Molina’s newsstand in the centre of the square, next to the fountain, and a shooting gallery they set up during the festivals for the neighbourhood’s patron saint, Saint Gervase. No toy store, no bookshop, and as for the nearest cinemas, one – the Adriano – was next to Plaça Adriano, and the other, the Murillo, was at the end of Passeig de la Bonanova before you got to Sarrià. From our flat’s window we could see the sea; we lived in Barcelona, but Barcelona remained far away.

It was my father who showed Barcelona to me, who took me to the Rambla and made me feel like a Sagarra. In the Rambla I came across the goldfinches and the macaws, I wolfed down my first oysters in El Cantábrico, a restaurant in Carrer Santa Anna next to the Rambla, I saw Robin Hood in the Capitol cinema, I bought my first books in the Llibreria Francesa, I made friends with the turtle in the romantic Ateneo garden, I started my stamp collection at the flea market in Plaça Real, I had my first aperitif –orange juice– at the bar La Rambla on the corner of Carrer Canuda, I saw Els pastorets (The Shepherds) at the Romea theatre, I bought violets for my mother, I discovered the Boqueria and I had my picture taken in front of the monument to Columbus. And above all, I was immersed in the midst of people, holding the hand of my father and forming part of a curious procession that went up and down the Rambla like something quite normal, full of life.

I was now from Barcelona, a Sagarra and a barceloní, as in Paris I was and remain Jean-Pierre and Parisian. But with a small difference. In Paris I did not need a Rambla – the Champs Elysees? – to feel Parisian; I had enough with my neighbourhood, the neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where I spent part of my childhood, an area very different from that Plaça de la Bonanova, friendlier and, in those years after the Second World War, a bit bohemian, or “existentialist” as the newspapers said. Unlike Bonanova, in Saint Germain there were toy shops, bookshops, lots of bookshops, a handful of cinemas, restaurants, bar terraces… We could not see the sea from our apartment on the Rue du Bac, but we had the Seine practically next door. And crucially, I would almost say decisively for my Parisian identity as a Paris gamin, Saint Germain was the neighbourhood where once upon a time, before Baron Haussmann invented the Paris we know today, the musketeer d’Artagnan lived, and that for a nine-year-old child, who had just discovered Alexandre Dumas’ famous novel in a children’s edition, was an unexpected and highly significant and revealing gift.

I lived in Bonanova for twenty-odd years and, just as when I was a child, I never had the feeling of living in a neighbourhood: my life as an inhabitant of Barcelona began in the Roxy cinema in Plaça Lesseps and went down Carrer Gran de Gràcia towards the boulevard of the same name, and from there to the Rambla. Or it went down on the tram – numbers 58 and 64 – along Carrer Muntaner to Diagonal – the Diagonal of the Windsor Cinema, the Bagatela bar (now called José Luis), the Áncora y Delfín bookshop, the Boliche… – or continued its journey to Plaça Universitat. The Rambla still formed my Barcelona identity, but by now, a matter of age, it was a more night-time Rambla than a daytime one – the Jamboree had replaced the stamp collectors and girls the goldfinches and macaws – with the exception of Boadas and the newly discovered Athenaeum library.

When I got married, I left the flat in Bonanova and I lived in a lot of places around Barcelona, too many places – in addition to my trips outside Spain – to acquire that sense of belonging and pride experienced by a resident of Sarrià, Gràcia or Barceloneta. Or of Carrer del Tigre. But then I remarried and with my wife, who is from Elda in Alicante, I went to live in a flat on Passeig de Sant Joan, at the top of the boulevard, between Diagonal and Travessera de Gràcia. And we have now been living there for twenty-four years. Passeig de Sant Joan was not part of my Barcelona, neither the Barcelona of my childhood, nor that of my youth nor my forties. But it would be my neighbourhood, I wanted and somehow needed it to be, so I had to discover it or invent it for myself. And make it mine.

The first thing that struck me about the top of the boulevard was the amount of statues it has, so much so that, in an old story, I called it the “cemetery of statues”: when a statue bothers, wearies or annoys traffic in this or that point of the city, they send it to the boulevard. This happened in 1960 with the most spectacular of them all, the statute of Anselm Clavé, the founder of the famous choirs that bear his name, which Mayor Porcioles ordered to be removed from the Rambla de Catalunya and moved to its new location. Next to Clavé’s statue there are two smaller ones: one for José Pablo Bonet, an Aragonese clergyman, educator and father of education for the deaf, and one for the Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de León, “the inventor of oral teaching for the deaf”, as its inscription says. The “cemetery”, as you can see, starts somewhat surrealistically: music and the deaf or, if you prefer, music for the deaf.

As we go down the boulevard towards Diagonal, where it crosses Carrer Indústria we find the monument to Senyor Guillem Graells i Moles, who was secretary of employers’ association Foment del Treball. A man stuffed into a fur coat and with a rather bored air about him. We continue further down. We go past the pensioners playing boules, past the paddling pool where kids and dogs seek relief from the heat and we reach Carrer Còrsega, and in the middle of the street we find the Font d’Hèrcules (Fountain of Hercules), a memorial to King Carlos IV and his royal wife. There they both are on a stone medallion scratched by time (the monument dates from 1797 and was moved from Passeig de ­l’Esplanada to Sant Joan in 1928) with two lions at the sides and the demigod with his club on top of the structure. And then we come to Rosselló, where the part of the boulevard most frequented by children begins. There, on the right, is the Font de la Caputxeta (Fountain of Little Red Riding Hood; 1922), designed by Josep Tenas, my favourite. You just have to glance at it to see that although the wolf might have gobbled up the grandmother, it is now Little Red Riding Hood who will thrash the wolf. What a gaze the girl has; she looks like a cousin of Nabokov’s Lolita. At the end of the boulevard, by now in Diagonal, in the middle of Diagonal, stands the monument to Mossèn Cinto (1924), who turns his back on Anselm Clavé and whom the local people call “el Corb” or the raven (although there are also some who hold that this nickname is an invention of mine). In theory, and if only because of family inheritance – my grandfather Ferran was a good friend of Verdaguer and my father, the poet, who met him, held him in high esteem – that statue, so close to my house, should have filled me with pride, pride of neighbourhood, the source of that identity, of that belonging that I craved and needed when I moved to the boulevard, but things did not turn out that way. That raven-poet, constantly fanned by theatrical and gloomy cypresses, on top of a pedestal in the middle of Diagonal, like an old-time traffic policeman controlling impossible traffic, seems to me too remote and inaccessible and, indeed, a little Napoleonic or Mussolini-like, not even due to that advertising owl on his left and with which he appears to chat every night. Hardly had I arrived in the neighbourhood than this Verdaguer, between the owl and cypresses, seemed to me more like a character from the series Twin Peaks. To integrate Verdaguer in my neighbourhood, and for me to integrate with him, needed greater proximity, a less monumental character and more humanity, being able to touch or kiss his hand, as my father, the poet, kissed it when introduced to him by my grandfather Ferran.

Régis Debray once wrote (Contre Venise. Gallimard, Paris, 1995) that from your 50s onwards watching superfluous fat should be accompanied by “une diététique des images et de sons pour continuer à sentir avec son âme et non avec celle des autres”. This is true, but it is no less true that to live, to become integrated into a neighbourhood that was not yours, not the one of your childhood or your teenage years, like me, to make it mine, one is forced to some extent to resort to ghosts of others. As a child in Paris, in Saint Germain, I had already resorted to a ghost, d’Artagnan; now, at Passeig de Sant Joan, I had to find a new Musketeer. And that is precisely what I did.

First I found Carmen Broto, the murdered red prostitute who appears in the novel Si te dicen que caí by my friend Juan Marsé. Carmen Broto lived on Carrer Sant Antoni Maria Claret, not far from where today stands the statue of Anselm Clavé, and she used to have a pre-prandial drink on the terrace of the Alaska bar (now run by some very pleasant Chinese people). Then I resorted to another friend, also a writer, Enrique Vila-Matas, my cousin Enrique. Reading one of his stories, I discovered that the first time that Enrique saw a woman’s legs – emerging from an extremely short slip dress – was in the Texas cinema in Carrer Bailèn, not far from the boulevard. The splendid legs belonged to Nadia (Annie Girardot), the girlfriend of Rocco (Rocco and His Brothers, the film by Visconti). Enrique must have been fourteen and the Texas cinema was “one of the few,” he writes, “that allowed us to watch films that kids under 16 were not supposed to see.” Later on, thanks to another of his writings, I discovered that that boy who fell in love with Nadia’s legs and dreamed of being Rocco lived practically opposite where I live now.

Thus that boy who every day went along his mythical Rimbaud Street, as he called it in his writing, a path that led from his home at number 343 Carrer Rosselló, on the corner with the boulevard, to the Marist school on the boulevard, on the other side of Diagonal, became part of my new neighbourhood, which I tried to make mine, mythologising it in turn. And in another old chronicle I wrote: “That boy who was Enrique will perhaps find it amusing that his old night-time comrade (in the late 1960s) who reads him in Stockholm, Rome or Paris, today lives above what was one of the most legendary places of his childhood: the Chile cinema, now a car park. A car park on whose roof I saw this morning, as I was hanging out the clothes, a seagull pecking open the chest of a poor pigeon it had just caught.”

I had not found any Musketeers, but I had taken over the ghost of Carmen Broto, the ghost of the child Enrique, with his equally ghostly “Rimbaud Street”, Nadia’s legs and a couple of legendary cinemas, now no longer there like the vast majority of the legendary cinemas in this blessed city. It was not bad for starters. Now I had to keep searching for the Musketeer, hunting for new ghosts, but first of all I had to define the boundaries of my neighbourhood. To the north, the Alaska bar; to the south, the Concepció market in Carrer València; to the east the Michael Collins pub in Plaça de la Sagrada Família (with a more than possible extension to the old Damm brewery); and to the west, the terrace of the bar Bauma (in Rosselló on the corner with Roger de Llúria). To the ghosts of my two writer friends I added those of a third, the illustrious Aragonese Javier Tomeo,¹ who lived very close to home, in Carrer Roger de Flor, and who at that time behaved like a ghost, checking whether or not we were at home by seeing if the blinds were up or down. On the same street, almost on the corner with Còrsega, I discovered at Can Josep the ghost of a bistro of my Parisian childhood: old photos of Hollywood stars, a republican flag – the flag of our Republic – thistles, cargols a la llauna (baked snails), Leon blood sausage… Elena, the wife of Josep, the owner and chef, turns out to be the youngest daughter of Dr Jordi Rubio i Balaguer. Another ghost. Further down, after having crossed Rosselló, we come to Jazmann, which Tete Montoliu used to frequent and where at night you can hear the voice of Sarah Vaughan: “The man I love…” More ghosts. In Plaça de la Sagrada Família I take over Michael Collins, the Irish hero, while I watch rugby matches and cheer my soul with John Jameson & Son whisky (J.J., the whisky of James Joyce, another ghost). For a moment, I am tempted to get my hands on the vampire of the Sagrada Família, an amusing creature created by my friend Marsé that drinks the blood of the young and not so young Japanese women who come to the now widely celebrated basilica, but the church never attracted me, perhaps because it is an “expiatory” church…

We head west. In Morryssom, the sunniest terrace in the neighbourhood, where they serve a creamy rice with prawns and mussels, one wonders if this curious name is a tribute to Jim Morrison, the singer of The Doors – “Come on baby light my fire/Try to set the night on fire” – another ghost, or whether it is a tribute to a distant relative of Senyor Graell i Moles, the austere secretary of the Foment del Treball, who served as sheriff in the state of Iowa in illo tempore. Pedro, the owner, a gentleman from Cuenca who learned his trade in the Ritz hotel kitchen when Xavier Cugat used to stay there, and who hunts boar and deer at the weekend, says he has absolutely no idea where the name comes from, and that when he took over the premises in 1974 it was already called that. Pedro is a classic-car enthusiast, and from time to time he takes me out for a drive around Barcelona in an old US Army jeep, from when Franco was “the sentinel of the West”. Pedro gives me eggs from his precious hens, he addresses me affectionately as “baby Jesus”, and I wonder if the goodness of Pedro is not a ghost, a mixture of Buñuel and Monsignor Tarancón, that the Lord sent us to sweeten the neighbourhood.

Further on, before reaching the corner with Bruc, stands Can Pere, a Pere with a beret. Several ghosts inhabit Can Pere. The first, the dearest, is the singer from Alcoy Ovidi Montllor, whose photographs cover the wall opposite the bar. Ovidi was a close friend of the owner of Can Pere, Pepe Morata, who fed him well with his cod rice, stews and other delicacies. Pepe often recounts how, one night, Ovidi came to dine with Stefania Sandrelli – “Sapore di sale, sapore di mare…” – who was shooting a film in Barcelona with him, and after dinner Stefania decided she was rather taken by the man who sang la samarreta vermella (the red shirt) and took him to bed. When Pepe tells the story a tear rolls down his cheek. The other ghosts are Barça players, loads of old photographs from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s… And that is because Can Pere is our retirement, and sometimes expiatory, Barça temple. Watching a Barça game on the restaurant’s small TV at Can Pere together with Pepe, and even more so if that afternoon Messi is in superlative form and scores a hat trick, is like finding the elusive and damned Musketeer.

And finally we reach Bauma, the western border of my neighbourhood. There the ghost is called Bobby, Lynn Robert Berkeley-Schultz, Bobby to his friends. He was a British citizen, a United Nations official and consultant on international environment issues. He was a member of the famous Montreal Protocol and knew a hell of a lot about climate change, the ozone layer and all the disasters that are bearing down on us. He was rather short, with long hair, but not overly so, and a beard. He resembled those wise squirrels that appear in British comics, but when he put on one of his gorgeous hats – he had loads, picked up in the most remote corners of the planet – he looked like a bird-of-paradise. He was vain, was Bobby, and a bit of dandyism spiced up his life.

One day when I was sipping my Jameson on the Bauma terrace – Bobby lived two doors up the road – the wise squirrel came up to me, introduced himself and immediately asked: “Is it true that you’re Lawrence Durrell’s nephew?” I told him what I have told people loads of times; he was not my uncle, that “Uncle Larry” was how my mother and I called the famous British writer when, after she read his The Alexandria Quartet and fell in love with him, she found his phone number in Sommières and, after knocking back a double whisky, she used to call him every weekend. Bobby was amused by the story and told me that he would have liked to meet my mother. We became friends and shared a table and drinks every day. Bobby told me, not without some shyness and even a hint of a blush, that he had been one of the characters of Barcelona’s nightlife, the father of the Bobby’s: Bobby’s on Diagonal, Bobby’s Two, on Carrer Doctor Rizal, Bobby’s Free, in Claris on the corner with Casp, and a couple more places in Calella, out on the coast. The wise squirrel had flooded Barcelona’s nocturnal scene with darts and pool cham­pionships, with whisky and beer, and the best music (one day in Calella Bobby met a guy who played guitar on the beach. He was really good and Bobby offered him the chance to perform in his boîte in exchange for dinner and a bed and the guy happily accepted. The guy was none other than Carlos Santana).

Bobby died of cancer five years ago. During these years I have thought that my friend Bobby, that wise squirrel, son of a famous London actor, was the Musketeer I was looking for and who opened the doors of the neighbourhood to me beyond the mythical “Rimbaud Street”, cargols a la llauna, Barça players, my friend Pedro’s jeep and the poet-raven chatting at night with his owl, while the demigod showed off his figure under the heads of their Royal Highnesses. And it may be that I was not wrong. Until a few days ago, on Carrer València, to the south of my neighbourhood, coming out of the Murrià grocery store where I usually buy my beloved and delicious French cheeses, I went into the Jaimes bookshop, newly set up in the neighbourhood after being forced out of Passeig de Gràcia by high rents, and I came across the Pléiade edition of The Three Musketeers. My neighbour d’Artagnan, from my Parisian neighbourhood of Saint Germain, was coming to join my Barcelona neighbourhood of Passeig de Sant Joan de Dalt. Or, to put it another way, the Musketeers, the ghosts that help you to be yourself, to mark your own territory, to live in it, are not one, or two, or three, like the three musketeers (of which there were four): they are countless. What matters is knowing how to look for them – a drink, a smile, a look, a gesture, a cry, a tear, a song… – and once found, not letting them get away, sticking together with them, all turned into authentic residents of the neighbourhood, local barcelonins, which, today, is the best guarantee of not being definitively swallowed up by the Barcelona brand, which, while it makes us feel proud, endangers our small, rich and cherished identity.

 

Note

1. My friend Javier Tomeo passed away on 22 June this year, shortly after these lines were written (J. de S.).

A dalt, the advertising owl overlooking Mossèn Cinto at the junction of Diagonal and Passeig Sant Joan. A la pàgina anterior, photos of the Alcoy-born singer Ovidi Montllor on the walls of Can Pere.

A corner at the top of Passeig de Sant Joan. On the previous page, one of the crammed walls of the Can Josep eatery.