Barcelona Metropolis

While I hang out the washing, Hannah is sitting on the sofa watching telly. Whenever I’m around, she always puts on TV3 – a sort of magnanimous gesture, smiling with satisfaction, as if I were a pregnant woman she’s just given her seat to on the Tube. “I honestly can’t stand this channel”, I tell her. “Come on”, she says, in her German accent. “Besides, this programme is endearing”.

She loves the bloody programme El Foraster [The Outsider]. I suppose it’s the perfect programme – the level’s low enough that even she, who doesn’t understand a word of Catalan, can follow it. Like when that chap goes round looking for the most colourful old people he can find – proper time-travelling foreigners – to interview them. She watches it like someone wandering through a quaint and exotic little ethnographic museum. And really, what else is she supposed to watch?

“The presenter’s unbearable”, I say. “Doesn’t his nasal voice get on your nerves?” “I think he’s really funny”, she says. “Look – look now!” When he finds someone properly old, he asks their age. She answers: “Eighty-four”. He says: “How old did you say?” She repeats: “Eighty-four”. Then he turns to the camera, pulls a very familiar face – his signature face, as Hannah calls it – and repeats: “EIGHTY-FOUR YEARS OLD!”

“Like your friend, right?” Hannah asks. “Yes. Well – no. Almost”. Margarida. Right now I can see her, as I hang the washing, sunbathing on her balcony, two buildings over from ours. The sun’s beating down; the CDs we’ve hung from the washing lines are catching the light. We ended up having to hang up my old Sopa de Cabra collection. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but it’s the only way to stop birds from nesting on the balcony.

“It’s lovely”, says Hannah from the sofa, “that you’ve got this language, that you can understand that lady – like a secret code, isn’t it?” “Not bad”, I say. I’m never quite sure if she hears me. Later, we smoke together. We talk about how we picture the future. What winds her up is the way the future moves backwards, towards the past, like a crab. “Don’t you think it’s a pathetic image?” “But that’s not what bothers me about the future”. “What is it then?”, she asks. “That it’s such an enormous, unbeatable enemy, and still it doesn’t bring us together. That it makes us betray each other, goads us with fear, I think. I don’t know”, I say. “But whether it walks backwards like a crab doesn’t bother me”.

Generally, my mum’s voice tightens whenever I talk about my partners. “How old is she? And what does she do?” She worries that they’re young. So do I. “I hope you understand that a relationship with a young woman isn’t the way forward”, she always says. Of course, I do. “And so tiny, so slight. How many Argentinian empanadas can she get down in one sitting? Two? I hope you see it’s not the way forward”.

I’m not going to get rich, but I’ve got a plan to earn a bit more – maybe help out with the family finances. I’ll write in Spanish. Not yet. When I’ve made a name for myself. That’s the smart move, isn’t it? It’s the only thing with a future. She gets it. I’m not sure if she catches every word, but she understands. I’m sure of it.

I don’t always stay over at Margarida’s. Better to take it slow. There’s no rush – I don’t have to move out yet; the new tenant’s not arriving till next month. She’s very lonely and always welcomes me with a smile, but I think it’s best not to force things. Some people really throw themselves at others, and I find that a bit shallow. More nerve than backbone.

At night, back at the flat, Hannah talks about her unusual racial background. She’s very white, but apparently her surname isn’t. There’s a Black ancestor somewhere up the line. She says that to Germans, she’ll never truly be German. We bond over our shared dislike of the great European nations and their proto-fascist ideals of ethnic purity. My political side kicks in. I try to explain my parents’ self-hatred – how they don’t read in Catalan because they don’t see it as a serious language. I think she gets it. She says these scuffles between white people always feel like minor family feuds to her. “Family feuds”, she repeats. Then I get a bit intense. I tell her about forty years of fascist dictatorship, a banned language, bodies dumped in ditches. Ethnic hatred – not racial – has killed enough people in Europe recently to be more than just “family feuds”. I say, “I don’t want to elevate my cause to the magnitude of yours, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be serious”. I tell her assuming white people can’t be targets of ethnic hatred is like assuming men can’t suffer domestic abuse. It might work as a general rule of thumb, but it blinds you to all kinds of real suffering.