The Dream of the City

by Andrés Vidal

  Dimas spent the better part of the celebration with his gaze wandering over those present. He seemed to be looking for someone among the dignified dresses, the sequins, the veils, and the tulle. Once in a while, in a studiously improvised gesture, he would stretch his neck over the rigid celluloid of his shirt collar. When Bishop Reig, near the end of the mass, commanded those present to exchange the sign of peace, Dimas spoke first to his father, then to Guillermo, and afterward received greetings from people in the row in front of him whom he didn’t know. When he turned to greet the faithful in the row behind him, his eyes met the large, feline eyes he knew. Once more, when he saw those eyes, he couldn’t tell whether they were taunting him or scrutinizing him maliciously, if they appreciated something in him or were showing nothing more than their habitual rigid courtesy.

  The two of them looked long at each other while their hands carried on without them in the ceremonial gesture. Laura’s smile was faint, Dimas’s jaw clenched tighter and tighter. Both seemed isolated from the crowd in that instant, brought together by something indefinable that squeezed and pounded at them from within, like the call of some antediluvian creature.

  Juan saw them and glanced at Guillermo. The boy smiled at him from below, shrugging his shoulders as if to say to the older man, Don’t look at me. When they left the temple—which took some time, since only a small number of people could fit on the stairs at any moment—the wind lashed their faces. Distant, inexpressive, courteous, Dimas introduced Laura to his father.

  “This is Señorita Jufresa,” he said.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Señor Navarro.” Laura gave Juan her hand.

  “A pleasure,” he replied, cordial but formal.

  They walked along together in a conventional silence. Juan tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t embarrass his son Dimas, about some banal topic that would lighten the mood as they walked until she left with her parents or some acquaintance from her same class. Guillermo looked at everyone, not understanding this obtuse silence. Finally, he was the one who asked, “Are you done with my sculpture?”

  “I forgot to tell you! This weekend we put it in its setting,” Laura responded.

  “So now everyone can see it?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “On the façade?” Juan asked, unable to believe it was really his son’s face.

  “Obviously. Laura put my face on one of the angels,” Guillermo snorted, as if he was tired of repeating it.

  “Well, that must be because she hasn’t seen you come home after Sunday mass with your clothes filthy after running around with your friend’s goats.”

  “Would you like to see it, Señor Navarro?” Laura offered.

  Juan looked at his son before answering. Dimas appeared unbothered.

  “Yes, I’d love to.”

  They turned back from the apse, where the crowd was thinner, and walked parallel to the Calle Provenza until they had passed the projection of the sacristy, in front of the Nativity Façade. There, the scaffolds rose up like stairs, clinging as closely as possible to the unfinished towers. They seemed absorbed by a kind of dense fog, because the profusion of details on the lower part gave the building an appearance of completion, when in fact it was only just begun.

  “This is the Nativity Façade,” Laura explained when they had stopped in front of it. “It’s joyful and lush, a song to nature and to life. That is why it’s the first one to be built.”

  “They’re not building everything at the same time?” Juan asked.

  “No. Master Gaudí is certain he won’t live to see his masterpiece finished, so he decided to start with the happiest and most luminous façade to give a sign of the greatness of the building. On the opposite side will be the Passion Façade, harder and more austere. If that had been the first one, people would have imagined it would be a stern, sorrowful monument.”

  Laura fell quiet and looked up. Dimas then glanced at her slender, delicate neck and became lost in that pale skin, imagining its softness. When he heard her voice again, he emerged from his daydream.

  “See up there, beside the beginning of that tower?” Laura said.

  “Where the windows start?” Guillermo asked, looking around anxiously.

  “No, lower down, right at the base. The last figure. Does it look familiar?”

  They all smiled when they saw Guillermo’s face in an expression of perfect piety. He looked very small from so far away. Even so, he was perfectly recognizable.

  “Well, if I want to see you quiet and behaving, now I know where to look,” Juan said with a laugh. And everyone chimed in except Guillermo, who looked at them with an air of disdain that struck them as even more humorous. The more they laughed, the angrier the boy got, and finally he exploded.

  “Well, if you all think it’s so funny, maybe I’ll just go.”

  “Hey, don’t get mad, it’s not such a big deal,” Dimas said.

  But the boy didn’t give in and began to walk off, perhaps waiting for them to try to hold him back, or at least listen to his words of protest. “Right. It’s not such a big deal. … Well, you should have thought of that before. I’m happy with the sculpture and all you can do is criticize it.”

  Juan turned to Laura and Dimas.

  “I’m going to go try and clear this up. Thank you so much for your time, Señorita Jufresa. It’s been a pleasure.”

  “Likewise, Señor Navarro.”

  “Guillermo, come on. Guillermo, please! Careful with that suit!”

  Juan Navarro disappeared through the group of people in search of the boy, who now seemed less genuinely angry than in the mood to play around with his father. Dimas turned to Laura and looked at her, not knowing what to say.

  “They’re really nice,” she said.

  Dimas tried to break through his seriousness for a moment, and without speaking, he gave a hint of a smile. Finally he agreed, “Yeah, they are. Even if sometimes they act like a nagging couple.”

  Suddenly, the murmuring among the people rose up. Soon the two of them were surrounded and even a bit unsettled by the pushing and shoving. The multitude opened right in front of them to open a respectful path for Gaudí himself, who was accompanied by Bishop Reig. The master architect spoke Spanish with a marked Catalan accent and pointed upward and all around, offering pertinent explanations to the church authority; judging by his constant gesticulations, Laura imagined he was discussing the relation of the building’s height to its base. His hands accompanied his every word and he seemed to be explaining everything down to the smallest detail. With an almost hypnotic movement, the bishop’s head followed the back-and-forth of the architect’s hands. At times he couldn’t make out the details he was pointing out and he stood in a momentary state of confusion, until once again he had matched Gaudí’s hand movements with the vertiginous speed of his commentary. Undoubtedly the bishop had no idea what the man was getting at.

  Behind them, moving along more slowly and with apparent calm, the other dignitaries strolled by. President Prat de la Riba was immediately behind the bishop. He was followed by representatives of the Public Works Commission and the mayor, Boladeres i Romà, though their positions seemed threated by the distinguished gentlemen—and the odd lady as well—who were edging in to get closer to the bishop and the illustrious Prat de la Riba. Among these people, all good manners had broken down, and the careless, often involuntary elbows, pushes, shoves, and cane blows were directed indiscriminately among the multitude with rage, so much so that when the shoving citizens had disappeared, a file of children in their Sunday best followed cheerfully in their wake, waiting for someone to drop a kerchief, cuff link, or earring.

  Laura and Dimas couldn’t stop smiling at the people’s slavery to social convention and the attention sought out by the majority of those present. When they were finally alone, they still stood close together, their faces close to each
other after being shoved together by the mob. Laura, her body pressed against Dimas’s, looked up at him, while he tensed his muscles beneath his suit to avoid any movement that might be interpreted wrongly; he didn’t want Laura to think he had tried to come close to her against her wishes. But now—in fact, he hadn’t even realized it—he too was refusing to pull away, and in his head there was a fierce struggle between the demands of decorum and good behavior and what his body, struggling against his own thoughts, longed desperately to do.

  They stayed that way awhile, frozen, as though chained together, without feeling the wind or the cold or the dust that rose up with the others’ footsteps—until suddenly what their bodies understood on the edge of their thoughts rose up between them like an insurmountable barrier that made them aware of where they stood, of what others would think if they saw them like that, if they gave in to those instincts that seemed suddenly and incomprehensibly to be taking over both of them, that they seemed incapable of reining in. Then they imagined the looks of the people—a crowd, not anyone in particular—who would look at them and reprimand their attitude. And they separated. Laura patted down her hair and Dimas, just to do something with his hands, adjusted his tie and straightened his detachable celluloid collar.

  They walked slowly and in silence, like automatons, carried by the inertia of the masses, and when they had calmed down, they were almost at the edge of the lot. Laura pointed to her family’s car.

  “There are my parents and Núria. I have to go.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry …”

  Laura moved to place two fingers over Dimas’s lips, then thought better of it, afraid she would be seen or he would reject that spontaneous gesture.

  “Don’t say anything. I’ll see you tomorrow.” And she turned around. That phrase, so normal, so habitual, seemed to him like a promise concealed in normality.

  Her step was light as she walked away. Dimas stayed there looking a few moments and then returned to the temple. After he had walked a few yards, he found his father, who was there waiting for him. When he reached him, they started walking together.

  “That girl …” his father began.

  “Yes?”

  “She’s the sister of your boss, no?”

  “She is,” Dimas said.

  They went on walking in silence. Guillermo saw them and ran up to them. His hands were stained, and his pants were filthy from sitting on the ground.

  “Can you not have anything nice?” Juan reproached him. “If you had said something, you could have gone home and changed. I can’t leave you by yourself. Have you seen what you look like?”

  Guillermo hung his head the rest of the walk, kicking the occasional stone, looking back sometimes at Dimas, while his brother resisted looking back. The young man had a strange feeling in his stomach, and though it was different, it made him feel very good.

  CHAPTER 27

  Laura arrived at the jewelry workshop before Ferran, who was surprised to see her so early in their father’s office.

  “They don’t need you at the cathedral today?” he asked with a certain sarcasm.

  “No,” she responded drily. “I want to finish a drawing, something Papa assigned me.”

  Ferran lifted an eyebrow in response. He didn’t like to be told how to run the business, but he did have a high regard for Laura’s work, although he didn’t tell her to avoid swelling her expectations. He was racking his brains trying to come up with a more economical and efficient way of doing things. He thought that what would work was automating the processes, eliminating costs and reducing production time, and focusing on the quality of the materials—a perspective that would bring together the old and the new with the traditional idea of jewelry, or what Laura dismissively called “the price of fancy rocks.” His sister, unlike him, worked in the uncertain terrain of art, a world where the idea, the form, was what mattered. But what did she know about invoices, purveyors, fluctuations in the precious metals market … Ferran headed to his office. He remarked to an apprentice that he should tell Dimas Ferran was waiting for him when he arrived.

  When she heard Dimas’s name, Laura trembled. Luckily, nobody noticed. Since the morning of the day before, she had been incapable of getting his image, his voice, his gestures out of her mind. She pulled back her hair from her face and tried to tuck it behind her ear. Then she bent over the table and traced for the thousandth time the line of a curve that still did not seem right to her. It was impossible to concentrate. Every time she heard a noise, she thought it was the door. And every time someone came in, she raised her head timidly. She spent a long time in that state of continuous excitement without sketching a single worthwhile drawing.

  Then suddenly, she heard someone say: “Dimas, the boss wants to see you; he’s waiting for you.”

  Laura heard that phrase, and though she hadn’t planned on doing so, she couldn’t stop herself—she burst from her father’s office. It was as if her legs had a life of their own and dragged her on regardless of her will, as if they heard an unmistakable call, the call of her blood, of her passion, beyond her own perception. She made it in time to see him step into Ferran’s office. Since she was up, she went to Àngel’s table to consult him about a question. With her back to Ferran’s office, she tried not to give the impression that she was occupied with anything except her work.

  Slightly perplexed, Àngel answered Laura’s questions about the malleability of white gold. She seemed distracted. Then Ferran came out with Dimas, who had a tube of cardboard under his arm, and accompanied him to the exit. They passed by her side without noticing her. Ferran wished Dimas luck and said to make sure to keep him informed.

  Dimas put on his hat and walked pensively out of the workshop. Ferran’s assignment would require him to act again. He needed to think clearly before taking any steps, so the first thing he did when he reached his destination was to find a place to sit down and have a coffee.

  Ferran Jufresa was interested in getting into the real estate business; the new times were doing away with the traditionally secure values. Speculation was an evil that had burdened the country’s economy for centuries, but it worked well for making the already rich even richer. Barcelona was living through years of unrestrained growth and land was doubling in price in the blink of an eye. What had formerly been fields for crops became apartment blocks in a matter of months. “Cheap housing,” as it was called, invaded the suburbs; it was ludicrously priced and built in enormous quantities, tens or hundreds of buildings jammed into lots that had previously belonged to a single mansion or country home. Innumerable families were packed into the most minimal spaces. The huge number of people determined to struggle for a simple job in the city meant that, because of sheer volume, even humble dwellings were big business. “I want my piece of the pie, Dimas,” Ferran had insisted moments before with the look of a hungry animal.

  The plan consisted of acquiring tracts in the region known as Campo del Arpa, a place belonging to San Martin de Provensals. When that had been a town independent of Barcelona, it was known as La Muntanya, and they didn’t begin to build houses there until the second half of the nineteenth century. For a long time it was agricultural land providing food for the neighboring city of Barcelona. But with industrialization, the factories took over the district, and Campo del Arpa filled up with workers as well. Cerdà had included it in his plan, with the idea of respecting the region’s peculiar terrain. Nonetheless, the owners resisted it, and as a consequence, there were numerous streets in the Ensanche, like the Calle Rosellón, that stopped dead when they reached Campo del Arpa.

  Ferran’s idea was to buy there, little by little, until he had managed to obtain enough properties to organize them into an island in the style of the Ensanche. That would certainly involve buying up agricultural land as well as neighboring buildings. The latter would be more difficult, because the property owners were heavily divided and some would be willin
g to sell while others would be against it. Once everyone was convinced and Ferran had the land, he wouldn’t have any problems finding a builder.

  Dimas’s job was to make that consensus happen. He knew the operation was important for other reasons: Ferran was not only trying to show himself to be an able businessman in the eyes of Barcelona’s bourgeoisie, but also trying to win positions of power by flushing the radical workers out of the area. Campo del Arpa was becoming a nucleus for anarchist, Catalanist, and anticlerical organizations. If he acquired the buildings and bourgeois residents took them over, little by little the ideology of the neighborhood would change. The workers would eventually sell, and they would spread out through the city and lose some of their strength, which after all lay in their unity. But for now, Dimas was trying to get the lay of the neighborhood, contemplating the possibility of making the initial buys and getting to know who was who.

  He took a sip of coffee and set the cup down softly on the marble tabletop. He stretched his neck to relieve a bit of tension and looked lazily around the bar, trying to distract himself for a moment. His eyes fell on the back of a girl who was just getting up from her seat: her hair, the same color as Laura’s, was cut in the garcon style. Forcing his mind back to business, Dimas paid for his drink and began chatting with the owner, a thin bald man. With just a few questions he managed to find out that one of the major property owners in the area was Bartolomeu Raventós, who had built a number of apartment buildings for rent. His good reputation indicated he wasn’t someone excessively ambitious, so Dimas didn’t imagine it would be too hard to convince him. He went home ready to think up a plan.