The Dream of the City

by Andrés Vidal

  Ferran was fearing the type of losses suffered by many builders in Paris owing to delays in city planning that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. But Dimas didn’t understand the rush. He had talked with Ferran on Monday in that very same office about the results of his investigations; he had brought him the names of the leaders of the protests so he could decide what to do, and all Ferran had done was fret pointlessly. And now, all of the sudden, he was acting as if the ball was in Dimas’s court.

  “What is it with you? Is your brain working?” Ferran said aggressively, interrupting Dimas’s thoughts.

  Every few seconds, he would glance at Bragado for an endorsement of his words. Ferran Jufresa was looking for his approval, as if he wanted to show the policeman he was as powerful as he’d been before the recent troubles. Normally Ferran had been anything but a typical boss with Dimas. He let him come and go and manage his time as he saw fit. The reprimand now didn’t go with his character; Ferran normally cared more about the results than how they were achieved. Dimas realized he must have his reasons for being agitated, since the business was not going well, but that morning, with his hangover and the burden of his break with Laura, he wasn’t in the mood to cheer anyone up.

  “There’s nothing for you to understand,” Ferran said. “I told you the best thing would be to scare those people and you come back to me with the names of two imbeciles that I have absolutely no use for. Is that what I pay you for? Our good friend Bragado has looked those two up and believe me, they won’t take anything in exchange for their silence. They’re not just two pushovers, or am I wrong?”

  “No. Those two are hard as nails, and they’ll try and bleed you dry.” Bragado’s voice shot out like a whistle from his corner.

  Dimas could feel him behind him and he didn’t like it. He preferred to have everyone in his field of vision, to be sure nothing was going on behind his back that he couldn’t see, especially if Bragado was involved. He always had a weird feeling when he was around: the police chief was too sure of himself, too cold and too calm, his every gesture too studied. Everything about him reeked of control, and that made Dimas nervous.

  “I’m not City Hall and I’m not the Department of Public Works,” Ferran continued. “If they won’t move a finger to pay, why should I? You need to shake them up, Navarro; I want them shitting themselves from fear. There’s no other solution. Fear is more powerful than any amount of money.”

  Dimas looked down at the tips of his shoes. He hadn’t had time to clean them, and they looked soiled and worn out. He felt the jabs of his headache piercing his corneas like tiny, endless needles.

  “There’s too many of them,” he whispered.

  “Excuse me?”

  Dimas looked Ferran in the eyes and let the soft morning light heat up his face.

  “It’s an entire area of the city protesting. How are you going to frighten all those people without someone suspecting something and calling the police?”

  “That’s not something you need to be worried about at this point,” Esteban Bragado interrupted from his chair.

  “Yes, exactly,” Ferran seconded him eagerly. “You do your work and leave the rest for later. All right?”

  Dimas resisted making any gesture of agreement. He knew he was provoking his boss, but he wasn’t going to be a coward again and obey him like nothing else in the world mattered. He debated between his reason and what his heart was telling him to do. For the first time, his principles triumphed over his willingness to abandon them to climb higher in the world. He knew that he was facing a choice now, Laura or Ferran, temperance or gluttony, solidarity or selfishness and cutthroat materialism. He knew he shouldn’t oppose his boss—Ferran didn’t pay him to argue—and yet, everything Dimas believed in up to that moment was now gone, drifting away like sand between his fingers, leaving only the deepest-set convictions, those that shone most clearly. Ferran’s insistence pulled him from his thoughts.

  “All right?” Dimas nodded, unconvinced, and Ferran, slightly relieved, added, “Anything else?”

  Dimas breathed deep before responding.

  “No.”

  He could feel Bragado’s triumphant smile boring into the back of his neck.

  “Excellent. By the way,” Ferran went on distractedly, “come for me early in the morning tomorrow, at six. We have to pick up some samples from the shop and take them to some important clients.”

  He got up and began to look through the documents on the table. After a few seconds, he looked up and hissed, “Now, beat it.”

  When Dimas shut the door, he heard Bragado and Ferran resume their conversation from before he’d arrived. His eyes scanned the room, looking for Laura, but he didn’t find her. He waved to Àngel in the distance, and Àngel waved back, then pointed to his temple; Dimas nodded, then left without looking back.

  On the street he came across a knife grinder bent over the pedal of his wheel. As it spun, a shower of sparks shot out over the road and the wall next to him. The sound of the stone eating into the metal blade was unbearable, as if it were grinding into his very bones.

  “He’s never been so obtuse, questioning my orders like that,” Ferran complained as he paced around the office.

  “Maybe he has motives you don’t know about for doing so,” the chief of police said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Bragado clicked his tongue, as if getting ready to tell a joke.

  “Ay, Ferran, how much I still have to teach you. What happens when a man gets whipped?” Ferran’s face showed he didn’t know what the officer was getting at.

  “Women, Ferran, women.”

  “Bah!” Ferran waved him off. “I don’t care what whore he’s shacking up with; there’s no reason that should affect me. Maybe he’s gotten comfortable. … What do I know? You’re right about putting the pressure on him, but beyond that … if he doesn’t do what I say, we’ll know if I can keep counting on him or if I need to show him the door.”

  “That wouldn’t be especially wise. He’s seen too much. …”

  “Then what should I do? Pay some layabout who doesn’t even follow my orders?”

  “That’s a thought,” Bragado conceded, and then he abandoned the sarcastic tone he had employed up to that moment as his gaze turned somber. “If he doesn’t play along, we’ll have to make him forget.”

  Bragado’s veiled threat whistled through the air of the office and broke the room into tiny molecules, each of them charged with significance. When the idea shot like a dart into Ferran’s mind, each one of those molecules shattered into a thousand pieces. Everything sped up and Ferran realized that if that moment came, neither Bragado nor anyone else would be with him, nobody would listen to him, nobody would accompany him. And he felt alone, terribly alone.

  When she managed to leave the workshop at midmorning, Laura walked to the Sagrada Familia and wandered around inside the temple, looking for Gaudí. She climbed the stairs of the chaplain’s house to the workshop and saw him in one corner, far from the hubbub in the back where the models were. He was standing up, bent over his simple rustic desk examining what looked like a model. Since his faithful collaborator Francisco Berenguer had died the February before, he no longer shared his office with anyone. Berenguer, like Gaudí a native of Reus, had been his friend and loyal cocreator since 1887. After an attack of uremia, he had died at only forty-eight years of age, leaving Gaudí desolate, in a state of mourning that had moved everyone who attended Berenguer’s funeral.

  The yellowish light of the gas lamps illuminated the plans and drawings on the walls. A bundle hung from one of the lamps with the same provisions as ever, and a xubesqui stove was already lit. The large uncovered windows let the light come in during the white, brightly lit hours, showing the contours of the plaster models of human and animal forms hanging from the drop ceiling with hemp ropes.

  Laura walked ov
er slowly. The fight with Dimas the day before had made it barely possible to sleep and she was very tired. She was convinced she had done the right thing, but she went on hoping that nothing that had happened was true, that it was some kind of dreadful nightmare that she might still awaken from. She had never before felt a pain so physical, and she knew there was no cure but time. Secretly, she cursed the encounter with Pau Serra and all the revelations that had come along with it. She asked herself what would have happened if he hadn’t come along to dispel her image of Dimas, if there would have been another moment when he would have let down his mask and let her see the deepest, truest part of himself. He could have changed, but Laura didn’t know what to believe, and she was too bitter to even consider forgiving him for what he had done.

  Soon she emerged from her thoughts and returned to reality. She was distracted and she feared Gaudí would notice her distressed state. Only when she was sculpting or sketching a model did her mind manage to focus on something concrete and leave everything else aside. That day she had shown up early at the workshop, but when she saw Dimas arrive, she knew she couldn’t stay there anymore. That was why she had arrived at the Sagrada Familia before her usual time, with the intention to stay there the entire day.

  “Master Gaudí.” The architect, wearing his customary black suit, raised his head from the desk and looked up without seeing her. Laura knew that though his blue eyes were pointed at her, his thoughts remained with the model he had been looking at until that moment. “We are about to place some gargoyles on the façade, and they are waiting for you.” Gaudí didn’t respond; it seemed he didn’t hear her. “Master?”

  “Come here,” he finally responded, and he pointed to the model he had in front of him. He gave Laura time to look at it. “Do you see? It’s a hyperboloid made of one single sheet. You make it by twisting a hyperbola on its imaginary axis.” Laura nodded, very attentive to the artist’s words. “It represents light. And some like this will also go into the temple, on the capitals of the columns. We have to make the interior a forest and the light is important, for the essential quality of a work of art is the harmony that comes from light.”

  “It’s such a shame that we’ll never see this temple finished …” she whispered absently, without looking away from the model.

  At times Laura wished she had a window to peek out of to see into the future. She had been witness to developments she would never see through to their end, that would go on although she could no longer remain a spectator, and that made her feel vulnerable. She asked herself what would become of them in a few years, of Dimas, of the Sagrada Familia. The city had changed so much since the turn of the century, and though those changes didn’t affect every citizen equally, it was adapting to new times: there was an increasing number of cars on the road, running water and septic services for more and more houses, and electricity was no longer an invention of the devil. … Would Barcelona go on being the same fickle lady it was now?

  “It doesn’t matter that we won’t see it,” the old architect said. “The temple will grow little by little, but that has always happened and is in the nature of everything destined to a long life. The centenary oak trees take years and years before they grow large; winter frost cuts short their development, but then they recover and they go on growing.”

  Laura thought this must be a year of frost: not only was the work on the Sagrada Familia progressing slowly as a result of the terrible crisis that had gripped the country, but she herself was also moving forward at a crawl. It was hard for her to admit that the break with Dimas meant so much more than what she was pretending. The disappointment had opened a wound in her, knocking her off balance, upsetting the harmony of light that Gaudí spoke of, which rendered relief, marked contrasts with shadows and revealed complex structures. Laura felt a void inside her and she was disoriented, like a person who had just returned to earth after falling asleep in a balloon that has been blown to who knows where. She longed to weep, but she contained herself.

  “The most important thing is to honor this magnanimous work with art,” Gaudí continued. “Because what is art without beauty?”

  He shot her a quick glance while keeping his attention focused on the model. Though she knew that in his introversion, he hadn’t paid her any mind, she had the feeling that he was cryptically referring to the question she now faced: What was going to happen to her?

  “Beauty is the glimmer of truth. Without it there is no art. That is why we should continue to bow before art.” Gaudí awoke from his abstraction and stood up, shifting to a firmer tone of voice, as if up to that moment he had been talking to himself, and now addressed Laura directly: “It is every artist’s duty to show the truth, but that doesn’t mean the path there is not fraught with difficulties. As you well know, Laura,” he continued, resting his intense blue eyes on hers, “on more than one occasion, we find ourselves faced with unexpected obstacles, unforeseen surprises that interrupt us, that even make us doubt whether we’ve taken the right direction. What do we do then?”

  Laura said nothing, thinking that the master had uttered a rhetorical question. When she saw that wasn’t so, she tried to answer rapidly, but couldn’t avoid stammering, “I suppose … that we have to reflect, stop to think to avoid making the incorrect decision. …”

  Gaudí’s eyes closed partway, making Laura feel as though he was reading her mind. After a few moments in silence, which made her nervous, he smiled softly and replied.

  “That’s it. We have to look for the light. Do you remember the beginning of the Book of Genesis?”

  “The tale of creation?”

  Gaudí nodded and recited from memory: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Do you realize, Laura? Without the truth to illuminate us, everything created appears as if in shadows, which confuse us and keep us from understanding. Don’t try to cross through the shadows; always seek out the light first.”

  Laura shivered as she heard the master’s words. That man, who seemed so often self-absorbed, closed up inside his thoughts, had understood her feelings perfectly. She would have liked to say something of similar profundity, but all she could do was smile with gratitude while she struggled to choke back the emotion that was causing her eyes to well. Gaudí nodded, pleased, and resumed his soft tone of voice, adding, “And do not worry that you won’t see this temple finished. If we do our work as we should, the truth will remain in it throughout its long life.”

  He stood up and placed his hands on his back, stretching. Then as he went in search of his hat in the wardrobe by the door, he said: “Let us go put up that gargoyle.”

  Laura nodded to the architect and went down the stairs in his footsteps. She was thankful for the reflections of Antoni Gaudí and decided that simple words were the ones that had real meaning when you spoke them: art, light, beauty, work. … It was precisely there that the truth shined, the only thing capable of giving her the answers she was looking for.

  CHAPTER 41

  When the night fell, the jeweler’s workshop was immersed in silence, a quiet broken only by the soft metallic blows of a chisel sounding rhythmically in the shadows of the large room. The patriarch of the Jufresa family had returned very late in the evening, when the workers had all gone to their homes; at one of the tables, his hands were working away diligently. A reading lamp of almost searing brightness lit up the piece he held. Francesc took a piece of white gold, turned it ably to one side and then the other, holding it to look at the bias against the light. … When he found a relief that needed to be polished or an unwanted irregularity, he picked up the precise tool needed to repair it. His tired eyes needed a certain distance to make out the fleeting glimmer of a
flaw.

  He felt old, and he had lost some of his abilities. Since he was very young he had taken great pleasure in the art of jewelry, and though he barely practiced anymore, he now had a good reason to do so. He had always believed that in his line of work, they made more than objects, that they fashioned pieces that in the course of time would become a feeling, a memory, or even a shield. Jewels changed their nature depending on their use and came to share a relationship with their owner: the attachment you felt for a locket with a picture of a deceased mother was not the same as the one for a pearl necklace given to you by a lover or a bracelet that had been yours since childhood. Right now Francesc was working on an object that he had loved since it was first conceived and which would not be destined for sale: he was following the plan for a brooch that his daughter had presented him some time back.

  Laura was the most talented of his offspring, a true artist, and all the ability she possessed in her tender hands was accompanied by an acute sensitivity for capturing the essence of every material. In her sketches and finished pieces, a curve could reflect an animal; a relief, the texture of a liquid or mineral; a color, the tenuous feeling of well-being. That skill had awakened envy in some of her siblings and had made difficulties for her, and she found herself limited in many of her choices, seeing her dreams limited to sketches or models that never managed to be completed. Moreover, Francesc was well aware that his daughter had been somewhat sad lately. He didn’t want to see her laid low like that, and he thought a gift like the one he was finishing would help her overcome some of life’s disappointments.

  At his advanced age, Francesc Jufresa knew that love showed itself often through partial defeats, many of them the most painful in youth. With the passing of years, passion dilutes into a succession of good moments and the deceptions, which seem all-encompassing at first, fade away like chalk marks on clothing. At least, that was what had happened to him.