Will Self - Psychogeography

But back to the unfinished cathedral: everyone loves Gaudí, no? Loves the idea that La Sagrada Família is the truest of modern Gothic, in its praxis if not its form. For, unlike contemporary, flat-pack edifices, this staggering stalagmite of a building has been dripped into existence over decades, a slow accretion handed down from Gaudí daddy to Gaudí son in much the same way that the great medieval cathedrals were built. Inside its tracery of gushing buttresses — which spurt skywards in a dense cage of scaffolding — you feel this praxis intently, a highly sexual stridulation of steel rubbing against stone.

Yes, everyone loves Gaudí, except that close up La Sagrada Família is just a little bit. . Well, what is the mot juste. .? Just a little bit ugly. That’s it. Because the holy figures on the façade have the Cubist features not of angelic beings but of that crude puppet once used to advertise Cuprinol wood preservative (a puppet which, bizarrely, was kidnapped and held to ransom, but that’s another story). And the flying buttresses that stretch from this façade into the forecourt: well, perhaps it’s the presence of entire herds of heifers chewing their latex cud, but they are rather reminiscent of Wrigley twists between girlish teeth. And the finials, spires and pinnacles of the sacred edifice (a building likened by a contemporary of Gaudí’s to a ‘pile of chicken giblets’): while their bright colours and fruity form, and their incorporation of traditional Catalan mosaic, give them a certain trippy quality, this is not the artificial paradise of a Baudelaire or a Coleridge, but an altogether more cuddly noumenal realm.

Don’t get me wrong: everyone loves Gaudí — and I’m no exception. La Sagrada Família wins me over with its sheer wantonness as a building — this is the Lolita of sacred architecture. But it isn’t until a couple of days later, when we venture further north to the Parc Guell, Gaudí’s botched attempt at building a garden suburb, that the conundrum of his unique vision is finally resolved for me. Yes, it is modernist, yes, he took Art Nouveau and gave it several more twists into the mystical, yet observing the dinky gatehouses of the park, their pie-crust roofs and organic windows, I was reminded, not of anything remotely sublime, but of the kitsch dwellings of those animated Belgian munchkins, the Smurfs. I half expected Father Abraham to emerge from behind one, monstrously large and speaking baby-Walloon.

It is this infantilism that explains why everyone loves Gaudí, I think. This desire we all have to be a pink, fluffy girl in her pink, fluffy bedroom. And in our kidult era, what could be more loveable than a kidult genius of the built environment?

On the expansive balcony of the Hotel Arts, overlooking the Barcelona port area, I listen to the following conversation: ‘Today, sir, can I recommend the seared tuna steak, which is very excellent?’

‘Look, I gotta tellya right off: I’m from, like, North Carolina, and if there’s one thing we have there it’s the best goddamn tuna in the world; so, I’m, like, tuna sore, if you know what I mean.’

‘Certainly, sir, I quite understand.’ The waiter is impeccably neutral. He looks Belgian — all the staff here appear Low Country. They wear understated uniforms, baggy khaki trousers, striped linen shirts. They also all look as if they have degrees in art history, which is no surprise given that the whole shtick of this luxury hotel is its collection of fine art works.

‘Do these lobsters come from, like, Maine? Coz 150 euros is a helluva lot to pay for a lobster.’ It’s only because I’m actually reading a sensitive, humane, funny and fiercely intelligent novel by an American friend while I listen to this clod — with his ‘Buttons Hawaii’ baseball cap and his black and maroon ‘rising sun’ motif shorts, and his nonce connectives — that I don’t, like, collapse into rabid, internal anti-Americanism. There’s this, and the fact that I myself hold a US passport.

‘I’m not sure, sir, I will check with chef and see what he says.’ The doctoral servitor pads away. O! The Hotel Arts, with your sun-drenched terraces and your rooftop garden full of palms; with your whispering, air-conditioned corridors and your elegant lobbies crammed with the toned and upholstered bodies of the rich! Why is it that I feel about as relaxed in such environs as a scrotum with a razorblade poised beneath it? Luxury — I just don’t sit well with it. Comfort I can broker, but luxury is non-negotiable. It’s the way that I can’t open the picture window in my room that really alienates me. This sets up a fundamental antinomy between hotel/not hotel, that renders the whole experience nauseating. The Hotel Arts could be anywhere — orbiting Uranus even. It certainly isn’t in Spain, with its international staff and nouveau-riche clientele.

It probably doesn’t help that I feel compelled to watch rolling news on plasma screen TV in my room. The juxtaposition between the pulverised villages of southern Lebanon and the brushed aluminium, smoked glass and leatherette fittings is grotesque in the extreme. I decide to film the whole scene with my digital camera in the hope that by doubly distancing myself I will somehow dock with the hotel and thus enter a secure orbit around my own hypocrisy. No dice. As I pan and zoom into the bathroom — which is the size of a Hezbollah bunker — I catch sight of my mad, Anthony Perkins rictus in the full-length mirror. Damn it! If things continue like this, I’ll stab myself in the shower.

It didn’t help that on the way here, while changing trains at the Plaça de Catalunya, I was looped in by a peculiarly efficient beggar. He performed that unearthly trick street people have of projecting his voice into my inner ear as I paced along the platform, chatting to my daughter: ‘It’s great to hear an English voice,’ he said in a rusty Mancunian accent; and had me in that moment, for I stopped, turned and engaged with him. Whereas, had he encountered me straight on, I would’ve been on guard against his sweaty baseball cap and moribund khaki shorts.

He set out his spiel with a stallholder’s efficiency as I stared into his eager, bloodshot eyes: there was a baggage handlers’ strike at the airport — we better watch out! He had to get back to work, so his brother had bought him a Ryanair ticket out of Madrid. There was only one problem — and this came after some minutes of chitchat, so I was completely gulled — he needed another 10 euros to get there. I gave him twenty without demurral: in my experience commerce renders public space domesticated, so we were huddled together in his front parlour, rather than forming a small, Anglo-Saxon baffler, around which the Hispanic multitude flowed.

‘I’m not a bum!’ he protested, taking the note. ‘Give me your email address and I’ll make sure you get it back!’ But he most certainly was a bum — and I never would, and besides I was already striding away, daughter in tow. ‘I’m not a bum!’ His cry came back to me now as I sat, sipping my tonic water and munching my cob salad complete with half the dratted lobster. The waiter closed in again on the bum from North Carolina at the next table: ‘They’re from Maine, sir,’ he said.

‘Wossat?’ The bum looked up from romancing his girlfriend, who wore Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and pearly-pink lip gloss.

‘The lobsters, sir, they are from Maine.’

‘ — and undoubtedly off,’ I put my oar in, ‘given that there’s a baggage handlers’ strike at the airport. .’