Barcelona
morning
I return to the world of the living in summer. My little tropical soul comes out of hibernation and the world feels full again. Brain lubed up on atmosphere, I write pages and pages, lying on my back with my notebook shading my face from the sun, and the world feels juicy and present.
Writing and reading, reading and writing, sweaty paperback on the knees. Writing in summer is this magic trick, pretending you’re at leisure while up top everything’s firing, a delicate state just below the surface of consciousness that must be protected from the self that cares about production and labour.
Work dries up. Money staggers in, months late, and I have to presume something will come along as it always has. This summer I am worryingly underemployed but next month’s rent is alright and our friends will put us up if we don’t make it to September. I luxuriate in this indolence.
I wake, sit on the floor of the balcony in a string vest and cotton shorts, drink an espresso and eat an off-brand cornetto to the symphony of the garbage trucks shattering glass. Nothing is shit and everything is beautiful because it’s SEACAUL DAY, the best day of the week, when I have a date with my girlfriend Fer to write our novel together, entering a mutual trip of seeing the world and sharing visions and voices and our city of the future. My life’s mission: girls having fun with no consequences. When it’s good it feels like flying, the feeling that, even as the writer, I’m also the reader, reading the words before they’ve been written, seeing the story unfold rather than directing it. I cry every time I read certain chapters, feeling that they didn’t come from this world, the characters, their ecstasies, their yearning, their throwing themselves into the abyss of revolution.
All the windows thrown open to catch the air, the soft ebb and flow of the street, telling time by the screech of metal shutters raised and lowered then raised and lowered. By the time siesta rolls round and the heat peaks I’m knackered, right on the edge of distraught. Harvesting like this demands aftercare, debrief, cuddles like a hard session does. Rebe calls and says let’s go to our spot! I say, only if you can bear us in the state of crazy-hair-scavenging-old-crackers-from-the-bottom-of-the-pantry. Rebe laughs and says oh yes, I know that state.
We switch pages in the early afternoon. Her black hair stands on end as she reads, screen scalding in her lap. I watch her eyes sweep across the page back and forth back and forth and she trembles shudders thrilling at each unfolding phrase and, mission accomplished, I lie on my back cackling and kicking my legs and arms in the air like a dying cockroach.
More daytime hours in summer for writing and more for reading, reading days like in my memories of childhood, with total avid concentration unconstrained by time. With great difficulty and pleasure I read Lemebel, Sarduy; difficult to adore the baroque when your ability stretches to minimalism. The summer feeling – that half-awareness right below rationality, the under-conscious daydream – is also invoked by reading in languages you don’t really speak.
I’m also working on translations of Hannah Regel’s and Ellen van Neerven’s poems for the next issue of Canal. It’s so exciting to have these works arriving and starting to chime together, speak across the room to one another. These two both talk about lineages, women, being mothered, though from very different positions. And I receive, read aloud by Rebe in a silent olive grove, the first translation of the Cuban poet Mane Ferret into English, which is so beautiful it rings in my head like a song all the rest of the day.
Everyone so beautiful in the street, so open and so naked. The other day passing through the throng by Sant Pau a girl rang a doorbell and above her friend stepped for a moment around the wooden slatted shade overhanging her balcony in nothing but pale mesh knickers and a bra, belly and shoulders still damp from the shower, her hair half-brushed, to glance down and grin widely at seeing who’s there and throw down the key, and just now, drowsy sitting in a cotton slip on my balcony drinking a little coffee, across the way on the rooftop above me a girl has been sunbaking and stands to take in the street, her bare breasts barely peeking over the top of the wall, and, perhaps the sweetest and most disarming of all, as I leaned out the kitchen window to catch the breeze, a girl in the street below meandering along on her bike tipped her head right back and, upon catching my eye, smiled the most luminous and joyful smile which I returned stunned with pleasure, feeling all at once the pure emotion and force of baring our full faces to one another again.
afternoon
I pack a picnic with what came in the cistella: jamón con melon, tomatoes splitting their skins, cucumber, celery-leaf pesto and buttery green olives, potato salad with cornichons and kefir and fennel dressing, ripe black plums and a sheep cheese rimmed with a fat layer of rosemary. Although Fer packed a bottle of ice cubes, they didn’t survive the journey, so we drink our vinho verde with peach juice a little tepid, slicking on salty tongues instead of sliding down fast.
We lay the jamón and melon on our bare tits and season the plums in the swash. Out in the clear green deeps I tell Rebe to try opening their eyes underwater. They have never done it, which amazes me, I beg them to try.
It doesn’t sting?
It doesn’t sting, I say. It’s good. It feels good.
You’re the one who told me you can drink a little gulp of seawater from your cupped hands, as a treat, says Rebe, kicking gleefully to stay above the waves.
It’s true, I do this often in clean seas, especially before breakfast. Taking in seawater by accident hurts and burns the throat, but doing it deliberately is a delicious savoury treat. Clarice Lispector did this in the early mornings in the sea in Rio, which is a pretty good recommendation.
While we three expose our skins to the heavy light the dog lies under an umbrella with a damp silk scarf tied around her head and the ice packs from the picnic under her belly, spoiled – especially since in her past life she was a working greyhound in Córdoba and is surely accustomed to the heat.
I ask Rebe what ‘crush’ is in Spanish and they can’t think of an equivalent – creo que me gusta… but I point out that crushing, the state of crushing, is not just liking someone but an active pleasure for the crusher alone. The crushee becomes irrelevant under the state of openness, anguish, pure possibility, perhaps without even desiring consummation. The pleasure being in the frisson of flirting, wondering whether they’ll be wherever you’re going, the gut-drop when you spy their head over there in the crowd.
It turns out me and Rebe had both fictionalised a lecture by Irigaray we went to together years ago, where a woman had stood up and asked the philosopher in the most plaintive possible voice exactly how to find this romantic love between two she kept talking about? The three of us laugh at the memory of her response, something to do with masturbation and yoga, but then Fer says real serious, well, how do you answer that question? What would you say in response to that question?
— When I was yearning to be in love it was so annoying to talk about it with people in love, because they would be kind of like, (simpering) it’ll happen, don’t worry, it will happen soon! And you know, it’s not true, lots of people are great and it never happens.
— I think I actually dealt with it by thinking of who I thought was really cool, the kinds of people whose lives I liked, who I would have liked to have fall in love with me, and I made a project of becoming those people. I don’t really believe in ‘being yourself’ to find love. I think you do have to try to be a more loveable version of yourself.
— Just to settle into your pleasure, settle into your yearning, let it be fun. The nights of walking the city like a lunatic, drinking too much, the freedom of nobody caring whether or not you come home. It’s romantic, too, the before-times, though it’s hard to realise it in the moment. Also you can really change yourself, you can be a completely different person…
You do give up certain things in allowing yourself to be loved. Your sharp edges to the world, a kind of glittering, hard-fought austerity that exists as a result of, not in contrast to, your openness. You can’t be loved until you lay that glorious garment down and prostrate yourself to the world.
evening
Hours swim by and we have massive plans, enormous plans, plans that are all-consuming and require a lot of squid and pescaditos and more bottles of wine, thankfully cold this time. We may not always all have money, but usually someone has money, channelled through the state or some last minute answered prayer, turned in service of eating squid in the sun. Questions of poetry and the structures of power, parenthood, our various migrations, genetic destiny, living together and how to keep doing it, property and lack thereof, money and how to get it without giving up anything in return, not to mention the hosting of many decadent parties with everyone we want to kiss as guests. By the time we step from the chiringuito’s wooden deck onto the cool sand it’s night and kids are setting off fireworks on the beach. In the silken dark we take a little bomb shared on three tongues from the party leftovers, take off our clothes and slip naked into the warm black water. There’s no horizon, it’s too dark, but by the light of the moon you can see your body floating beneath you in the transparent liquid.
The conversation about our crushes opens a window in the couple to allow air inside, an unspoken invitation that can charge the space between bodies, let something happen. Earlier that day I had, innocently or maybe not, relayed a conversation with another friend and ex-lover. I had said, well, once a lover, always a lover, I feel like there is always space in the friendship for the erotic or flirtatious state to reopen. The friend had violently disagreed, needing closure on one state or another. But Rebe nodded thoughtfully.
I hold the dog as they both sneak inside a bar to piss and in the cramped gap of time scribble a poem on the notes in my phone, words blurring, typing by muscle memory. I’ll decode it later, my hands are sweaty and wet rainbows the glass.
At home we sit in a circle on the floor with sweating amber glasses of beer and ice. Rebe performs the speech act that had lain waiting, creating a hospitality, the opening of desire’s window between three. Fizzing with delight at the invitation I go for more ice and when I come back to them sitting looking up at me sweetly I say NOW KISS like an impatient toddler and Fer says we were waiting for you! And I say, gratified, grinning, ok then, and then they kiss, two dark salty heads leaning in to one another, and it’s so beautiful I tear up, gazing at them, and then I lean forward to enter.
In a cigarette break – our guest’s request – the two of them clamour for a performance and I read a poem to them off the dim light of my phone, standing naked by the balcony facing the bed and lit by the deep yellow of the streetlight. My best audience, they heckle and screech MÁS, MÁS! And there is more, more of everything.
I am delighted in my little sin
somewhere between sunlit doze and sightless mania was I,
hopping from one fucking foot to the other.
body goals: a frightening festival of dereliction
and my beauty obeys me, joyfull in its oasis of muck.
what does most divine wisdom make of the fatherland?
waterlogged and cruel, ruining you & old alike
under the harshness of its glare.
take the enemy path, oddling, find your mates
get a clue, get into proteins, learn the labyrinth
by heart before you’re sent there in the full
bloom of your own volupt corruption. learn that
Perpetrators daydreams are usually pretty insipid
& over quickly if you play your cards right.
it takes real freaks to match your longevity &
you know enough to seek them out like a heat bomb
the finest of the species won’t have ganas to
impede you if you choose your route correctly
taking into account water, order, the rules of the race.
Maidenhood cloying in your veins
habitude opening your pores
you’re so delirious, sweatie.
you’re so ready
morning after
We wake tangled and soaked with sweat in the beating midday, the doors all open to the balconies and Sunday’s lunchtime throng below. I’m all salt, I exude every manner of liquid. I feel most myself on humid days with everything wet, the soles of your feet slipping in your sandals, under the boobs, braless, wearing as little as possible, the back of the neck, between the legs, the scalp, every touch to another’s skin clinging you to each other.
With a light and gentle comedown we walk to the cactus garden overlooking the port, our cruising ground. As so many pleasures have lately been curtailed I am wallowing in the pleasure of the debrief, the pleasure of reliving the flame of every touch, every new arrangement of flesh on flesh, dragging it out as long as I can. We cackle with glee, delighted in our little sin. In the dusk the trees are black, except the flame trees fluorescing in the dark. We stand under them a while, and the swiftly dropping buds make a sound like rain on the brown leaf-litter below. Standing with eyes adjusting to the dusk allows us the stillness to notice an owl, huge and perfect, standing above appraising us.
evening after
As the light goes out of the day and the pavements cool we join the bodies turning themselves out onto the street, following an animal urge to gather. As we mill on the plaça space expands, each corner taken over by beautiful bodies holding placards, filled with rage and delight. Ears tuned hard to the language as the chants swell and pass over me, I just catch one as it ebbs, a promise to turn a fascist into fertiliser for your orchard, definitely.
A group of teenagers march ahead of us, unable to contain their joyous, furious energy to fit the sombreness of the occasion. They scream the chants, leaping with arms linked in denim shorts and t-shirts with cartoons printed on. I see them eyeing the anarchopunks who move through the crowd keeping watch on everything, who, like thieves with eyes everywhere, pull their bandanas over their faces to spray our words onto the bank’s glass façade. Cap agressió, sense resposta. I hope the girls are learning from the punk dykes, who, after reddening the bank, the realtor, the chain burger store with slogans of refusal, melt back into the crowd as wolves do to hide among the lambs. There are old women with us holding hands, and babies strapped to chests or hoisted onto shoulders. I have a crush on everyone, the many-gendered and many-genred all luminous in the pink light of evening, and the tourists stop, look up from their dinners, blonde boys scrolling their phones, eyes fixed, their girlfriends all made up slumped in the chair opposite, gazing with naked longing as we roll past, a carnival of flesh and incandescent rage and joy unfolding, flowering, shimmering with spite. The teenagers are delighted by this piece of theatre, learn which side they want to be on.
The thing that I really want to know, you know, is how could it all be so much, how could it all open like this, how could it be so flimsy and yet so wild and hard. The dereliction opening to let us all in, the flowers closing to respect their private night. And it’s everything that moves like that, and it’s everything that sings that skips down the main avenue of the city miraculously emptied of traffic, and it’s the opening that a body can perform if the hands are willing, spreading with the space of the fingers and the wet warmth between, belly-up euphoria in the sunshine.
Madeleine Stack is an artist and writer.