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¹ Translated from: Salvador Espriu, “Assaig del cantic en el temple” (Rehearsal for a hymn in the temple), El caminant i el mur (The wanderer and the wall), 1954

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Jaume thinks that parents shouldn’t have to knock on their children’s bedroom doors, that the doors should always be open. Well, that is what he thought. That is what he thought four years ago, before he left. But back then Albert was eleven. Things were different. Jaume has just walked into Albert’s room without knocking and finds him sitting at the computer, with the music cranked up. Rosa told him to go in, without her, it’s better if you go in on your own. Jaume nodded and crossed the hallway. Years ago, there was a time when it had been the hallway of his home. The white of the walls has yellowed a little and there is a painting that wasn’t there before. But the important things are still where they used to be, they haven’t changed that much. At the end, on the right, next to the bathroom, is Albert’s bedroom with the door shut.

Albert hasn’t lifted his eyes from the computer screen and Jaume thinks he has minimized something, as if he was trying to hide it.

“No, it doesn’t have to be right now. Or we can if you want. Whatever you want.”

The bedroom is a jumbled den. Clothes on the floor. The bed unmade. A shelf full of books and exotic miniature cars bought on vacations. A photo of Barça from the last season between two flags: the enormous Catalan independence flag with its blue triangle; and a crude plastic flag in the Barça colors, blue and scarlet, that was probably given away free at a match. A Braveheart poster. Scarlett Johansson in Match Point. Lots of photos pinned to a cork notice board, taken from very close up, distorted, Albert and messy-haired friends that Jaume doesn’t know pulling faces into the camera: tired faces, adolescent and pale, dressed up as punks, in groups of twos and threes. On the football shirt hanging from the ceiling is Ronaldinho’s number ten but with Albert’s name. His first name. Not his family name: Cortès, Albert and Jaume’s family name. Nor did it have Rosa’s family name, Albert’s other name: Mercadal. Tenim un nom i el sap tothom: We have a name that everyone knows. Everyone chooses which name to put on the back of his or her shirt. The essential name: footballers only have one name, sometimes a shortened name, sometimes a nickname, sometimes their family name, sometimes their first name, sometimes a kind of nom de guerre. But on this shirt, it says Albert. It’s a choice.

Yes, that would be better. Right now Jaume doesn’t know what to say to his son, he wasn’t expecting that question. It’s not a question he can answer quickly. Maybe: because of my father, who’s dying. Because of your mother. Because of you. Because of work. He rehearses a few replies without voicing any of them out loud, he doesn’t like them.

Albert has lifted his eyes from the computer screen. Jaume looks discreetly at the screen but he only sees a cluster of icons over a blurred photo. Maybe this out-of-focus blurriness is precisely the point. Maybe it evokes, despite its lack of focus, an extraordinary, secret, and intimate moment. He doesn’t know what to say to him. Suddenly, he feels as though he doesn’t have the strength to talk about anything serious, it’s the last thing he feels like doing. Why have you come back? I ask myself the same question, why have I come back. I’ve missed the boat. I can’t act like nothing has happened. Why have you come back? If you ran away once, you can run away again. I don’t trust you. They don’t say it, but maybe they sense it. Jaume pauses for an instant, perplexed. Coward. You’re a coward. I’m a coward. What if I don’t say what I’ve come to say? But it needs to be said. Otherwise I’ll regret it afterwards. He takes a deep breath, like someone leaping into the void.

“I just wanted to say I have a couple of tickets to the Champions final in Paris. I’d really like you to come with me, if that’s what you want.”

He says it tentatively, like a diplomat. Like someone slipping a note under the door, to see what happens. He is afraid of a sharp, curt response. But Albert doesn’t say anything. Rosa has stayed in the living room, in front of the television, waiting, drinking a beer and snacking on potato chips, her weakness. Jaume wants to leave to go back home, his current home, the home that was his before, his parents’ home. He looks back at Albert’s bedroom and it doesn’t seem that messy after all. It is packed full of stuff, in the baroque sense, but there is a certain order to it. There are books; a few, not too many. He can’t make out the titles; he’d have to look closely, it wouldn’t be very discreet. Albert has grown lanky, he is wearing an old black t-shirt with “No Future” written in white graffiti letters and some baggy combat shorts that are falling down. His hair is long and messy, studiously messy.

“You don’t have to tell me right now. Just think about it, if you want, and let me know when you’re ready.”

Jaume responds with a nod and a measured smile, he doesn’t want it to look like a proclamation of victory. Too premature. He carefully closes the door behind him leaving it ajar and steps back into the hallway just as he used to years before when he would leave a glass of water in Albert’s room in the middle of the night, barefoot in the hallway, half-asleep and bleary-eyed, happy without knowing it.

“It’s a good thing you came back. Otherwise I don’t know how I’d manage.”

Llúcia takes Jaume’s hand because there are things that have to be said through touch. The sense of touch expresses things, it takes the sting out of words, and it gives them the right tone. No, Jaume’s mother doesn’t know how she’d manage with her bedridden husband; at times feverish, in pain, absent. But that isn’t why she needs her son’s help, that isn’t the tough part, she has always taken care of her husband. There is this atavistic instinct of protection, a genetic sense of reality in the face of illness and pain, even death. All the women in the family have it, it has always been there, passed down from mothers to daughters or sometimes straight to granddaughters. No, she needs Jaume when the doctor comes and says things in that particular way and she doesn’t know exactly what he means, what she has to do, and what will happen. Jaume works with words, he understands them. He translates them for Llúcia, his mother, into scheduled doses of pills and into concrete and comprehensible symptoms, prognoses for the following day: he’ll have a stomachache, a fuzzy head, and he’ll have difficulty breathing. Then Llúcia follows the instructions. The doing isn’t the problem. It is the understanding. The knowing what to do. Speaking and listening to the visiting doctor, the high priest of a hidden truth, about a secret that he protects with convoluted words. Llúcia leaves that to her son.

Jaume has gone back to his parents’ house, to the family apartment on Rutlla Street. He has moved back into his bedroom, the bedroom he had before he got married, his childhood bedroom. He looks at the room and compares it to his son’s room. There are still things from when he was a child, not everything, some of his books on the shelves, and the furniture that has become dated, more dated than antique, old-fashioned. The cups from when he played indoor football at school. There are no posters. But there were posters once. Not too different from his son’s. There were posters of other films and other actresses, less vivacious and less explicit. There was a different Barça lineup, from the time of Cruyff when he first arrived from Holland, the year of the five-nil win away at Madrid, the era of Sotil and Rexach and Asensi. After years, yes, fourteen years without winning a league. The old La Trinca record that he used to sing must be here, too, at the back of some chest of drawers. Records that you can no longer listen to, because there aren’t any old record players left to play them on anymore, though nobody dares throw them away or take them to the Sant Antoni market to sell. Jaume puts his jacket down in his childhood bedroom and his mother walks in without knocking; you don’t knock on children’s doors.

She means he should go and see him. He is stretched out on the marital bed with the blinds half drawn so that it isn’t too light and to stop the noise from the street drifting up. It’s a busy street, especially at midday. On the console table there is a photo of Albert, among others, when he was a little boy, dressed in a football shirt, the Barça shirt, with a trophy in his hand, a photographer’s portrait. His father is sitting up slightly with cushions at his back, like a convalescent in recovery phase. But he looks ill. Yellowing skin and dark circles under his eyes.

“Bad. How do you think I feel?” But he doesn’t say it angrily. He is just acting out a theatrical role, the old grouch.

The mother arrives but she hangs back, she doesn’t want to get in the way. She spends enough hours in this bedroom as it is. All her life, in fact. Now it is her son’s turn. She plays the role of Chief of Protocol, an umbilical cord with the outside world.

“You’ll see it on TV. We’ll wave at you when the camera zooms in on us.”

Jaume’s father hasn’t fully digested the separation. There are couples who stay together to spare their parents the upset. There are parents who think that if a child of theirs separates it is because they haven’t done their job properly. Antoni Cortès, Jaume’s father, is one of those who thinks everything is their fault, that if there is a very long silence at dinner it is because they didn’t know what to say. Every time he finds out Jaume has gone to see his son—and his ex-wife who Antoni always liked when she was young—he thinks that maybe things will go back to how they were, to what it should never have ceased to be.

His father refuses with a shake of the head and takes the cushion from behind his back, flattens it, and gets into a comfortable position to sleep. But he won’t sleep, he already knows it. He’ll go over and over everything in his head, life, all the things that he wishes would remain forever but that he will take with him to the grave. All the things that should have happened and have never happened. Jaume coming back from Buenos Aires was a surprise. A good one. As he weighs up everything, the good and the bad, his eyes half closed, alone in bed, he puts Jaume’s return onto the plus side. When Jaume leaves with his Llúcia, he looks at the photographs on the console table, the photo of his wedding day, the photo of his son holding up a football cup that he had just won, a photo of his grandchildren, Glòria and Albert, who haven’t been to see him for such a long time.

Albert knows that he has to call his father, OK, count me in, when are we leaving? But he’s not in any rush. Or rather, he’s dragging his feet. He doesn’t know how to say it, what tone of voice to use. He doesn’t want to be rude, or unfair, or bitter. But even more than that he doesn’t want to be a pushover, he doesn’t want to trade the apologies he is owed in exchange for tickets to the final. It’s more complicated. Rosa, his mother, has always told him that nothing is easy. The only things that look easy are things that are poorly articulated. If you explain something well, the whole story, it is bound to get complicated. Jaume only comes over from time to time to what had once been his home, an apartment that is too big for two people, Rosa and Albert, next to the old cemetery, on the other side of Vallparadís, the site of building works for years now to divert the trains underground. An apartment that has become dated and worn with the years, but Albert doesn’t notice; he has always seen it the same. But if Jaume came to dinner, tonight for instance, he would say OK, fine, as if he wasn’t bothered, without being rude, without any grumpy or scornful looks. But he doesn’t want him to think that everything has gone back to normal. Because this isn’t normal. Coming out with these things, so many years later, as if nothing had happened. And what’s more, his father won’t come for dinner tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or the night after.

A couple of kids from Albert’s class, at the Piarists school, want to go to Paris. He knew they would. Xavi’s older brother says he’ll plant himself in front of the ticketing agency the night before the tickets go on sale, he’ll spend the night sleeping outside on the sidewalk to be the first in line when they open and to be sure he’ll get them. One for Xavi, a couple for some other friends. Albert spoke to them about the trip to Paris, before he gave his father an answer, before he told him yes, he would go with him. Albert’s father having tickets before the agencies even open looks like special privileges. But it is a privilege that is admired and envied. There will be no revolutions against privilege in this case. Your dad’s a journalist, isn’t he? Yeah, but not a sports journalist. He doesn’t talk about football. He’s really into it but he doesn’t write about it. But he must’ve got the tickets because he’s a journalist. How much’ll they have cost him? No idea. He might’ve even got them for free, journalists live the good life. I wanna be a journalist. You don’t have to study much, right? But a sports journalist. Or a music journalist. Like the ones who write gig reviews. Not the ones who go to war zones.

There are some kids in class who only think about football. About Barça. And Xavi seems to be one of them. Not Albert. Not exactly. Actually, he has never stopped to think about what he thinks about. Of course, there is football. It’s a way of being part of something, having a conversation with friends, to feel part of a deep ancestral tribe with its own anthems and colors. Not an obsession. He didn’t ever choose to be a Barça fan, he just is, period. There was no decision, no conversion, no day that he decided after carefully considering and measuring it against other equally weighted options, that he would be a lifelong Barça fan. He found himself, like everyone else, carried along by the very force of things, the strength of the tribe. He hasn’t been to the stadium much. Maybe his father had taken him the odd time when he was little, before he left. He doesn’t remember much. He has gone back a few times thanks to friends who have lent him their season tickets. He liked it, more so in the stadium than watching it on TV. But he isn’t at all obsessed. If they show the matches on television, you watch them. Albert is rather quiet, he doesn’t shout much, not even when they play football in the school yard, not even when they go out on Thursday evenings. To his classmates at Can Culapi, he is a boy like any other, he isn’t a freak, maybe a little more silent, a little more in his own shell than the average boy, he does his own thing. But for an adult, outside observer these differences in comparison to the rest of the kids in the class would be imperceptible. He isn’t the most popular kid. But neither is he a loner. The list of things he isn’t is longer than the list of things he is.

“If not, we’ll go and see it together. They’ll definitely put screens up in Vella Square. Or if not, in Barcelona.”

“You can all come to my place. There’s a TV in the basement. We’ll have the place to ourselves. My parents will be watching it in the living room.”

Xavi and Arnau, and Laura too, talk about watching the match together if in the end Xavi doesn’t go to Paris. They have met up on other occasions to watch the weekly game together, or to go to a bar in Sabadell, or to climb La Mola on a Saturday morning. Albert used to go with them sometimes. They are the ones who plaster their folders with laminated photos of Barça, like his, but also photos of the same bands, the same Catalan independence flag, the actors from the Ventdelplà TV series, Princess Leia from Star Wars. They are from the same world, the world that makes Albert feel warm and protected. And what if he stayed here with them? It would just be a question of saying no to his father. Deep down, he doesn’t even like football that much. Or maybe he does. It doesn’t matter. But he doesn’t say anything to them. That’s not his way. He doesn’t care about the giant screen or the television in the basement. He is going to Paris. He’ll be one of those who go to Paris. With his father. He’s lucky.

For a second, when Xavi looked at him incredulously, envious of his father’s privilege, of the trip and the tickets, Albert thought he had found, underneath the layers upon layers of compressed sedimentary rock, the fossil of an ancient and forgotten age. A childish and primitive feeling, well-worn but not completely expired, a surprising and simple form of pride. Yeah, it’s my dad. My dad got them. I’m going with my dad. Just for a second.

“Yes, but not much. They’ve been reserved in your name, from the Barça agency, because it’s us. But we can’t cancel them the night before. They’re very sought-after.”

The production girl from the sports section is very friendly, the kind that ends each phone call with affectionate niceties and calls people “honey” and “sweetheart.” Jaume likes her; he didn’t know her at all, until he asked her for this favor. But now she seems a little irritated, you don’t have all the time in the world, they keep these tickets for us because we’re from the radio, but we can’t take advantage. They are all so young in the sports section; there is almost nobody from the crowd that Jaume knew before he left to take up the post of correspondent. In fact, the sports section is always a little set apart, it is on another floor, in their own newsroom, you have to go up another flight of stairs. Jaume went up a few days ago with a certain timidity, they definitely know who he is, one of the veterans, a familiar voice, Jaume Cortès, Buenos Aires, and they said of course, that they at the production department would take care of dealing with the official travel agency, that they’d be sure to find a package with the travel and tickets to the match before they went on sale. Would he like to fly there? No, better to go by train. Two tickets to the match and two sleeper berths. Nothing too fancy, just the standard.

He felt bad asking them to wait a few more days over the phone, favors should be asked in person. That is why he has come. He hasn’t been to the radio station much since he got back. It’s a strange situation. He is one of them, but he doesn’t have a job. He came back because he wanted to, he can’t turn up now making demands. He will probably end up in the international section, as an editor, or deputy director, but he needs a few weeks to tie it all up. In the meantime, he waits at home. He says hello to the girl at reception and to the security guy, he goes up the stairs because he has always gone up them but he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in there if he had to stay there for any length of time. He goes to see the people in the international section but he won’t distract them with philosophical conversations, they have lots of work to do, radio never stops, you always have to start work on the next bulletin, not like a newspaper where one edition a day is enough. Today he has gone straight to the sports section, there is hardly anyone there. The editor is downstairs in the studio, working on the bulletin. The team from the nighttime program will arrive after lunch. The people from production are there.

“A few. Loads of people are going. There’s a lot to do. All the news programs are asking for content. They have to work on the program every night as well as the live broadcast, of course.”

“I wish! No, they don’t take me out to play. I may as well be a telephone extension. They could tattoo Bang & Olufsen on my arm as if I was a cordless answering machine. Just a machine to make and receive calls.”

The journalists in the sports section have covered their editorial office with photos of themselves at stadiums all over the world, all the celebrations, wearing headsets, the microphone sponge a centimeter from their mouths, next to Koeman at Wembley, player and reporter united in the celebrations on the pitch. With Eto’o on the pitch at Levante last year, the day they won the league. Hanging on the walls there are old press passes from previous Olympic Games, World Athletics Championships, Champions League finals, they are souvenirs, it would be distressing to throw them away. They are laminated and glamorous, ID photos with know-it-all faces and PRESS written in big letters. Press passes from all kinds of sports, we don’t spend all our time talking about Barça, even if that is what people think. We talk about everything here, canoeing, and even field hockey, and because you’re from Terrassa, you should know that.

Maybe Jaume would have liked to have worked in sports journalism when he was younger. In fact, he liked everything about journalism, he is a journalist because that is just who he is, inquisitive, eager. He was that way before he started studying. He sees the world in the form of articles, reports, and editorials. As he experiences things, he thinks about how he would write about them, what the headline would be. But he could also cross over into sport, why not? But you don’t get to choose much in this job. You mostly end up doing what happens to come your way by chance. He went into political journalism, he doesn’t have very good memories of that time, and then he was put in charge. When you’re in charge, as a journalist, you end up having to do a bit of everything. You have to evaluate and choose the order of the top stories, the running order as they say at journalism school. But how the hell do you decide whether to open with the Barça semi-final, the AIDS vaccine, or the bombing in Afghanistan? How do you compare them? Jaume used to get flustered when he was in charge. And he was only in charge a little, once in a while. Better to be a correspondent. You’re on your own. The editors are thousands of miles away. Ideal for solitary people. No need to take responsibility for other people’s work. Only your own. Jaume is a loner. He has sometimes been called a coward. He doesn’t like being in charge. But neither does he like people being in charge of him.

Maybe that was the reason for that whole mess before he went to South America. Back then he was the night editor. It was after eleven and the news editor wasn’t there, neither was the editor-in-chief, which was normal at that hour. Then there was that terrorist attack in the Basque Country and we ran it in the bulletin, we broke the story, I got the correspondent out of bed so that he could do a news summary and a report. But he didn’t dare open the twelve o’clock bulletin with the story or interrupt the programming to do a special report. He called the news editor but simply got the automated message “the number you are calling is temporarily unavailable.”

Afterwards, when all the chaos erupted, letters from listeners, the protests by politicians, everyone wanted to dodge the bullets and Jaume took the fall. Various political interpretations, hysteria. This is down to the night editor, Cortès. Nothing happened to him. No dismissal, no disciplinary action, nothing. That would really have been the icing on the cake. But it was unofficially established and generously divulged that it had been Jaume’s fault. He had done something wrong. You couldn’t trust him. There was a great scandal. It was talked about extensively in the journalists’ bars. Rival stations also made a big deal out of it; the news was carried far and wide. He tried not to talk about it too much at home; it put him in a bad mood. He thought it was unfair. Indecent. He thought he had acted reasonably. He would have quit, he was sick of everything, but he had a mortgage to pay and it wasn’t the best time to look for another job with everything that was being whispered in the corridors about him. Without shouting, shouting didn’t come easy to him, Jaume complained to the editor-in-chief:

“Christ, you can’t throw all this shit at me. We can discuss it, we can talk about it, whatever you want. But don’t make me look like an idiot, because you know it wasn’t my fault. In this job we have nothing more than our name. We have a name, nothing more. We make a living off our name. If you taint mine, I’m finished. I can deal with anything, failure, triumph, muddling through, but not the tarnishing of my name. If I’d done something wrong, fine. But I just did what had to be done. You know that.”

After that he went to Buenos Aires. Almost straight away, the first chance he had. And now he has come back. Could people really still remember all that? When he leaves the sports section, halfway down the stairs, he bumps into the news editor, the new one, not the one who was there when Jaume left. Back then he was in the business section. He will have to ask him about his situation, when his posting is going to come through. The news editor will have to tell him that he still doesn’t know. Jaume will have to ask whether everything that happened years ago is still an issue, whether they haven’t been able to find him a posting because of that, and whether it left his name tarnished. And the news editor won’t know what to say to him. Neither of them has any appetite for a duel in the middle of the staircase.

Sometimes Barça is handy when you’re looking for something else to talk about. To avoid arguments. To disguise conflicts. To speak to someone on a neutral subject, whoever you happen to meet in the elevator or on the staircase of the radio station, on your way out of the sports section.

“Don’t come back late. But if you are going to be late, at least call and let me know.”

Since her eldest daughter, Glòria, went to study in Dublin, Rosa Mercadal’s life has revolved around Albert, as if he was her very foundation, an essential but ever more delicate, more brittle, foundation. It’s not that she only lives for Albert, but her son has become her great source of meaning, a necessary worry, the reason or the excuse for all her decisions. Living alone, for instance. Alone with him. Without a man. When Jaume left, she very nearly moved in with Gabriel, they were just a step away from it, but they decided to stay each living in their own house, until the children were older. And when the children were old enough, it no longer mattered, she had got used to living alone and everything between them became languid like a worn-out marriage: it’s not always true that life gets damaged when you use it. Sometimes it gets damaged precisely when you don’t use it.

Now Jaume has come back and she absolutely wouldn’t want him at home. Neither has he asked to come home, he hasn’t even suggested it. Rosa doesn’t even think that he wants to. He says he has come back because his father is sick. Maybe. But he came straight to see Albert. And now, all this about the tickets for Paris. Albert must be really happy about it; he has already said he will go. But what is it that is making him happy? Going to see the match, or taking this trip with his father after so many years? Of course, Albert is crazy about football, he thinks of nothing else, all those photos on his bedroom wall, meeting up with his friends on Saturday nights to see the match. No more explanation is needed. It’s the Champions League final, isn’t it? The ultimate match. He wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.

While he was in Buenos Aires working as a correspondent, Jaume didn’t call Albert very often. And he called Rosa even less. He used to write, though, every now and again. She has always thought that Jaume is the type to say things in writing, that he feels more secure writing than talking, maybe because he doesn’t want to see the eyes of the person he is talking to. He isn’t brave. He plays the innocent. Or maybe not. That isn’t fair. Rosa decided never to speak unfairly about Jaume in front of the children, not that she wasn’t tempted at the beginning. It wasn’t just out of kindness: it was a way of showing that she was the one who was balanced, fair, and to justify her righteousness. She wanted to aspire to the celebrated and admired status of martyr. She had never spoken badly of Jaume to Albert. She had always insisted—without much success—that he go to visit his grandparents, Jaume’s parents, even though Jaume wasn’t there. Now she would push him as much as she had to so that he would go to Paris with his father. Nobody could reproach her for anything. She was fairer than anybody, like all Librans. Calm and serene. Hurt.

“Why don’t you go and visit your grandparents? It’d be no bother. Just a quick visit. They’d love that.”

“Because I don’t know what to say. And neither do they. They only talk about dad. About when dad was young, when he played football, when he knew he wanted to be a journalist…”

Rosa had been once or twice to her in-laws’ place after Jaume left. It was a bit awkward. It wasn’t their fault, the poor things, they’re good people. It must have been very difficult for them too but they plucked up the courage and they went out of their way for her. But Rosa didn’t know what to say either. She didn’t even know what to say to herself. Jaume explained that he was going to Buenos Aires, that there was a correspondent’s position on the radio and that nobody else was going: everyone says they would go wherever, but when push comes to shove, they all have small children, parents that are ill, and things to do, everyone says it would have been fine a year ago, or we could talk about it next year, but now, right at this point in time, it’s not going to work for me.

When Jaume said all of this to her, dragging it out without actually knowing how to say it, her world fell apart. It wasn’t the surprise. In fact, she was the one who told him to go, maybe we should spend some time apart, maybe we have to rethink things, maybe it’ll be good for us. But Rosa was convinced that Jaume would never make the first move, not the first move or any other move, either she would have to leave or he would carry on doing the same thing, neither yes nor no, neither in nor out, the same thing with her and with the others. It was then that she met Gabriel. And when she said to Jaume: we need time to think, perhaps it might be good … She figured that at the most, he would go back to his parents’ place for three months, giving them any old excuse. It was a little, very soft, push away, but his response was over the top. I’m going to Buenos Aires, I’ve been offered a correspondent post. Rosa thought he was going with someone, she was sure of it then; now she’s not so sure.

They never actually went so far as to separate. At least, they didn’t do the paperwork. They merely separated their bank accounts, their savings passbooks, and their credit cards. They never talked about the house or the children. They never divided anything up. They didn’t even openly use the word separation. It was as if the two of them were the same as before, except one was in Terrassa and the other was in Buenos Aires. A complete fiction. And Jaume’s parents played along with this fiction, they could see it wasn’t real but they clung to it. A generation that didn’t understand all that, that couldn’t understand it. They could see which way the wind was blowing but they couldn’t understand it. Her mother, Rosa’s mother, didn’t understand it either. And she too played along with the game; Jaume has been offered a great job, in Buenos Aires. Yeah, right! But they couldn’t get their heads around it. Or maybe it wasn’t a generational thing. Glòria and Albert never understood it either. Glòria closed herself off, little by little, until she finally disappeared. Albert suffered. And he is still suffering. There are days when he doesn’t want anything to do with his father. Other days, he asks questions.

But Rosa pauses: it is one thing to be a Libra and quite another to waste a good opportunity. And she adds with an artificial and projected magnanimity:

Time changes and places remain. But time retouches places. Jaume has made the trip on foot hundreds of times from what was his home to what has always been his parents’ home, from the old cemetery to Rutlla Street, four blocks away. But it has been a long time since he walked this route, not since his exile, his escape to Buenos Aires. He finds it changed, dramatically changed. Maybe it isn’t a big deal. He finds it worse, but not deteriorated, quite the opposite, everything appears to be newer, cleaner, and more practical. And less his.

He crosses the bridge over the Vallparadís river, not the tall and solemn bridge, but the one further down, the industrial, practical, less aesthetically pleasing one. The bridge is surrounded by old industrial warehouses that are now municipal depots. Over a corrugated iron door there is a graffiti image of a star and four stripes and the phrase “Burn Spain.” Below, the Vallparadís. In his childhood the area around the river was like a jungle. Children must have some kind of strange intuition: now that they are digging tunnels for the trains to pass through, they have found rhinoceros and giraffe bones and the remains of towering tropical trees at the bottom of the river bed. He didn’t go to play there as a child. It would never have occurred to him from Rutlla Street. But he did go as an adolescent. In that time of obsession with archaeology, when he used to go on Sunday mornings with Ramir de Masdéu i de Castellet, a self-taught archeologist, to excavate at Vil·la Moderata, near Can Jofresa, and midweek he thought he could find fragments of terra sigillata and other treasures in the mouth of the river that passed by the churches of Sant Pere, a wild place of fountains, trails, and streams of manure, that cascaded from the tubes of the Sant Antoni factories. But how do you tell the difference between a piece of fine Iberian ceramic and a urinal that was smashed up thirty years ago? Back then Vallparadís was a medieval, ancient, African river. Now it is a Nordic park with benches, neat pathways, pools, and ponds. Jaume looks nostalgically at it from the other bridge. He feels sentimental. He has felt sentimental for days. Ever since he got back. Maybe even before: and that is why he came back.

When you go up by Sant Quirze, there is not a single shop for a fair stretch. Not one. Nothing. There are no shops until you get to the bakery on the corner with Topete Street. If you look around Sant Quirze, around Torre Street and Riba Street, the houses are all low-rise workers’ cottages that look as if they have been there forever, and they have: all they have done is turn one of the reception rooms into a garage with automatic doors. They are not particularly stylish houses but neither are they ugly. They are practical. Some of them, the oldest, the most abandoned, have or have had squatters, graffiti in the shape of a bolt of lightning, and black flags on the balconies. The others must be being used for storage by the people who lived there but who have now bought an apartment in the center of town. They leave all their junk in the old house and there is a garage where the kids can play without making noise or being a nuisance. They can play and sing and do whatever else they want. In these big houses with two floors, instead of the black flags of the squatters, there are Barça flags—and maybe even a Catalan independence flag—belonging to the fledgling members of the middle-class tribe. It is a street without amenities. Jaume used to get bored as a child and he would count the tiles on the sidewalk, but back then they weren’t tiles, they were primitive flagstones and they were always broken. That is how the streets were back then, full of steam and industrial austerity.

His real world starts, or it used to start, after Topete Street. On the immediate right, behind the Matalonga family’s house, is a spectacular mansion. It wasn’t that spectacular from behind, but you could see its grandness, you can still see it, in the two tall palm trees in the patio. After that, there is a mix of houses and factories. This was the world of Jaume’s childhood. Here, in the direction of the Vapor Gran steam textile mill or further ahead to the Farinera flour mill on Cervantes Street or Rasa Street or Àngels Street. Factories and more factories, old and labyrinthine, with unkempt, winding alleyways where the vans used to drive in. It wasn’t serene and square architecture like the modernist Aymerich i Amat textile mill on the Rambla. It was an architecture of overlapping buildings, of appendages, like the old farmhouses, extended here, hoisted up there, with passages that weaved between them, and workers’ houses in the middle, everything with an aftertaste of smoke and noise from the loom and a wintry cold on the way to school. Now there is almost nothing left.

A hotel and lots of shops are being built on the site of the old Vapor Gran mill and there is already a square, what will be a square, where Asian children play football wearing the Barça shirt like someone carrying a residency certificate or a passport. Everyone is different. There is no trace of the old factories. Only some forgotten fossils in unlikely places. There is one on the right before you get to Puignovell. Further along, on the left, what is left of the Vapor Gran, now hidden behind a fence of unceasing construction works. Jaume never saw it as one big factory, or at least he can’t remember having done so. It was a space crammed with small workshops and warehouses that could provide the perfect setting for crime novels; it was easy to imagine someone being stabbed in a corner. Jaume and his friends used to sneak in, the workers didn’t want kids around, and they played hide-and-seek, or football. There are some remnants left, especially chimneys; it appears they feel bad about knocking down the old chimneys, as if they were the only monument in this city without monuments, of this jumbled city of houses and factories. The only thing that need remain. Time disappears but sometimes places disappear too.

At the end, before turning into Rutlla Street, to his parents’ house, on the right-hand side, right behind Sant Esperit, the mix of the spiritual and the material, of religion and manufacturing, the Cal Ros textile mill, was where his grandmother had worked as a child. When she was a very young child. I think she used to tie knots; it’s what children younger than ten used to do in the factory because they had little hands and were better at tying knots. She married a weaver, the aristocracy of the working classes at the mill. That’s where we come from. From the songs that his grandmother used to sing to him, when he was a child, sitting on her lap, innocent versions of Pilar Alonso hits, the world of football and the street, marquees and fiestas, the village. Songs learned among the knot tyers at Cal Ros, singing at the top of their voices; heard, it seems incredible, amid all that racket. They all ended up deaf:

Cal Ros has a forged iron gate with an antique, calligraphed letter R, and it is a smaller but well-made mill, immaculate. The old factory has everything from gyms and shops, to houses and offices. But it has an air of the old days. All in all it’s nothing special. This isn’t Buenos Aires, or Barcelona. Imagine traveling the world only to end up back here, next to the Vapor Gran, the Vallparadís river, the walkway bridge, and the many other ordinary things that are there. He has seen much better things traveling the world. But maybe this is the only way for his return to make any sense: the fact that he has been here before, that he was here when it was all being built. To find a trace of his knot-tyer grandmother and his weaver grandfather, and the other grandfather who arrived from Andalusia. He stayed with relatives who had arrived earlier, living with the whole family in one room in the neighborhood of Poble Nou, like the North African immigrants now. Without all these remnants, what would all this be now? What would the squares be without the chimneys? Without the past, why would he go on foot from the old cemetery to Rutlla Street, from his children’s home to his parents’ home, if all that didn’t have an air of pilgrimage about it? Jaume thinks that he is the last survivor of a world that is condemned to disappear, a world of factories and chimneys, the landscape of his childhood. And many more things. And that he has come back to curb its disappearance, to prolong the life, to stop the thread from breaking. From parents to children. He is a pilgrim, he confesses to himself, surprised. He is a pilgrim in Terrassa. And he will be a pilgrim in Paris with Albert, following Barça. From father to son. He has become unbearably sentimental, and he doesn’t care who says it.

“I’m going to watch the match at Xavier’s house. I won’t be home for dinner.”

But it isn’t true. He is going to Bar Miramunda, near La Creu Gran, next to the street where his grandmother, his mother’s mother, lives. Albert wants to be alone. He doesn’t know why. Sometimes the best place to be alone is to be surrounded by people you don’t know. It is true that Xavier did invite him to watch it at his house, it’s on pay-per-view and they have it at their house. But he isn’t going; he just doesn’t feel like talking. There is a big crowd in the bar and lots of smoke. But there is no need to be sociable if you don’t want to be. It’s like an old cinema with all the seats in darkness. They show all the Barça matches at Miramunda, even though they are on pay channels. The bar is colorful, vaguely Caribbean, young. He has been a few times before, always in a group. Never with a girlfriend, not yet, that’ll come later. He might meet someone he knows tonight but he sits alone in a corner. He has been there other evenings before a match, and other days when there was no game on, when there are people of his own age there, maybe a little older. At night it’s quite a different thing: people who really are older. Today the game starts in the daylight, there needs to be time to celebrate the league afterwards, we’re already champions. Albert arrives early and orders a beer, as if he was playing the rebel in an old film. He looks older than he is, at this age it’s hard to tell how old people are, the older people dress younger and the younger ones dress older.

He never does this, tells his mother that he is going to a particular place when he knows he is going somewhere else. He just doesn’t tell her anything about it, it’s better to hide something than to lie. Neither does he ever watch the games on his own. He always watches them with others, or he doesn’t watch them at all, but it doesn’t matter, it depends on the game. Barça is the excuse to meet up in a group, something people can do together, something that has to be done together, a tribal game. But today Albert is confused. His father’s invitation has made things complicated. The simple fact of his father’s return had already complicated his life enough. He didn’t miss him. He had a solid, stable life. He hadn’t needed to ask any questions because there was nobody to answer them. And now look at this whole mess.

“These things happen. Things happen just because and that’s it. You should stop thinking about it. It’s nobody’s fault.”

Fault? It had never occurred to him that this could be somebody’s fault; much less that someone might think it was his fault. It’s nobody’s fault when it rains or when there is a tsunami in the South Seas. It just happens and that’s it.

MORE THAN A TEAM

CONTENTS

1