OVERHEARD

Barcelona is a city where plenty takes place out­side the home or work­place in full view of the pub­lic. The other day, on the edge of a hos­pi­tal car park, I wit­nessed the awful sight of a naked young man, scream­ing and kick­ing as he was strapped onto a gur­ney stretcher by po­lice and am­bu­lance crew.

They are far less alarm­ing but here are just a few of the con­ver­sa­tions in var­i­ous parts of Barcelona that you could have heard if you’d been with me at other times…

“And well,” the French­man said, “in our cen­tury how can you win? You and me, we are liv­ing in a coun­try, it is called the Spain and about Span­ish peo­ple there is one enor­mous prob­lem. My ex-wife is Span­ish. I un­der­stand this prob­lem very, very well.”

His nose wrin­kled in his con­quered face as he went on.

“For they, the Spaniards, every­thing only is black or white. All things must be lo­cated on the ex­treme. Their opin­ions, their pol­i­tics, their re­la­tions; noth­ing can exist in a mid­dle. When I speak Span­ish, I am like them and I use their ex­treme words all the days: nunca, siem­pre, todo, ninguna: never, al­ways, all, no one. I’m sure you know when they want to say ‘every­body’ they say ’todo el mundo’, mean­ing, all the world. When all the peo­ple of the town come to­gether in the square, that is all the world!”

He shook with laugh­ter.

“Yeah, that’s a strange one I agree, though I tend to speak bet­ter ’pain-ish’ than Span­ish,” the Eng­lish­woman said.

“But with the French, how dif­fer­ent we are,” the French­man coun­tered.

He straight­ened his pos­ture and an index fin­ger pricked the air.

“Yes, this is the truth: we are so happy with the am­bigu­ous, we are in the deep love with the grey areas. We enjoy many ex­cep­tions be­cause we are ex­cep­tional.” He chuck­led again. “No­body can fix us to a po­si­tion be­cause we change it in an in­stant. We evade you all.”

Over­heard in a cafe on Avin­guda Di­ag­o­nal, the North Amer­i­can group leader, in clan­des­tine con­ver­sa­tion:

“You said we were gonna do this thing. Why you wanna back out now? We came here to­gether and we gotta be strong. This is no time to be chicken shits.”

An Eng­lish busi­ness­woman talk­ing to an­other woman stand­ing smok­ing on Car­rer Enric Grana­dos (again, over­heard:)

“I went to that plumb­ing com­pany of­fice again and had an­other big fight with the staff. I was told to wait but after 10 min­utes they hadn’t given me the libro de recla­ma­ciones [com­plaints book], as I re­quested. I told them I was in a hurry but they ar­gued with me in­stead. I asked to see the man­ager, they wouldn’t do that ei­ther. I asked for the name of the man­ager, they wouldn’t tell me. I said that I would give them five more min­utes only.” She looked across the traf­fic.

“They started to threaten me with get­ting the Mossos [Cata­lan po­lice] to come. I said fine with me – they were break­ing the law, not me. A staff mem­ber ac­cused me of ‘falta de re­speto’ [a lack of re­spect] be­cause I didn’t use enough po­lite lan­guage with them. They threat­ened to call the Mossos again. I smiled at her and she took a pho­to­copy of my fac­tura [util­ity bill]. I de­cided to get out of there. My lawyer’s going to hear about this.”

Free en­ter­tain­ment is every­where in the city if we just prick our ears often enough. For some time, maybe free en­ter­tain­ment is all that many of us are going to be able to af­ford.