Wintertime

Not long be­fore the end of 2014, a Bel­gian ac­quain­tance of mine died of a heart at­tack, aged 52, in his na­tive Flan­ders. I say 'ac­quain­tance', be­cause we were never friends, but nei­ther were we ever en­e­mies. About a year be­fore his death, I ran into him by chance in Barcelona, the city where he'd lived for the last quar­ter cen­tury. The eco­nomic cri­sis had left him, he ex­plained, with no al­ter­na­tive but to head back home. To judge from his un­usu­ally dis­traught ex­pres­sion, he felt that both life and fate had teamed up to kick him in the teeth. He was an af­fa­ble man, and I don't re­call we ever ar­gued, but do re­mem­ber that I never felt too com­fort­able in his pres­ence, there being lit­tle rap­port. The rea­son might have been some­thing to do with the fact that, for me, Cat­alo­nia had come to be the only place that re­ally felt like home; whereas my Bel­gian ac­quain­tance dis­liked Cat­alo­nia to the ex­tent that one night on the streets of Barcelona, in­fu­ri­ated by the pro-Cata­lan slo­gans being shouted by all and sundry on the oc­ca­sion of Barça win­ning the league, he bel­lowed, nay, roared 'FUCK CAT­ALO­NIA!': a cri de coeur that re­ally did come, un­mis­tak­ably, from the heart. Why he hated Cat­alo­nia so - as op­posed to not hat­ing or even lik­ing it - I never un­der­stood. He was cer­tainly far too smart to be­lieve that every­thing Cata­lan was 'na­tion­al­is­tic' and there­fore au­to­mat­i­cally con­demnable (there are more than a few North­ern Eu­ro­pean res­i­dents who have the idea that any­one who, say, ha­bit­u­ally reads a news­pa­per in Cata­lan, is an em­bry­onic eth­nic cleanser). No, I sus­pect it was more that he pre­ferred to live in a kind of imag­i­nary Spain of his own Bel­gian mak­ing, in which ir­ri­tat­ing things like the Cata­lan lan­guage sim­ply had no role to play. There were mo­ments when this neg­a­tivism em­anated from him in al­most tan­gi­ble waves, in­dica­tive of some dark side to him which re­minded me of a cer­tain dark side of my own – about other sub­jects, and other places - that I was try­ing to keep at bay. Hav­ing said which, I feel sure his life could have worked out dif­fer­ently, had he some­how man­aged to tweak it a lit­tle. Among other things, for ex­am­ple, he was a gifted pho­tog­ra­pher, as is at­tested by a re­mark­able, in­deed out­stand­ing, por­trait he took of me and my part­ner when we were both hit­ting 30. When­ever I look at it, I re­mind my­self to men­tally thank him. Es­pe­cially now.