Spain 2: Barcelona

It’s true that Barcelona never sleeps. It positively throbs. We stayed in a beautifully central apartment within walking distance of many of the Gaudi buildings and a couple of fabulous little squares, including one with a towering clock in the middle with a tolling bell and the most amazing ice cream shop on its corner. It had Nutella ice cream that tasted as if it had dropped directly from heaven into the old, glass-fronted, wooden-panelled shop with a beautiful, smiley boy behind the counter. Then the Poppy ice cream, like lying in a field of poppies with a Spring sun shining on your face. Sublime.

I’m the first to admit I’m a small town girl so I was initially a little intimidated by the city’s hum, but then we walked through its ancient narrow streets, exploring the back alleys that looked like scenes out of a gothic movie, washing hanging above, little balconies with potplants on them, ancient walls and new graffiti, and I got into the rhythm.

We spent a lot of time just wandering about the back streets, behind the tourist-tat-filled ones and sitting at street cafes, drinking ice cold beer, eating tapas, watching people. One day we wound our way through a narrow alley toward Barcelona Cathedral, confused by the ever-loudening rock music. Popping into the sunshine of the cathedral square, we were met by a stage made of a double-decker bus on which a Spanish rock band were rocking to a large audience of Spanish youths. To the left, some fabulous wall art, to the right, the cathedral herself – beautiful, ancient, intricate.

We stayed and rocked for a bit and then went into the cathedral, her thick stone walls blocking out the noise, her air thick with hundreds of year’s of people’s prayers. I’m not particularly religious but here, in this cavernous building with its many beautifully decorated, gold-bedecked little chapels, I was stunned into silence. I felt like the very air I was breathing contained so many hopes and dreams, mine included. Mainly the shattered ones, although, I’m sure the fulfilled ones were there. I was overcome by sadness and I cried, big, fat tears, the kind that drip off your face and land in your lap, for all the lost souls.

I lit candles in the courtyard outside with the pretty geese and I watched their flames flicker, little lights, symbols of warmth and love and hope and I breathed again, the warm air of Barcelona. Afterwards, anyone watching would've seen three girls disappearing down the side street to find the hidden coffee shop in which to drink carajillos, write postcards and watch life pass us by.

A visit to the gallery: Tretchikoff

I’ve always liked Tretchikoff’s work, so when I saw that they were showing the first retrospective exhibition of his work at The National Gallery, I was very pleased. H, C, and I traipsed off there on Saturday morning, wrapped warmly against the icy Winter’s day.

I love The National Gallery. It sits in The Company Gardens looking like a beautifully iced simple wedding cake, the old kind, back when they were always a square fruit cake with white icing over and you slept with a squashed slice under your pillow, to dream of your future husband. It looks out over the ponds of the gardens toward Signal Hill and inside it is still and the air is thick with art. It always makes me want to sing out loud.

The gallery types, especially, make me want to sing loudly. You know the ones – they all look terribly intellectual and have scarves wrapped artistically around their necks and they say things like “Ah yes, this was in his flower phase, when he was depicting the intricacies of the social system of the time, using a floral motif, ” where I say “Ooo, look at those pretty flowers he painted!”

I did, in fact, say a lot of that, because I especially liked his big, colourful, highly-textured flower paintings. His iconic Chinese Girl is there too, and a whole lot of others. I hadn’t realised how prolific he was, and how wide a range he had – from still-life to nudes to portraits to animals (which I didn’t like) to some haunting and disturbing war images, he did all sorts.

It’s always nice, though, to go to an exhibition. To see something creative, to admire a great man’s talent, to be allowed to look through somebody else’s eyes, just for a little bit, and to wonder what they were thinking and know that what you’re thinking they were thinking is probably a thousand miles away from what they really were thinking at the time.

Joan Rivers: A piece of work

I went to the documentary festival on Friday evening and watched Joan Rivers: A piece of work. When we went into the dark cinema, I knew very little about her, other than that she was famous for two things: being funny and being plastic-surgeried to the hilt. After leaving, I had those two things confirmed and had learnt a whole lot more.

She’s 75-years old and looks about 55-years old, but in a stretched and strained, far-too-much make-up, unnatural kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an attractive woman, but in a desperately clinging to youth manner, something I have never found graceful. When the credits roll at the end there’s a scene where there are two of her and one moves suddenly – it’s her. The other is her wax double at Madame Taussads (sp?). It provides the perfect analogy for her plastic surgery – she looks waxy.

The thing that struck me most, though, was her battle for perfection, her insatiable desire for recognition, not as a comedienne, but as an actress. She will never be satisfied with how well she’s done and she is so terribly sad for it. It’s also made perfectly clear that she’s lost friends because of it. Underneath her side-splitting funniness (and she is extremely funny), clear as day, is a creature so vulnerable, so terribly tragic that I longed to hug her and say: “It’s okay, relax, you’ve done well.” I think I'm going to write her a letter to say just that, even though I'm sure she hears it from far more important people than me, all the time.

Lift music

I'd tag her at about 49-years old, give-or-take five years. Her hair is dyed blonde, cut well and looks like it took a good amount of time earlier in the evening to get it to its current state - long, smooth and loose. She wears an unsuitably-tight-for-her-age white lace top. Underneath it she either has a boob job or a very good push-up bra, which we can clearly see. A little off-putting, really.

She breezed in as if she owned the restaurant, with a strangely-shaped large black suitcase that looked like something a mafioso might carry. She had various other boxes and a suitcase with her, all of which she placed next to us in the space left there after she ordered the waiter to remove the table and chairs. Right. Next. To. Us. Close enough for me to look at her perfect make-up, lots of it.

Collecting a bar stool from the bar, she placed it in the spot next to us too, and then led a power cord under our table and plugged in a small computer which she placed on a small table that she'd found somewhere while I wasn't looking. Her white lace top and dyed-blonde hair glowed in the blue light from the screen.

We were finishing up our food, chatting voraciously about books. It was book club, after all, a haphazardly put-together meeting of The Eager Beaver's Reading Circle because one of our circle, our host for last night, had to rush away to see her sick mother-in-law. We'd decided not to just cancel, but instead to meet at a restaurant, just to chat, because we can.

At this point the lady opened her mafioso suitcase and I wondered whether I should duck under the table, seeing the headlines in my head: "Eager Beaver's Reading Circle members injured in bizarre mafioso shootout at local eatery." Luckily, my sense came to me before I made a total fool of myself, as she pulled out a large, very shiny, saxophone.

She then began to play, using her computer to make background beats, what I can only refer to as Kenny G-esque lift music. Basically, my worst musical genre. Luckily, we were done with dinner, so could pay the bill and leave hurriedly, the dulcet sounds of the saxophone haunting us all the way into the parking lot.

Not another one

I’ve known her for years although, in the past four or so, I have seen her less and less. She moved back home to the small town where people know her and knew her parents and their parents before them. I was glad for her, she seemed lonely here and unsafe in the house she shared with her sister and son and she was always ill.

She called me two weeks ago, when I’d just got back from Spain and was sitting waiting for a friend at a restaurant. It was that dreaded, heart-sinking, scream-inducing phone call. The one where the person on the other side says: “I have cancer.” And you want to cancel the call and throw your phone into the pond next to you in which two goldfish swim, not noticing a thing, in the hope that, by throwing it there the call won’t have happened and it won’t be true.

Yesterday afternoon she popped in to visit with her son who used to be a little boy and is now a grown man. She looked tiny and fragile, despite being wrapped up in layers of clothing. Always prone to being a little morbid previously, she was surprisingly upbeat, if pale and wide-eyed.

At Real Work yesterday I had a discussion with a doctor who had been soothing another collegue whose mother has brain cancer (monstrous thing is everywhere). He said something I hadn’t thought of before: “We all die,” he said (I had thought of that, not the next bit), “and, in some ways, it’s a better option to be given a time frame. It gives you time to tie up loose ends, to say goodbye, to tell people you love them.”

A difficult concept to grasp. I have never been okay with the thought of death. Of anyone else dear to me’s death, that is, not mine. Mine, I’m fine with. Maybe that makes me intrinsically selfish?

I didn’t ask her what the prognosis is. She’s being given some treatment, and I hope it works but, mostly, I hope that in this whole process she doesn’t feel too sore or yukky and that she will be loved as she should be, to make it all as okay as it can possibly be.

These things remind one to hug the people you love closer, to be nicer, gentler, kinder. Time is limited, always.

This cancer thing is a bitch.

Alone time

I sat alone. Luxuriously alone. Well, really, I wasn't alone. Who is, in The City Beneath the Mountain? But I was alone in a generic coffee shop, at my own table, frequented only by a smiley waitress asking me if I wanted things. Being on my own is something that doesn't happen often.

I had my book with me and I delighted in spreading my (rather small) handbag over the whole table, making sure anyone who looked at me knew I was not expecting anyone else. I was just waiting for a friend who would not be joining me, but rather just picking me up. Then we were going shopping. In the meantime, though, I was fabulously alone.

To celebrate, I ordered a glass of wine. And I drank it, all alone, in-between reading my book and just sitting. Everyone around me was drinking coffee, it being a coffee shop, so I felt especially decadent. They were also all eating American-sized slices of cake and muffins that were aimed at Gulliver as I, again, questioned why such huge food is necessary... It's SO wasteful, nobody ever finishes those slices.

I was disappointed that I hadn't arrived half an hour earlier, as the table behind me contained two ladies who could've been in their 40's, 50's or 60's, maybe even 70's. It was really hard to tell because their skins were stretched and tucked, their lips plumped. They were plastic. It's beside the point, though, because unfortunately they were paying their bill, after what sounded like a long session.

"And then, my latest, was such a wonderful man. We were so in love and filled with passion, but after two months I realised he was just using me, so I kicked him out." She'd obviously just regaled her entire romantic history. And I missed it! But still, I was luxuriously alone, with my glass of wine and my book. Glorious.

I watched a woman interview a young girl in the corner, her hands twitching and wriggling beneath the table, which I could see from my vantage point. It was a job for a PA to a chartered account, one that is "well-known in Cape Town" and needs discretion. I'd have loved to know the back story to that too. Maybe he chartered accounts dodgy strip bars in the seedy parts of town.

Then C arrived and we did adminny things like paying bills and shopping for soap. I'm a sucker for a bargain and found an enormous bottle of the 2-in-1 shampoo I used in Spain, so bought it. It contains 150 washes, according to its label, so I hope I didn't love it so much in Spain because I had my Spain bliss on. Otherwise it's going to be a long hairwashing year!

Even the admin seemed fine in the afterglow of an hour with just me. That sounds terribly vain but is not meant in that vein. Snigger.

Glad-wrapped and pizza-ed

There was a sweet, young couple at the table in the corner. It was the most dimly-lit space in the otherwise quite-bright-for-a-restaurant pizzeria. He looked like the stereotypical computer-geek from teen Hollywood movies, she was young and pretty. They shared a chocolate brownie for pudding and left holding hands.

I needed to go to the restaurant, one I’ve driven past on my way home from work for nearly 14 years but never been in. I had a voucher you see, that needed using and a disposition that’d make a bipolar sufferer off their meds look like a kitten. That’s why I needed it. The cling wrap is too tight, I needed out. G, too, was wound tight as elastic inside a golf ball. An old family-friendly place that smelt like pizza ovens was a good choice. It catapulted me back to a childhood place and wrapped me in its warm flour-dusted embrace.

All around us were families, each seemed to me to have an anomaly of some sort. The family with grown-up children next to us had a mother who is obviously going through chemo, her hair almost gone. They were talking and laughing and shared a salad to start. When their pizzas arrived the table was suddenly too small as they shared those too.

Next to them, another family – mom, dad, teenage daughter and boyfriend and much younger, very pretty blonde princess daughter in a spangley outfit more suited to a burlesque club. The parents were huge, their children tiny. They, too, were deeply engaged in conversation and handed phones around to show photos, Facebook statuses, heaven-knows-what. The princess threw her head to the table when they didn’t listen to her story.

Behind us two fresh young boys (oh, I sound old… they were in their early 20’s) sat with an older wealthy-looking lady, possibly one of their mother’s, talking passionately about music. We decided they were hoping she’d fund their band. They reminded me of various boys I went out with in my university days.

There was an old-fashioned carpet on the floor in deep, rich colours, highly patterned. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much red wine, how many pizza crumbs and olive bits and parmesan sprinklings were crunched into those patterns. How many family dramas, delighted celebrations, declarations of love and declarations of unlove... just stories of people's lives does that carpet have woven into it? We drank wine, ate pizza, spoke of plans to see things, get out of the city, breathe. The feeling of suffocation is just there making us both tetchy and short-tempered and that makes me anxious, a gnawing in my stomach that something in my life needs to break open.

I’ll plan it slowly though, tentatively. Start with a night, look to see not just to look, breathe it in, smell the smells, feel the wind, writewritewrite. Turn it into something that’ll keep me. Something that’ll keep me happily, most importantly.