They went to the party. It was a fifteen-minute walk, in the vicinity of La Sagrada Familia. Across palm tree–lined boulevards, beside fountains and light-rail tracks, up narrow alleyways with bars and tabacs and copy shops and pet stores. The grinding of espresso machines, the upshift of motorbikes, the steady laughter of large groups drinking at tiny tables on the sidewalks. The sky was low and lit up yellow. The core of the cloud cover was dark, but the smothered presence of a late-spring sun persisted gauzily into the early evening.
The entrance to the party was through an iron gate in a narrow archway that opened onto a courtyard shared by the building. It was like a secret park. There was a small pool for children and dogs. Benches beneath palm trees. A modest garden and a faded soccer goal spray-painted onto the brick wall at the far end. The courtyard was teeming, but it was difficult to tell if everyone was there for the dinner. The apartment nearest the street belonged to their host, and enough nice-looking people were spilling from his atelier—out the doors and down the steps into the courtyard—to convince Will and Whitney they’d found the right spot. Each guest had a plastic cup of wine in hand, a plastic cup or a bottle of beer. Drinks were in buckets of ice. Whitney led Will by the hand.
“Do we check in, then?” Will said, and Whitney shrugged like how would she know.
They walked around slowly. The courtyard was such a surprise, the sort of thing they never would have noticed if they’d been simply walking by, if they hadn’t had reason to dip in. So many of the buildings they’d strolled past in the previous four days, especially in the planned sections of the Eixample, had an identical footprint. Four sides and four chamfered corners—perfect octagons—taking up one block each for the entirety of the vast neighborhood. The heavy diagonal corners were matched by diagonals on the sidewalks and streets, creating exceptionally wide intersections. It was inconvenient for pedestrians, but the plan was beautiful, and the buildings looked even better, Will and Whitney knew from their maps, from above.
Inside many of the buildings was a hollowed-out center, a courtyard with a range of attractions. This one had its garden and pool, but also enough space, evidently, to accommodate a hundred strangers. There were lemon trees. There was a pea-gravel pit. There was a squeeze bag of wine resting on someone else’s steps. The signs on those steps—in Catalan, in Spanish, in English—asked that guests respect the private property of the neighbors, that Sunday was a day of peace and quiet for everyone else. The weekly dinners, it occurred to Will and Whitney, must’ve been a nightmare for the neighbors.
An English woman with long gray hair and blue glasses asked if they were part of “the Gram Thing.” When Whitney said she didn’t know, the woman explained she meant the thing that she herself had resisted for years before attending a lecture of his at the university and falling in easily with his congress of former students. Whitney explained that they hadn’t met Gram yet, that they were merely stuck here because of the volcano, that they weren’t aware that Gram possessed a following of note. And so the woman introduced Will and Whitney to some others, who, like her, were British developers or architects or artists who worked primarily in Spain. Personal homes in Barcelona and Madrid and Valencia, et cetera. Who, too, professed to be very much part of the Gram Thing, if they caught their drift, which Will and Whitney still did not. Will asked a middle-aged man with a brand-new baby how he was coping so far. “The baby’s fine, but the birth part, that was like watching your favorite pub burn down,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his wife’s vagina.
The couple introduced Will and Whitney to a restaurant owner with a French accent, and identical male twins with matching Scandinavian hair and glasses, and a Catalan separatist with a yellow-ribbon lapel, and a short, curly-haired Italian classics professor who talked excitedly at Will and Whitney about their university years in the American South, how he’d long fantasized about taking a road trip to mythical jazz and blues destinations, to New Orleans, to the Delta, to the Mississippi crossroads where Robert Johnson made his deal with the Devil. An older man with hair like soap suds crashed in and introduced himself as Josep, then shooed anyone inside who hadn’t yet checked in with Gram. There was the business of saying hello and verifying attendance, but also soup was being served, the first of three courses. They squeezed past several small groups, strangers clearly getting to know one another, based on the biographical details they picked up. They all seemed at least twice Will and Whitney’s age.
The atelier apartment was up a half flight of stairs from the courtyard, and the door was a retractable wall of glass that ran on runners like a gate in a loading dock. The main room was overstuffed. Several queues competed for space. To the right ran a line to a kitchen island with a checkered tablecloth, where a younger man ladled white-bean-and-kale soup out of an industrial-size pot into wooden bowls. To the left, a shorter bathroom line pressed against the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with titles in countless languages. And in the center of the room was the line to check in with Gram. From Will and Whitney’s position, only glimpses could be caught of Gram, the edge of his generously follicled head, a free arm gesturing with a golf pencil in hand.
Above the main room was an open loft—the bedroom, they presumed.
