“Just one more thing for me to shoot for,” he said. “Another new benchmark.”
He lifted her to her feet again and they gazed back up the hill toward the palace. From that perspective, there was a stark desperation to the grandness. Here was a structure built to say: From this day forward, we, Catalonia, will be a country all our own. That its architecture alone hadn’t won the Civil War meant it now said something more like: Please visit the gift shop so we can further explain our intentions.
They passed the old bullfighting ring, long abandoned, now a mall.
“Did you know that Catalonia was the first place in Spain to ban bullfighting?” Whitney said. He knew what her knowing meant, the implication of it. It was her way of raising the idea of adopting a dog. She spent most weekend mornings reading scripts beside the dog run in Tompkins Square Park. Iced coffee from Ninth Street Espresso, eyes on the sporting breeds that wouldn’t last a week in their studio.
“Dogs are for people in their thirties,” Will said. “Dogs are for people with bedrooms and money.”
“I didn’t say anything about a dog,” she said, smiling, and crossed the boulevard against the light. “All I said was that people here saved the bulls.”
They zigzagged through Sant Antoni, past a couple of the other restaurants that Gwyneth had recommended and that they hadn’t been able to get into. They pushed into El Raval and crossed the skateboard-infested plaza in front of the Museu d’Art Contemporani. Will promised no more museums for as long as they were stuck. They crashed into La Rambla and got swept into its raging current, downstream in the direction of the harbor, before turning into La Boqueria and finding their way by feel to the vendor where they’d had their favorite meal of the trip earlier in the week.
It was midafternoon and the late-lunch rush was on. Stalls on all sides. The silver steam of seafood and oil on griddles. Fresh fish mounted on walls of ice. Fruit juices spiked into ice mounds of their own. Nuts and seeds and berries for sale by the gram. There were gray birds cheeping in the vaulted roof that rose to the center of the marketplace like the canvas cover of a big-top tent. Their spot was smack in the middle. They didn’t know the name of it and wouldn’t have been able to find it if they hadn’t retraced their steps precisely. All the stools at the counter were taken, but they spotted a middle-aged couple who looked to be paying, and hovered at their backs. They ordered two beers. They sipped slowly and did their best to keep out of the way. When they sat, they had a view through the glass partition that separated them from a bucket of baby squid, lavender and spilling slowly over the container edge like a lava slide. They ate shrimp, they ate razor clams, they ate seasoned mushrooms from the hills. They drank until their headaches were gone, instead dialing into the frequency of the cooks’ meticulous operations, slipping into the day’s first awe of post-confessional calm. They loved each other again.
On either side of them, English was being spoken. Beside Whitney was a family with Russian accents, calling for the attention of a server and failing to receive it. They clapped and waved their hands over the partition, and with each display of mounting impatience, they grew more invisible to the servers. Beside Will was a couple who he and Whitney discerned had arrived by train from Madrid that very morning and rolled straight to the counter because Jacqueline In Her Office had suggested it. Will felt the specialness of the spot diminish in big gluttonous gulps, even though he and Whitney had heard of it only because of their own email guide—a guide that seemed to have been forwarded over and over again, originating with somebody they and the person they received it from didn’t even know personally. In fact, the guide had gone so wide that Will and Whitney had each received it independently from coworkers. Which meant there was but a single comprehensive email of suggestions from one unknown New Yorker that dictated the Barcelona experiences of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands in their set. Will wondered if the guide had reached this couple beside them, too, or at least Jacqueline In Her Office. Will could’ve asked them, but he and Whitney had fallen into a private silence in face of all the English. They weren’t like these tourists, they told themselves. They were return customers, after all. They understood how the menu worked. They knew how to order. They could pronounce the words by parroting them. They were practically locals.
They were also getting drunk. They’d done nothing yet to catch up on sleep. Their heads were full of static, and the impossible suggestion of sunlight was blasting in overhead through a crack in the roof. It was a beam from the sky like they hadn’t seen in days. Whitney pointed and they squinted, wondering aloud if the clouds were breaking. But when they paid and found their way through the maze of vendors back outside to La Rambla, the ashcloud was baked over again—darker than ever, in fact—and Whitney and Will wondered if it hadn’t been sunlight at all, if it was perhaps just another inexplicable sign from the heavens meant solely for them and their transgressions.
It looked ready to rain and they got within a couple blocks of
