You know you’re not in a posh neighborhood. Do not put that face. It was not necessary for that boy of about ten years old, with a rapper gold chain around his neck, to approach you and ask you for “rolling paper for my uncle” to know that we are not in Pedralbes. You are in Can Dragó, you have traveled along the Meridiana, you have left behind the Hipercor of the attack and you have entered your old domains. You come from next door, from Nou Barris, so now don’t be splendid, erase that classist look of superiority. Do not despise the multitude of people that see your eyes, or doubt whether to get into the water or not because wherever you look, everything is bursting. Maybe the radioactive one is you. Launch yourself, respect your origins, try to understand what you see, refresh yourself and your memory.
You were that child who goes in that cart, and also that adolescent who smokes, you knew the Meridiana dog track, do you remember? Betting on greyhound number six with your colleagues, whom you stopped seeing. You played in Viviendas del Congreso, a neighborhood team that challenged Barça, Espanyol, Damm and whatever team it was. Does the noise bother you? don’t fuck with me It is the sound of life. Tokischa’s lyrics cannot shock you, because you heard worse shit: “Leave me full of milk; let’s not make a lot of noise that my brother doesn’t suspect; that I have a delinquent in my bed; that he breaks my ass in four, after he blows me ”. A mother scolding a child (your mother?), the lifeguard’s whistle forbidding cartwheels (again you), some laughing teenagers (your sister in the eighties with some friends), some dodgy-faced guys chasing them with feigned ways of good people that at the moment of truth will turn towards evil (bad people always exist). South American, Filipino, Andalusian accents, the occasional Catalan speaker (you and three more in an EGB class of 40 children), tattoos everywhere, beautiful bodies in bikinis two sizes smaller; multiform bodies, too thin, often obese… The mixture. The world is that, not the bubble you decided to live in as soon as you earned a little money running from your past. Do not beat yourself up, they will also want to leave. And one day return to feel authentic again. We can leave the neighborhood but the neighborhood never leaves us.
You have come with your daughter. 19 years old, yeah She carries the little camera of hers, as always. She studies cinema. She is freaking out with what she sees. You took her away from the real world. Maybe not as much as you think. Today you return as a tourist, but you are an impostor, you were them. And you know.
The pool is huge, but there are so many people that each bather has a minimum space. Order in chaos. This is not a spa. “Throw my life, it’s warm,” a mother tells her son, who doubts whether to jump or not. I would have said “fresh” to convince him, I think to myself. It’s unbearably hot. Fresh better than hot, lifelong, woman.
In the austere changing room, some friends undress another quadriplegic friend in a wheelchair. I don’t know why and I’m not going to ask. I do know that there is so much affection in that scene that it could condense in this small room in which we find ourselves, which smells of ammonia and sweat. There is a moving spirit of solidarity there. They try to put a swimsuit on her and it’s not easy. They talk to him without paternalism, they laugh and they get it.
My daughter and I seek shade on the vast expanse of uneven grass that surrounds the pool. We dodge a few towels until we spot a leafy tree. We smile at each other and stretch. I tell him little stories from my time as a thug, which are mixed with rumors of conversations that take place around us. We are looking up, the rays of sunlight filtering awkwardly through the leaves and our conversation improves, as if we want to live up to what we see.
We laugh at how bad we have eaten at the bar. We are sorry for the bad time that the table cleaner has had, a bitchy immigrant who walks the bar with a wet cloth, when he has discovered that one of the tables had become Saigon. The rudeness of a large local family in the form of chickens scattered across a plastic table with no tablecloth, a bone here, a skin there, mixed with Coke, beer, and red wine. disgusting
Looking up and taking a deep breath allows you to soon forget the scene. Everything is mental. Be water, as Bruce Lee would say, the benchmark of those childhood years.
I remember that with my friends from adolescence we used to get together every day in the same square, in La Guineueta. There were no cell phones. It was there and always at the same time. An almost old man, extremely thin, lonely and as if he had escaped from a nursing home, was always hanging around the square. He did not speak, he was not fine. We nicknamed him “Future”. We were morons and look where one day he gave us for being poets.
I have lost track of practically all those friends. It’s time to get in the water.
Immerse yourself, put on your best face, you are Fraga getting into the waters of Palomares beach. You have resisted time.
You are radioactive.
