ANNA FUNDER
Aplace is always ghosted by the authors you’ve read on it. My first time in Barcelona was the summer of 2006, and George Orwell was with me. I walked down the paved centre of the magnificent Las Ramblas from Plaça de Catalunya to the seaside. In May 1937 Orwell strolled under these same plane trees, past the same metro entrance and newspaper kiosks. Then, halfway along, the world changed – suddenly, as it sometimes does.
“I heard several rifle-shots behind me,” he wrote. “I turned round and saw some youths, with rifles in their hands and the red-and-black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists round their throats... exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal tower…” People ran to take cover in the metro but Orwell didn’t, because he wanted to see what would happen. It turned out to be the beginning of the end of the unified resistance to Franco’s fascism, for which he’d been fighting in the Andalusian trenches for months.
I reached La Boqueria market and admired the technicolour pyramids of fruit, and the great haunches of jamón hanging by their hooves alongside spiky necklaces of red chillies. A stallholder was frying pink baby octopus in garlic. The day after the shooting Orwell had managed to arm himself but needed sustenance. As he approached, the market came under “a heavy crash of rifle-fire” that sent people “flying for the back exits”. He ducked in anyway, downed a coffee and bought “a wedge of goat’s-milk cheese which I tucked in beside my bombs”.
I felt like a coffee, too, and turned to find one. And then, as if to test my ghosted grip on the present, a man sauntered past me, stark naked. I blinked. He was definitely real – the vendors were greeting him casually by name. This is why we travel, I thought. Not necessarily to see a naked emperor with a full-body tan, but simply to be thrilled, on your way to get coffee, by what the locals in any given place take for granted.
Sometimes the world feels like it turns on a dime, that bizarre and unexpected, terrifying and magnificent realities can emerge, apparently out of nowhere: a bullet, a naked man, a new regime. When Orwell arrived in Barcelona in December 1936, the Anarchists were in control and “the revolution was still in full swing”. He found it “startling and overwhelming”. Red flags flew from the buildings and every shop and café, even the bootblacks and the prostitutes had been collectivised. “Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.” Tipping was forbidden. “It was the first time,” he noted, “that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”
I had the privilege of joining a trip on the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War with Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, and Quentin Kopp, the son of Orwell’s commanding officer, Georges Kopp. We went up onto the roof of the Teatre Poliorama on Las Ramblas. During the street fighting of May 1937, Orwell spent three days here, mainly reading Penguin paperbacks – because the “enemy” (another worker’s force) had agreed to warn them before shooting.
As Orwell’s son started reading his father’s description of Georges Kopp’s courage in defusing the situation – by “walking, unarmed, up to men who were frightened out of their wits” – I watched the quiet pride on Quentin Kopp’s face. Below, the street looked peaceful, people were strolling, and backpackers pondered postcards and whirligigs at the kiosks.
And then, only a few months later, Las Ramblas was again full of demonstrators, this time demanding secession, a centuries-old struggle. As I write, their leaders are still in prison or exile, at the same time as La Boqueria is in full swing, the kiosks are selling La Vanguardia, and Orwell’s ghost strolls down Las Ramblas. Or ducks for cover – cheese and bombs in his pocket.
Then, halfway along Las Ramblas, the world changed – suddenly, as it sometimes does.