Karen Swenson

human kind
cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot “Burnt Norton”

This was a week of joy. Wednesday my house cleaner returned and I don’t have to give over one day a week to vacuuming and dusting and a second day to ironing and floor washing. The windows are unstreaked and shinning. But, in doing those two days of cleaning, which was not sufficient, I realized a) what an effort at my age it is for me to do the work, b) how easy over time it would be to let things get dirty and then have a massive cleaning up or, perhaps, not, just live with the dirt.
This awareness roused the specter of B, my now dead neighbor.
The couple who sold me my apartment, a Belgian-German combo, introduced me to my neighbors, a nice, as well as a good thing to do, mentioning in passing that there was a woman around my age living alone on the first floor, the Principal. Blanca was my introduction to a side of Barcelona/Spanish life I would not otherwise have thought about and an education to me as an American largely uninstructed in a social system close to unimaginable in my country.
Blanca was a little older than I, 3 to 5 years. She had no money and had not paid rent in years. Asking around about her. I found the gossip was she had once been wealthy, very wealthy. This was presumed because she had had a chauffer driven car. That’s a sign of wealth. Her family had owned a store that made hats. Her husband had died, the money had melted away and she, becoming poor, had also become estranged from her son and daughter because she was mean and nasty. That turned out not to be quite the truth.
She spent most of her time in the Catalan library housed in the hospital across the street researching the history of the immediate neighborhood. I wish I had her notes. As time went on I think she gave this up.
The first cause for my American astonishment was that B was still in the apartment, although not paying rent. In NYC she would have been on the street after two months nonpayment. If she did not qualify for a state home she would really have been on the street or in shelters and probably dead within 3 to 6 months. But in Spain she was “a statutory tenant” because she had some sort of eternal lease and because of her age. Her landlord whom I met a couple of times at building meetings, five us of own the building, had once owned the entire edifice. Over the years he had sold off the apartments. I am sure he wanted her dead. I could understand that, but he was so obviously a pinchpenny I didn’t have much sympathy.
I would find B, when I came home from coffee with a friend, sitting on the stair, her small grocery bag beside her, getting her breath back. I would offer to carry the bag up to her door for her. Immediately, she would protest fiercely with many no’s that she was fine and not in need of my help.
Although clean she wore clothes over clothes in the winter, the holes in the top layer revealing the colors of the under layers. Our one sympathetic point of contact was my hats, which she commented on appreciatively.
The man on the second floor had some rapport with her. She let him do a few repairs for her. He, at one point, offered to replace all the broken windows in the apartment for her, there were many, with no charge her. She refused.
Although she had water, she had no electricity, and no gas. She received food through a Meals-on-Wheels program, delivered every morning and hung on her doorknob at eight am. But with no electricity she had no heat, and there were all those l broken windows, all winter, every winter. Sometimes I would see the beam of a flashlight flickering when I looked down at her floor from the patio area outside my kitchen windows.
The second floor neighbor told me that he went by the bathroom with his head turned away.
Although winded by the stairs, she was in feisty spirits and better than adequate physical abilities when I moved in. Things deteriorated, of course. She was visited by her social worker but was so vehement about not being helped that they tended to leave her be. I suspect they urged her to leave the apartment and go into a home. Very sensible but that would have been anathema to her, a capitulation. We old, hang on to our independence, with despair and desperation, until it is in shreds.
I no longer offered help.
Perhaps five years later things had crumbled sufficiently so that they forced her out of the apartment for three days to live with her son while they fumigated it and all of her belongings.
When I met her son once, it took me under five minutes to realize he was crazy. He stood on her threshold trying to sell me a camera, an excellent old one. When I refused, he seemed to wake up to a muddled awareness that perhaps he should not have made that offer.
In her last two years I saw from time to time, in the afternoon, the Meals-on-Wheels bag still on her doorknob. I would pound on her door until she answered to tell her breakfast, lunch and dinner were on her doorknob. I was terrified one day I would pound and there would be no response; she would be dead inside. Sometimes I asked my upstairs neighbor to do the pounding.
She also had a daughter who wanted desperately to help her. She was rejected, as were we all.
When I was on one trip or another, she became ill. They took her to hospital and from there, of course, to a home. That was the end. It took months, but she died.
The landlord’s first action was to have the fumigators in. Everything that creeps, crawls and scurries, I am sure, had a representative in her space. However, it took the penny-squeezer a couple of years to sell the apartment.
Negative role models are important as positive ones. B was a negative exemplar from whom I acquired positive proposals for aging: take help; ask for help; listen to what people tell you and think; don’t reject out of hand.
Male or female, there are few good examples of aging. Shakespeare offers us, all males, Lear, Timon of Athens, pompous Polonius, Henry IV, although he isn’t that old, Prospero who breaks his staff, drowns his book. The crucial factor in his being perhaps the one positive exemplar is that of his own will he abdicates his powers, not waiting for them to be taken from him. Because giving up your powers before they are wrenched from you may be one of the cruxes of aging.
There are books on aging, many written by young people, most written by exceptional people in exceptional circumstances, which tweaks the story. Fear of death or of the process of dying is occasionally talked about.
I don’t see anything craven about fearing death. A woman I knew who fought off cancer for years talked to the Dali Lama about her terror of death. He told her he too was afraid of dying. Why wouldn’t you be afraid of the unknown, no matter how many people have gone there?
Sometimes people just lose interest in life. My mother was one of these. She told me in a bank on 42^nd Street in New York one day when she was in her seventies, “I can go any time now. I am not interested in being alive.” No one seems to talk about this mind set. Others, like her sister, my Aunt Liz, are just curious to see how the sun comes up tomorrow.
Two of my role models for dying are Alexandra David Neal, the first Westerner to get to Lhasa, who died at the age of 100 during a nap after going over her royalty statements and Montserrat Abelló, a Catalan poet, who rose at, I think, 93 from her table after lunch saying, “I need a nap,” and never got up again. Naptime is a good time to leave.
I am finding eighty to be the age of elder adolescence, meaning that as in adolescence there are disruptive bodily changes. I don’t like this. It isn’t just that I wake up with aches. There are a range of changes to your surfaces and organs–your digestion as much as your sexuality. Your skin is drier, rough patches appear. You may grow little things as though you are a disintegrating pier with barnacles and clumps of mussels.
If female you develop a tummy, a sort of round lump at the bottom of your pelvis, possibly before you are 80, but you will definitely have it in your 80’s. Sometimes dancers are impervious to this longer. Men get it too eventually. Something that has been holding things up in your gut has decided to let go.
My two big dissatisfactions physically are the tummy and the considerable loss of energy that takes place at 80 and increases each year thereafter. The gym helps but certainly does not solve the problem. It’s as though my energy is cheese being nibbled by a mouse. I sleep more. I do less. I have no metabolism to speak of. However, if I allow myself to be resentful I will become angry and defensive, a variation on B and that is not the way to go.
A loss that saddens me sad is my hearing. When I take out my hearing aids, I cannot hear my new cat purr, only feel the vibration in her body. Due to glaucoma I have developed a little blind area in my left eye.
Then there are the mental changes. Words suddenly amble off like truant children. Maybe they go down to the sea to build Gaudi castles. I find that if I am patient they often return in a few minutes. Names, however, take longer trips. They can be gone for a couple of days, whether to Gerona or Biafra I have no idea. People of great mental power I knew at Columbia ended up not being able to read their own books. That is terrifying.
The two things I do not want to outlive are my brains and my money.
We think we are all right because we do what we have always done and the mind in its groove is quite happy to putter along but challenged to think in a different way, given an alien task, it may come to a full stop.
While dealing with these changes we, or certainly I, am trying to cope with the presence of death in my life. It has always been there, although not particularly central. If at twenty death is central to your life you are either hopelessly romantic or neurotic.
As I have aged death has moved out of the wings of my theater to center stage. What seems to happen is that I am walking around it, or is it walking around me, seeing it from different perspectives, but always in its presence. It is dominant. In the US there is talk of elder depression for which doctors give pills. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that perhaps if you are living in the sphere of death you are going to be depressed until you work out this relationship; it is a relationship and, I think, most of your experience in life so far is used to create that liaison. One can, of course, ignore the whole thing and many do. For each of us it is different. Old age is an amazingly individual time period,
Although I have little control over my aging situation, progression, what control I have is mental and amazingly important to my well-being and the continuity of my personality, who I am. I need to know how old I am but NOT accept any of the dictums handed out by my culture about my age. I must decide and work at who I am within that spectrum of what 80 can be. Does that make sense?
Then there is the outside reaction to our aging, the condescension of younger friends. When I went off on my five month solo journey to China, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand and French Polynesia someone remarked, “Isn’t she cute to be doing that.” Another friend insisted that I must take someone with me, that it would be impossible for me to do it alone. I will not comment on what I felt but issue the curse that those who condescend should in their turn be condescended to.
I am closing with two poems one by an old friend, Harvey Shapiro, the other mine. Harvey’s is about breaking your staff and drowning your book. Mine is about what happens when you don’t.

HOW CHARLIE SHAVERS DIED
He had a gig
but he was hurting.
His doctor said, play the date,
then check into the hospital.
That night, when the party ended
and the band packed up,
Charlie start to give stuff away—
his watch, his rings—to the women
in the room. Then
he circled the room with his horn
playing: “For all I know we may never meet again.”
At this point, the man who was telling the story
in the locker room at the Manhattan Plaza gym
and who had sung the line slowly, with
a pause between each word, began to cry.
Harvey Shapiro

DRIVING
There were no licenses when she learned to drive,
just straight dirt roads between green fields of wheat
that bent to her wind, which spurned with its passing heat
the ripe green heads and made the rabbits dive
into the thicket of swaying stalks. It was
her way to delete her mother, the world. Once wed
she drove away from arguments, buried
them in the speed of her anger, which became both cause
and effect. When she picked up the hitchhiker Death,
that beggar’s first demand was the alms of her eyes;
the cataracts were the blur of his breath,
his exhale shrinking her boundaries without reprise.
He shut her highways, lowered his border bar,
till the only way out was on his road, in his car.
Karen Swenson

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When I left the U.S. I sent, a few weeks before my exodus, all my worldly goods packed into three-quarters of a container to Barcelona. I already owned my apartment, the renovation of which was supposed to be much further along than it was. My cat, Shimi Moto, and I slept on a futon, a rather narrow futon, on the floor of the library full of bookless shelves.

Shimi did not much approve of this situation, it was difficult for the two of us to fit on the futon, but she was an amenable cat, much traveled by rail, car and most recently plane, business class with her own seat. She only complained once on the flight. I opened her case so that she could see where she was. She stuck her head out into the cabin. The expression on her face approximated that of a respectable, Westchester matron discovering herself inexplicably transported to a male brothel in Tangier. She recoiled back into the case and did not complain again.

Shimi, I should explain, entered Spain, unintentionally on both our parts, as an illegal alien and remained so until her death some two years ago. It happened this way.

I had all our papers in hand and after I went through passport control looked about for any sign about entering animals. I saw nothing. I approached a young man in uniform, pointed at Shimi’s case saying, “Tengo una gata.” She was after all a female cat. The young man was a bit taken aback by the female form but adjusted himself and asked, “Tienes papeles?” I proffered her papers.
He opened the folder and went through them very thoroughly before turning to me, laying a finger across his lips and with his other hand pointing vehemently at the exit. So out the door into Spain we went and never looked back.

Somehow I had made my way with my lame Spanish through all the necessary labyrinths to get my goods passed by customs on arrival and then arranged through, I think, my superb architect, to pay for the street to be closed in front of my building for two hours so that an elevator platform could come and lift my belongings up to my window on the fifth floor where furniture, rugs and bulky things would enter the apartment over the balcon railing. Belongings in smaller boxes came up in the elevator, all the books, which the men unpacked and rammed any old way onto the shelves so they could take at least those boxes away.
But a few days ago I relived the thrill of standing in the middle of my bookless library watching sofa, after chair, after table rise solemnly up and the men reach out to pull each off the platform before it sank slowly down for the next load.
Only this time I was sitting at my desk as I-beam after I-beam went up swaying gracefully before my window. The street was blocked from all traffic for a specified amount of time, so that the compact little elevator, not in this case a platform but a series of arms and elbows which unfold, can park in the middle of the street, lean another arm against the building to steady itself and lift things up, with the help of a winch, to the roof.
Another event of this week was to see the most up-to-the-minute style in a hat shop window on the edge of Urquinoana. It was a sun-visor with an attached mask and clear plastic face shield. Absolutely au courant and chic.

But the big event, of course, was that Mendi’s the café down stairs opened. You can only sit on the terrace under the trees and there are not a lot of tables but what joy to have a café con leche with a friend while the cat ladies are cleaning out the cat park. It gives me needed distance from demolition noise.
I think they must be hollowing out the old convent to the walls and totally reconstructing it within that shell. Facades are protected in Barcelona; you are not allowed to alter them so often everything but the façade is destroyed before new construction begins.
They are still sending rubble roaring down a chute many times a day; along with drilling there are various tonal levels of pounding going on. This all appears to be happening in the tall, front building.

The little building in the back, which is only two stories high with a curved outside stair up to the second floor where narrow balcons open before tall, arched windows, seems to be, so far, intact. Between these two buildings is a court, which I cannot see into well but what I can glimpse suggests lots of rubble. On my side of that court is a roof, which serves as a bridge between the two-story and the tall.
Two spirited young men leapt happily yelling at each other crossed this bridge that connects the two-story and the tall, went to the rear of the two-story roof where there is a bit of projecting wall, went round the wall and disappeared. I realized for the first time that there must be a stair there. What they ran through used to be the nun’s garden. I had thought the nuns only had access to the roof from that bridge of roof. Interesting what you discover about a building you have never entered during its reconstruction.

By the way, Shimi and I slept on the floor on the futon for, I think, about two months. I remember it took me a week to shelve the books. Shimi spent her days, not unhappily, curled up in one or another of the boxes in what was to become the living room, coming to bed with me at night. After the books I shelved, so to speak, my clothes, in the walk-in closet with the help of a friend from Rome. Then the master bathroom was finished. Then the kitchen. One day Shimi heard the men, cats are acute about sound, moving the bed out of the living room. A furred flash she positioned herself in the hall to see where they were taking HER bed. That was the first time I realized it was HER bed. She watched the operation and surely less than a second after they hefted the mattress onto the bed, it’s a four legged teak, Thai bed with clawed feet, she was on it, washing up with an air of delicious smugness before taking a nap on HER bed.

As anyone who has owned a cat knows, the saying “Dogs have owners but cats have staff,” is one of the unalterable truths. I was most complimented by her belief through cars, trains and planes that finally her staff could be trusted to arrange events so all would be well for her on HER bed.
(Shimi Moto means Cat Motor in Tibetan.)

My cobbler opened this week, a good surprise, causing me to think, mangling Shelley, “if my cobbler comes can my flower lady be far behind.” Yesterday she was open. I bought two stems of tightly budded lilies and, as there were no lilies of the valley, too late in the season for them, three big mottled pink balls of peony buds. My flower lady is thinner, worn, her dark eyes large in her long face. The tension of this time has marked her. When she spoke of the future it was not with optimism but concern about the recurrence of the virus. But I am so grateful to have her back.

The lilies have been reluctant to open but the peonies are ruffling out like a closet of fin de siècle dresses in a Parisian closet. They even have a slight scent. When I was a child, peonies had a wonderful perfume but they have been improved until they are odorless.

My other memory around peonies is that they attracted ants and Japanese beetles. I don’t think the ants are harmful but the beetles, which have the most gorgeous, metallic, green and gold backs, munched right through the buds, destroying any possibility of bloom. My insomniac Aunt Liz used to drift out on summer evenings with a jar of kerosene to collect and drown them. She did this in her white night gown, a horticulturally appreciative ghost, a wisp of misty white in the gloam of the garden.

An aside. If you have never read about the Japanese beetle man in Gerald Durrell’s MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS you have missed a fine portrait. He is a hunchbacked peddler on Corfu who ties thread around the beetles and attaches them to his hat. He sells them to children on his route or at fairs since if you whirl them about they make a satisfying buzzing sound as they circle over your head.

Further gratitude. The café on the corner opened earlier this week. I had my first café con leche in over two months under the trees in the minute square containing the monument to Margarita Xirgu. When I make coffee at home I drink it black. The café con leche followed a lunch of callos with chickpeas and spinach salad. What heaven to eat what someone else has cooked. How superb to not have to wash up. The tables were properly separated and we smiled shyly at each other across the open spaces.

As if to prove that nature is in tune with us, opening up as well, the gulls brought their two fluffy babies up to the roof ridge of the hospital. There seems to be an equal amount of care from the parents, the one with the broken leg doing both guard duty and food gathering. She/he stands on top of a little metal chimney and screams at any with the audacity to come near or stands, meditatively contemplating the webs of her feet, until she regurgitates while the babies dance frantically about her squeaking in my imagination, “Throw up, Mommy, throw up.  Hurry up.  Throw up. I’m starving.  Hurry.”

But I don’t see them today. I hope everything is all right.

Before my flower lady opened I walked up to Valencia to see if the stores and the flower market there were open. I like just inhaling the their wet earth and greenery odor. But they were closed, sealed tight. However, it did give me an opportunity to admire the stained glass in windows on Valencia in that neighborhood, appropriately of flowers, iris I believe, which is exceptionally beautiful.

I did find a florist shop open near my cat food store on Aragó but the cat food was so heavy I was unwilling to add to my load. Also they didn’t have lilies. I am glad I was faithful.

Some stores seem to be open fitfully; the Chinese ones on Balmes, which bless them, are not at all nationalistic but have Thai, Indian, Indonesian ingredients, fresh as well as packets, boxes and cans. One, the smaller, has used the pandemic to do a thorough housecleaning, so thorough it was hard to find things. But I can never tell when I come by if I will find them open or closed. The pair form a sort of tiny Chinatown.

The disturbing event of the week was an email from a friend in Hong Kong that included a video of women demonstrating the apparent dangers of hand sanitizer as an inflammable liquid. My first thought was, have I heard of any cases of people being burned when cooking after using sanitizer? Or have there been reports of smokers with burned hands from lighting up after using hand sanitizer? Surely this would be all over the TV news as well as in newspaper headlines.

My friend had not fact checked the video, so I did. What I found was that the only danger from sanitizer being inflammable is if a bottle is in direct sunlight perhaps in your car or in an airplane. If you leave a bottle on your dashboard in direct sun your car will not explode but you may have a gooey melt down of bottle and plastic dash.

Much more disturbing was to find that this video is available in a number of languages with women whose faces are appropriate to the language. The one my friend sent me features women with Chinese faces. Another in Spanish features “Spanish looking women”.  In other words this video is being calculated to a linguistic audience. It is also telling that the women are not pretty, indeed a bit homely, as that makes the video appear more authentic, not like an commercial.

It is not an innocent video. It’s intent is to do harm by causing people to distrust and stop using hand sanitizer. It is a malignant video. I am nonplused by the desire to do this kind of gratuitous damage. I reminds me of the incident in the U.S. years back when strychnine, or was it cyanide, was introduced into Tylenol pills causing a small number of people to die horribly. The perpetrator was never found.

What is further alarming is how easily people accept these “informative” videos. My Internet attitude is, everything is suspect until proved innocent.

A young man I know, not the brightest button in the box, asked me this past week if I thought the Corona-virus came from a laboratory in China.  I was horrified that a man in Spain would have “contracted” the Trump lie. I told him I did not think it came from a Chinese laboratory but was a relative of the SARS virus, which never made it to the West.

Then there are those people burning cell towers in England and America because they think Covid is being transmitted by 5G technology. Some of us, and I suppose this will always be true, are mentally, emotionally and informationally in the 12th century. We might get a few Baptist preachers to rant at people that the virus is their fault; God is punishing them for their sins and issue them whips with which to lash themselves. The reference here is to a scene in THE SEVENTH SEAL.

I don’t want to end on this note. I had lunch again today at Mendi’s at an outside table from which I watched the cat ladies cleaning up the cat park while a small, white Scottie-type dog ran along the fence peering in at the cats with intense excitement and an elderly man with his mask covering his chin fed the pigeons. A gull came down to see what the pigeons were getting—the pigeons gave him backed off; the males even stopped chasing the females—ate a few large chunks of bread, it looked uncomfortable as it went down his throat, before deciding it was “pigeon food” and leaving.

This past Sunday I walked to the Sagrada Familia and back, ten kilometers. After a morning of threatening clouds, the streets glowed with sun. People were out, couples walking together, fathers with strollers, mothers with boys on scooters, most with masks, including the children. I had not realized that at noon, perhaps only on Sunday, there is a small concert given by the carillon bells of the Sagrada, a melodious pealing to listen to as I stood beneath the moving green shelter of the street trees. Why should the shadows of leaves on a Barcelona street seem more emphatic to me than those in other cities?

Having read Clara Laughlin’s commentary, I was happy to go to see the church again. There’s lots I am not happy with in what has gone up over the last ten years but what I do like, even when I disapprove of other things, is the piece-meal effect of the building. That is in the spirit of the great medieval cathedrals built over a hundred or hundreds of years as people changed their minds about what they wanted in their building, as architectural ideas altered. I have never cared, for instance, for the finials on the steeples, although I appreciate the touch of color they give to the immense greyness of the building. They look like plastic geegaws to me. Now there is a white, bar like thing that I think is an aesthetic error.

But the Sagrada is a unique expression as Arthur Stanley Riggs, whoever he was, said. The Catalan architectural outburst, and I think it is an outburst of voices clamoring joyously in their own language, in the late 19^th early 20th century is an outrageous singular occurrence whether by Gaudi or another architect of that time. I took an American architect friend to see the Hospital de Sant Pau y Santa Cru designed by Lluis Domènech i Montaner. As we wandered through the buildings while I told him about it. He turned to me and commented, “This is astonishing. He was either crazy or on drugs.” A very contemporary compliment.

People were walking in a desultory way, enjoying the sun, the air, looking in shop windows just being alive under the balconies where geraniums bloom in fierce reds. There were cars but not many. I am not looking forward to the return of traffic.

And Monday the traffic was much greater as I walked up to my trainer’s studio. His wife was there with their baby who found me much less interesting than the spoon her mother was wielding. I had Alberto video me doing some exercises my grandson and I have discussed which help you keep your back straight. Alberto, since there is a distance problem, no longer stretches me. He has acquired a thing that looks like a sci-fi ray gun that massages you. It vibrated me furiously until I wondered if my vertebrae were going to be in their usual alignment when he finished. It also made me feel I was being reduced to the condition of tomato aspic in a violent earthquake.

Having worked out I had a thoroughly self-indulgent half hour at the basement grocery in Corte Inglés. I bought a Japanese steak, some of the biggest blue berries I have ever seen, the size of large red grapes, and two exquisite figs—I felt I should hire a Dutch painter to do their portraits, they were so beautiful—and other things, such as chocolate, before happily walking home in the sun.

Coming home down La Rambla I passed my florist’s little glass box. I keep hoping all those glass boxes will open up and pour their colors out onto the pavement in a panoply of bloom around potted orange trees, avocados and other ambitious tall, but usually gangly trunks available for purchase. Last week I saw her sweeping her box out, rearranging the orchids which seem to do well living there alone, and had a surge of hope that she would be open that week, but no. I am still waiting for her.

This morning I was startled to see an I-beam go swaying by my front window. When I went down to shop, I found the street was cordoned off and I-beams were being raised by a winch on the roof of the convent. Repairs are going along. My day is punctuated by the sound of pounding, drills and saws. The deconstruction part seems to be over. I am intensely curious to see what they are going to do with the part of the building I look down on.

On my route to the Boqueria I pass one of my favorite restaurants, Bacaro, an Italian place, small and boisterous with excellent food. I was first tempted through their doors by a menu that offered liver Venetian style, actually liver with onions. They do it well. I saw the steel door was raised and poked my head in. They are cooking for doctors in the hospitals while waiting to reopen. I touched elbows with one of the owners. His news is that he is thinking of opening another venue in Sariá.

There was something in the air today. The contacts with people sparkled, an intrepid warmth slipped out from masks that hid smiles, eyes above masks shone. We seemed in the beautiful day, customer and seller, to be so happy to see and be with each other. There was a strong sense of camaraderie, of here we are after months still selling and buying carrots, still asking each other how we are, how the family is. There was a sensation of strength, of congratulation so far at mutual survival.

Coming home with my purchases I looked in my mailbox. One of my kvetches about living in Spain is that the mail service is terrible, particularly for things coming from overseas. I now tell people not to send me any package from abroad because I get yards and yards of forms on line from the customs office that never have anything to do with the book or gift I am receiving. This time I found the box stuffed with six issues of the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT which has been arriving two months late, and that is if I am lucky. Now I have lunchtime reading material for over a month.

I went up stairs, cooked, plugged in the fountain on the terrace; this is a green ceramic snake who wriggles down the wall, sticks his head out and sends a liquid chime of water into the bowl beneath him. I will read a TLS over my omelet.

I am going to go back to Calcutta for a few paragraphs. Nirmal Hriday, however much I found it grim and earnest, at least provided people with a place to die that was clean and as comfortable as things get for the direly poor in India. It was not trying to solve a large problem.

The foreigners with whom I worked were varied as the jars on a spice shelf. I spent most of my time with a Dutch woman who was a psychiatric nurse in Holland, taking care of people out in the countryside. This couldn’t have been a big change of occupation for her, although the work was more physical than mental. There were a couple of Danish girls who had come for a week or two. There were Catholic groups organized by parish priests from all over the world. One such group was a dozen women from Malta, among them a dwarf. She attached herself to me because, as she explained, “You know what you are doing.” This, of course, was not true. But we had a good time together. She had a sharp wit in four languages.

We were given buns and tea at some point in the morning. Usually we went up to the roof to sip and nibble while viewing below us people buying fish cooked on a wooden spits over a tiny charcoal fire. There was a barber who shaved men, trimmed beards and one day cut a woman’s hair and then shaved her head. We thought it might be lice but it could have had a religious meaning.

We may have been sad at the state of the women but we all accepted the situation and our work whether unpleasant to us or not. I found bathing the women difficult because their mortality was a fact beneath my hands, the tactile certainty of bone under the thinnest integument of skin communicated the fragility of life, what would quickly and what more slowly be consumed in the fire at the ghat.

However, one day a young American woman arrived who it became apparent had thought she was coming here not to wipe up diarrhea but to sit sweetly, in a nice outfit, next to the suffering, hold their hands and say kind things to them. She was aghast by what surrounded her and walked around in rubber gloves doing nothing. I finally handed her a rag and said, “Wipe that up,” pointing to a pool of yellow diarrhea in the middle of the floor. She did wipe it up but that was the last we saw of her.

A very beautiful Italian girl sat, as instructed by a nun, beside a dying woman, holding her hand. She complained to me afterwards, ”I couldn’t talk to her. She wouldn’t understand me. I don’t know that she could even hear me. It all seemed so useless.”

The reason there is little contribution from the Indian community is due to the idea of karma. Your karma is the result of your actions in your past life. If you are a beggar dying on the floor of Howrah station it is quite possibly because you were a rich miser or you were mean or even violent to your daughter-in-law in your last life. Your fate in this life is a result of your deeds in your last life and you deserve it. This is a philosophy that certainly makes not giving guiltless.

Out of India and into Barcelona where this was the week children were allowed out of their houses. When I saw my first stroller occupants I was astonished, as though I had come across a furry duck billed platypus in a forest. They have such wonderful tiny fingers. They were looking a bit stunned too. Having been deprived of the outside world for almost two month must have made the streets a terra incognita with all those strange adults wandering around in masks, and then your own mask. They were very good about their masks. I wish I could say the same about the adults.

I have taken to scowling at people who don’t wear masks and occasionally asking them why they aren’t. To those who wear them dangling around their necks I want to say, “Is that a necklace? Do you have earrings to match?” Then there are those who wear their mask below their nose. For them my question is, “Do you breathe through your chin?”

I did a 10km walk, actually three of them, this week, one from Hospital up to Lesseps along Gran de Gracia where I turned left and wandered among small streets with delightful small houses until I came down again, stopping on Gran de Gracia to call a friend so that I could wave to her up on her balcony. Another walk took me up Balmes to Sant Gervasi where I took Via Augusti back down, switching over to Aribau to go to the cat food store on the way home. The third I started by walking down to the Post Office which I love for its beautiful stained glass ceiling—they had sent my package back to HK—up Laietana to Urquinaona, continuing on Bruc to Diagonal and coming down Balmes, all wearing a mask. The one to Sant Gervasi was a killer because the up hill part is aggressively steep.

There were people out but not too many on each walk; the sun was shinning. I would stop to gaze at flower shops, being tempted, and then not buying because it was a long way home and the weight sufficient to discourage a purchase.

I have discovered how difficult housework is in your 80’s and how boring cooking for one can become. However I have shelved books that have been lying about for months and weeded out about 35 that can be given away. I still have to go through my travel section where I cling to out of date guides to India. I would like to cut that in half. But I will not give up my family’s collection of Baedeker’s from the 1910’s or mother’s So You’re Going books.

These date from the 1920’s and were written by Clara E. Laughlin, a woman of great respectability and the very best taste. She knew her American audience was historically ignorant so she delivers small vivid dramas of great moments from the past to enable them to understand the importance of certain sites, saturating them with atmosphere. Her history is sometimes history and sometimes the richest gossip but it works.

When I was deciding to come to Barcelona to live I looked up Barcelona in So You’re Going to Spain, published in 1931. There is very little about the city in her book, which covers Gibraltar, Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, Seville and Madrid. I have to quote this excerpt because it reduces me to laughter every time I read it.

“He (Arthur Stanley Riggs) says the Church of the Holy Family is characteristic of both the city and its spirit and the Barcelonese regard it as their finest expression. Have you ever seen a picture of it? Those I have seen have given me such a feeling of horror that I have never wanted to go to Barcelona. Foolish, of course! I’ll get over it—or, at least, I’ll learn not to look at that church, or to think about it, and enjoy the things in and near Barcelona that are beautiful, even sublime.”

Ah, the opinions of a refined, cultured American lady, in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

I needed cat food the other day, which took me out to the Rambla for the first time in at least a week. It is now wearing its leafy arches, but is totally silent except for bird song, and almost totally empty, the shops on the margins shuttered unless they are a pharmacy or tabac. The waves of the pavement stretch away under the trees like a lost, wind-ruffled stream. Even pigeons seem fewer.
Pigeons and various sectors of the population dependent on others for sustenance are in difficulty. Someone bought baguettes and stuffed them into the holes of the monument for Margarita Xirgu, transforming it into a sort of avian buffet.
The Sisters of Charity, Mother Teresa’s nuns with whom I worked for two months in Calcutta, Kolkata, at her hospice for the dying destitute next to the Kalighat Temple, are feeding long lines at the back of Sant Augusti. But there are those who either do not chose to frequent the Sisters or perhaps are not welcomed by them. The Sisters are strict about behavior, talking and prayers. You pray before your meal or you don’t eat. Mumbling, however, is accepted. My two months at Nirmal Hriday did not elevate me to a Mother Teresa enthusiast.
There is a black and white couple that have been camping out and looking desperate in tiny Dr. Fleming Park. He is a black man going grey; she is white and totally out of her mind. While he begs in front of the Dia supermarket on Carme she sits up under a quilt roaring in a hoarse voice in English, American English I believe, about unidentified “bastards” and “assholes”. She retains a faded prettiness along with blond curls going grey. I bought them some cheese and ham. When I did it this week again, she was sipping a beer, looking pleased with life and lucid enough to thank me.
But there seem to be fewer street people than usual. I am supposing many have gone into shelters. What is on the street is exclusively male, decidedly rough, definitely drug and alcohol addicted and living on the salvage edge of the fabric of sanity likely to fray out into madness at any moment. When I walk through the open area behind the Boqueria I do not look at anyone.
Another group, thieves, must also be suffering since their source of income is no longer on the street. Pickpockets have no pockets available and with everyone standing a meter away from each other pickings must be extinct. Unfortunately what may have happened is that the normally nonviolent thieves have taken to violence. A friend walking home one night from shopping had a rope thrown over his head. He was garroted to unconsciousness, robbed of his phone and left. Luckily he survived. This is not the only case I have heard of. Everyone is trying to make a living, however precarious that may be for yourself or those who are your source of income.
I cut over to Universitat on Tallers, zigzagging through narrow streets where there was no one. The plaza before MACBA, my least favorite BCN museum, was silent, without the usual roar of skateboarders gliding at an unnerving pace over the pavement and leaping on and off platforms. Since there are a number of these platforms in the plaza this is a favorite place for practicing this maneuver. It leaves an interesting hiatus in the roar followed by a clunk as the skateboard lands again sometimes with and sometimes without its passenger. I wonder if there are statistics about the number of broken ankles achieved in front of MACBA. I was in an abandoned city, until I heard the traffic on Gran Via.
Once across Gran Via, however, I reentered that abandoned metropolis, silent now in a soft rain that slicked the pavement and pebbled with shiny droplets the parked cars lodged at the sidewalk edge still as chloroformed beetles in a display case. There was nothing particularly sad about these cars packed tightly into their block long cue but the stores, rain dribbling down their fronts, seemed pathetic castaways with their accordion gates looking permanent.
The store, Kiwoko, was new to me, a pet supermarket replete with every variety of food for gerbils to Great Danes and every source of amusement for that species span as well, from exercise wheels for the former to gargantuan rawhide bones for the later. The other customers, there were three, knew what they wanted and darted about loading up their baskets. I wandered in wonder at the infinite varieties of cat foods, cat beds, cat scratching posts, cat towers upholstered in a variety of plush and fake fur, selecting cans of tuna and chicken in a leisurely manner.
It says something about our society that our companion animals eat a plethora of hygienically prepared foods that children in desperate pockets of the world would gobble given the chance. I had a Vietnamese student who said to me once, “When I am reincarnated, I want to return as your cat.” I quite understand his point.
I am about to digress from Barcelona to Calcutta for no better reason than I can. I went to work at Mother Teresa’s, she was dead by that time, partly because having lived in the American culture where attitudes toward death are odd and artificial I thought a dose of reality might be good for me. A friend who had worked there a few years before told me all I had to do was walk into the hospice, pick up a rag and start to work. I would understand what to do by watching others. She suggested I bring boxes of latex gloves and any left over medicines I had.
The hospice is next door to the Kalighat Temple where each morning hundreds of goats have their throats cut as sacrifices to Kali until the gutters run with blood. Kali is usually portrayed in her fierce aspect as a blue or black woman with many arms who sticks out her tongue. She wears an opera length necklace of severed heads and sometimes a skirt of severed human arms. To the Western eye she is at the minimum disturbing and not someone you would be eager to trust, but ask any cab driver in Calcutta and he will tell you, “Kali is a good mother. Bring her a goat and ask her for what you need. She will give it to you.”
She is either sticking out her tongue or biting it in embarrassment because when her “husband” Shiva tried to calm her rage, she twisted in his grip and committed the appalling solecism of stepping on his chest.
This is the neighbor of the Christian hospice of Mother Teresa. Every morning I went to work there, six days a week, I found the contrast between the two religions as bracing as a dip in the Atlantic off the coast of Scotland.
On my first day I found, as my friend has told me, that all I had to do was walk in and work. Someone showed me where to lock up my things. I put a box of gloves I had bought on the counter, pulled on a pair, grabbed a rag and entered the women´s section– the house is divided into a male and a female section with the kitchen and laundry in between—where skeletal women of unknowable ages were lying on hard beds with plastic under the sheets stained and pooled with yellow diarrhea. Many could neither stand nor walk. Those who were capable of locomotion of any kind, including walking on their knees or hopping went down the center aisle on their own power to the bathing room. One woman walked in a squat; she could not straighten up but she was adamant and angry if offered assistance.
The nuns ran the kitchen and the laundry but the foreigners with a little assistance bathed the women, washed the nightgowns, sheets and blankets in home-made lye soap, wrang them out and carried them upstairs where they were hung out on the roof. From there one could look down on the Kali temple and the lively very un-Christian neighborhood.
Part of the Mother Teresa philosophy is that the hospice should be run at the level of a household in the neighborhood—no washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, modern devices or conveniences. No medicines or doctors to speak of either. A local doctor did turn up once a month. Sometimes, rarely, someone in Calcutta would donate medicine; therefore, the leftover, out of date medicines the foreigners brought were of use. With very rare exceptions the women were of subnormal intelligence due to lives of malnutrition.
It was a place to die in. The nuns received calls from people who noticed that the beggar on their corner was comatose or that someone was lying on the floor of Howrah Station unconscious. Volunteers went and picked these people up.
It was a severe place. The inmates were prayed over but not actively encouraged to become Christians since they understood nothing. There was one Christian patient. She said grace before each meal. The others had no idea what this was but knew you didn’t eat until it was over.
Death was constant, not every day, but every few days, someone would die. I spent time caring for a woman whose main symptom seemed to be infected bed sores which made her moan. She died of them as I sat by her feeling as useless as if I had been trying to cure her with chamomile tea and rice crispies.
Once while I was there two women recovered and left—they had been temporarily saved from malnutrition and starvation—but although they were joyous at leaving the hospice what was ahead of them but more starvation and malnutrition.
The atmosphere was grim, of that variety of Christianity, which in its earnestness seems incapable of imagining even small pleasures or a space in which laughter or beauty might breathe for a moment. Sorrow and sadomasochistic sainthood are its themes. I met the Mother Superior, a woman dedicated to Mother Teresa’s principals, without imagination, and rule bound.
Some years later I returned to Calcutta where I was joining a group of friends to do a trek in Sikkim. Arriving a day early I decided I would go over and do a day at Mother Teresa’s. The very air seemed different when I walked in. I was astonished to see in the arches above the women’s beds cages with birds singing and aquariums in which bright fish darted amount colored rocks.
There was a new Mother Superior. She asked me to help with changing the bandages of patient who had been severely burned when her nylon sari went up in flames as she bent over her cooking fire.
“Hold her hands and talk to her while we change her bandages,” the Mother told me. “She thinks foreigners are a sort of television.” I took the woman’s hands, looked into her dark brown eyes and said, ”Let me tell you if our places were exchanged, I would be screaming this place down to its foundations. You aren’t making a sound, not a moan. How do you do that? I couldn’t.”
When they had re-bandaged her, they asked her, to my amazement, what side she wanted to lie on—back, front, left, right. They didn’t approve of her choice but they put her on that side. I was amazed. The nuns under the earlier management, treated patients as objects, they were never asked anything, and if a patient protested, or cried out under treatment they were scolded.
Then the Mother told me that the woman was eating very little and was likely to die. Some one had donated some sweets—Indian sweets have a decibel level of sweetness that can only be heard by saccharine bats—which they wanted me to feed her since sugar was the one thing she ate. I spoon-fed her the entire hyper-sugar desert while she stared at me.
I asked the Mother Superior what happened to the women who never recovered enough to go out of the hospice but did not die. They are sent to an institution in the country she told me.
“We have tried to teach them things but their brains are so damaged by starvation and malnourishment that you cannot even teach them to peel garlic.”
I told her I thought the birds and fish were an exceptional idea. She became a little flustered and said defensively, “But we don’t take care of them or buy them. The foreigners buy them, feed them and clean the cages and aquariums.”
No Mother Teresa would not have approved of birds trilling in the hospice. But what a difference a thinking person can make in an institution.
To return to Barcelona the line for the Sisters of Charity soup kitchen at the side of Sant Augusti is now enormous, following the side of the church and then snaking in front of the church and spilling across the Plaza de Sant Augusti.
And to return to a Barcelonan convent, one morning this week I heard the rushing sound of debris hurtling down a chute. They are gutting the convent next door. My upstairs neighbor tells me the convent is being reorganized as a halfway house for abused women. Nuns will run it. However, I don’t suppose the nuns I knew will return. The gardening nun’s garden also went down the chute. But if she does return I am going to La Rambla and investing in a garden for her. I would love to do that.
The swifts have returned but they do not come to the back of my building. I think this is because the French pilot has turned his huge terrace into a sort of spa cum Coney Island. There are hammocks, canvas beach chairs, tables, a wadding pool, cushions, planters full of tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini. And he has ordered more things from Amazon. I don’t think the swifts approve.
And the court of the Hospital is now open. At the moment the homeless have not moved in so that it is a quiet, enchanting place to walk through smelling the single white roses and looking up at the last of the oranges clinging to the branches overhead.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

That is T.S. Eliot from his poem ASH WEDNESDAY. It feels appropriate. We are having difficulty with our empathies, our will is useless, it may be a detriment to us, and though we know stillness is both a remedy and a necessity we squirm within our skins like six year olds at an incomprehensible grownup event.
My latest evidence of this was when a friend told me she had heard on the radio that those 80 and above would not be allowed out of quarantine when everyone else was. I was precipitated into immediate belligerent rebellion and outrage not a notch above the reaction of the teenaged daughter of a friend who when told her boy friend would not be allowed to visit her caterwauled in anguish, “Oh Daddy, you’re soooo unfair.” It may not be true. I hope not.
Among my many luxury problems, I am tired of cooking. I cooked two to three meals a day for about 20 years. I was a very good cook; I enjoyed cooking. Somewhere around the age of 78 I stopped enjoying it and took to restaurants, even traveling the metro three stops to a favored one. I have not been doing badly but I’m definitely sullen about exercising this slightly atrophied muscle. I look in cookbooks for inspiration but what they inspire are thoughts such as, “Too complicated. Too many pots. I can’t get up to Balmes to the store that has shrimp paste.”

Too many pots is a bottom line objection. I find I want to clean two pots at the most at the end of a meal. But I also know that to leave the pots in the sink is not only the act of a sloven but that there is a mysterious retributive backlash for such minor acts of procrastination. Some how the abandoned pots have a malign, accusational quality about them. They shame.

Part of my cooking has taken the form of a game. Various people, of divergent tastes have stayed in my apartment over the years leaving behind edibles, mostly starches. I have spent recent weeks using up half or quarter boxes of spaghetti, macaroni and bow ties, a couple of half used bags of quinoa. But the big challenge has been a large bag of lentils I bought myself for an Indian receipt. I didn’t feel like lentil soup, which would have been the obvious solution. I found a receipt for dhal in an Indian cookbook that can be frozen. You serve it with a topping of garlic butter. It is very nice but still it is going to take a long time to consume all those lentils. It was a big bag.

Along with using up edibles, I am “using up” books. I inherited my Aunt Liz’s library. It was small and largely composed of histories, biographies and historical novels written from the 1930’s to the late 50’s. I have been making my way through these, most old and out of date, but not the less interesting for that. I have read now in fact and fiction about Richard III, one of the first biographies to absolve him from the Tudor slander, so stirringly told by Shakespeare, of having killed his nephews, Warwick the Kingmaker, an earl whose reach for power exceeded his life, Queen Elizabeth, a survivor if ever there was one, Sir Thomas Moore, one of the rare righteous in English or any history, a superbly written novel about Harry of Monmouth (Henry V) and a slender volume about Jane Shore, a goldsmith’s wife who became and stayed the mistress of Edward IV. She is mentioned in Shakespeare’s RICHARD III.

They are all interesting personalities but I was hooked by Jane Shore, despite the fact that the novel by Jane Plaidy is not particularly well imagined. Plaidy has her tricked into the arms of Edward by a woman Pandarus, I suppose to make her more blameless. But Jane interests me, not because of her sexual adventures which were many and varied, but because she was by all accounts a nice person, even Edward’s wife liked her. She successfully talked the King into helping people and forgiving them.
Under Richard, who was a prig, she had to walk through London in her kirtel, a one-piece undergarment. It increased her popularity and the men of London came out to see what King Edward had admired. I found myself annoyed that Plaidy gives Jane the kind of end a bad girl is required to have. In the novel she dies in poverty, a beggar on a street corner in London. The actuality may have been that she retired to a not unpleasant middle class life and died in bed.

There is a forty-page poem in MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES, a source much used by Shakespeare, about her. I have been trying to find this poem on line with no luck. When Edward died she went on to other well-heeled lovers. I like to think of her comfortable in a cottage outside of London in her old age.

I pile these books up as I finish reading them to be given to my son, my grandson and others who are interested. At the moment I am on Churchill’s HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLE, the first volume. I am amused at how thoroughly it reflects his worldview.
Once I am finished with England I go on to France and then Egypt, which fascinated my Aunt. It was the last foreign trip she took, a Cook tour. She became very ill, returning to the U.S. That experience made her give up her foreign travels. I believe she was eighty.
So in quarantine I am spending time with my Aunt Liz who has been dead for thirty years. She was born in Reed`s Landing on the Mississippi in Minnesota when paddle steamers took travelers up and down the river in 1887. She went to New York to study at Columbia and get away from her mother, a ring-tailed witch. One night she went to see a Japanese dancer and was so entranced by his performance that she went back stage and asked to become his student. She learned Japanese dance from him, then Indian dance from an Indian woman who was his friend and toured with her troupe. She danced with the Ziegfeld Follies, although she was not one of the long stemmed roses, being a diminutive five foot three. I thought she was the most interesting woman I had ever met until I was eighteen or nineteen and began to know women who ”did things” besides cook tuna casseroles.
The clapping has started. I must go to my balcon and join.

I am now in absolute quarantine, lodged there by my upstairs neighbors. When I told them I thought had had a form of the virus last week they responded by declaring I had to stay inside; they would do my shopping. So here I am on a rainy Barcelona day looking out on the tiled roofs of the Hospital made a richer red by the rain. I feel like a grounded teenager who has been apprehended sliding down a drainpipe to a midnight tryst with a dubious young man.
My experience with what may or may not be the virus might be useful to others, therefore…
Last week I began to feel seriously terrible in that way the flu takes you where you feel that death would be an enormous relief. Something is sucking all your energy leaving you flapping about like a scarecrow’s empty glove. I was not coughing. I had no temperature, indeed, my temperature was subnormal but I felt nauseous and my intestines after breakfast were severely upset, although not at all in the kind of dramatic state I have known them to be in India or Tibet.
I slept and awaited developments. I had the day before received a call from my red button people who keep track of the elderly here. They urged me to call them if I felt unwell while saying in the same breath that all hospitals were on overload.
The next day I felt slightly better but not much and nausea was still lurking slyly. However, I did not feel worse and that seemed to me the important factor. I slept more and I decided to wait another day.
On the third day I felt better although tired and unenthusiastic about life. As time goes on I am a little more enthusiastic.
I wrote in a previous blog about housework and forgot an area of that activity, ironing. I find ironing a contemplative occupation but in one aspect I am totally defeated. I cannot fold a fitted sheet. Every house cleaner I have ever employed has been able to do this, has demonstrated it to me, and still I cannot do it. Even the man from Chile who worked for me for almost ten years in New York, and was divorced by his wife because he was faithful and didn’t beat her, could fold a fitted sheet. But I cannot. I will try again on Thursday when I do the ironing but I know defeat awaits me. It did, abysmal defeat.
Shopping has taken on the aura of adventure in this time. It feels like a slightly illicit activity. I go out with my bag as I might otherwise go with luggage to some exotic clime, Madagascar or the Seychelles. My supermarket has never been so crowded that I have had to stand outside of it. Although the shelves are a little sparse, they have never been so clean. I find that pleasing. However, I have had to wait for as long as twenty minutes at my local Veritas. Most of us, six feet apart, took this fairly easily but there was one young woman who needed to get in there NOW. It was like watching a racehorse trying to break out early.
I also notice that people often seem to be in a controlled state of rage and are not nice to each other. As I was walking along my almost entirely empty street one afternoon, a woman, coming up from behind me, thrust herself violently between the buildings and me. There was no reason to do that. She was wearing what looked like either nurse’s or pharmacy clothes. Fear usually manifests itself as anger. I could understand that she might be fearful in either of those professions.
We are all afraid. I find, for instance, I am annoyed at my butcher for not wearing a mask. That’s my meat he’s breathing on. At my vegetable stand in the Boqueria I am sometimes passed over and have to assert myself to pay.
One day the man, not the usual one at the stand’s cash register, passed over me with a brusque nod when I told him I had everything. I was impressed when the woman he chose to wait on, in mask and gloves, a careful meter away from everyone, told him I was next on line. I was grateful because in this time it takes certain courage to do what she did. I find one of the results of lockdown is people tend to just fall in line; they go limp and passive. There is little effort to push against things.
Going to my cheese counter on the other hand is like a reunion with an old friend. The proprietor and I greet each other effusively. I ask about his mother—she’s younger than I am, in her seventies—about his wife and daughter. He wants to know how I am before we get down to the intense decisions about Brie, Stilton and Gorgonzola with truffles.
I went to a pharmacy on the Rambla for masks. It was the first time I had been on that broad and beautiful avenue since we shut down. The trees were budding in pale green overhead but there were no more than four of us in sight. Farmacia signs were blinking, tabacs were open but people were absent from the picture. It was surreal. Who was the Italian painter who portrayed architecturally elegant town centers that look as though they have been hit by the hydrogen bomb erasing all humans? It had the eerie quality of those endless corridors in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. My grandson tells me that he runs utterly alone through Columbus Circle.
But now I am deprived of even the entertainment of shopping. My house is beginning to be as clean as the supermarket’s shelves. I move between three forms of reading, 1) The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT over lunch, 2) a mystery by Michael Innes or a P.G. Wodehouse novel, 3) a fairly serious historical work, usually out of date because either it was inherited or has been on my shelves waiting for me for years.
Next week I shall be able to do my own shopping again. I am still waiting for the swifts to arrive.

I have not done house cleaning for years. I am one of the lucky who has someone, young and vigorous, to do it for me. When I came to Barcelona a friend said to me,” If you want a really clean house find a Russian.” A couple of days later an acquaintance said he had a Ukrainian cleaner who needed more work. So began my association with Ukrainian cleaners. They are wondrous. I am on my second, the first having had to withdraw her services because of a sick husband. This one is young, embroiders vestments for the Orthodox clergy in her spare time, and because of her abilities I never take down a book and have to wash my hands. I consider this miraculous.
In my first week of returning to housekeeping I learned how to use my Dyson vacuum, succeeding, without reading the manual, in learning how to empty it. I consider manual reading a sign of intellectual failure. But I also rediscovered the truth of one of Betty Friedan’s dictums in THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE that housework expands to fill the time available. Things began to appear that needed “doing”. Therefore, I firmly initiated a list of “no’s”. No windows. Only lower books shelves. Furniture polish once a month. Silver, brass and copper objects once a month.

 

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My mother-in-law was Betty Friedan’s literary agent. One night at a small gathering when someone mentioned Friedan she said crisply over her martini, “She never would have written that book if she hadn’t had that nose.” I was amused, startled, I wondered how often a physical characteristic created a writer. I know of two cases, at least, where an inadequate father created a writer—Thoreau and Twain. The next evening at a family dinner I mentioned what she had said and asked if she really thought it was true. She looked at me wryly saying, ”Oh dear, I wonder how much I had to drink.”
I have always done my own washing. I own a dryer but only use it on rainy days, not only for ecological reasons but because I like the smell of a sheet that has dried in the sun.
There is an open space in the back of my building above the patio of the French pilot on the first floor, the principal, whom we do not approve of because a) he found a legal loophole that has allowed him to turn the apartment into an Air B&B, b) he refers to women as girls. These are serious offenses. He understands he is compromised by the first and, therefore, works very hard to be “nice” but I don’t think he has any idea about the second. I am planning a mild grandmaternal lecture for him in the future.
His patio, at the moment, is humped and lumped with athletic equipment and plant containers he has hauled out of a sort of closet at the back of the patio, which he is painting. This is definitely a quarantine activity.
In his favor, it should be mentioned that he has preserved the large plant on top of the closet that once a year puts forth a multitude of white blooms. On the wall behind the closet there is the sad tracery of a vine, which was executed before I moved in. My neighbors tell me it used to cover the wall with green leaves and once a year adorn itself with white flowers. But it dug its roots into the basement of the hotel causing them to cut it off near its base.
To the right of his space there is, beyond a high wall, the patio below and the roof garden above of what used to be the convent next door. It faces the street with a great arched door followed by another implacable door that I presume leads into the patio. To the side, in the gloomy vaulted area between doors, is a little window with a sliding panel through which you could make known your business.
When I hang out my sheets I look down sadly on the empty spaces of the convent. The nuns left, it may be five years ago now, lured away by the Church’s promise that the building would be renovated and they would return. They were elated. I was fairly sure this was a lie. My father worked for the Catholic Church, I was raised in it, and I have a thoroughly jaundiced view of that ecumenical corporation.
There were not many nuns and the youngest was in her late fifties. They were occupying a nice piece of real estate. I was quite sure the Church was coaxing them out so they could either sell it, BCN property values have been escalating, or alter it into apartments. A few months ago an architect came to look at it but nothing has happened since. Certainly they will not return. I have had friends who were nuns and priests and I know like many another international corporate entity the Church treats its elderly employees poorly.
Hanging out sheets I would often see one of the nuns tending her garden. She had no money to spend on plants, of course, so all she had in the way of flora she had acquired through gifts or cuttings from friends. She multiplied those cuttings and presents into her garden that bloomed and thrived under her love. Much of it still does although the little palm tree has died. Once when we talked across the evening air she said to me, “Soló los animales, y las plantas son inocente.” She was of Dostoyevsky’s belief. I didn’t tell her about sea gulls.
Beyond the high nunnery wall are the backs of the houses along Carrer d’En Robador. This translates loosely as Thieves Street. It is a narrow alley, not long, with an evangelical store front church that tries to help alcoholics and drug addicts, a bicycle shop, a laundry and a couple of tiny Pakistani supermarkets. It is a tough little lane and where it debouches into the square before the Filmoteca prostitutes of various colors gather, sitting on plastic crates or big water bottles or, if energetic, patrolling the street with their long black hair swinging behind them. But the backs of these houses are hung with laundry and the tenants I see are often in my age group.
I have been praying that nothing goes wrong in the house while we are in quarantine. However, the other day I walked into the kitchen to find a pool spreading slyly out from the dishwasher. I shut it off and mopped. Now I do my dishes by hand.
It put me in mind of things I am missing in quarantine. Not big things, because I don’t miss them with the same persistence as the little things. Outside of the obvious ones, the company of others and walking freely through the city, I think the main, irremediable one is flowers. I buy mine from a woman on the Rambla.
When I moved into my apartment I walked up the channel of flower sellers lining that famous street looking at the offerings. Since they were largely the same I then looked at who sold them. I chose my seller because she was a woman alone. Her thin, bespectacled face seemed a little withdrawn, slightly bitter to me but I became her faithful customer buying anemones and jonquils in season (we will miss them this year) and deeply scented lilies either pink or white.
Last Christmas I glimpsed what might be the cause of her withdrawal. In the local bank, she was urging forward gently, a smiling, awkwardly shy, ill looking little girl, holding a bouquet. She was perhaps nine and was almost bald. The bouquet was for one of the clerks at the bank. There was so much to guess and infer from that small scene. My flower lady did not see me but I felt guilty as though I had witnessed an intimacy from which I should have been excluded.
I wonder how she is managing with no income. So many are in that situation all over the world. A friend in Bangkok WhatsApped to say she is moving back in with her parents. She has had no income this month. Others are working from home and rearranging their lives. My grandson has a friend with two children who has lost his job in New York City. Luckily his wife, a lawyer, is still employed.
One of the first things I plan to do once the quarantine is eased is to walk to her stall and buy more than I need of lilies and if she has them anemones, jonquils and one of her tiny bouquets of violets.

As my building is about 120 feet long, I have been using its length as a track. Walking back and forth in my apartment means rolling back rugs, dodging furniture and being judged by a cat with an acerbic eye. On the roof I can jog a little, walk uninterruptedly and look about the neighborhood. Sometimes others are out on their roofs, not walking but reading, sunbathing or, probably illegally, chatting with a boy friend.

Since the roof is two stories higher than my apartment I can look down on the roofs of the hospital; I can look up to Tibidabo. In local legend the hill is the spot to which Satan took Christ to tempt him with the material world, namely Barcelona. Tibidabo is translated as Satan’s words, “To thee I give.” I have never been up to see the church but a friend told me it is better at a distance. It certainly is a romantic pile on top of the hill.

Looking about me while jogging, a little, walking, a lot, I thought I had discovered a hidden structure, church like, in the middle of the next block. I was quite excited by my little mystery. It took me two days to discover, to my chagrin, that I was looking at the back of the church of Sant Augusti, not a very interesting structure built in the early 18^th century and never finished. What is most interesting about it is this unfinished quality, the rough angularity of the stones on its left side and above the porch, which were to have been covered with an ornate, baroque façade. The funding never appeared and neither did the façade. Its parishioners are, as far as I have been able to tell, down to the last baptized baby, Philippine. They have lovely parades down Hospital accompanied by drums in which the women glow happily in evening dresses and the men look embarrassed in suits.

In May, on Saint Rita’s day, the square is a perfumed lake of rose sellers. Saint Rita is a saint of hopeless cases, los imposibles, and her acolytes come to buy a rose taking it to be blessed in her chapel.

The roof is wonderful because I am out in the open; I can hear the bells ringing from various churches on the quarter hour; I can see the birds above and around me. There is a pair of gulls who nest in some cranny of the hospital. When their young approach adolescence they bring them up to a flat place among the tiles to be fed and learn to fly. One, I’ve no idea whether it’s the husband or wife, broke a leg some months ago. One-leg carries the leg at an awkward angle. Since the red tile roofs of the hospital are pitched, she/he has difficulty landing with stability. But one-leg has survived six months or more now and seems to manage, although I hold my breath with anxiety at every landing.

Not that one should be sentimental about gulls who are murderers. In Venice once I saw one grab a sparrow and drown it by holding it under the water. The sparrow fought hard struggling and splashing in a small storm of wings in the canal but that gull beak held it under firmly until it was still.

There are also parrots, screaming, green flashes. They are escaped pets who have flourished among the palm trees in the streets and squares of Barcelona. They also kill off the sparrows. Mourning doves cry softly among the antennas. Magpies strut arrogantly, chic in their black and white outfits, decidedly decorative against the red tiles. The pigeons, of course, moan and spatter in trees, on roofs and coast up and down the street just below the level of the eaves.

Sometimes my upstairs neighbor joins me at the proper distance on the roof. He has breakfast under a sort of sail he has set up and reads the paper on Sunday or he brings up his computer to talk to friends or hold meetings. He works for the Ajuntament, the local government, of Barcelona. He is an architect and he has painted the walls around the roof with starry skies that waver with colors like an aurora borealis and big initials whose, significance I don’t know. His daughter is with him. I have yet to ask where his son is, possibly in the country. His wife is in Madrid doing work for Barcelona’s educational institutions. I love them dearly.

One night when I first moved into the apartment, I went to the opera taking only the keys for my door on the elevator landing. When I returned home the elevator was broken and I needed the key I had not taken with me to the door on the stair. We found a locksmith at that late hour but he was no use, so they kindly took their daughter into bed with them and I slept in Sara’s bed that night.

Living alone I love hearing their footsteps above me. It is a comforting sound. I know Sara’s footsteps, her bedroom is over mine, because she is always on the run. Once when she was about ten or eleven I was awakened, not late, by a rumbling overhead. I pulled on my bathrobe to go up and find out what she was up to. When Marta, her mother, opened the door, I asked, “What is Sara doing?” Marta shrugged and called down the hall, “Sara?” Sara rolled out of her room on her skateboard, took one look at me and understood everything.

On days like today, when it rains and the roof is not an option I walk in the house, looking out at the slick, wet tiles of the hospital roof in front and the pale, hard little buds on my potted olive trees on the terrace. Soon they will burst into clusters of white flowers. By that time I may be able to do 4 circuits jogging with two of walking in between. At the moment I am doing three circuits jogging followed by three walking until I have done fifteen. Then I stop and gaze out the window before starting again. I am able to do five to ten kilometers. Today I did six in the morning.

Rain in Barcelona is a different. Sometimes it comes down like rain anywhere but mostly it falls tenderly in separate drops so that you can almost walk between its gentle splashes. The attitude toward this wet caress of lluvia is odd to me. A friend will call and say, “I can’t come to lunch today. It’s raining.”

I will stop writing this now to feed the cat and do three or four more circuits. She seems to have stopped pooping in the tiled corner of the living room; may this continue.