I take my daughters to a skating rink twice
a week. I should sit in the stands and watch them skate, but often pack a
laptop, order a coffee, and settle down to work at a table in the cafeteria
overlooking the ice. The place fills up with skaters waiting for their lessons
to begin and families waiting for lessons to end. Skating lessons aren’t cheap:
many of the regulars among the children come in private school uniforms: their
parents look prosperous, some of them tony. It’s an upper-middle class preserve.
Siblings run pretty wild while their
brother or sister skates. One boy who may have been seven or eight lobbed a
soccer ball at the wall (he never failed to catch it) a few feet away from the
mounted flat-screen TV, until, to be fair, his mother stopped him. The wonder,
to me, was that he tried it at all. I’ve seen high-speed games of tag between
the counter and the table, slowing only when one child hid under an unoccupied
table. One day I had a visitor under my
table, by my feet, for five minutes
or so before his older sister coaxed him out. He might have been five or six,
his sister ten, his mother—three or four tables down from mine—was chatting
amiably with a gaggle of mums, all of them coping easily with a child or two.
As behaviour, my squatter’s taking refuge beside my boots struck me as unusual,
but not extreme: not what tends to happen, but what might happen.
A few days later the lure of
after-Christmas specials drew me to one of Barcelona ’s pricier grocery stores. From an
aisle full of jars (mustards, sauces) I went around the corner into one stocked
with olive oil and vinegar, some in plastic bottles, some in tin, some in
glass, and dodged a ten-year-old on a scooter. He and his sister (also on a
scooter) belonged to a tall, late thirties father in a navy jacket and quilted
vest that might have been from Barbour’s. It was as though the bicycle-dodging
pleasures of central Barcelona
sidewalks had been re-scaled and reconfigured to make a scholar’s point about
analogous public spaces.
All of this leads me to wonder whether a
Catalan childhood leaves one ill-equipped to cope with the social world of a
Catalan adult. If childhood can seem understructured, unbound, and untroubled
by rules and authority, life at twenty-five, thirty-five, or forty-five often
seems to comprise a series of administrative hoops through which the individual
must leap, of increasing difficulty, in a kind of circus act where the citizen
plays the elephant and the state, the tamer. Starting a business or applying to
be vetted for tenure can entail trunkloads of paperwork and require consummate
patience. I doubt that the cultures of childhood and adulthood make for a
perfect match, and an easy transition, anywhere in the world, but I wonder whether
they are here peculiarly ill-matched, and the transition distinctly difficult.