ABSTRACT
Barcelona collapses when the first atomic alarm is sounded, proving, in extremis, that it is one of the most inevacuable cities on earth. Its highways simply cannot sustain the exodus of terrified inhabitants; cars are quickly abandoned, left sputtering in all directions, and the people, long accustomed to a more rapid and metallic mobility, find themselves forced to flee on foot. Of the various areas or neighborhoods of the city, the Eixample, the great nineteenth-century monument to rationality and grid-like order, is the most battered, the least protected. Its wide, tree-lined streets lure far too many to choose it as the point of escape. It is a fatal choice, for as cars crash furiously into each other, careening around the wide chamfered corners, bodies pile up amid twisted branches, shattered furniture, and smoldering wreckage. The city, darling of architects, artists, and urban planners, pride of nationalists and internationalists, site of world's fairs and Olympic games, of workers' movements and bourgeois pleasures, of medieval memories and modern projects, gives up the ghost in a dizzingly swift, yet excruciatingly protracted, agony. But this too, fortunately, is a modern imagining, one that begins Miquel de Palol's massive, melancholically futuristic novel, El jardí dels set crepuscles (The Garden of Seven Twilights).1 It is a novel of considerable power, not least of which is, for the contemporary Catalan reader, its effusively apocalyptic precision: it “knows” Barcelona, knows how it is made and how, it seems, it can be unmade. For me, an American struggling to write on a city that I have come to love with an intensity that at times overwhelms me, Palol's description of an anguished, disastrously ineffective exit will serve as my entrance: perhaps no less anguished, but hopefully somewhat less disastrous.
