How Benevolent White Elephants Nightly Take Barcelona

My next door neighbour stormed Barcelona last night.

His wife was with him in the cab, in the spacious white cab, the armoured rubbish-crusher mounted behind them. They were flanked on either side by speeding white elephants on their way into the city to disappear what we threw away today, what we didn’t eat yesterday, last night’s leftovers that we scraped off the plate into the bin under the sink.

At 10pm every night the onslaught rages. The white elephants race into town with empty bellies, with high hopes at the start of a new night, a new negotiation of tight corners and narrow streets where restaurateurs curse them and little old ladies and children turn over in their beds for the beeping and scratching outside their bedroom windows.

Other vehicles arrived from other places, along the Gran Vía under Plaça Espanya and into the heart of it all. Buses arrived from the airport with newcomers who looked right at Montjuic and the fountains, left at a bull ring on stilts. A coach marked “Zaragoza-Barcelona” zoomed by on the home straight to the Estació del Nord.

Cyclists pressured past on creaking pedals and a lady waited to cross the road on her way home, or to some place that endowed her with a relaxed, and easy gait. She paused at the roadside as taxis crawled by, their drivers distractedly twiddling at GPS navigators dangling from windscreen-mounted arms on suckers.

The nights are not yet cool but the oppressive heat has gradually receded like a tide that snuck away and left us more room on the beach. It is the eve of the Mercé, Barcelona’s grandest festival, where the streets come alive with heavy-headed medieval dancers and dragons bathed in sparks.

Musicians will play for us and we’ll watch human castles erect themselves only to be successfully dismantled, floor by floor. We’ll think they won’t make it so high as they rock and tremble. We’ll pretend we’re not excited by it and we’ll sigh silently in relief as the tower melds with the crowd squeezed into the Plaça Sant Jaume to see what they’ve seen every year, thrilled by the dissimilar repetition like a daily-football-highlights addict.

We’ll leave the squares strewn with plastic glasses, redolent with beer and sticky coca cola. We’ll kick papers from our feet as we pace home or seek yet more emotion in smokey bars.

And my next door neighbour will nudge the white beast’s withers, inclining her left, right, then canter, then gallop. And the streets will be clean when we awake from it all, ready for more of it.

And at 4am, the small hours of the morning, a keen ear will hear the turn of a key in next door’s door and they will both, husband and wife, push in home, to sleep till the sun is shining up the Ramblas from the port.