Fifty white doves are released, one for each year that Gaudí has been dead.
The doves leap above the crowd and thread among my towers, white wings beating against the bright blue sky. Some alight on my ledges and cornices, tiny hearts pounding against chiseled stone. Roving spots of warmth on a chilly day.
Down below, the bishop delivers his address to the masses filling the streets. He talks about how this is the fiftieth anniversary year of Gaudí's death. In honor of that remarkable man, the Passion façade and its towers have been finished. Gaudí's dream of faith and devotion to the Sacred Family lives on.
The crowd roars. Not with rage, as in the Tragic Week or Civil War...but with approval. With appreciation.
It's a sound I love. It accomplishes the very thing I once thought was my purpose in life. It drives away loneliness.
Not that I am often lonely these days. Gaudí is fifty years gone...even Quintana has been dead for a decade...and I have lost track of everyone else who has departed—but new faces continue to take their place. New architects and workmen and artists and tourists and children keep coming. Some even talk to me now and again.
They see me as something out of the ordinary...something grand. Which is what I thought of myself from the start. Humbled by time and death and destruction, I've stopped seeing myself that way...so the people's admiration has a different taste than it once did. Whatever there is about me that might be grand, it has nothing to do with my personal greatness. It is nothing I did.
It is only because of my maker.
When the bishop chants a prayer, he calls Gaudí a saint, and rightly so. Only someone so devout and inspired could have put in motion a dream that still lives and grows today. A monument not to his own glorification but to the hope of the world.
It is a privilege to be his creation.
The bishop splashes the doors of my Passion façade with holy water. It makes me think of that night years ago when the mobs splashed me with gasoline. When they set me aflame.
How things have changed.
Did Gaudí foresee all this, I wonder? Was it in his plans from the start, in the parts I couldn't see when they fluttered in the wind? If so, what else was on those pages? What is the fullness of his plan for me? That I shall grow to live up to his vision and help redeem the lost souls of this world?
Or was it only this: to realize, finally, that I can only ever live up to the parts of the vision that I can see. Or understand.
On the ground, the choir begins to sing...voices of varying timbre and pitch weaving together to create a beautiful structure of sound. Then, the crowd in the streets joins in, adding hundreds more voices...thousands...growing grander with each passing second. Turning the structure of sound into a cathedral, the equal in music of my physical form.
It resonates in every window and vault and tomb of me. Echoes and amplifies between my walls. Synchronizes with the secret hum of my mind and bursts skyward in a great harmonic bolt. Straight to the heavens.
I wonder if Gaudí will hear it. If he will recognize it.
Did he plan it all along? Years ago, when I thought I could fly, was it just a premonition of this moment? Intuition of this talent to channel the voice of humankind heavenward?
Or is the actual flying still to come?
My visions of flight from years ago are still strong. To tell the truth, I don't think I ever stopped dreaming about them.
Oh, to rise from my hole in the ground and soar through the air. To explore the far corners of the Earth and bask in its wonders. And when I have seen it all, to rise even higher, climbing past the sun to meet the stars and powers of the night.
How I once wished I could do that.
Now, even if these dreams were merely hints of other destinies to come, how I wish it again.