How beautiful to be thirty...

If my past appeared barefooted in front of my every day of my life, there was a reason, a name and a date that justified it.

His name was Gibel and he came out of a corner. Unexpected, without seeing him coming, just as he did nine years ago.

- What a lovely coincidence to see you on your birthday Elena! – He said with his French accent.

He was just as I remembered. You could say that time hadn’t changed the image that was repeating itself every morning, sleepy between the blue sheets and the sea shells, of a childish bedroom with a smell of lavender.

- Hello Gibel – I said hi to him – Mother of mine, how long has it been! – I could tell how many days exactly had passed since that first and last time we saw each other, but I didn’t. – You still remember my birthday?

- Of course! You celebrated it with me nine years ago Elena – touched and sunken.

The neighborhood of Gracia was immersed in the mourning of the lowered window panes. The sadness of its closed doors palliated the morning of late dreams, intertwined sheets, alarm clocks on strike, late dawns. It was a spring Sunday, as precise as the eighteen degrees that ran the still deserted streets, preparing to receive the people who would leave at noon, with the mark of the pillow still on their cheeks, to flood the terraces, review the week and to get a tan with the rays of the sun of a month without an “r”.

My life at that time was as calm as my morning walk, protected by a sleepy town, prepared to explode in a few hours, resting hectic past of nocturnal hours. That’s how I felt, turning thirty-one years old, light on luggage.

I sat at one of the terraces that decorate the corners of Plaza de la Villa. The trees had gained their life back, the green color of their leaves, the desire to decorate a landscape and the stories of those who, like me, spent the hours under their shade. Spring was breathed, with its allergies, its revolted hormones and the indecision of closets that don’t know whether to dress short or long. The first scents of sunscreen cream were felt, the first start of summer with still cautious bags, filled with handkerchiefs and knitted jackets. It was a month of transition, a time of the year when I could feel my feet tied to the ground, my skin nestled in my own skin. It was nice to be me on that morning of the month of May, in that place and at that time.

The coffee was turning cold in that small red mug, with the little spoon stained with milk resting next to two sugar sachets. Sweet, very sweet. Two slices of bread decorated the rest of a silver table, almost cold. I looked around me and I didn’t recognize the faces that were sharing the morning with me. Pau, the waitress, the only familiar face, approached me and left an ashtray next to the napkin holder.

Ever since I stopped smoking I became quite unbearable with fumes and everything that smelled of tobacco, even if it was a badly washed ashtray, it bothered me. In fact, that was the first thing I did when sitting on a terrace, removing cigarette butts and ash from my table. I was grateful to the anti-smoking law and the right not to wash my hair before going to bed after a night of partying. Age made me intolerant, at least in some things.

I spread the strawberry jelly over the toast full of butter. One of those pleasures I have never resigned to, the taste of summer camps. I had been noticing for a while how somebody, at my back, had been staring fixedly at me. I didn’t know who, but I felt observed, uncomfortable, controlled. What the hell did he want from me? I knew he was a man and I remembered that he was already seated, on one of the wooden benches that delineate the edges of the square when I sat on the terrace, but I hadn’t noticed his appearance. I remembered his figure, a shadow dressed in dark, but not his age or his appearance. I didn’t want to turn around and provoke a visual contact with him but it was irritating me to feel his two eyes on the back of my neck and I hurried to finish breakfast to take off to another place, free of curious, as soon as possible.

I paid the bill and I got up visibly upset. I passed in front of the looker walking fast, not that I was in a hurry, it was just my way of walking. That was my rhythm, I didn’t know how to walk slowly. It was a really bad habit that I was trying to correct, but I still hadn’t been able to dominate it. I noticed it a couple of years before, when one spring day, very much alike to the morning of my birthday number thirty-one, with sun and fresh air, I signed up to a guided tour around the city that the city hall of Barcelona was organizing just for residents. Not that I needed for someone to show me around the city I had lived in my entire life, but I thought I could learn to view it from a different point of view. And so I did.

The tour guide, a middle age lady, with a clear, clean voice, good looking and an enviable elegance, was waiting for us at ten in the morning under the Arc of Triomphe.

- Hello everyone. My name is Elena – she introduced herself and I could not help but smile. I know I am not the only Elena in the world, I would miss more, but I feel a special sympathy for the women with whom I share my name with. – and I want to ask you a favor, look up. Do not be satisfied with looking at your own height, broaden the objective and see beyond.

During the three hours that the visit lasted, I discovered a new city. I was totally wrong, I only knew the Barcelona of my meter sixty. The stores where I used to buy, the restaurants where I used to eat or dine, the cafeterias, the doors of the historic buildings, the streets that united my initial place from my destiny, but I had never looked beyond. I had gotten used to just moving instead of walking, to look at the watch instead of observing, to count the numbers and forget about the history of the city. That morning, among other things, I discovered that near the Portal de l’Angel, practically covered by a new construction, you could still observe the remains of a Roman aqueduct that served to bring water to the city from the Besós river or that the walls of the Sant Felip Neri Church, are the sad testimonial of the death of forty-two people, mostly children, that took shelter in the church’s basement and died when a bomb launched by the aviation of the rebel side during the Spanish civil war, exploded where the square is now the redoubts of the shrapnel can still be seen.

Barcelona that morning showed me her most human face and I promised myself, not always with the same success, to observe and appreciate her as she deserved.

The Villa square, was still deserted. The city refused to wake up on the morning in which I was turning thirty-one years old and I wished that the voice heard in the middle of the morning silence was not that of the man who’d be staring at me during breakfast, peaceful and quiet, that ended for not being such.

With all the rushing I had forgotten to grab the purse which, when I sat on the cafeteria’s terrace, I hung on the back of the chair. That was another really bad costume I could not manage to remove, not even when I got robbed four years before while having dinner with some friends from my neighborhood in a restaurant from de Born.

We were seated at one of the tables that the restaurant had in the inner dining room. It was still too cold to have dinner outside. It was a calm Thursday evening. We did not need a reservation to get an available table. We dined calmly, catching up on the latest news. Life had changed a lot since the time when the same four girls who that night toasting with their wine glasses – to the old times – were playing with a ball in one of the neighborhood squares. It was nice to come back and reunite a couple of times a year, to still be the earth cable that reminded us of who we were and the place we came from.

It was almost midnight when we stood up with the intention of paying the bill and extend the friendly meeting in one of the city’s trendy bars, but when I turned around, I saw that my purse was not there anymore. I had hunged it from the back of my chair, resting my back on the leather handles that crossed from one side to the other, the highest part of a wooden chair. I didn’t notice any pull, in fact, the leather handles were still crossing the back of the chair. It was the bag that was missing. Someone must have bent down, cut the strap and taken my bag without the two friends who sat in front of me noticed anything strange.

When we went out of the restaurant and to the nearest police station to put the complaint, the police told us that robberies of that kind were a common thing, - a trendy – he described it. My friends paid for the bill, my mother opened the door of my apartment with the copy of the keys she kept in her house and the handles of my bag ended up in a trash bin in front of the police station. Even so, I did not learn the lesson and kept putting my bag on the back of the chairs, even if it was night time or if ‘I was seating at a square, the Villa square. I didn’t get robbed again, I don’t know if it was a matter of luck or the trend simply stopped.

He was the one calling me. From the wooden bench in front of the Campanar de Gràcia. He would be about forty years old, a bit younger perhaps. He was tall and thin-built. Narrow black pants marked his thin legs. He was wearing a dark shirt, with long sleeves rolled up at the elbows, a string of thread around his neck and a photo camera hanging from his left arm. At first glance, I thought he was odd-looking, neither handsome nor ugly. He wasn’t particularly attractive but he was not a man who went unnoticed either. He was funny, just like I was funny when I was a kid.

The strange man sitting on the bench in the Plaza de la Vila, looked at everything with curiosity, as if everything that happened around him had the capacity to surprise him, to make him fall in love. The children in the car out for a ride, the man dressed as a cyclist who drank water at the fountain, the young woman having breakfast alone on the terrace, the bag that was abandoned on the back of a chair. Mine.

That morning, when I dressed with the intention of walking and having breakfast at the Plaza de la Vila, I chose wide jeans that ended just at the height of my ankles, leaving the end of my legs uncovered, like a horizontal line dividing the pants from the shoes. Before leaving home, I opened my bedroom window to check if the weather was hot or not. I was still barefoot. My mother, used to tell me I looked like an Indian and called me “black feet”. Wearing shoes, for me, was almost optional and at the first chance, I would get rid of them to touch the floor with the soles of my feet.

When I opened the window I felt the sun shining with strength but spring was still young and the mornings were still cool. It was the time of that undefined halftime in which is neither too hot nor too cold. I decided to wear a long-sleeved body, like those used by ballet dancers. It was made of cotton and it covered my chest and my arms leaving my back uncovered. I knotted a colored handkerchief in my bag to cover myself with it in the event that it cooled off during the day and I went outside with my hair still wet from the shower, my face washed and my lips red.

I had been painting my lips for a year. My thirties arrived with two big aesthetic changes. The day after my birthday, I went to visit Patty, the hairdresser who had been taking care of my hair since I was three years old and I told her to cut my hair off.

Patty, was over seventy years old and resisted retirement, she loved my hair. With good reason, I had always worn an abundant hair, strong and shiny. I didn’t need to take care of it too much and I’d never dyed it, because with the sun I got natural blond highlights that brightened my natural color, chestnut, and welcomed summer. Since I have consciousness, I have always carried the same length, finger up, finger down. The only change had been the curls that came out in the form of sea waves when I turned thirteen.

- I want a change Patty – she didn’t agree with me and she refused to pick the scissors – If I don’t like it I’ll just let it grow long again anyway, easy fix – I insisted.

Patricia Pérez Martín, whom we all knew as “The Patty”, was to me one more of the family that the inhabitants of the neighborhood formed. She was my grandmother Helen’s age and the energy of a ten-year-old girl. She had been working her whole life and she still had that same illusion as when she arrived at Barcelona at the age of fifteen, with a half-broken suitcase and the hope of the big city. She left behind the memory of a small town in the province of Huesca, the snow, the dry cold and the smell of homemade bread that came out of the wooden stove owned by her father.

Patty, attended her business six days a week. Her hairdresser was her home and the place in which she most received affection, because Patty was one of those women to whom life gave back all of the goodness and happiness that she always gave between the people that had the pleasure of sharing our daily lives with her. We, her clients were her family. She had watched us grow up, get old, prosper or fail. Cried the losses and the absences, celebrate with her the moments of happiness. She wrote her story alongside ours, morning after morning, from Monday through Saturday, on rainy days and sunny days.

To us she was like an untimely symbol. The years passed and “The Patty” was still there, with her hair salon, waiting for us to come and visit her, that one of us maybe brought her flowers from the market, Easter candies and souvenirs from countries she never thought about visiting. When we got back from our vacations, she would listen attentively to every detail of the days we spent outside the borders of her hair salon, in a place where surely the landscape would be more beautiful but we where we could never receive so much love.

- I'll cut it off but I will not change the color! – she said accepting my request without giving her arm to bend.

The new look favored me a lot. True, it did make me look a few years older, my long hair rejuvenated me, but it gave me a more sophisticated look. Besides, it was also much cooler and more comfortable for the summer.

The second one of my changes was the lipstick and it came attached to the first one. In the few meters that separated Patty’s hairdresser from my apartment, I inevitably walked searching for a reflection of my new look on any door, showcase or mirror, on an effort to recognize the appearance of my new me. When I got home, I sat in front of the dressing table that I bought in an antique market that was organized in Cadaqués and that it had become one of my treasures since the day the transport company took it home and placed it on the right side of my bed, next to the window of the room. It was blue, like the sea shore on Costa Brava and over the waves of its legs it had little starfish engraved by hand.

I stared at myself in the mirror for several minutes trying to recognize me in the new reflection. I felt something was missing, a complement to my new image. I was never a person who put on too much makeup, but since I started going to the university and specially since I started working aat Beauty Building Company, few were the times when I got out of my house with my face “completely clean”. I think it was a matter of habit, rather than aesthetics, although it’s difficult to know. I never knew where the line was between what I do by my own will and what I do stimulated by all the information I received through publicity, stereotypes and social pressures.

I could say that I only put makeup on for habit. But I would be lying if I said I’d thought about assisting a business meeting without a drop of makeup. That would have been inadmissible. First (and most regrettable) for me and then for every people accompanying me, because an image free of makeup, would show disinterest, little cure, lack of professionalism. So, why did I put makeup on? Who did I put makeup on for?

That morning, in front of the new image the mirror of my room gave me, I grabbed one of the lipsticks I kept in the center drawer of the dresser and painted my lips red to see how it looked. I discovered that that was what was missing and from that day on I replaced my makeup for that unique color of my lips, in a natural but refined style. With age I learned to feel beautiful with comfort, to be less a slave to appearances, to like myself in every way.

- Forgive me if I have upset you – said the man in the bench seeing I had ignored his comment and was walking away from Plaza de la Vila – but you have a beautiful back and I couldn’t resist photographing it.

I looked at him and before I had time to say anything, he went ahead. He came close and held out his hand to me as he said:

- Forgive me, I have not introduced myself. My name is Gibel, I am a photographer and I am French.

His answer was so funny that I loosened my frown and exchanged it for a big laugh. The way he introduced himself using his nationality as a complement to his person seemed brilliant to me. Surely it was not funny and I’d swear he didn’t do it to make me laugh, but I, suddenly, inexplicably, was in a good mood. Despite having forgotten my bag on the chair and a stranger photographing my back.

I finished my sentence with information as unnecessary as his but I wanted to make him a wink.

- Then we have to celebrate – he proposed with a remarkable French accent.

- You and me? – First he stares at me, then he photographs me and now he’s inviting me to celebrate my birthday, I thought.

- Yes, you and me. Or do you have a better plan?

Not really, no, I didn’t have a better plan, or if I did... I still didn’t know. I would have to go eat with my mother at one thirty like every year. We always celebrated together, who better than with her to celebrate my birth. We were both the protagonists of a magical moment, as mine as hers and we promised each other that whatever happened we would always be together on that day.

Gibel surprised me with his security, he didn’t know me and already he had the courage to assure me that no plan would be better than to spend the day next to him and even though I wasn’t sure of his proposal, I accepted. Spending the day of my birthday number thirty-one with a stranger was something I’d never done it could be a gift or life lesson. Maybe both.

- It doesn’t matter. Let’s take a walk... a walk it’s the best way to get to know someone.

It’s true, to walk beside someone, aimlessly, no destination, is to know them better. The time, free, gives you long uninterrupted speeches. The landscape, changing, offers you unadverted curiosities, surprises to pick up and add to the conversation basket, like fresh fruit, renewed information. The distance between the bodies, it breaths, it protects you from the fixed stare, the eyes that watch you and inhibit you. Walking, the bodies don’t face each other, they accompany each other and the dreams, like the sadness and wishes, sprout free. And so, Gibel told me he was born in Quimper, capital of the department of Finistère in French Brittany.

- Quimper is a black and white picture with unfocussed colors. – That’s how he described it – A city of grey pointed ceilings. Green, rainy, of narrow buildings, wide, cold and fun.

- Lyon was the bridge that opened my mind to the world. I arrived on a train but left flying out of there. Have you ever smoked and then quitted? – he asked me.

- And do you know that feeling when all of a sudden food starts tasting better? Tomatoes taste like tomatoes, peppers like peppers, coca-cola is really sweet and tea is bitter. Do you know what I mean? – he insisted.

- Yes, I know – It was true. The first month without tobacco I gained 5 kilos and it wasn’t because of addiction or anxiety of nicotine, it was because everything tasted great. Even the things I had always rejected were to me, a delicacy. And the smells... everything smelled so good!

- So, for me, leaving Quimper was like quit smoking. I started to see the tonalities of colors, to comprehend expressions, to see the city with new eyes, fresh, curious. Lyon was my first photograph. I bought a photo camera and began immortalizing the lives of others.

He explained to me that since photography had turned into his profession, he divided the hours between pleasure and duty. The orders, from different newspapers, magazines or publicity agencies were varied and he complied promptly with the orders, but what he was really passionate about were <<the expressions of the body>>.

- The way a person drinks coffee, rests a hand over a book, ruffles its hair... I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like people are talking to me with their gestures. Each expression has a history, which is not always linked to the person who makes it. Sometimes it’s conditioned by time, sadness, by an involuntary guy who walks in front invading that person’s space... gestures are ephemeral but I make them eternal.

As we were making our way through the widening of Barcelona, Gibel told me that when he finished his studies, he put his pack on his back, his photo camera to his neck and began travelling. First Europe; Switzerland, Italy, Croatia and Greece. From Athens we went on a ship to Turkey. After a month on that country, a plane took him to Moscú and a train to Saint Petersburg. <<The city that brings to life the poems of Bulowsky>>. There he became obsessed with the wiring of cities. There he became obsessed with the wiring of cities. The ones that have the electric system hanging from house to house, going through the roof of the eyes with black thread, with lights that oscillate in the wind., trams, contrails of aircrafts that cross the crossword of the sky. The union of other people’s lives in the view of everybody.

Saint Peterburg impressed with its colors but Gibel concentrated in the tonalities of white and black, in the gray corners, with the smell of urine and vodka. He sold a dozen of his photographs in the Udelka market, attached to a piece of carton, with his signature in exchange for his will.

Among the second-hand stalls, where hundreds of Russian vendors line up on weekends in the streets of the Udelnaya neighborhood, you can find – anything - . from shoes, clothes, antique coins, porcelain vessels... - even guns - . Gibel discovered it by chance and right away he understood that there, in one of the largest markets in the world, between all the stories that live side by side every weekend, his, the ones the objective of his camera captured with the power to stop time, had their space also. He bought in the same market, a metal fence in which, with the help of some wood pieces, hung up some of his photographs and sat over the green backpack that accompanied him on every journey, with the hopes that someone understood what only he could see.

There were many curious ones, few buyers and even fewer the people who understood the story behind each image. But there was one who did, who paid the photograph with the only currency that really mattered to Gibel, the emotion.

- I remember with a special fondness one of the photographs. I was at the train station in Vitebsky, where tons of iron grow in the shape of tropical palms, striving to touch each other, only separated by horizontal crystal blocks that illuminated the station during day time. A girl, she was maybe your age and looked a lot like you – he said – was searching for her train among the steel scribble. I came close to her, camouflaged in ordinary people, bent down and invented a new moment. The image that reflected in the photo was not her, it was one of a young woman dreaming for a better destiny.

I didn’t know Gibel’s aptitude for photography, but if the images he captured with the ability to stop time, showed only part of the passion he put into each of his words, his work would be an experience full of sadness, mystery, sensitivity and love.

- No – He answered in a mixture of melancholy and pride -, I sold it right there, in the Udelka market, to a couple of backpackers. He wasn’t very interested but she was. She didn’t hesitate, she wanted it instantly – he assured – she put inside a book to protect it from the bumps it would receive inside the backpack and in doing so, she got excited. Like someone who discovers a treasure and intends to take care of it.

Russia was followed by Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica. He spent more than ten years traveling the world in search for inspiration until he returned to France, specifically to Paris. The city didn’t cause him to feel passion, on the contrary of what the rest of the world’s opinion was, to him it wasn’t the most beautiful, or the most romantic and far less the best place to live, but it was a good base. From there, from a little attic with views to the Monceau park, he could organize his jobs, his trips and his pleasures. It was, strategically, the ideal place.

We were at the Raval, we had spent more than three hours walking around the city, enjoying the unfamiliar company, the one that allows you to know yourself better. That with which you lose the shame of being judged, even remembered, the one that allows you to be who you want to be, without the fear of disappointing. Gibel had told me a lot of things about his life, but I would never know if they were true or not. We played the of game innocence, we decided to believe the words of a stranger and accept them as universal truths. It was just one day and we could live it the way we wanted to.

- I didn’t know we’d have a date – he replied, surprised as he looked around trying to recognize the landscape.

- There are so many things you don’t know Gibel... - I smiled -. Look! – I said pointing to the end of the street with a nod of my head. – There comes our date.

I hadn’t told my mother that a French photographer would be joining our celebration but I knew she wouldn’t mind. She lived daily, accepting things just as they came, without turbulence, without frights. My mother was always the pendulum that kept me in balance with my own life. The reason why I came back when my house was not yet my home. Never, with anyone, had I laughed so much... or cried. It didn’t matter how many years passed, how many numbers the candles on my birthday cake would add up to, my mother was my shelter, even when she was shorter and smaller than me, she was always the stronger one. The one who hugged me when I thought the world was falling to pieces over any stupid thing and the one who put me in my place when my perception of reality was selfish, shallow and exaggerated. She dragged me, like a hurricane, but she never let me fall. She was my guardian angel, if there is such a thing, the fortune of my life, with all certainty.

Helen submitted Gibel to constant questionnaire and almost endless, if it wasn’t because the waiters of the restaurant we were eating at lowered the shades at four in the afternoon inviting us to leave. My mother’s curiosity was infinite but I have to admit that because of her I discovered the missing data to fill out the puzzle of my unknown companion. I knew he was thirty-nine years old, that he was the oldest son of a paint teacher and a carpenter, that he was bilingual, because apart from French he also spoke Breton, and that although for professional reasons he had learned English and Spanish, which I attested he dominated in an enviable way, to him, his languages were the ones of his land. Curious how a person who has traveled the world and who openly refused to return to the place of his origins, felt such a special attachment to his people, who only visited on rare occasions.

- So what are you doing in Barcelona? – that was the question I still hadn’t asked in that whole day – apart from celebrating a complete stranger’s birthday with her mother – Helen joked.

Gibel told us that the reason of his staying in the city was professional. He had been hired as a photographer for a private event, of which he did not provide any more information than that – private – and he was recognizing the distinct sceneries before the start of the event. He would be leaving the next day and didn’t know when he was to return.

I was really enjoying his company, he seemed like an interesting, cult man, a person who transmitted passion and life. I was really liking sharing my birthday with him, mostly because I didn’t consider a second date, if that could be called a date. Gibel had been a birthday present that expires in twenty-four hours, counted from the moment I opened the package, in front of the wooden bench in Plaza de la Vila. I could have let him run and forgotten about him or enjoyed him until he self-destructed in the last minute and when the time had reach its caducity, everything around us turns out to be special.

- Well, Elena, and company – emphasized my mother – it’s time for me to leave. It’s been a pleasure to know you Gibel – she said while she kissed both of his cheeks – Happy birthday my daughter – she hugged me.

It was four past ten in the afternoon when Gibel, my mother and me, in front of the closed door of a restaurant in the neighborhood of El Raval, were seeing for the first time in many hours the city’s blue sky.

- By the way, what are your plans for the rest of the afternoon? – that was a good question.

Gibel had accepted to let himself guide by me and he looked at me hoping that I was the one who responded to the question my mother had just asked us. In the end, I was the birthday girl.

- I am in the mood of doing something I have never done – I answered while looking at Gibel with a gesture of complicity – and a French tourist is the perfect excuse.

Gibel, as an only answer, smiled, as he had been doing since Gracia neighborhood. With tenderness, with sincerity and with a strange complicity we had created in only six hours.

- Girls – he said while mother and daughter were hugging to say goodbye to each other – I have to make a diligence. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be back, ok?

We joked about the possibility that we would not return although we knew he would. During that time, my mother and me had time to schedule to meet on Tuesday, we wanted to go to the movies and talk about the latest news from Norfolk. News that always revolved around the weather, hunting some occasional death and a bit more. My mother and my grandmother called each other every Saturday at three thirty in the afternoon, but their conversation didn’t last longer than five minutes, in which Helen (daughter) had time to say hi to her father and listen to Bob the dog’s barking, (Dog for my grandfather) in the back of the garden. Their relationship between them, had nothing to do with the one we had worked on for so many years and I say worked on because relationships, pretty and special, must be tended to. The break up is so easy that the reconstruction after a deception or treason, turns out to be almost impossible. That’s why you have to avoid damages, even though silence sometimes is more complicated than a war.

Gibel reappeared from the same street in which minutes before he had disappeared without giving any more information and my mother this time, did say goodbye to us.

- Now I’m really leaving – she said repeating the ritual of kisses and hugs – enjoy the afternoon.

- Goodbye mom.

- Goodbye Helen.

Gibel looked at me waiting for directions. He trusted his day on me, without right of choice, but if he didn’t need to know how his next twelve hours would be like, he at least wanted to discover what was the next stop.

- Do you like heights? – I asked him while intertwining my arm with his and invited him to follow me.

- Yes – he replied with a mixture of doubt and intrigue.

- Then, let’s go.

A long walk awaited us, nobody said that dreams were around the corner, but we were not in a hurry, despite the fact that time was a relentless race against the clock waiting for us in each zebra crossing to remind us that that day was ending whether we wanted to or not. Barcelona, was as beautiful as always, it sounded of Spanish guitar, of thrumpet and bass jazz, to the harmonic of a barefooted homeless man resting against the side of painted broken wall. The city danced to its music, of light skirts, galloping high heels, tended laundry. The cruisers had docked at morning’s first hour and the travelers were rushing through their last purchases before returning to their floating rooms, waiting that their next destiny, maybe Niza, maybe Valencia, would be at least half as interesting.

We left behind the neighborhood of lust, where nights take on a more carnal meaning and tobacco sinks in strange bodies, between bills and lubricant. Barcelona, always beautiful, when the streets turn into wide avenues and the horizon is drawn in a parallel full of cars lost in opposite directions. The theatres, the concert rooms with the names of some Greek god, where the music of the homeless man playing the harmonica stays outside of the door, not being able to come inside. He’s not wearing any shoes and his music is not invited. Victoria, Molina, Condal theatre, a new boulevard without birds, flowers, or mimes to photograph. Walker there is no road and almost without wanting to we arrived at the Miramar station.

- I have seen millions of times the cable cars cross the sky of the city – I said – but I have never climbed on one of them.

Ever since I started cultivating my passion (and profession) for trips, I have always detested visiting the attractions, buildings or touristic places of a country or city. The objective of traveling, at least to me, is to know, learn and observe the novelty. The distance of my reality in a new space. The costumes, the schedules, even the fashion which as such has never fascinated me, were objects of desire in the discovery. Novelty, was the reason of my journeys (no professional) and touristic monuments represented that which I do not seek. The reunion of foreigners in a foreign place without more attraction than the beauty of its art, planted by chance or not, in a unique place, sold to the photographic spectacle and to the memory of a country from which nothing is remembered but the smile of the framed photograph over the lounge table.

I was interested in the opposite corners, there, were the tourist didn’t go even by mistake, where the drapes were dirtier and food was better. Where the waiters didn’t understand me but they earned the tip of a satisfied stomach. That’s why I had never been on the port’s cable cars, in the London Eye, or the Corcovado. The heights of my trips were others, there, where the ground didn’t have tourist indications.

- I on the other hand, love to visit the most touristic places of each city – Gibel said while we were waiting our turn to climb in the cable car that would take us to the port – they are a unique, sacred place. There is no other part in which people from different cultures, social conditions, economical and intellectual, come together to share space, time and moment. The bars, the restaurants, even schools and hospitals, are classist. Societies divide races and colors, religions fight for their cult, even God and His truth. The nations – he continued – dispute their beuty, city councils their parties, soccer teams the league... but here, in this line – he said looking backwards – and in the many other ones scattered all over Earth, people who would never share a table come united. Enjoying the same views, they pay the same price and wait, with more or less patience, in a line that will take them to the same place. They will all have the same photograph and no one will look, or judge the rest, because they only have eyes for what they are seeing. It’s magnificent – he concluded excited, with that way of speaking he had, weaving his hands to the wind and looking away towards the horizon.

That was another way of seeing the same place. His vision, so different from mine, made me change, perhaps, a little bit, my opinion. There are times when the simple contempt to be like others, blinds us. We try to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the people by believing that individualism gives us extraordinary value, not because of what we are, but because of that in which we do not belong. It’s okay to be different, trying to be it constantly is exhausting.

I had been traveling for years, discovering countries in my own way, moving away from the crowds, believing that I was taking the best part of the cities by pulling away from the masses and I had lost the value of the symbolic places, which a French photographer showed me while accompanying me through my first tourist experience, helping me discover, a little more, my city.

The sunset was perfect, it couldn’t have been better. A golden light, like a dying wide, long ray of sun, was bathing the roofs of Barcelona when the sky was getting darker and the street lights were beginning to turn on the way the keys of a grand piano with the lid open move. The port, as it is logical, smelled of the sea and the salt attached itself to the nude skin that breathed humidity. Gibel and I, walked between the white and yellow lights, reflected in the water and in the crystal of a modern Barcelona that was facing the years, the history and a new spring night. The same but different than the others.

The emotions and the conversation opened our appetite with the luck of being two good palates in the exact place. The Born.

- Italian, French, Mexican, Turkish, Basque, Chinese, Japanese, Mediterranean...? – I asked him naming the cosmopolitan offer of the low streets of the city. – Where do you want to dine?

- Over there! – he answered by pointing to the glass of a wooden bar, with sawdust under the bar.

- Are you sure? – I asked.

It was hard to pick a restaurant to the historic, architectonic charm The Born always had, a wide range of gastronomy and nightlife had been added to it in recent years. The restaurants and boutiques that decorated the labyrinth of cobbled streets, were like little museums. Art was breathed in each plate, in the shapes of the dresses that hung in the shop windows, the colors of the local handcrafts, the flavors of the overnighter cocktails on the bar of an old bar.

We were at one of the most modern and sophisticated neighborhoods of the city and Gibel had pointed to the door of an ancient tavern. The place, at least in looks, less appealing than The Born.

- At least this wish you can grant me – he replied. He had let himself be carried away by me since he made me the irreparable proposal to share the day of my thirty-first birthday with him and I couldn’t refuse at his sole express wish on that Sunday in the month of May.

We dinned more fat and fried stuff than our body could tolerate, but the Roman beans, the sausage with cider, the ham croquettes, the spicy potatoes, the prawns with garlic and peppers of the father – some are spicy others aren’t – they were such a classic delicacy that I barely got in and I didn’t hesitate to surrender to him and while the empty plates were piling up in the center of the table, Gibel and I crashed our beer mugs.

Cholesterol, alcohol and a night that was turning its music on. We couldn’t do more than to get lost, let us be carried away by the city lights, get drunk and kiss for the first time in an ambient bar, with tattooed walls and blurry images that I don’t remember if they were pictures, portraits or people. A Luz Casal song was playing.

It was such an expected kiss that by that time it was almost unexpected. We had spent more than fifteen hours together, without a caress, a gesture, an insinuation. I liked what I knew about Gibel, it stimulated me intellectually. He lived in a particular world, with every gray tonality, with his way of measuring and stopping time. He was an extraordinary person, as a virtue and as a definition.

I liked him for his words, for his particular vision of a landscape that we both shared and that each of us, saw a different way. His perspective of things, although it wasn’t always shared, enriched me. Gibel, was a birthday gift. An open book. He allowed me to sense the smell pages, to study the shape of his letters, to stop in every chapter, to enjoy his story. Kissing him was just another part, dispensable in its essence, although desired. We could have renounced the kisses, the sex, the caresses and not because of that, our casual date would stop being one of the best experiences I had lived until that moment. We had given into one another from the instant in which we decided to begin to know each other with a walk that took us from de Gracia neighborhood to The Raval, accepting the freedom of being that which we wanted to be and to do only what we really wanted to do.

The first kiss between Gibel and I was instinct.it came out of the deepest part of our desire, like the final piece on a day filled with emotions. It was a kiss as intense as each one of the words we gave ourselves and when we parted our lips, we laughed for no apparent reason and with every reason. That was the crazy night of an extraordinary thirty-first birthday. The beginning of an end that would arrive with the next dawn, without another excuse to celebrate.

At four in the morning when the local was closed and we were left under the protection of closed blinds, Gibel said to me:

- It appears to me that the city is closing its doors on us, it’s time to go to sleep. Do you want me to walk you home? – everything seemed to indicate that our date was coming to an end. There was no more music to dance to. The silence of the street cradled the dreams of the city and the streetlights accompanied the last passers-by on their way back home and Gibel and I stood in front of the mystery of our next stage. The one we had not planned but that it was about to happen.

- There’s no need, I’ll order a cab... - I answered while protecting myself from the cold with a scarf – anyway, I thought you would invite me to your hotel. The day is not over yet, at least for me.

- You would come? – he asked changing his farewell expression to a more sensual and attractive one.

- You would have to make the proposal if you want to know the answer – one thing was to be bold and another was to hand him the job done.

On his knees, with bottle of beer still in his hand, offering it to me as if it was an engagement ring, Gibel looked at me and said:

I have wondered many times how one person can have that much power in our lives, why do we let someone, known or not, exert an influence capable of changing our destiny. Like the way a drop of water can be the start of a devastator tsunami, one look can drag us throughout the years with just a memory, one stroke or a gesture of love.

People come and go, I know accepting that is a way of letting them go, of making them free in their destiny, to let loose, but I can’t help, once in a while, to look back and remember a friendship that was important, even when it didn’t last. I would like to know for one moment what has become of their lives, if they are happy, if they are satisfied, to even know if they are alive for my memory gives life but it’s not immortal.

I remember the past as their ghosts, sweetening memories, many times forgetting the names. I would like to have a coffee with all of those people I’ll never see again, but then my past would be my present and the things learned on the way will vanish as if by magic. The same magic that would seat them in front of me in a city cafeteria, with the childish image of my memory, the clock stopped in a calendar of the last century.

To live is to look ahead, not backwards. To walk being more and more free and wise, to appreciate the landscape from another place.

As I have grown in years, the number of people next to me has diminished, as if age was at odds with company or vice versa. It intrigues me to think about the memory other people will have of me, in that Elena that I don’t recognize and that instead lives in other people. I’d wish that the memories of others were generous to me, for my errors were unconsciously done, they were part of a learning experience I hope I learned from. How many Elenas are there in the world? Not women, mothers, grandmothers, lovers... but the Elena that is of others. How will Gibel remember me? What Elena was I to him?

To me, Gibel was the person who changed my life forever, although the morning we said our goodbyes, I lived it with the ignorance of not knowing the footprint that remained in me. His memory would not be punctual, but eternal and his image, the fine shape of his lips and his long-lashed eyes, would look at me in every awakening as he did after a light sleep, in a room that smell of sex, cheap wine and sweat.

- Bonjour mon petit inconnue – I said to him while dressing up in front of the bed. Him, my stranger, was looking at me with his eyes half closed, resisting to leave the sheets that covered his naked body. The one that didn’t have secrets for me anymore.

Our time was over and with its ending, came back the rushing of a Monday, the obligations of a normal day that wouldn’t be, because nothing would ever be as it was before.

We had breakfast together at the hotel cafeteria, with the pillow shape still plastered to the face, filling the coffee with sugar, not being able to distinguish sweet from salty. It wasn’t just the hangover weighting our bodies down, it was the memory of the experience, the footprint of millions and little moments recording themselves slowly in our conscience and in our memory. It was time for goodbyes and at seven thirty in the morning, in the exact moment a bell resonated in the city, I pushed my chair backwards, kissed Gibel and left without the drama of explanations, without interchanging our phone numbers, our house addresses or any other sign or indication that would ensure a future for us, which could be tomorrow or in a month. Maybe a year or ten.

We let time run its course accepting the race against the clock we started hours ago, when the only thing we knew was the end, the farewell.

For there to be a second chance, there must have been the first, which was not such, but an encounter that caught us by surprise at a time when the surprise was welcomed, well received and maybe even (well) expected. We had fulfilled the duty of our time and the goodbye that has just arrived was one more part of our encounter, not the best nor the worst, just one more. Essential as all, unforgettable, perhaps.

I was walking between the cobbled streets when I heard his voice. It was not the echo from my memory, but the repetitions of a first instant. I turned around and I saw him. He was smiling. With an envelope in his hand he was approaching me covering his body from the cold morning that awakened the city, protecting himself from the memory we were beginning to create.

Again in front of me, instants after leaving the hotel cafeteria thinking I would never see him again I asked:

- Yours – he said resting the envelope between my hands – I owe you a birthday gift – he kissed me.

- There is only one “but” – he said – open the envelope when you are at home.

I kept the promise only in part. I went through the city undoing the road, in the absurd attempt to retrace my steps to remember them again forget about them later. The morning was cold, at least for my bareback body and velvety feelings. I had to go to work but I didn’t feel the rush of the hours, I was still floating in the universe of a time without urgency. Barcelona was waking up between phone alarms and clock strings, into one calm, brilliant and of dubious sharpness dawn. I went up the Gracia walkway, between the lowered shades of the stores that were sleeping still and the bars serving the first coffees to the early risers or night owls like me who resisted reaching for their destination. Mine was the shower in my house and then the office.

With the envelope in hand and the bag hanging from my shoulder, I reviewed conversations, moments, kisses and smells, still not understanding how everything happened, thanking life for giving me so much, for filling my path with ephemeral and eternal gifts that filled my heart with loves in the shape of roses and thorns.

My neighborhood reminded me that I was home. Every dream has a beginning and an end and when everything is over, what really counts, is the road. Plaza de la Vila was deserted, the shades of its houses, lowered, and a man dressed in green, with a broomstick on his hand was sweeping the cigar tales from the night before. He greeted me even though he didn’t know me, making me a witness of a place occupied by both of us in its diverse cuadritures, partners of a silence and a moment. I extended my way back home by sitting on the wooden bench in which just a few hours before, Gibel, dressed in black, was holding his photo camera with a curious look. Nothing was like yesterday, not even the landscape, which hadn’t changed, was the same. Neither was I.

I opened the brown envelope and took out a white and black photograph. The image of the woman, mixing sugar in her coffee mug was not me. It was my body, even my name, but that Elena drawn between shadows of a thousand tonalities was not me, she was Gibel’s Elena. She had my hair, my skin, the messy moles of my back, my arms resting over the table. You couldn’t see my lost look, or the red of my lips, but you could notice the loneliness of a moment, thoughts reunited in silent groups that slowly passed before me, the music of birds waking up the city. In the picture you could see everything I didn’t see that morning and I understood why Gibel wanted to spend the Sunday of my birthday with me, because he didn’t see reality, he lived a dream he improvised in every image. In the world he captured with his magic, with the ability to stop time. The one I belonged to for twenty-four hours, taking its memory for ever and a birthday gift that it took me a while to discover but that it was eternal.

It had been exactly nine years since Gibel and I met at the Plaza de la Vila and it was precisely him, the last person I would have expected to run into that morning of my fortieth birthday. Or any other morning.

Gibel kept the secret of our unique encounter, the reason that changed my life forever, the greatest motive why I stopped being the Elena he met to be the Elena I am.

But he was there, the person I never thought I’d ever see again was looking into my eyes for my fortieth birthday and I could not escape from him, the way I could not escape my fears or my past.

- And what are you doing in Barcelona Gibel? - I asked him trying to demonstrate a serenity I didn’t have.

- I live here – horror, I thought – I never left – horror, horror, horror.

- What do you mean you never left? – I knew he had to go back to Paris, to his study, the place where he managed all his trips. How did he never leave?

- After we said our goodbyes at the hotel cafeteria, I called the marketing director of the advertising company with whom I had the event to tell him that I had the list of locations. I sent him an email with some pictures and... long story short – he interrupted himself. It wasn’t easy to resume nine years of a life, (tell me about it!) – he offered to stay in Barcelona as a fixed photographer and I’m still here.

- Nine years living in the same city and we never saw each other...

That morning, my past was playing me a bad hand. Some memories had lost the power of hurting, others were even better than their original version, but this one, Gibel was concrete, he was an open memory for a lifetime.

- I thought I saw you once, you know? – no, I don’t know, I thought. I was getting nervous by the second, I couldn’t believe Gibel was right in front of me. Precisely him – you were walking with a little girl holding your hand – he continued -, I took a picture of you from a distance but I didn’t resolve the doubt of whether it was you.

- Surely... - I answered. I wished for the conversation to end as soon as possible. That he would leave for the same place he had arrived and for him to disappear, for at least, another nine years.

- Was that you? – he insisted.

- Yes, it was me. And the little girl holding my hand was my daughter. Your daughter.

The last phrase I said only in my mind, not out loud. My daughter was only mine even if her father was named Gibel, was a photographer and French.

How beautiful to be thirty...

...how beautiful to be forty.