10 Barcelona: Underwear on Fire and Semen-smelling trees

THE STRIKING EROTICA OF THE CATALONIA REFERENDUM

It’s 3 October 2017, general strike day in Catalonia. ‘This building will be a library!’, civilians chant in front of the Spanish police headquarters, in Via Laietana. Two days ago we voted in a referendum for Catalonia’s independence from Spain. We managed to do so under heavy rain and a heavier Spanish police presence, because the Spanish government did not approve the referendum. Injured voters numbered in the thousands, and forty-eight hours later we threatened those who had beaten us up by creating a library in their Barcelona headquarters: eventually, in an independent Catalonia, we may not need their services any longer. A police station turned into a library. Goosebumps again, a shiver down my spine. I don’t know who came up with the idea but I instantly had a crush on every single one of the people who were chanting.

ART WILL SET US FREE

Because of Joan Brossa’s ‘Llibres/Lliures’ (1994), a visual poem that plays on the words ‘books’ and ‘freedom’, I would love for that hypothetical library to be named after him. He was also a source of knowledge, and even more, of creativity, art, provocation, performance, and call to action. Brossa started creating in the forties, always pushing the boundaries of the arts to blur them, to break standards. He was the forward-thinking one when thinking was forbidden, so he couldn’t escape censorship during Franco’s dictatorship. Still, Brossa was too much of Brossa for a dictatorial regime to stop him. He was highly prolific until the day he fell down the stairs of his studio. He passed away the next day, 30 December 1998. He was about to turn eighty.
To honour Brossa, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (Macba) organized a cabaret this autumn, for three Fridays in a row. The creations in motion he came up with had a bit of magic, a pinch of striptease, some music, a hint of paratheatrical works and lots of art, art, art! Would Macba be able to gather artists at a level high enough to really honour Brossa? I was about to find out. If you’ve ever been to Barcelona – and I bet you’ve been, everybody has been by now, which is a bit of a problem for us, locals, in terms of how the real city is shifting towards an amusement park, city style,… but this would be another topic of discussion – you may have visited Plaça dels Àngels, aka the skater square. This broad, concrete area is polished non-stop by rolling wheels. Hold your breath and cross it, I always say to myself. It’s worth it: Macba museum is at both sides, in two different buildings; there’s something good awaiting you, no matter which way you’re going.

DISAPPEARING UNDERWEAR

That second Friday,¹ I hesitantly went to the cabaret, and it was worth it. I entered a dream-like atmosphere, dark but colourful, openly fun and erotic. Free beer helped to erase the tension of the past days and soon I was in a better place, where art reigned and sexiness was the only state of mind. Why does time go by so fast when you’re enjoying it and slow like molasses when you’re bored to death? Four hours in the blink of an eye with amazing performers from the likes of Rodrigo Cuevas, a young artist who mixes Asturian folklore, trap music, sexy and witty lyrics and a powerful voice. His under-glam look takes a lot from the traditional female Asturian attire but leaning towards the homoerotic side. Rodrigo takes off a piece of clothing during each song, adducing that it’s hot – but he’s the hot one, you bet he is – to end up in his garters and underpants. Just note that his website is rodrigocuevas.sexy (give me a break here…). It’s a true gift to see this person on stage.

FLAMING TASSELS

My big discovery, though, was the subversive Úrsula Martínez. The pinnacle of her show was a striptease that started with her in white underwear looking for a cigarette in the crowd, smoking it at a speed only a former smoker dropping treatment could smoke it to the end ² – and there you go with the big effect – by putting it out on her right nipple tassel, which sets itself on fire and disappears, and the same goes for the left one – and thong. I didn’t know you could buy pyrotechnic underwear; that’s interesting, no more washing. Naked, sweaty and dancing like crazy, she finishes her cigarette. People cheer her from the first moment on. Next Friday, same place, same time.

THE SUN BURNED ITSELF

Martínez’s gig makes me think of Terenci Moix and José Pérez Ocaña. The cigarette and the fire remind me of them because of the way they died. The writer, Moix, died of tobacco use; the performer, Ocaña, died from burns. It’s been seventy years since Ocaña was born and it will be thirty-five years since he died. The sun burned itself to ashes, literally. He died in costume, dressed like the sun. He lit a flare, a spark caught the synthetic jumpsuit he was wearing, and the fire couldn’t be put out. The accident happened in his small home town of Cantillana, near Seville. His comrades took him to hospital but he didn’t make it. The hepatitis he was suffering from didn’t help.

In a set moment and time in Barcelona, Ocaña was everything. He was a painter, an anarchist, an artist, a transvestite and an LGTBI activist. A very much loved character, the soul of post-Franco’s Barcelona, he was free and people saw a new era in him, full of freedom and happiness. When he moved to Barcelona from his home town, in 1971, he made a living painting walls. But what he really loved to do was taking performative walks in Las Ramblas or La Rambla³ to amuse and scandalize people. Dressed like Madame Bovary, plus shades, he would move his fan in a pretty, elegant way. The heat, this sticky warm weather… enough. And there he would go, up with the big skirt, up to his belly, no underwear.
The apartment in No. 10 Plaça Reial, where Ocaña lived, is now an art foundation, Fundació Setba. The burned sun disguise is being restored thanks to Verkami crowdfunding. Paper smiling sun that took Ocaña’s life away … smile again because that’s what he would like. And party, and sensuality, and freedom, and Las Ramblas and Plaça Reial.

TRIO OF ARTISTS

Ocaña had aspects in common with Terenci Moix. Both were genuinely subversive just in the fact of being gay and talking openly about it. In the seventies in Spain, imagine… it’s mental, it blows your mind if you can picture it. Moix, though, was more refined than Ocaña, and much more of an intellectual. ‘Pornography is the eroticism without intelligence,’ Moix said. Maybe that’s why he used many types of eroticism in his novels, all celebrated although not by everyone, definitely not by the objects of his satires: Catalan bourgeoisie and Spanish rich and shallow women. Brossa, Ocaña, Moix. All exceptional, all misfits. Why aren’t there any public places named after them in Barcelona? Streets, libraries, theatres… They were very attached to this city; their works show a bond with the Catalan capital and, that being said, there’s nothing in return from this ungrateful city.

Ocaña does have a bar named after him, metres away from the apartment he lived at in Plaça Reial. Brossa, well, he has no library or cabaret named after him in Barcelona, but rather a small square. It’s so small it’s called Placeta de Joan Brossa, in diminutive. Since I live nearby, I take my dog there every now and then. It’s forbidden to take animals but before 5pm there’s pretty much no one there, except for a handful of teenagers skipping class who couldn’t care less about me playing with my Jack Russell. If I have the day off I take her up the Magic Mountain, the nickname for Montjuic. It’s good fun for her because she has a number of paths that run from the bottom to the top of the mountain, most of them wild and winding. It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book in real life.

ENOUGH TESTOSTERONE

This mountain, crowned with a castle that was built to watch ships approaching, is full of unseen activities, sexual among them. It has a reputation for being a classic place in the city for casual encounters, mostly between gay men; the place is well known for cruising. ‘No cruising for a bruising,’ I tell my dog when I unleash her. She likes to sniff around and look for bugs, pigeons, mice and whatever moves, so I’m scared that she might go into the bushes and stumble upon unknown men, pants around their ankles, making their acquaintance. I think of Món Mascle (Male World), the savage novel by Terenci Moix that goes like this: ‘Would they believe me if I predicted that this very same night they could disappear forever, swallowed by the mountains that mark the boundary between the desert of the heretics and the jungles of Male World? Wouldn’t they make fun of me if I were to cry that they are in jeopardy of being dragged to the limits of the Empire, where no one could ever find them? No doubt I would expose myself to mockery, and these eyes that now just look at me with mischievousness and maybe that think my interest is that of a buyer of bodies, would call me crazy.’ I wonder if testosterone has something to do with the fact that cruisers are mostly masculine. Or if it has nothing to do with hormones and sex drive and it’s just us, female, being less adventurous because we have been taught for centuries that danger awaits us. ‘Prou testosterona’ (enough testosterone) claimed the sign that two girls were carrying at the demonstration on 3 October, condemning the violence that the Spanish government used against voters.

TRAPHERO, THE HERO IN UNIFORM

The recent conflict between Spain and Catalonia has brought up some sexiness and some sexism. Sexiness because of Josep Lluís Trapero, former chief of the Catalan police force – called Mossos d’Esquadra. He’s the vivid image of the hero in uniform; he led the quick response to the terrorist attack in La Rambla on 17 August 2017 and stood by the Catalan government until the Spanish government took over, and he was set aside. He is now performing administrative tasks in a random police office, but this humiliation makes him even more adorable to the public eye. An ice-cold look in his eyes, warm heart and hands: civilians altered his family name to call him TrapHero and asked the government to name him Catalan of the Year, an award which recognizes the Catalan person that was the most prominent in the development of his or her social or professional activity during the previous year. Sexism was brought up in several forms, for instance that Twitter poll asking: ‘And you, what country do you want?’, by the picture of Inés Arrimadas (C’s) in a sexy bodycon and Anna Gabriel (CUP) in casual wear.⁴ Both are Catalan parliamentarians playfully negotiating their identity as a result of being stigmatized as women. Also, #purplewashing was a hashtag used because political presenters started to compare Catalonia with a beaten woman and Spain with her violent husband, an image that feminists of all kinds have widely criticized, because those people using this image would otherwise never care about gender violence. Those people are mostly men, in suits, grey hair… the standard for a politician.

X-CONFESSIONS

What does Erika Lust think about all this mess? She, whose office is right in front of Ciutadella, the park where the Catalan Parliament is. She, who works towards writing ‘Herstory’ by making erotic films where diverse points of view are taken into account. And also very democratic, because the compilations X-Confessions are made from anonymous fantasies confessed by her audience. Democracy, this is what we lack the most now in this country. We think beyond bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism (BDSM): it’s time for coming together.

SEMEN AND FUET

A breeze wafts the smell of a tree and brings me back to where I am, Montjuic, the Magic Mountain, the place where invisible things happen. I don’t see it but I know what kind of tree it is and what it looks like in spite of not finding it in that big groove. I know exactly what it looks like because there are some like this in Plaça Universitat – to be exact, in the garden surrounding the main building of the University of Barcelona. At dusk, that tree smells like semen and fuet, a Catalan dried sausage. No joke, next time you pass by the crossing of Aribau and Gran Via, pay attention and you’ll notice. Semen and fuet, I’m telling you. Although I’m positive the smell has a vegetal origin, not human or animal, I hurry the dog to walk away, to the Poble Sec Viewpoint. Open air, fresh marine breeze. We are facing the Mediterranean, the sea of hope and death. From there we see the harbour, packed with foreign families cruising. These cruisers, you can find them wherever and whenever, snapping pictures of the main attractions against the clock, smiling here, posing there, just to prove they were there. What an insufferable activity. I really prefer the other cruisers: they know how to enjoy themselves better.

A RANGE OF FANS

From this viewpoint to El Molino it’s a five-minute walk. Founded in the nineteenth century, this is the place in Barcelona for old-school cabaret. In fact, one of the main stars from El Molino, Merche Mar, performed at the pop-up cabaret at Macba. Unlike the not-so-far Bagdad, at El Molino you can’t touch the dancers. It’s very vanilla but there’s nothing wrong with it; no one is harmed by a show based on classic striptease and double-entendre humour. Bagdad is a more hardcore venue; it’s basically porn on stage that can count on the public for help. A ticket for the Bagdad venue is 90 euros for an hour; of course very pricy for the average Barcelona citizen. That said, most people pay it expecting to have a role, not just to be a spectator. And halfway between Bagdad and El Molino is Apolo, the venue where I’ve seen two bands led by non-binary people: Hercules and The Love Affair and Liniker e os caramelows. To me, this is the new erotica, throwing some public light on how broad the range of people can be, not just men or women, cisgender or transgender. Ocaña would be so proud.

EVERYBODY USE IT

‘Range’ in Catalan is ventall, homonymous for ‘fan’. Same in Spanish: abanico. It’s a very graphic image, something that has the capacity to cover 180 degrees. It’s an object omnipresent in this society. Your grandmother uses it like a laser, to point something out, and like an extension of her fingers, to tap her listener’s arm when they’re not listening or as a cliffhanger, to emphasize that what she’s about to say is of the highest interest. The perfect and most common storage place for a grandmother’s fan is in her cleavage, where it’s impossible to lose it. Among young people, losing fans is very common, since we mostly use them at music festivals or parades. Actually I haven’t paid for any of the fans I currently have, and I don’t feel attached to them because I know sooner or later they’ll change hands. Mine are cheap, made of plastic, cotton and wood, without any prints. The ones resting between boobs can be very expensive, hand painted on silk, or have an added sentimental value, for instance, as a present from a loved one who went on holiday to, say, Benidorm or Rome. El Molino dancers use fans to hide their bodies; Ocaña used one to refresh himself down La Rambla; poets at Prostíbulo Poético use them to create some intimacy with the listener; people parading use one to hide from the sun; Brossa has an anthology called Ventall de poemes urbans (Range of Urban Poems) and Terenci Moix published the novel Mujercísimas (Women in a Superlative Way) with two ladies on the cover posing with fans.

THE LINGUISTICS OF THE FAN

A person holding a fan is an eye-catching image, full of meaning if you can read between the lines. Fans have a language; they were invented by the young ladies who in the late nineteenth century had to communicate with candidates at balls without their mothers or ladies-in-waiting noticing. Going alone to the ball was out of the question for the young ladies; they had to be escorted and men couldn’t go close to them. The fan did what the voice couldn’t. Posing it on the right cheek was a yes while on the left meant no. Tapping it on the left palm was a call for him to write her. Holding it near the left ear was the end of it: she wanted him to leave her alone. Incidentally, ‘I hate you’ was easy to say: she just needed to throw the fan to the floor. And so on and so on. Nowadays, in most regions of this country, people still use fans on a daily basis, for erotic or refreshing purposes. Not so in the northern regions (Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, País Vasco and Navarra), where the weather is rainy and chilly; here the fan is exchanged for a nice, wide umbrella. But we are a passionate and flirtatious society, and in the rest of the regions the weather is warm or hot nearly year-round, so fans are very useful. Although, admittedly, people don’t use them any more for communicative purposes; there are so many other ways to do so, perhaps less romantic, yes – but welcome to the new era of technology.

RANDOMNESS OF LUCK

Way before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket, fans had already become outdated as a way for lovers to communicate. Surprisingly enough, cruising is still in its heyday in Barcelona in spite of all the apps, Grindr above all, that allow people looking for sex to have it right on their doorstep, any time and for free. It is very convenient – but not as exciting as entering the unknown labyrinth of sex and fun that Montjuic offers cruisers. I guess that no matter how much technology might improve in the future, there will always be lovers who prefer the randomness of luck.