Things That Happen to You in Barcelona When You're Thirty

By Llucia Ramis

What happens when you turn thirty and still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? In this witty and sharply observed portrait of a generation, lost thirtysomethings grapple with, and avoid, the responsibilities of adulthood

On the morning after celebrating her thirtieth birthday in Barcelona, a journalist wakes up to a hangover—and a magician in her bed—and wonders if she’s too old to be living as though she was still twenty years old. Her artist friend, Blai, has already immortalized the rest of their group on canvas. There’s man-eater Cati, drama-queen lesbian Neus, and wild-haired, poet turned teacher Nil. But as she enters a new decade of her life, the narrator remains “an idea for a painting that is yet to be defined.” When she’s left looking after a stranger’s bag, she looks inside and finds a love letter that fires her imagination. The search for the truth behind the romantic clue leads her on a hunt through the bars of Barcelona. If she doesn’t believe in fate, why should she believe in the letter’s Prince Charming? And what should she do if she finds him? In a precarious era of flat-packed, ready-to-assemble lifestyles and disposable relationships, surprising stories are never too far away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barcelona eBooks
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453264058

Llucia Ramis

Llucia Ramis Laloux (b. 1977) was born in Majorca, and moved to Barcelona when she was eighteen to study journalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Since then she has worked in radio, as editor-in-chief of the literary magazineQuimera, and at the newspaper Diario de Mallorca. She also directed and presented Això no és Islàndia (This isn’t Iceland), a television program about books, She has shared an apartment with fourteen people—not all at once, but almost. Ramis is a columnist for El Mundo and El Periódico. Her second novel, Egosurfing, won the Josep Pla Award in 2010.  ?

Book preview

Collige, virgo, rosas

I feel like a muse on leave. Blai frowns, arches his right eyebrow, and nibbles the end of the paintbrush. He looks back at me again, makes a strange grunt, and tells me it isn’t going to happen; he can’t paint me. All around us, adorning the walls of his studio, are the portraits of our friends. Portraits that show what they will look like at the age of eighty. There’s Nil and Cati and also Blai’s cousin who has bags under his eyes, hair sprouting from his ears, and a mouth with no teeth. The thing is, Blai only knows how to draw faces that have aged. And he says that if he ages his models it’s only because he sees beyond the here and now. But now, as I sit naked in his studio, dirty newspaper pages scattered at my feet, unable to become another one of these paintings, I think to myself that Blai’s paintings look too much like Lucien Freud’s work and that someday the critics will tell him so, and it isn’t fair that he can’t see me in the way that he sees the others, and I’m tired of sitting still while my Sunday ebbs away.

The day he turned thirty, Blai painted a self-portrait in front of everyone in the patio of his father’s house in Vimbodí. Afterward, his cousin played a minimalist techno tune on a keyboard and drum machine and Nil recited some poems that spoke of hell and a Vespa, or of a journey to hell on a Vespa, or maybe it was a Vespa that had broken down and was hell to fix. We knocked back absinthe and pomada, a mix of lemonade and the Xoriguer gin that Cati had brought over from Menorca. There were forty of us and we all ended up sleeping in the same room together. Someday they will all be the subjects of an art exhibition. They will all be immortalized, their portraits hanging in the same room, part of a complete or retrospective work of art. They will represent a generation with no name. The only one missing will be me.

Blai insists that he can’t paint me. He grabs a cloth and scrubs my face out of the canvas, smearing my features.

Hey, what are you doing? I snap.

Relax, it isn’t you yet, he says, teasing me.

Then he tells me to put my clothes on and promises that he’ll give it a try another day.

I wanted this to be my birthday present, I protest as I pull my jeans on.

Don’t worry, I’ll paint you before your boobs drop and the cellulite sets in, he replies.

Yeah, but maybe your inability to paint me means I’ll never grow old. That’s why you can’t see me in your paintings; you can only see old people.

Well then, it looks like you’ve got one less thing to worry about. Your boobs will never drop and you’ll never have orange-peel thighs.

As I zip up my jacket I have the feeling that something ominous is going to happen before I turn thirty. I tell Blai that I’m meeting Andreu at Sol Soler in Plaça del Sol for a sandwich and some patatas bravas, and I ask him if he wants to join us.

Blai and Andreu don’t know each other but they have a lot in common—antidepressants for starters. The beers haven’t even arrived and the two of them are already comparing symptoms and trying to justify their use of diazepam. Blai had his first bout of serious depression a few years ago, shortly after turning thirty-one. He blames his nephews because they make him want to have children, but he can’t find a woman that he feels passionately enough about to want to start a family with, and without a family he says he wouldn’t feel fulfilled. I tell him that the real problem is that he’s bored and when you get bored you start thinking about silly things like falling in love, having babies, buying an apartment: things that’ll keep you entertained when you’re bored. Blai works hard for three months of the year so that he can spend the remaining nine months painting. During the summer months he picks almonds for his father’s company. He has an unsettled look, as if he was never fully there.

Andreu looks calm but under the surface he’s a bag of nerves. He’s a psychologist and lives with one foot in Barcelona and the other in Palma, Majorca. He has clients, or patients, or whatever you call them, in both cities. He doesn’t want to call them patients because he doesn’t consider them to be sick as such, but they’re not quite clients either. Andreu has never actually been depressed himself, strictly speaking. He’s had a couple of panic attacks, which start with his heart racing and continue with weeks of insomnia that make his heart race even faster and keep him awake even more. He says anxiety has become the greatest evil of our time. Almost all his patients, or clients, or whatever they are, go to see him because of anxiety. They’re afraid of dying, afraid of going crazy, afraid of their boss, afraid of their kids getting bullied at school, afraid of their wives leaving them, afraid that their husbands aren’t really in love with them, afraid of growing old but, most of all, they’re afraid of fear itself. I think about Cati, who’s frightened of pigeons, and Natàlia, who screams at the sight of spiders. Blai himself is terrified of going bald and I’m petrified of flying, which Andreu finds strange given that I never seem to have my feet on the ground.

How can I can I cure myself? I ask him.

Don’t become an air hostess, is the response.

Besides my case, Andreu is very happy because he thinks he’s found a new way to treat these phobias using an American system called Brief Strategic Therapy. I ask him, Do you think the term ‘brief’ has the makings of a good concept to define our generation? I mean, we try and resolve our issues quickly but actually we don’t end up resolving anything; all we do is brush it all under the carpet. The YouTube generation is hot on our heels, only five years behind us. And in those five years, we’ve already seen a generational change: We’re not the target of nostalgic ads like the generation right before ours is.

They both look at me as if they find the subject endlessly fascinating. And then Blai says, "Shall we order some more patatas bravas? I’m hungry."

Andreu says, I can’t spend too much.

But Blai continues regardless, Well, I left my psychiatrist because she just kept repeating that I had to see the positive side of life. Does she think I don’t know that myself? You end up feeling like they begrudge you any luck that comes your way. I can see the good things that surround me; I’m an artist for fuck’s sake. It’s just that sometimes I just don’t feel like seeing them. Happiness doesn’t inspire me.

I begin to wonder whether I’m too happy for Blai and whether that’s the reason why he can’t paint me.

The Coca-Cola philosophy has done us a lot of harm, Andreu sighs. ‘Enjoy,’ ‘Life tastes good,’ ‘Life begins here,’ …

Neither one of them can drink Coca-Cola because, aside from the insomnia, the panic attacks, and their respective diets of prescription pills, they also share a mutual affliction of heartburn, which in Andreu’s case was on the verge of turning into an ulcer. I don’t drink Coca-Cola because I don’t like it.

We order a second round of beers.

Then the girl sitting at the table next to ours turns to us and asks if we can watch her bag while she goes to the bathroom. It’s a green leather bag with an orange clasp. She thanks us quickly and runs to the restroom. Andreu makes a comment about her butt, which Blai seconds, and then I remember that Cati, Natàlia, and I celebrated my twentieth birthday in this very same square, at Cafè del Sol.

We were sitting at one of the tables upstairs. The pianist that used to play there hadn’t yet died, but he didn’t have much time left. That old pianist was a neighbor of ours but back then we didn’t know that he was a pianist, let alone the pianist at Cafè del Sol. We had never heard him practice. We would sometimes find him in the doorway at three in the morning fumbling to get his key into the lock. He used to say it was because the street was very dark. We used to help him. Then one day we stopped seeing him. Shortly afterward, I saw his picture on top of the piano at Cafè del Sol. Then I understood why he used to come home at three in the morning and struggle to get his key in the door. I also understood why his photo was on top of the piano and why we didn’t see him anymore.

In any case, the night we celebrated my twentieth birthday we were sitting upstairs in the café, next to the piano, and we had the place completely to ourselves. Marta had brought some dried magic mushrooms over from Amsterdam and they tasted a bit like truffles. But obviously, in those times of sharing apartments and struggling to make our pay packets stretch to the end of the month, we had never tasted truffles. Nor, in fact, had we ever tasted that kind of mushroom.

After eating them discreetly while the waiters weren’t looking, we headed to a party thrown by some medical students in Hospital Clínic. We had barely set foot on Avinguda Diagonal when Natàlia started dancing with the green man in the traffic lights as he flashed on and off, on and off. Cati hugged the trees as she told them how she sympathized with their predicament of having to live there, planted by the side of the road. Marta cried out, None of you get me. You’ll never be able to understand what I’m feeling. I sat in a doorway to communicate telepathically with a friend in Palma.

Suddenly, we bumped into a great block of ice. There were flowers set within the ice; red roses imprisoned. It’s not every day you find a block of ice bigger than you in the middle of the street, so our first thought was to touch it to see if it was real or not. Cati shoved her hands through the holes up to her elbows, and Natàlia used the holes as footholds to climb up and sit on top of it. Marta, with eyes like saucers, chattered to herself about The Mosquito Coast. I asked passersby if they could see what we were seeing. The result proved empirical.

But a lot has changed since then. Natàlia is married and runs a hotel in Valencia, and I don’t know what’s become of Marta. The only one I’ve seen recently, by chance, is Cati, who has just sent me a text saying, Wrinkles are beautiful.

I’ll be turning thirty soon and I know I should be feeling something. A third of my life has gone by since that birthday with the mushrooms from Amsterdam, and that was the equivalent of half of my life at that time. My dad is double my age, and my mum had already had two children by the time she was thirty. Both these things should have an impact on me. But the only thing on my mind right now is the need to think of a pithy response to that crazy bitch Cati’s text; and to order another beer.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, the girl who has left us her bag to look after still hasn’t come back from the bathroom. Blai has asked Andreu to be his psychologist, and Andreu has said he’d be happy to oblige. Meanwhile, the waiter still hasn’t taken away the plates from the sandwiches and patatas bravas, and the conversation turns to women. Blai tells us that every now and again he meets up with a preschool teacher who would be a possible contender if she was a little more creative. I take this to mean that the girl must be a total drag. I hope for Blai’s sake she doesn’t bring her work home with her and rehearse Itsy Bitsy Spider.

I’ve met Andreu’s girlfriend; she’s a design student who lives in a world of her own. She smokes one joint after another so as not to have to open her mouth. She thinks she’s more beautiful if she doesn’t speak but what she doesn’t realize is that she’d have to have a nose job and pluck her eyebrows first.

In the beginning, Andreu felt a bit guilty about going out with a girl who was ten years younger than him. Now he says that it reminds him of me and the three years that we spent sharing an apartment on Carrer Villaroel in the Eixample district. Back then, he used to make fun of the guys I was going out with because he couldn’t understand what I saw in men that were that much older than me or what they saw in me. He just thought that they were using me. His theory back then, as an undergrad psychologist, was that men who feel attracted to younger girls are idiots because what they’re really doing is shying away from the kind of intellectual conversation that befits their age, knowing that they wouldn’t live up to the mark. Judging by his current girlfriend’s silences, maybe the time has come to tell Andreu he was right after all.

She’s really nice, she makes me feel comfortable. What better proof of love. The problem, he continues, is that he knows that she looks up to him and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. I ask myself what a design student could admire in a junior psychologist who has just got his foot on the first rung of the professional ladder and I make a mental note: sensitivity, a reasonable salary, and the chance to go with him to Barcelona once a month. Andreu sublets the apartment we used to share on Carrer Villaroel and the new tenants let him have one of the rooms where he keeps a bed, a wardrobe, and a table with a laptop for when he comes over to see his clients, or patients, or whatever they are. I think his girlfriend, on the other hand, is a good excuse to establish himself in Majorca. I wouldn’t be surprised if they moved in together in a couple of months’ time.

I must have made a face because Blai asks me, What are you looking at?

The future, I tell him. And as if it had been a sign, the two of them check the time on their cell phones and shout happy birthday! It’s past midnight and I have now officially reached the age of adulteration. They ask how I feel. I tell them I feel the same.

That’s the definitive proof that you’ve turned thirty, says Andreu. You won’t feel any changes anymore until you realize that you are trying not to feel them.

I’d need to make a huge effort to understand what that means. And honestly, I’d rather get on with celebrating my birthday instead. But we can’t leave without giving the bag back to the girl who asked us to look after it, so I go to the bathroom to find her.

I knock on the door. Silence. I knock again. Nothing. Maybe I need to worry. I knock again. Another girl comes searching for the bathroom after me and snaps, Listen, if there’s no answer, it’s because there’s no one there. But I know that there’s someone there. I saw the girl who left us her bag go in and she hasn’t left. I tap at the door again. The other girl pushes me to one side and opens the door saying, I’m bursting, for fuck’s sake! As I peer into the cubicle, I have no idea what I might find: the girl with the bag passed out on the floor, OD’d with the needle sticking out of her arm; fucking one of the waiters or maybe taking a never-ending shit or even just chatting on the phone. I imagine seeing her with a gunshot wound to the head, like in the films, with blood spattered on the tiles. I see her jumping out of the window to escape, or raised above the toilet, hanging from the cistern. I see her rummaging around the toilet fixtures for a hidden package or changing her clothes like Superman.

What I didn’t expect to see is what I actually see. Or rather, what I don’t see. The girl isn’t there. The cubicle is empty. There isn’t even a miserable window to escape from. The other girl rushes into the cubicle and shuts the door in my face.

She was flushed down the toilet, I say to my friends.

Look, it’s fine. Just leave the bag at the bar, she’ll soon come back and get it, says Andreu. He wants to go to the club Luz de Gas because we can get in for free with my press card and it’s easy to pick up girls as long as you’re not too fussy. He quotes Groucho Marx: We could drink to make other people more interesting.

But the guy behind the bar doesn’t want to take responsibility for the bag. He says that if there’s a bomb inside, it’s bound to blow up in his face. He doesn’t want any problems. A thousand retorts to that stupid idea come to mind, but I don’t want to argue on my birthday. So I throw the bag-bomb over my shoulder, and we go out partying.

* * *

Turning thirty is waking up with a hangover on a Monday, on Sant Jordi’s day, next to a stranger and thinking that you’re too old for this kind of thing.

At least I’m at home, I tell myself. The room stinks of whiskey. I get up and get into the shower and hope that he wakes up in the meantime. When I walk back into the room it smells even worse than before, and the guy still hasn’t woken up. I open the two windows that overlook the balcony, and the noise of drills boring holes into the streets down below does the rest. The stranger opens his eyes with a dumb smile on his face. Good morning, he says softly, and I feel like punching him in the face.

But instead I chirp, I’ve got an idea, why don’t you go and pick up a couple of croissants while I make coffee?

The stranger gets up, not bothering to shower, and as he pulls up his jeans a playing card falls out of his pocket. It’s the three of spades.

What’s that? I ask him.

Didn’t you remember that I was a magician? he says.

Then an image comes back to me. It’s him at Luz de Gas; he makes a cigarette appear from behind my ear.

What do you mean? What kind of magician? I insist.

The kind that turns women into jelly with his magic wand, the son of a bitch replies.

When he comes back with the croissants, I won’t open the door to him.

* * *

Sant Jordi, collige, virgo, rosas. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. My head thumps. Like every April 23rd—the day that Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Josep Pla died—the streets of the center of Barcelona are filled with stalls selling books and roses. Everyone buys books and roses, everyone gives books and roses as gifts. I lose myself in amongst the stalls teeming with books, the thousands of people looking at books, hands picking up the books, and booksellers hoping to sell hundreds of copies of books. This year, I have decided that I’m going to write an article about the end of the festival. It will be an article about rose petals trampled into the ground and the number of literary supplements that the media has dedicated to the latest releases that also end up trampled under the feet of festival-goers. It will be an article on the metaphor of fleeting happiness, and all the money and effort that went into the literary festival and ended up in the garbage bins.

Welcome to your thirties! exclaims Elba when I tell her about it. Elba is a colleague from work who this year has liberated herself from the duty of having to write the perennial Sant Jordi article because I am the one who has to write it. And for this reason, she feels entitled to