In Europe

TWENTY-TWO
Amsterdam
Barcelona
    BARCELONA IS LIKE A SLOVENLY WOMAN WITH BEAUTIFUL EYES. AN unattractive city with lovely neighbourhoods and sometimes gorgeous buildings. A glorious city with terrible neighbourhoods. A city, too, that has trouble coming to terms with itself. When you walk through Barcelona's city centre, there are three things that strike you.
    First there is the stunning uniformity, even for a tourist haven. The shoemakers, barbers, greengrocers, news-stands, cafés and haberdasheries, the endlessly varied mercantilism that once dominated Las Ramblas, have been replaced almost entirely by boutiques and souvenir shops. The news-stands all have the same assortment of papers, magazines and other printed matter, almost all the bistros serve the same brand of instant paella, the souvenir shops all offer an almost identical collection of bric-a-brac.
    Secondly, there is the absence of Spain. Barcelona is French, Italian, Mediterranean, and above all itself. Graffiti, manuals, children's books, newspapers, all of them are in Catalan, even the instructions on the ticket machines. The Spanish nation? There will be none of that here, thank you.
    The third, striking phenomenon is the absence of historical markers. Like the Spanish nation, the twentieth century here has simply been glossed over. During the last century a great deal of fighting has gone on in a great many European cities, and all of them deal differently with their bullet holes. In what was once East Berlin they are still to be found, especially on street corners and in doorways, though their number is dwindling fast. Ah, one realises then, back in 1945 there must have been a troublesome sniper over there. In Barcelona you must look very closelyto uncover any of that. On Las Ramblas, for example, in the doorway of a clothing shop on the corner of the Carrer Deca Canula, the faint signs of a gun battle are visible behind layers of plaster. Or at the Telephone Building on the Plaça de Catalunya: today an office building with a cafeteria and a shop selling mobile phones, but back then the centre of all communication and the site of a historic battle. But only if you examine the outside of the building will you see the shadows of a few direct hits. Not a hole in sight, not a plaque to be seen. Nowhere is so much war so carefully dusted away.
    In late December 1936, the English writer and adventurer Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, had the feeling of having entered a city where the working class was truly in control for the first time. He had come to Barcelona to volunteer for militia service. By that time the city had been in the hands of the revolutionaries for five months, and under the anarchists a thousand collectives had blossomed forth. All the walls were covered with revolutionary posters. Almost every building of any size had been occupied by workers and festooned with red or black flags. Every café and every shop had been collectivised. No one said ‘señor’ or ‘don’, everyone addressed the other as ‘comrade’ or ‘you’. Tipping was forbidden. ‘Well dressed’ ladies and gentlemen were no longer seen, everyone wore work clothes, blue overalls, a militia uniform. There were almost no bullfights in the city any more. ‘For some reason all the best matadors were fascist.’
    ‘All this was queer and moving,’ Orwell wrote. ‘There was much in it I did not understand, in some way I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ He signed up with one of the militias of the radical leftist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the POUM, a choice he barely thought about at the time but which was to have far-reaching consequences. In the POUM militia, all orders were up for discussion. The training most badly needed – how to take cover, how to handle weapons – was never provided. The youthful recruits were taught only to march. ‘This mob of eager children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb.’ Later he would discover why: there was not a single rifle to be found in the whole training camp. Only with great difficulty was Orwellfinally able to arrange a weapon for himself: a rusty German Mauser dating from 1896. But, as he wrote matter-of-factly, a modern mechanised army was not something one could organise from one day to the next, and had the