XIV. Biking Barcelona
I borrow a bicycle from my landlord who lives
in the apartment above mine, a single mother
with a little girl who feels sorry for me in one breath
and envious in the other. She says I should bike
up to Mont Juic, see the stadium, she says, maybe Miro,
but instead I decide to bike further into the city,
planning a route up to Gracia to see a Chillida sculpture
in Creueta del Coll , an abandoned quarry turned park,
because today I feel like moving in, towards something,
and I am tired of swimming in my own black pools
of rock. At first I am clumsy on the bike, which is large
and orange, a beach cruiser you might see older couples
use, biking side by side to town from their summer
rentals on the coast of South Carolina, but the sidewalks
of Barcelona are not the wide effortless walks
of Sullivan’s Island or Folly Beach. They are thin,
packed with people walking briskly to work, to lunch,
to H&M to shop, infinite black and white bodies,
women in suits, students grungy and unbathed flying
down the uneven pavers on skateboards, and there is me,
an American woman feeling large and out of place,
weaving the deep streets, black creeks ruled with buildings
rising up like cypress trunks, on an orange bike like a horse
I cannot tame. What a long road this is. The wheels clop
against deep ruts in the blacktop, and I hold my breath
clenched in my jaw as I weave through people in my way.
The smell of urine passes up from the stone gutters,
and dark stains seep down the sides of buildings
like the roots of a tree spreading across the ground.
There is a break in the thick wall, a garden caged
in the alley, and when I look in, it is black and loud
with the chattering of cats, lapping up stale meat
on broken chairs and abandoned couches.
They are thin-bodied beasts, multiplying like the hidden
faces of children peeking around a corner, prisoners
stalking each other in the dark. I smell dead fruit and blocks
of lamb rotting in a trash pile outside of the market,
my neck is burning, wet, and I am sweating through
my thin button-up blouse as I pass the MACBA, white
against a black ground, a blue sky, whose front square
has become a haven for skaters, the homeless young,
and students sketching furiously, or studying on flat,
minimalist benches under the hot Mediterranean sun.
A young homeless man approaches me from behind
and taps me on the shoulder. I loose my balance,
the bike sways, my basket rattles, and the weight
of my bag falls to one side. I am gasping for air,
and he is laughing hysterically, the sound of a crying
bird, his dirty face distorted, wormy in the sun.
He is wearing a dark winter coat inside out
although it is summer, and this makes him look
like a large bull hovering in the square, blocking
my path. He is yelling something I can’t understand,
a loud caw, to his audience of half sleeping homeless
men and women, piled against the white tile finding
shade from its protruding end, and two of them
are making out, their thick hands around each other,
tongues moving in and out of mouths crusted over
from heat and drool. I am a bloated body on display
choking on my own fear like a toy knife, tears
in my throat, I pedal faster, hearing voices,
a bit of wind, and the echo of his laugh
behind me, rising up into the cloudless sky.
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