We'll Always Have Paris (25 page)

Part of the ceiling looked like taffy being pulled from the center. The stained glass windows were like Jolly Rancher candy. Even the crucifix at Sagrada Familia had a playful vibe. Instead of looking as though he were suffering on the cross, Jesus looked like he was parachuting in from heaven. The cross was unusually high and suspended in midair with a canopy that looked like the top of a carousel.

It was the first time I’d ever thought of Catholicism as whimsical.

Katie shrieked with delight as she recognized grids with Fibonacci numbers repeated in the church basement. She explained the math concept she had learned that year in school as I looked at her blankly. “Zero plus one is one, one plus one is two, two plus one is three, three plus two is five, five plus three is eight, and so on,” she said, pointing to the numbers.

“Um, so what?”

“Now look at how the line is encircling the numbers and forming a snail shape,” Katie continued. “The Fibonacci sequence is found in nature a lot, like sunflowers, pinecones.” A boy about her age overheard her and the two gleefully chatted about math for a few minutes as I exchanged confused looks with his parents.

At our appointed time, Katie and I climbed to the top of the thirty-story tower. Sagrada Familia offered panoramic views of Barcelona from the modest apartment buildings just below us to the cruise ships pulling into the sparkling blue port. The view was mostly whitewash and clay tile rooftops, with a sprinkling of modern and historic buildings. Piercing the skyline was Agbar Tower, a mirrored skyscraper that is usually mentioned as one of the world’s most phallic buildings. Washington Irving would have loved it.

As we explored every thrilling nook of the church, Katie and I agreed that Gaudí was our new favorite artist. The following day, we planned to visit his house in Park Güell. But first there was an evening of dinner, waffles for dessert, and musical entertainment in Cathedral Plaza.

Before Katie and I left for Spain, my friend Kersten had given me a list of her favorite places in Barcelona, where she had spent a year during college. We finally found one of her dinner spots where the waitress told us “Bugs Bunny” was the daily special.

“
Quiero
Bugs
Bunny, por favor
,” Katie said.

“Really, you want to eat Bugs Bunny?” I asked.

Katie winked at me and whispered, “It’s not
really
Bugs Bunny, Mommy.”

“Very funny, but still, it’s a rabbit.”

“You just ordered chicken,” she said.

The following day, we took the subway to Park Güell, stopping along the way at a bakery that mercilessly tempted passersby by displaying giant meringue puffs in the window.

The entrance to Park Güell was marked by two of Gaudí’s designs, small homes that looked like iced gingerbread houses. Two long white staircases led to an enormous gazebo-like structure. But before visitors made the climb, a mosaic tile lizard at the base of the steps greeted them. On one side of the stairs was a dirt lot where vendors sold necklaces, fans, and souvenirs. On the other was a multi-level park with flowery gardens and cavernous, open pathways. At every turn was colorful tile mosaic work either inlaid into supporting walls or freestanding as sculptures.

The elevation offered a spectacular view of Barcelona. As we stepped into the seashell-pink Gaudí house, I immediately wanted to return with my mother. I would love watching her head snap from one direction to the next as she took in the artist’s funky furniture design. I could easily see Gaudí’s olive-and-purple velvet love seat in my mother’s apartment. The wooden chairs were rustic and slightly misshapen, yet polished until they shone like glass. The pieces that would make her gasp aloud were Gaudí’s light fixtures. I could not stop snapping photos of the elongated emerald-colored and bejeweled chandelier. Some lamps were stark and modern; others looked like a glass bouquet of flowers hanging from the ceiling. A few looked like lava lamps without the glass encasing, amorphous colorful blobs floating freely. The home was like a Victorian acid trip.

I saw a photo of Antoni Gaudí and smiled at the thought of him and my mother walking through Greenwich Village with their arms linked. They could have been best friends, stopping at every moving sale, playfully fighting each other for the artful castoffs of gay guys redecorating.

***

Days before Katie and I left for Spain, we met a couple who told us we should hop on a train and take a day trip to Montserrat, about an hour from Barcelona. They said we would see the most gorgeous views from the mountaintop and be able to visit a monastery that housed one of the famous Black Madonna sculptures.

With less than a minute to spare, we jumped on a train from Barcelona to Montserrat. Katie whipped out her Kindle and began reading as I eavesdropped on a dozen English-speaking young travelers. None was older than twenty.

There were four punk rock Australians, a mix of clean-cut Europeans, a young man from India, and one from the United States. They had connected at a youth hostel in Barcelona and decided to spend the day together. Four were seated on the floor. They tried to engage two young girls from Florida, who were polite but clearly not interested in tagging along with the group once the train stopped in Montserrat.

“What hostel are you staying at?” the Indian boy asked.

With a southern twang, the brunette Floridian said she once accidentally spent a night at a hostel thinking it was a regular hotel, but soon realized she would have to share a bathroom with other residents, and there was not enough room for her hot rollers. The blond sweetly added, “I need a place that has enough space for all of my shoes.” Two European girls exchanged amused looks. If anything, they felt sorry for their American counterparts for missing out on the fun of hostel life. “You meet a lot of people our age,” a girl with a German accent said. My heart sank.
Their
age. I would never again be their age.
I didn’t particularly want to stay in a youth hostel, but the reality that I was disqualified was jarring.

I gave Katie a gentle nudge and whispered, “This will be you in a few years.”

She looked up. “Huh?”

“These kids,” I said, gesturing discreetly. “One day, you’ll be able to travel with friends and stay in youth hostels and meet people from around the world. People your age.”

“Right,” she said, completely disinterested.

A hard-edged Aussie girl tried to shock the southern belles with a story about how she left for her trip, simply telling her family, “Fuck all of you, ay.” The Floridian with pageant-ready hair looked down at her perfectly manicured hands. Sunlight glistened from the gold cross around her neck.

Soon the group was earnestly debating the ethics of vegetarianism. They were passionate in their views, completely convinced that anyone who held a different opinion was a fascist.

Katie kept her nose buried in her book. It was impossible for her to feel reminiscent about a life that was still ahead of her, but I was amazed that these older, independent kids didn’t intrigue her in the least.

“Katie,” I whispered discreetly. “You should listen to this. This is your future.”

She looked up. “This book is really good,” Katie said. “Plus I don’t care about a bunch of grown-ups talking about meat.”

***

We arrived at Montserrat and took a tram up mountains that resembled jagged saws. As far as the eye could see were sweeping views of mountaintops and trees beneath us, all veiled by a thin sheet of atmosphere.

At the site of the monastery was a stone structure that looked like nature’s surrealist take on Mount Rushmore. Inside was a statue of Black Madonna sitting on a golden throne holding Baby Jesus, who gave viewers a peace sign. “Don’t you think it’s kind of stupid that they call her
Black
Madonna, assuming she must’ve been white?” Katie pondered.

Outside there was little to do other than hike and take in the scenery. William is an avid hiker and would have loved spending the day in Montserrat. I like walking on paved ground; I need the security of knowing that when I step down, everything is where it’s supposed to be. The only one who seemed less excited about the terrain was the Asian woman sporting kitten heels with striped knee socks.

As Katie and I hiked the trail, we came to an area that was so completely devoid of sound, I worried for a moment I might have lost my hearing. Then I heard the delicate trickle of a waterfall, so small it would fit in a therapist’s office or a backyard Zen garden. We sat on a boulder that looked like an oversized bread roll and watched the water flowing.

***

“I want to show you a little pocket of sanity in New York,” my father told me when I was six years old and we were driving to the Cloisters. “Whenever life gets to be too much, I come to the woods up here, have a smoke, and everything is cool again.”

The Cloisters is the home of the lesser-known Metropolitan Museum of Art in Washington Heights. The site is surrounded by gardens, walking paths, and a few wooded areas. My father liked to call our adventures mountain climbing, though looking back, the drops were fairly shallow. Back then, it was serious business. Once, my father pretended he was falling off the side of our mountain. “Help me, JJ!” he cried. “You need to save me.”

I remember looking down at my red Keds sneakers, terrified that I was going to lose my father. I leapt to the edge of the ravine and reached down to grab a thick chunk of roots to secure myself. Then I leaned over the side and extended my free hand toward him. He was on his stomach looking like my neighbor’s G. I. Joe doll, crawling through a warzone.

“Grab my hand, Daddy,” I called.

He reached for my hand and missed by inches. “I’m not going to make it,” he said with great dramatic flair.

My heart pounded with the thought that my father was going to die falling off the side of a mountain because I wasn’t able to help him. I couldn’t save him. “Stay there, I’ll get help,” I said.

“No, you can do it,” he said, suddenly inching his way up until our fingertips touched. Moments later, our hands were intertwined and my suddenly supernatural strength pulled him back to me.

“You did it, JJ. You saved my life,” he said, hugging me tight.

It never occurred to me that this was a game because nothing about it was fun. Even after I was dubbed a hero, I was horrified at how close I had come to losing him. “You rescued me.” He kissed my head. “It’s a lucky man who has a daughter strong enough to save his life.”

Located a few hours outside of Barcelona, the Salvador Dalí Triangle is formed by three cities, all with Dalí museums. A massive collection of his art is housed in a traditional museum in Figueres; his summer home in the seaside village of Port Lligat is a testament to his architectural genius; and his wife Gala’s castle in Púbol reveals that of all of Dalí’s surreal creations, his marriage was the most bizarre.

We first heard about the Dalí Triangle three years earlier when William, Katie, and I were visiting Aunt Bernice in Florida, the summer before Katie began sixth grade.

The centerpiece of Aunt Bernice’s living room is an original Dalí sculpture with three golden prongs that look like tree branches reaching five feet from the floor. In its center rests a clear stone.

As a child, I always thought the piece looked like an engagement ring the ogre from “Jack and the Beanstalk” might present to his beloved. Bernice got the sculpture for a song when she was a young woman because of a misunderstanding with the gallery owner in Manhattan. He had originally quoted her for the piece sitting next to the Dalí, then two weeks later told her of his blunder when she came to pick up her new sculpture. Bernice told the man that she had already rented a moving truck and made several costly changes to her living room in preparation for the new sculpture. She told him it would be most ungentlemanly of him to renege on their agreement. “I’ve scheduled a party for its homecoming,” Bernice explained. A half hour later, the man was packaging the piece for her.

Recalling the story from an era of pin curls and soda fountains, my eighty-four-year-old aunt sighed and lamented that she was no longer able to drive to see her favorite artist’s work at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, five hours away. “I’m lucky to get to the Winn Dixie on my own anymore,” she said before taking a bite of her ham sandwich.

William shot me a look that asked if we should take an impromptu road trip. I smiled and nodded.

En route to our bed and breakfast in St. Petersburg, we stopped at Thomas Edison’s winter home in Fort Myers where Bernice said she felt very comfortable because she could understand the technology on display and the banyan trees in the garden had more visible veins than her legs. As we crossed the Everglades, my aunt casually dropped the fact that we were crossing Alligator Alley as rain came down like a carwash. The last thing we saw clearly was a yellow road sign, warning “Crocodile Crossing.” William looked in the rearview mirror to ask a question before noticing that Katie and Bernice had fallen asleep in the back seat, their heads leaning into each other’s, fitting perfectly like puzzle pieces.

The following day at the museum, standing in front of Dalí’s enormous canvas,
The
Hallucinogenic
Toreador
, the tour guide told us the museum housed the largest collection of Dalí’s work in the United States and the second largest in the world.

“Where’s the largest?” Katie and I asked in unison. I waited for her to dub this moment “a personal jinx” and say that I owed her a soda. Silence. I wondered when that had ended.

The guide told us about the Dalí Triangle, where we could not only see the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and jewels, but his birthplace and burial ground too.

***

Getting from Barcelona to Figueres was easy. We hopped on a train and two and a half hours later, followed the throng of tourists for a half-mile trek through the dusty streets. We passed modest apartment buildings, bargain clothing shops, and an oversized bodega. A group of boys walked down the sidewalk kicking a soccer ball.

In the distance stood a white museum with a row of giant eggs lining the roof. Rimming the structure were several Oscar-like golden statues and sculptures of women balancing baguettes on their heads. “This must be the place,” a young woman said to her friend a few paces ahead of us.

In front of the museum was a sculpture of a sitting man with an egg head tilted to the side. In its womb was a bust of Catalan philosopher Francesc Pujols.
Yes, this was definitely the place.

Once a theater, the Dalí museum was created by the artist with the support of the local government in the seventies. The museum site held sentimental value for Dalí because it was where he held his first art show at age fourteen. He died in an apartment attached to the museum and is buried beneath it.

Inside, a dizzying array of Dalí paintings and sculptures competed for attention. A giant mural he designed for the opera
Labyrinth
and the photographic oil
Gala
Nude
Looking
at
the
Sea
Which
at
18 Metres Appears the President Lincoln
were displayed under a glass geodesic dome. Nearby stood a brick niche where a rhinoceros head, rust octopus, and cubist angel hovered over a statue of Moses. An enormous glass window opened to a courtyard with a centerpiece sculpture of a rotund Queen Esther mounted onto the back of the car where, suspended above, there was an overturned rowboat dripping faux water droplets. For one euro, visitors could prompt a downpour inside Dalí’s
Rainy
Taxi
, which was occupied by a life-sized model chauffeur and mannequin passenger.

As we looked at a sculpture of a woman wearing a corn-on-the-cob scarf and baguette hat, a woman turned her head quizzically and asked her husband if he thought Dalí was on LSD. “He says no,” the husband replied, looking at a guidebook to the museum. “He says, ‘I
am
the drug.’”

“He
is
the drug?” the woman.

“Yes,” the husband said, taking in the details of the piece, like the ants crawling across the bust. “We’re tripping on Dalí right now. It’s a nonchemical high.”

***

Across the street from the train station in Figueres was the Sarfa bus terminal with coaches leaving for Cadaqués every few hours. The seaside village bordered Port Lligat where the only tourist attraction was the home of Salvador and Gala Dalí, another corner of the Triangle. The villages are located on the northern tip of the Costa Brava, a stone’s throw from France.

Although the bus was clearly marked “Cadaqués,” I nervously asked the driver if he was, indeed, going there.

He returned the question with a sharp glare and corrected my pronunciation.

I tried again, mimicking his inflection.

He barked at me again, rolled his eyes, and waved us onto the bus. We were leaving the safe environs of Barcelona and Figueres, where American tourists were everywhere. Katie and I were headed to a part of Spain I wasn’t quite sure I would be able to manage. I hadn’t felt such a lack of confidence in my travel skills since we first landed in Paris when Katie was eight. Thankfully, at fourteen, she was still unable to detect my uncertainty. I was equally grateful for the fact that she had maintained her sunny spin on the cultural differences that terrified me.

As Katie and I sat at the front of the bus, she whispered that it was really cool how the driver didn’t give us a scripted customer service rap thanking us for choosing the Sarfa bus line.

The journey took one hour, two Dramamine, and seven prayers to Saint Christopher, just in case he was listening. The bus wrapped around a narrow road that clung to the edge of a mountain. I dug my fingernails into my palms as Katie read her book. When we began our descent, the view opened up to an expanse of bay connecting to the Balearic Sea, which connects with the Mediterranean further south. Enormous rocks erupted from the water, obstacles for dozens of white fishing boats.

Katie and I got off the bus and went to the ticket booth to ask where we could catch a taxi. My daughter had a huge smile on her face because the driver had just snapped at her when she thanked him for the ride. “It’s just so…real,” she told me.

A woman at the bus station laughed bitterly at my inquiry about taxis. Of course she had no map for us either. I stood paralyzed, wondering if everyone in Cadaqués was going to treat us with contempt.

“Look at that road, Mommy,” Katie said, pointing to a path where people were coming and going dressed in swimsuits. “Let’s follow them.” I had no better idea so I let Katie lead. As we made it down the path, the seaside came into view. Suddenly Cadaqués was alive, its main street a smooth stone path that was filled with small hotels and restaurant tables on one side; the seaside was dotted with tourists swimming and scuba diving.

All of the homes along the hillside were white, a contrast with the steely evening sky and mountain backdrop. As streetlights began to flicker on, the village took on an ethereal glow. Katie noticed a small blue sign listing nearby hotels. “Look, keep walking this way for our hotel!” We continued on the stone path, listening to the soundtrack of playful chatter, sangria glasses clinking, and seagulls squawking overhead. The soft evening breeze washed over us, and I could feel my stress leaving with it. We had entered a different world.

Ten minutes later, a clumsy young man looked up from the reception desk at the hotel and welcomed us to Cadaqués. He showed us to our room overlooking the hotel pool and a quiet patch of shoreline.

The following morning, a redheaded pixie at a smoothie shop mixed our breakfast drinks in her blender. I thought about calling William to suggest we move here and enroll Katie in the local high school. We could work at the smoothie shop, or perhaps the art gallery next door. Outside, a man emptied a bucket of water onto the patio of his restaurant and began sweeping.
I
could
do
that
, I thought.
I
could
get
a
job
at
a
restaurant
and
clean
the
patio
at
eleven
in
the
morning
. The man noticed me staring and asked Katie and I where we were from. When we told him, he sighed, “Ah, California,” undoubtedly romanticizing the life we led in San Diego.

Katie and I walked up a dirt hill, horseshoeing around to make our way back down to Port Lligat. Through treetops, we spotted two silver alien heads perched on the roof of a home. Katie raised her eyebrows and led the way down the rocky path to the house on the bay. The first thing we saw was a rowboat pierced by a tree in Dalí’s front yard. The second was the water that surrounded three sides of the home.

The artist bought the property in 1930 when it was a tiny fisherman’s hut and added onto the whitewash home for the next forty years until it was a sprawling, multilevel estate. The Dalí house-museum had very few neighbors: a hole-in-the-wall deli and an unoccupied gallery across the narrow dirt road, a bait shop on the dock. There was room for little else.

A small group stood at the Dalí house doorway, people shifting their weight as they waited for their appointed tour. Since Katie and I arrived a full hour before our scheduled time, we grabbed lunch at the deli. Seagulls flew in the cloudless blue sky, occasionally plummeting down to bob for fish.

A man playing Spanish guitar music sat a few yards away, plucking something that was at once sultry and sentimental. I took a bite of my anchovy and tomato sandwich and watched as Katie read a book, eating sliced fried potatoes.
I
don’t need to be this happy at once
, I thought.
Can’t I save some for later?

A better part of me admonished that I should enjoy the experience now and stop searching for life’s doggie bags. “Katie,” I whispered. She looked up. “Do you want some dessert?”

She sat up and nodded emphatically. “They’ve got Chipwiches in the freezer,” Katie told me. I handed her a five-euro bill.

“Chipwiches!” I exclaimed. “Are you kidding me?”

Katie nodded. “Grab one for me too.”

***

That evening, Katie and I went to dinner at a tiny restaurant, a beach house chiseled into a hillside. A woman showed us upstairs to a converted bedroom that could only fit three small tables. She opened the shutters to reveal flowerboxes and a bay view and offered us wine. A half hour later, a heavy man with the air of a restaurant owner came upstairs and told us what he was cooking. This evening, he was playing chef and waiter, yet he didn’t seem in the least bit harried. When I ordered two appetizers and two main courses, the man began to shake his head. “Too much food for little girls,” he said. “I cook big meals. You share the paella, then if you still hungry, we get you more to eat.”

“Really?” I said, impressed with his down-sell.

“Yes,
señora
. We have all night.”

We
do?

We did. After the man brought our food, he checked back an hour later to see if we wanted more food, but he had been right; his serving of paella looked more like a catering tray than a meal for one or two. He returned forty minutes after that with an ice cream cake that tasted like frozen Snickers.

“What was your favorite part of the Dalí house?” I asked Katie as we sat at the table.