Barcelona Metropolis

Everything is very random when you’re sixteen years old. In my case, I was doing pure science and in third year of BUP [former secondary-school certificate and course for 14-17 age group] when we read Rousseau’s book Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men and I realised that, in philosophy, problems didn’t just have one right answer. This intrigued me. And with a certain unconsciousness I stopped wanting to study chemistry and wanted to go down the philosophy path, even though I had no idea what philosophy was. Well, even now it’s not that clear to me... (laughs)

No, I had a brilliant time the first year and studied with tremendous enthusiasm. But right now I don’t consider myself a philosopher either, I’m a teacher of philosophy. Philosopher is a very big word.

Well. Too well. They respected my decision because they thought I was so sure about things, but, in actual fact, I didn’t have a clue... (laughs)

There were books at home. My mother and father were always reading. My father was fond of war novels and essays on World War II. I suppose it was a generational thing, since during the Spanish Civil War, when he was a child, he was in Germany. My mother read everything: bestsellers, romantic novels as well as noir fiction. And from them I inherited the custom of grabbing a book when you have spare time. But it was not a particularly intellectual environment. My father keeps telling me, “Your writing must be brilliant, but I don’t understand a thing!”

The Tagore school in Sant Cugat, a Catalanist school that later ceased to exist. And at the beginning of secondary school, one day a teacher read a story by Cortázar in class, La señorita Cora [Nurse Cora]. And it was magnificent, wonderful. Then I started reading South American authors, Cortázar, Borges, because I had an Argentine friend who acted as my reading guide, followed by European authors. It wasn’t until much later that I started reading Catalan literature in Catalan. And when I read Sagarra’s Memòries [Memoirs] at the age of 35 I thought: being able to understand it perfectly is marvellous! All the references, the language... Because otherwise you are always bridging cultural and linguistic distances...

No, there isn’t any contrast of ideas, there’s an orthodoxy, some of us are familiar with it, and I talk to them. But hey, it’s a surname that gives you an inlet into lots of places, because Barça has a huge influence.

There was a lot of talk about it at home. We called him “l'avi” (grandad) because he was my father’s grandfather. My father didn’t know him because he died young in 1929. My father is now 86 years old. He was born in 1933. He didn’t go to the stadium much, he stopped going after Kubala because the football he liked was the one of that era, when it was played with five forwards. But we did go to the Gamper Trophy and some matches, where I had some sort of epiphany.

What I remember is that when there was a penalty against Barça, my father would go into the bedroom and wouldn’t re-emerge. (laughs) Because the true Barça supporter never watches Barça; he talks about them though, and criticises them a lot. But he doesn’t watch them.

I learned about football with Maradona. I started with Schuster at the stadium, and when Maradona came along I watched every match. I was there the day that Goikoetxea injured him, at the Bernabéu final when they beat Atlético de Bilbao, at the final in Zaragoza when they beat Madrid with that goal from Marcos at the end of the match... That for me was the ultimate game when I understood that football was really ‘cool’... But the reaction to Maradona... I realise that he’s ‘God’ in football, but I think we make fools of ourselves when we take sport out of the tribal realm and start lending it more meaning than it has.

Yes, they were both predestined to meet. Naples and Maradona are alike, and that combination created a stratospheric phenomenon that could not have occurred here on any account. My wife is from Naples and I was able to do a story on all the chapels and places of worship to Maradona in Naples. A stone’s throw from my wife’s house, for example, is a bar where they say they have one of Maradona’s hairs and people flock to see it. And the Maradona icon is fantastic because he was very photogenic, that’s what image experts say. Maradona is much more photogenic than Messi.

I don’t think they’re expressing themselves when they play, it’s something else. They don’t even control it. The footballer doesn’t know what he’s doing nor how he’s doing it, it just comes to them. It’s like an event, and they’re like an instrument through which it takes place. That’s what happens with Messi, of whom I am a devout follower.

I once handed him the Gamper trophy. I guess he’s used to being looked at in a certain way, and so he stares you in the eye, so you feel respected by him, as if there’s a connection. And I said thank you to him, that’s all you can say to him.

Yes, but neither the students nor I are comfortable with that. It isn’t a gratifying teaching experience. You don’t know if they’re listening to you or not because you can’t see them, they have the camera off. In class you can see who is being attentive and who isn’t, if they are following the train of thought, and you can shout or scold them, but not now. I complain to them too.

Closely confined at home with my family. We coped very well because we prepared ourselves and followed a routine, exercising, and so on. I was the only one of us to lose my temper and good humour from time to time. They’d have surely got on better without me. (laughs)

On the one hand, there has been a very clear conformity. If exercising power means getting people to do something they would rather not do, it has been done very well. Then making mistakes is inevitable, and a lot of them, in this situation. There isn’t anybody who hasn’t made mistakes. This is proven by the fact that it is not a situation that can be resolved in a way that you say: this government has handled it so well. The only ones who handled it well were the Chinese, at least they can sell it that way, although, as they are hazy, no one knows exactly. But it is clear that the more authoritarian you are and the less individual liberties you recognise, the easier it is to manage a crisis like this one.

The thing is, the best way to order a society is through repression, weapons and authoritarian power. Democracy is disorder, it is conflict, it is divergence. And we have decided to live in it because we value individual liberties, but not because we value order.

Yes, maybe ten or fifteen years from now we’ll have reliable statistics on everything that’s happened. In the meantime there will be elections and governments that will fall. But we have to keep in mind that people vote out of emotions and feelings, and not so much to have a clear idea about what has happened.

Well, what Plato said about the sophists was already that: you teach people to talk about anything, regardless of whether it is true or false, because it is a question of persuasion. That’s part of politics, as Hannah Arendt also claims. Truth and politics are two different fields of knowledge, two different epistemes. The first one says whether it rains or not, they are ascertainable facts, whereas politics moves in the realm of persuasion, rhetoric, sophistry... a little bit of everything goes.

Yes, you were told: look at this photo. Looking at the photo isn’t enough; I want you to interpret it for me. That a picture is worth a thousand words isn’t true.

Yes, but one should consider what happened the day before. And the year before? That picture without an interpretation is nothing. It’s a stimulus that, as you’re reading the Twitter timeline, has you overwhelmed by very powerful emotions: you’re outraged, you’re saddened, you’re gladdened. You see it on the train, how people are smiling, and their face changes. And in the end you’re fuming. What happened to me in those 20 minutes? Well, everything did. I’ve been saddened and outraged, and I’ve also contributed to the downheartedness and outrage of other people because I’ve retweeted and liked it. Ugh! I want a normal life!

I have Twitter, but I only use it a bit when I want to circulate something I’ve done. And I don’t have it on my phone. I just look at it on my computer for an hour each day. I think it’s best not to have it, but I also like to see that someone is listening to me.

Well, I’m from Sant Cugat and I’ve lived in Barcelona for ten years. I’ve always come to the city for an amble, and I like to stroll around Barcelona. It’s a city that I don’t look at like someone from here, but rather I look at it with a certain astonishment and as if I’m visiting. But it’s worrying, because a very strong commitment to tourism has been made. I don’t know what has made the city so dependent on this revenue; I don’t know whether it has been a conscious decision or whether it has just happened. I don’t want to make the sentimental statement that asserts “the city for the people of Barcelona”. Obviously, I like walking down the Ramblas more than I did before. Actually, I didn’t venture there before, and now it turns out it’s pretty and you didn’t remember it being so. It’s not that it’s striking either, it’s fine, but behind all the closed premises, the closed shutters, there is poverty, social unrest... If you play everything on a card like tourism, then the fragility of the model is revealed, because disaster can happen at a moment’s notice.

The day we’re told we can, I’ll take it off, needless to say! The thing is that it’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant. I don’t know what your face looks like. We met like this, and so did she [Clara Soler, the photographer] and I. We’ll say goodbye to one another like this and I have no idea what her face looks like. And lately I’ve been making friends who I wouldn’t recognise without a mask.