L’Eco
de Sitges, 9 December 2000
Soon it will be a year ago that,
coinciding with the celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, we visited
New York, a fascinating, stimulating city full of disparate contradictions,
cheerful and cosmopolitan, and the first megalopolis in the world. I always had believed
that, rambling through the streets, those highest of skyscrapers, so close
to one another, had to cause a sensation of breathlessness, almost of oppression.
False impression! Everything is extensive, luminous, limitless. The buildings,
all of different heights, form an assembly of extraordinary beauty, paradigm
of modernity and of harmonious architecture. In this unique scene, the
awestruck visitor feels a sort of vertigo, the same that one suddenly
feels in the middle of a forest of gigantic trees, conscious of one’s physical
insignificance.
It would be exhausting to describe
all the attractions that the city offers: the artistic wealth of its museums,
the proliferation of art galleries, the elegance of the boutiques of every ilk
replete with objects, from the most exotic to the most
sophisticated and refined, as well as the distinctive originality of the decoration.
On Broadway, a prodigious portal to musicals, theater, concerts...
New York: a city capable of instilling the vitality necessary to
enjoy all imaginable impulses. And again, the sensation of vertigo.
At dusk, to contemplate from
the other side of the East River, once past the Brooklyn Bridge, the island
of Manhattan as it is covered with that bluish semi-obscurity and adorned
with thousands of lights, constitutes a spectacle of a captivating magnificence,
as if a fluorescent mirage. In the distance, the Statue of the Liberty
proudly raises its arm from Ellis Island, like an invitation to visit the
city.
Central Park, a vast space of naked
calm at this time of the year, has the peaceful enchantment that nature always
offers when it extends through the middle of a boisterous city and defies
the stony elegance that surrounds it with the pure arrogance and slenderness
of the trees that in the spring must be of an intense verdure. On the frozen
lake, skaters twirl and twirl. They are multicolored figures that stand
out against the frozen whiteness, like belated flowers moved by the wind.
It’s curious how there are places,
spaces, cities, that leave a special imprint on our memory, on our sensitivity
and on our predisposition to the evocation: of the passage of a novel,
of the singular character of a personage or of the peculiarities of a deserted
landscape. Often, we intensely relate what we see with a close friend
with whom we have shared key moments of our life.
On a date half-obscured (medio
oculta) by the years, Antonieta Almirall had recently been married
by proxy and had traveled to New York to be with Marko to begin
her new life as an American citizen. How splendid she must have found the
city to be! How dazzling new landscapes seem to us when they are contemplated
for the first time with naive eyes! When the adventure of life passes
through its most intense moments.
All this I meditated upon while
walking through those streets, among the bustling crowd, occupied with
being able to see the maximum number of things possible in so few days.
We already sensed that she had to be ill, but we knew that, for the moment,
she was well. We took an afternoon to travel to the state of New Jersey,
some kilometers to the west of New York, where she, good natured
and smiling, waited for us with her children to celebrate our stay in the
United States. It was the last time we saw each other.
Antonieta spoke her maternal language
with a subtle Anglo-Saxon accent and often introduced American words
in her conversation. She was a person integrated perfectly with the nationality,
the language, the life and the customs of her country of adoption. She
did not forget her Sitgean roots, but she also knew that the fruit of those
roots, her children, were Americans and America, her ample home.
Our last talks on the telephone
already were tinged with sadness, the sadness that precedes the last
goodbye. Her voice was weak and distant, as if the distance between her
and ourselves were extending until infinite, until the announced death
has turned the distance into absence, though not into forgetfulness.
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