Out Among Humans

Just Your Average 69-Year-Old College Freshman Studying Abroad.

The prey is always at risk in El Raval.

The stalkers close in at tremendous speeds and from great distances. — feeding their young depends on it.

Yesterday a predator, this one on a bicycle, swooped down with amazing agility upon a guileless visitor. It’s an event that happens here every hour of every day. There’s no way to avoid the risk except to spend a life without leaving the hutch. And what’s that?

The prey, unharmed, discovered the emptiness of life without an iPhone. Every scene that had escaped him when he had his camera now unfolds like magic. Crowds of Metro riders show up like they were choreographed by Hollywood. People on the street gesture with just the right amount of diffidence. The light’s always good and the street noises are muted when you have no way of shooting a video.

Just Your Average 69-Year-Old College Freshman Studying Abroad.

You can see the strobes move on the face of the basilica from blocks away. The percussion drags you in even before the music does.

It’s another Friday night, unemployment is still high and the concert is free. What’s with the economy, you ask your professors. “Some kind of crisis.” they explain.

The music is wonderful and it’s still early in the evening for these kids.

A North American walked the streets and the plazas here with no companion but the sins on his soul. Barroom legend has it that the simple man was searching for a priest to hear his confession.

But the man had a problem.

His sins were devoid of drama and imagination. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor, or lie to save the lives of children. If he wrote a memoir, trivial sins of omission would fill its pages.

The inconsequential man feared wasting the time of a confessor and being dismissed like a schoolboy with three Our Fathers and Hail Marys. So he goes from parish to parish hoping to find just the right priest.

One day on the Gran Via a man of the cloth, completely deaf in old age, steps out in front of a speeding bus. The man grabs the priest’s arm and saves his life.

They retire to a cafe. Two bottles later the man asks the priest if he would hear his confession.

The deaf curate, who doesn’t understand a word of English and is now three sheets to the wind, is shocked at the pattern of bestiality, murder and larceny he imagines the man has confessed.

He instructs the foreigner to sell his possessions and give everything to the poor, a penance usually reserved for sadistic monsters facing the firing squad – no penance is more difficult to satisfy. But the man complies.

He had once overpaid a credit card by a large margin and enjoyed a balance that allowed him to spend with abandon for a months to come.

The Almighty Creator, he reasoned, must be at least as munificent as Capital One. With the spiritual credit he earned by performing such a disproportionate penance for his childish sins, the foreigner can be spotted wandering the streets of Barcelona, free to sample the Seven Sins at will.

He is said to leave exceptionally generous tips.