Clueless in Barcelona
Whenever I travel as a tourist, I am underprepared. I am fairly well-traveled, but I almost always arrive in a new city to realize I’ve made no plans. I’ve mostly traveled alone, so I often wander until something holds my interest. My inability to plan has led to many aimless and dull trips in beautiful and vibrant places. However, it leaves me open to the unexpected.
The first time I went to Barcelona, I arrived sweaty and bewildered, a 70-liter pack on my back. I set off in the wrong direction from the metro stop before finding my hostel in the Gothic Quarter. When I finally arrived, there was only one person ahead of me in the check-in line. Tinny Top 40 radio played. The other person in the line turned out to be booked in the same dormitory-style room as me. His name was Mounir and he was from Morocco. Mounir was a transit system engineer in Rabat. I was twenty-one and on my way from Madrid to a German immersion program in Marburg. Mounir spoke almost no English, and I spoke even less French (let alone Arabic), but somehow we hit it off. He had a warm smile and reminded me of a friend I had in Chicago. I stood with him on the balcony while he smoked a cigarette, looking down at the bustling medieval street below, and we spoke with a bit of English and a lot of mime.
After claiming a bunk and taking a shower, I went for a walk. I didn’t know anything about Barcelona or where I should go, so I went toward the water. I walked past a marina, around some upscale restaurants, to a pier. It was afternoon. Teens clumped around benches and railings, giving off whiffs of spliff smoke, and tourists zipped by on scooters. It was an April afternoon and the light was warm, the breeze off the Mediterranean cool. Spanish people seem to exude ease. The first time I had been to Spain, years before, my host told me, “We don’t give no fucks.” When I visited, he was unemployed and spent his days making hip-hop beats, smoking hash, and playing MarioKart. Visiting Spain always gives me that same sense: that everything will be fine if we can all just chill out. Now, in Barcelona, as I reached the sparsely settled beach, I marveled at the sun-kissed beauty of the people I saw. I walked to the water, took off my shoes, and waded in up to my ankles. The water was cold to the bone.
On my way back to the hostel, I stopped at a corner store to buy wine and dinner. I remember the dinner as tortellini, but I likely did not know what I was buying. I did not have enough Spanish to speak to the cashier. After a solo dinner in the hostel lobby, eavesdropping on the other tourists, Mounir appeared. We drank my wine and shot pool. We spoke our broken pidgin. I remember his wine-stained teeth as he leaned over the table to shoot.
Somehow, Mounir invited me to go to a bar down the street with him. I was relieved to have a plan and a friend. While Mounir smoked a cigarette in front of the hostel, we ran into someone, also from North Africa (Algeria, perhaps?), who Mounir seemed to know. This new addition to our group had a better idea of where we should go. I never caught his name, but he had glasses and prominent front teeth, so I’ll call him Mouse. Mounir and Mouse spoke Arabic, and Mouse spoke some English and some German, so I could say a bit more to him, but I was already with them more for company than conversation.
The three of us set off down the street. The air was sultry and, now that night had fallen, the gothic buildings we walked past were lit from below, tinting them a creamy, dramatic yellow. Before we had gone more than a few blocks, Mouse waved to a man across the street, who loped over to greet us. The third man was also North African and spoke only the English of a small-time hustler: “Hey buddy” and “C’mon baby.” I never learned his name either, let alone his country of origin, though I think he’d been in Barcelona for a while. He was taller than any of us, with chiseled features, and he walked with the hunched, swinging stride of a basketball player, so I’ll call him Mantis.
Evidently, Mantis had a third, even better idea of where we should go. It seemed that each person we found knew Barcelona better and had greater authority to direct our evening. Arabic is a dramatic language, percussive and guttural. The three of them, Mounir, Mouse, and Mantis, spoke rapidly and loudly, their faces very close together, punctuating with their hands. It was the kind of body language that, in English, would have suggested a boiling-point row, the kind that cuts deep and fractures friendships. But I assumed, and still have no reason to think otherwise, that it was just how they spoke. After all, none of these people could have known each other long enough to carry deep resentments. I followed along, silent, confused, watching their body language for clues.
Abruptly, Mantis told us to wait at the mouth of a side street and disappeared down it. I tried to find out from Mounir and Mouse what he was doing, but we didn’t share enough language for them to enlighten me. Mantis finally returned with a short stack of bills and gave each of us some money. We went a little further and then Mantis hailed a cab and we all climbed in. Now, before you marvel at my naïveté, I did hesitate. I barely knew where I was staying, and I certainly didn’t know where we were going. But, I thought, if there is a scam afoot, Mounir can’t possibly be in on it (we had, after all, checked into the hostel at exactly the same time) and Mounir spoke Arabic, so presumably he knew what was going on. I placed my trust in Mounir. And besides, I decided, if I didn’t go, I would always wonder where that cab of North Africans was heading.
As we all four climbed into the cab, I asked Mantis where we were going. “To the girls,” he said. “You like the girls, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
When we got out of the cab, we each gave Mantis’s money to a bouncer in exchange for a drink ticket. We descended a wide staircase into what, bathed in pulsing beats and stage lights, turned out to be a strip club. We walked to the bar and got what might have been whiskey-gingers, but all I remember clearly was the bartender pouring the glasses halfway full of whiskey before topping it off with mixer. I saw that there were a lot of strippers, several dozen circulating while one or two danced in the center of the room. However, there were only a few customers, scattered across couches, chatting with the girls. It was then that I realized where I was.
Let me pause here to say that I had never before been to a strip club. I was, and continue to be, romantically and sexually timid. I come from a milieu that sees strip clubs as exploitative and more than a bit trashy. The thought of paying a woman to look at her naked body still makes an anxious knot form in my chest. So to realize that I had been brought to a brothel masquerading as a strip club, that across the stairwell from the bar were doors through which customers intermittently disappeared, that I was only now, as I sat at the brothel’s bar, recognizing that a brothel had been our destination all along, petrified me. Perched there, I also figured out why Mantis had so surreptitiously paid our admission. Clearly, Mantis got a kickback from bringing us in, so we had agreed to come on the condition that he paid our admission. I sipped my very boozy cocktail and leaned over to Mouse. “Have you been here before?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he replied, his face placid.
The rest comes back in fragments. Someone told me to remove my feet from what I had assumed was a footstool. Girls came up to talk to me and I tried to find polite ways to say “No thank you.” They spoke in crisp, accented English. At least one said she was from Brazil. I have never found an easy answer to the question “Why not?” when posed by a prostitute, a problem I have only ever confronted in Barcelona.
I only remember sitting at the bar like a statue, next to Mouse, sipping my drink and politely turning down prostitutes. I do not know if any of them got laid that night, but I do not remember sitting at the bar with Mounir. I do not remember leaving or how we got back to the Gothic Quarter. I remember Mantis buying a six-pack of cervezas from a Chinese woman on a street corner and trying to convince pairs of girls to hang out with us while they averted their eyes and quickened their pace. I remember the thin taste of Spanish beer and the creamy yellow light of the Gothic Quarter at night. I remember pissing on the cobblestones in a shadowy corner already pungent with piss.
I am still Facebook friends with Mounir. Once, while planning a trip to southern Spain, I considered reaching out to him to see if I could visit, but I never did. I checked his profile while writing this piece and saw that he got married last year. For me, he is consigned to memory. I still have not willingly gone to a strip club, and I’ve gotten no better at planning trips.
-Zak Breckenridge
