El Raval is a notorious neighbourhood in the Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona. A place where - I'd been told - anything goes and gender is completely fluid. This, apparently, placed me under a compulsion to visit. And so, despite my doubts concerning the validity and, indeed, desirability of such a claim, I decided to venture forth one night and take a peek.
The first liquid bodies I encountered were puddles of piss left by drunks and stray dogs. Sidestepping these and the unfortunate beings that made them, I made my way to a restaurant which boasted haute cuisine on the menu and low-life outside its doors. Wealth and poverty never really meet; they simply ignore one another even whilst living side-by-side (though sometimes the rich like to slum it and the poor like to riot).
I watched the parade of people pass by: tourists from the UK; immigrants from South America and Asia; prostitutes from Eastern Europe; and a colourful assortment of home-grown queers. I suppose the latter best exemplified the fluidity of gender I'd been promised, but I couldn't help thinking that they seemed more fixated by - and fixed in - sexual rules and roles than the most conventional boy and girl next door.
I also thought of all the writers who have described such scenes and the painters who have depicted these very streets - the Carrer d'Avinyó is in the nearby Gothic quarter. Is it really so transgressive and so liberating to celebrate all that mushrooms beneath a red light and to unconditionally love everything that flows like Henry Miller?
Feeling a little tipsy, I went to powder my nose in order to clear my mind. When I got to the washrooms, I found that the doorknobs on the two doors facing had been replaced with dolls' heads; an ironic gesture of postmodern barbarism. One had long blonde hair and one had short dark hair - I'm not sure, but I think it was Barbie and Ken, both looking decidedly worse for wear.
As I was in a hurry and in no mood to try to puzzle out which head to turn, I decided to reach for Barbie. But before I could place my hand on her poor battered head, a man shouted and said that the Barbie cubicle was reserved for cross-dressers and transgender individuals only; that I should wait for Ken's cubicle to become free.
I was going to challenge the curious reasoning - I was going to ask about fluidity - but instead I just decided to turn on my heels and go home with my un-powdered nose in the air.
Katxu is a keen observer of life in Barcelona. Originally from Burgos, she likes to read, to paint, to cook, and to enjoy the company of her plants on the balcony of her apartment overlooking Sants Estació and from where she can smile at the Sony sign.
Katxu appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind submission of a text written especially for this blog, and, indeed, for permission to use the photo taken of her last year in Sitges.
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