I woke up this morning to a woman wailing down in the street. I thought I heard her say something about “robo,” figured it was just another purse snatching and rolled back over. But her wailing got louder and I started to hear a crowd amassing. I thought maybe her flat had been burgled. I thought maybe her entire life savings had been looted by an ex-boyfriend. I was not even the tiniest bit prepared to see, when I finally peered out my balcony window, a full-on five alarm inferno erupting out of the balcony windows of the flat across the way, two over to the left, one floor down. I guess I’d never really seen a fire blazing away like that before, huge bonfires in a backyard, yes, the forest fire of 2001 in Prescott, Arizona from a distance, yes, a lifetime of crappy footage on the news, yes, but somebody’s home, an apartment, 10 meters away from me, no. The affect was tremendous. At that distance you can feel the heat, ash wafts into your hair, the massive black smoke roils into every nook and cranny, and you put your shoes on just in case. Other than a family who fled from the same building and dissappeared around the corner, I didn’t see anyone running away or packing up. A man was on his cellphone, the small crowd was restraining and presumably comforting the wailing woman, and every single other resident on the block was out on their own balconies, some ironically smoking cigarettes, some holding their children, and some, just like me and my roommate, feverishly recording everything on digital cameras. Seeing everyone else, some on balconies even closer than mine, if you can imagine that, just calmly watching quelled my first reaction of “we gotta get the fuck out of here.” Then I remembered my ex-roommate telling me why there was bricks between the beams of the ceiling. A Barcelona apartment, and I suppose all old apartments of Europe, are ensconced in about 12 inches of stone. The danger is relatively low of any fire spreading to another flat. Of course, fire can crawl balcony curtains, sparks can jump up to a wooden flowerpot, and when the butane tank that every kitchen uses for its hot water and stoves blows up, the explosion can easily make it out into the stairwell. So maybe not everyone was watching calmly, just they knew they had some time, they knew the “bomberos” or firemen, whose jackets that say “Barcelona Bombers” (bombero in Catalan) never fail to delight me, would come eventually. It certainly did feel like e-ven-t-u-al-ly. I don’t know when the blaze started but it took at least 10 full minutes from when I started watching for them to arrive. I guess that’s not crazy rediculous. It just seemed like too long.
I did start shaking and breathing faster and sort of ducking when all the junk on the balcony started popping. Stuff just let go into entropy, a foldable metal clothes drying rack sprang apart in the heat and fell to the pavement, several terracotta flowerpots exploded and released their soil, a glass tabletop shattered and merged with the wafting ash, a rolled up venetian blind said goodbye to its hooks and uncoiled itself like a red hot carpet into the street below. Objects that, just the day before, leaning out of my balcony with my boyfriend, I had named in Spanish. Every week I trade him an hourlong English lesson for an hour of Spanish vocabulary practice. We go to a public space and I try to name or describe what I see. Yesterday, feeling lazy, we decided to analize the balconies of my block. The balcony across the way, two over to the left, one floor down was a rich lode of vocabulary as it was chock full of identificationally- challenged clutter. I got to use words like amasijo, chisme, trasto, and desechos; jumble, bric-a-brac, junk, and detritus. Later, when I was watching the bomberos rake up the smoking remains, I felt almost remorseful for having so slandered the wailing woman’s posessions. Certainly detritus was better than ash. And that’s what she owned now. I had never learned the verb for “to char” in Spanish. Carbonizar. To turn to carbon. Yesterday, I had scrutinized those items that seemed so permanent and now they were just traces of carbon over the sea.
The bomberos are almost gone now, they’ve taken the yellow crime scene tape down at either end of the street. They spent about two hours examining the structural damages to the building. Stone is not impervious to fire, the balcony of the upstairs neighbor has a large crescent shaped hole where part of it fell away in the concentrated flames shooting up from just below. The perfectly right-angled stone frame of the balcony door has lost all of its edges. Whereas before it appeared like a stately bank vault entrance, now it looks like an ancient cave or prehistoric tomb; the stones now undulating their soft facets under the still-dripping water. The last two bomberos are gathering up the entropic remains from the street, spraying and sweeping, and a great airing out has begun. The neighbors have all thrown open their balcony doors, they are shaking out curtains, wiping down windows, sweeping the tiny terraces, watering plants. There is still no sign of the wailing woman, she was carted away in embraces hours ago. But I expect she will be back later to begin her own unfathomable airing out. With the smoke completely gone and revealing 60 degree weather, and the sun’s rays finally overhead enough to penetrate the canyon of our alley, I take stock of my own detritus. Looking around my humble room and thinking about what I could lose and how it would feel, I understand the momentary collective mindset of my 10 meter community, it’s a perfect day to start spring cleaning.
