The following is a story from
This Is Not America by Jodi Puntí, one of Catalonia's most talented authors:
He leaves the subway in Plaça d’en Joanic and, coming up the stairs into the night, hears some nearby church bells chiming ten. Maybe they’re imaginary bells and they’re only ringing in his head, but never mind. What counts is here and now. He repeats it mentally: here and now, right? He lights a cigarette and walks briskly down to Passeig de Sant Joan. There aren’t many people in the street, not many cars, or it might just seem that way because the orangey glow from the streetlights is scattering arabesques of lack-luster shadows everywhere. As he passes the churro shop in Carrer de l’Escorial, which is closed today, he shoos away a bittersweet memory. Not now, not yet. But then, just after that, at the top end of Passeig de Sant Joan, facing the half-hidden statue of a friar and a small boy, he stops for a few seconds and thinks of her. The thought is full of pain, yet hazy. A few days ago, and he can’t be more specific than that, Mai’s face started being wiped out of his memory . . . Well, not exactly that. He doesn’t want to use a negative verb. Rather, it’s been gently fading away, a vapory cloud of smoke, little by little, very slowly dispersing, and the days go by and you keep seeing it even though it’s no longer there, and you reach a point when you can see it only because you can imagine it, because you’ve seen it before and you know it was there.
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