By 1977 it was as though it had never been banned. The new Spain was prepared to allow Catalonia a certain autonomy and the Catalan language a certain ocial respect. In those years when I lived in Barcelona the Rambla changed from being the centre of life in the city to being a centre of political dissent, where the crowd ranged against the police, where tear gas and rubber bullets were fired, where there were baton charges. As I walked up the Rambla each morning to go to work, I had to pass jeeploads of police. Policemen dressed in grey stood with machine-guns pointed at passers-by. By the time I left the city, however, in 1978, the Rambla had returned to its former self, democracy was, for the moment anyway, secured, and the citizens of Barcelona could once more wander freely in the Rambla and fleetingly size each other up.

I went back to my own country, and returned to Barcelona on holidays a few times over the years. Every so often in Ireland I would come across someone who spoke Catalan. Hearing the language again would bring it all back: the beautiful old city, the grati in red on the Cathedral walls, the political ferment, the smell of garlic, the faces in a demonstration defiant against the police, the slogans, the sexual freedom and the heat. In January 1988 I returned to Barcelona to write this book. I stayed there all year and again for three months in 1989. People asked me if the city had changed; some of the changes were obvious, such as the street names which were now in Catalan only. There was more crime. But I still wasn’t sure. On the final Sunday in September 1988, the last day of the Merce` festival, which had not existed in the Franco era, I felt at ease enough in the city, at home enough again, to look around me carefully, to take notes, and maybe take stock.

Yo u could hardly move on the Rambla that morning; the street was crowded as it had always been, but the stretch between the