Megan Pan Sagrada

My father chooses a table for us by the window. We are in a café just across the street from the Escoles de Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain. It is a wintry December day, coming off the festivities of Christmas but still before the excitement of the New Year has had the chance to settle in. Our matching indigo and maroon down coats hang over the backs of our chairs. Like my father and me, our coats assume the form of people in contact with one another and do not say a word.

Sipping my glass of Coke, I watch my father as he stares out the window. The slowmoving traffic in the street runs across the lenses of his thick glasses, and he takes a moment to zip his black puffer vest to the top before resting his elbows once again on the table and clasping his hands around his bottle of beer. It is in this moment that I realize just how old my old man has gotten. Of course, over the years I had noticed his hair growing grayer and grayer, until his former sweep of pure black hair has become speckled with flecks of white, as if covered in a field of cigarette ash. But looking at him now, there is even more to see. His eyes are a cloudier sort of brown, resembling the glassy eyes of the fish for sale at the marketplace staring up from beds of ice. As he takes a sip from his beer, I detect a faint tremor in his hands that was not there before, which causes the bottle to clank against the surface of the table as he sets it down again. The wrinkles in his hands and in his face are deeper chasms now, thin valleys in the seafloor of his leathery skin. If I had asked my father about it just then, he would have said that it was my sister and I who had given them to him, as if we had carved each and every one of them with a knife.

The waiter appears with our food. I had asked for a seafood paella for one, whereas my father had ordered the Padrón peppers tapa. Shriveled and salted and a deep shade of green, these mild peppers are his favorite, ever since we first visited Barcelona over eight years ago, and now he orders it wherever we go without any desire to try anything new. He plucks each pepper up with his fingers and pops it into his mouth, discarding the thin stems in a neat pile at the edge of his plate. He holds a pepper out to me across the table, but I shake my head and dig into my paella. My spoon unearths a mussel beneath a mound of golden rice, and a wisp of steam floats up into the air.

This scene of us eating without speaking is not an uncommon one. The family used to have a weekly tradition of eating out together, but with my sister working in California and my mother having passed away when I was 22, it has since fallen on the shoulders of my father and me to uphold the tradition as a silent but stalwart duo. For four years now, we have dined together once a week without fail; when I was finishing my undergrad in Princeton, he would drive down an hour every weekend,

and now that I am working on my PhD in New York City, he would meet me during his lunch break or after work on a weekday. He would always be on time, always cover the bill, and always say as little as possible, sometimes forgetting to even say “goodbye” before heading out the door.

When I learned that I was being sent to Spain for winter break as part of my PhD work, I called and told my father not to expect me at dinner for a couple weeks. He was silent on the other end for a moment.

“Where are you going,” said my father. His voice barely inflected it as a question. “Barcelona. I’m going to study the Sagrada Família.” He was silent again. “I’ll go with you,” he said finally, then hung up. And so we went.

We were here once many years ago, just before my 19th birthday. I had just started my first year of college that fall and nearly died as a result of it. Throughout the first semester, it felt like any one of those days was going to be the end for me. Every morning I would wake up and immediately be set into motion—jerked into action, rather, like a horse feeling the tug of a bit in its mouth. The days were all so busy and so miserable, spent ceaselessly trudging from classes to work to the library, day after day without any signs of stopping or changing. I had not made any meaningful friendships at the time, so I ate alone at meals or sat at the fringes of a giant group that would not have noticed my presence or lack thereof anyway. The only people to whom I regularly talked were my roommates (“Please put out the trash today”), professors (“I’m sorry, I completely forgot it was due”), and the guests who visited the university art museum where I worked as a student tour guide (“Right this way, and up the stairs”).

The month of December was worst of all. It was the darkness that made it so, the pitch black that set in around four o’clock in the afternoon and strangled me, as if each breath I took in the cold, lifeless air of the night was smoke in my lungs, poison entering my blood. The days in December felt liminal, existing simply to transition to the next, with each one consisting of little to no substance on its own. I was drowning in the tedium, suffocating in the strictness of mind-numbing routine. I was tired of constantly having to try, either to do work or to maintain superficial relationships or to worry about the future or to treat my life as if it mattered; I just wanted to be able to shut my eyes and go to sleep without thinking of the next day. Those days, all I really wanted was to do absolutely nothing, to just sit in my bedroom, not talking to anyone,

watching vapid shows and eating all sorts of junk, just withering away until eventually I would stop eating, stop breathing, stop living altogether. I wanted to disappear, as if I never even existed in the first place.

When my mother found me, I was asleep in one of the uncomfortable overnight infirmary beds at the health center. It was a party, they explained, a party to celebrate the approach of the holidays and of winter break. I had been sitting off to the side alone as the world raged around me. The sound of drunken laughter clashed with the music blaring from the Bluetooth speakers, with the rumble of each bass drop causing little ripples to radiate across the surface of the water in my red Solo cup. The room was hot, unbearably so, and people were opening the windows to let the cold air in. I approached one of these open windows and looked out. We were four stories above the ground, overlooking a frozen courtyard of frost-laced grass and a couple of spindly trees. I pressed my hand against the thin window screen and watched it curve against the flat of my palm. The cool metal mesh and the chilly December air met on my fingertips like a marriage. In that moment, I realized that I was ready to go.

They told my mother that everything happened very quickly. The onlookers at the party had reported to the police that I had not said anything to anyone, just began pounding my fist on the metal screen until it popped free from its frame, fluttered off with the wind and disappeared. It was only when I climbed atop the desk and swung my legs through the window that someone lunged forward to stop me. Apparently when they grabbed my arm, I had recoiled and started screaming. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me! Nobody get close to me!” People recalled that I sat there hunched over in the window frame, trembling violently and covering my ears to block out some nonexistent noise. Someone said they remembered hearing me whisper, “No one’s going to save me now.”

My mother was by my bed at the moment I woke up. “Baby,” she said, taking my hand. “Hello Mom.”

We sat in silence for a bit. She did not try to say anything, just held my hand and stared into the wall, as if seeing something in the distance. Finally, she said:

“Let’s go to Spain.”

In addition to the health center’s standard recommendation of further counseling and potentially medication, my mother prescribed a treatment of her own: a family

trip to Barcelona. To her, there was no better remedy than a spontaneous getaway to Western Europe, and surely the idea of sunny, seaside Spain with its fresh seafood and flamenco dancers would be the ultimate panacea in terms of lifting my spirits. She booked the tickets the day I was discharged, and no sooner had I arrived home did we begin packing to fly the next morning.

I was sitting on the floor stuffing sweaters into a bulging suitcase when I heard a knock at my door. It was my father, bearing his usual stern expression.

“Hi Dad. What’s up?” His eyes were stones. “You shouldn’t have done that.” A beat. I’m not sure what he’s talking about. “Shouldn’t have done what, necessarily?” “You shouldn’t have overreacted like that. You lost your cool, and you made a big scene in front of all those people. You should have kept it to yourself.”

I felt my hands begin to tremor. Suddenly the room felt very, very small. As he kept talking, my shoulders tensed and my stomach tightened as I tried to press down whatever it was that was threatening to rise up.

“Your poor mother woke up at two in the morning and we drove an hour down just to see you. You made her worry all throughout the night, and she should not have had to do that. You should be able to handle your—”

“I’m sorry! Okay?” I stood up and whirled on my father, knocking my unzipped suitcase away. Folded clothes spilled out onto the floor as it wheeled back and collided with my bookshelf. “I’m so sorry that I was such a damn burden for everybody, and I’m sorry that you and Mom had to go out of your way, and I’m—”

“You’re not sorry. If you were sorry, why would this keep happening? In high school and still now in college. They’re not just going to let you keep doing this, you know? They could kick you out of school, they could say, ‘No, we don’t want her anymore.’ You can’t go around acting like this, thinking that you’re special—”

“I’m not! I don’t! Good God, you think I would fucking try to off myself because I think I’m special—”

At this point, my mom burst in and promptly ushered my father out of the room. I could no longer see clearly through the tears welling in my eyes and staining my glasses lenses, so I just crumpled on the floor and buried my face into a stray sweater. My mother came over and sat by me. She ran her fingers through my tangled hair. As I lay there, motionless, settling back into the dust, I heard the sound of my luggage

wheeling, the crisp snap of a zipper unzipping, and finally the gentle lullaby of my mother’s humming as she patiently and meticulously folded each piece of fallen clothing and placed it neatly back into my suitcase.

On the plane, I gazed out from the darkened cabin at the nighttime clouds as my mother and sister slept in the middle and aisle seats, respectively, beside me. In my hands I was holding a copy of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a required reading from my fall semester English class. Mine was the only reading light illuminated; all around me, people either slept or watched TV or kept themselves busy in the comfortable dark. Barcelona was only an hour away.

“Nothing’s lost forever.” Harper, Mormon housewife and recovering Valium addict, tells me this. I brush my thumb over the serif text of the word “lost.” Something which once was that is no longer. Over the years, what was it that I had lost?

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Longing and dreaming. Wishing, hoping. Desperately clinging to semblances of joy, whispers of happiness as transparent as glass and transient as a bubble, poised to burst at the slightest exertion of pressure. Forever searching for something that does not exist.

“At least I think that’s so.”

My fingers twisted the corner of a page distractedly as I watched the sky outside come alive with the sight of the sun on the horizon. A mere hint of light at first, then a glint of golden orange before the world burst at the seams with warmth and color. Two rows in front of me, I saw my father pull his window screen down.

After shuffling along in line for about ten minutes, my father and I finally cross the threshold of the east entrance of the Sagrada Família. Formally known as the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, the Sagrada Família is a Roman Catholic minor basilica originally designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. While my graduate research focuses primarily on Gothic cathedrals, I have always had a special place in my heart for the style of Catalan modernism ever since I first visited Barcelona eight years ago. There’s just something about the geometry, the way in which massive blocks of stone shape themselves into soaring spires and intricate sculptures as if those were their natural forms. Curved lines dominate in the architecture—no straight lines or right angles to be found—and convey a sense of the whole work being an organic phenomenon rather than the labor of man. The detail in

the decoration, the symbolism of the design—oh, and not to mention the colors. So bright and beautiful and vibrant and alive. Yes, it was the colors that first won over my heart.

We follow the crowd until we find ourselves standing in full view of the Nativity Façade. The Sagrada Família has a total of three façades, or faces, that look out onto the street: the Nativity, the Passion, and the Glory Façades. The Nativity Façade facing the east was the first of the three to be completed, as well as the one that bears the most direct influence from Gaudí, as it was the only one at least partially constructed prior to his death in 1926. As its name suggests, the Nativity Façade is dedicated to the birth of Jesus, and my father and I stare wordlessly up at the statues of curlyhaired angels and kneeling magi all gazing in adoration at the young Christ. The style of the façade is ornate but naturalistic; all the onlooking statues appear as if they could resume motion at any time, and the bronze leaves carved into the doors seem as soft and as delicate as any I could pluck from a tree and hold in my hand.

My father and I both knew: this was my mother’s favorite part of the Sagrada Família. My mother loved the Nativity Façade from the moment she first saw it. I still remember her wonderstruck face, her hand holding the earpiece of the audio guide in place, her eyes drifting from feature to feature as per the cheery audio guide’s instruction.

“Do you see the turtles on the columns?” She nudged me and pointed, to which I gave a nod in return. “That one’s actually a sea turtle, and that one’s a land tortoise. They symbolize stability and the unchangeability of time.”

She then took her gaze up to the cypress tree on the central spire.

“See that? That’s the Tree of Life. And the little doves flying around it, do you see them?”

“Yes, Mom, I do.” “They represent peace.”

She and I stood there awhile, staring up at the doves in the cypress tree. They looked so small way up there, but so free.

“You know, your sister and your father are like those turtles. Unshakable, solid— they have tough shells and can go through life unfazed. But you, my little baby…”

My mother hugged me close to her. “I wish I could turn you into a dove and let you fly away.”

My primary research task for this trip to Barcelona is to study the statues on the side of the Passion Façade, the face that looks out to the west. In stark contrast to the Nativity Façade, the Passion Façade is austere and rigid, featuring harshly delineated straight lines that give the impression of skeletal bones and ligaments being pulled taut. The simple, angular statues by Spanish sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs depict the story of Christ’s death through several scenes. The Last Supper. The Kiss of Judas. Jesus presented in a crown of thorns. The soldiers dividing His clothes. Finally, the crucifixion as the central focus of the façade. While the Nativity Façade inspires a sense of new life and nurturing, the Passion Façade is meant to invoke the sentiment of Jesus’ suffering and pain for the sins of man.

I looked up at the statue of Christ on the cross, towering above my father and me down below. The paper I was currently writing was on the subject of artistic pathos and pain, and I had wanted to present Subirachs’ portrayal of Christ as a departure from the traditional depiction of pain in art. According to a Cambridge scholar whom I had heard lecture last fall, there existed a model formula for rendering pain in art that was achieved through the depiction of features of physiognomic strain—the head thrown back with the mouth agape, the arms and legs reaching in desperation, the torso contorting in agony. Many works of classical art rendered pain as such: vulnerable and bare, with the suffering of the subject laid out openly for the world to see. Subirachs’ Christ, however, exhibits none of these traditional characteristics. Bound to the cross by nails, His arms and legs are straight and unmoving. His whole body is stiff and still, fully frontal to any onlookers from below. Even His face is obscured from us, His divine head bowed in mortal humility. Yet the signifiers of pain are still present. Though the details are difficult to distinguish at a distance, one can still see the sharp protrusion of his ribs, jutting out from his emaciated form. The tension in his clenched fists, the strain in his contracting muscles and stretched tendons. The unspoken sentiment in his unseen face: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Throughout the entirety of His suffering, He has borne it all inaudibly, invisibly, all for the absolution of an unworthy people.

My eyes broke away from the crucifixion and searched for my father. At first, I did not see him among the swarming crowd around me, but finally I spotted him somewhat farther ahead in the distance. His back was turned toward me, and I could not see his face. I made as if to call out to him, but before I could do so he turned around to face me. His expression was blank, and his eyes were silent.

A month after my mother’s funeral, my father and I had our first weekly dinner as a duo at our local Applebee’s. Growing up, our whole family used to eat here all the time, so it felt strange to be back again in the same familiar booth, just the two of us, sitting underneath the photos of our hometown’s Little League baseball team smiling toothy grins out at us, the little boys having not aged a day.

My eyes were bleary and puffy from crying over the past few days. I stared vacuously at the gleaming burgers and steaks on the pages of the menu without registering a single image. I had no desire to eat whatsoever.

“What will you have?” I asked my father. “Fiesta Lime Chicken.”

And his Yuengling beer. That was his usual order, and he got it every time, without fail, as part of the combo deal with my mother. She would get the Cedar Grilled Lemon Chicken as part of the 2 for $20 deal, and they would split a Spinach & Artichoke Dip with the family.

“Okay. I’m going to have the Chicken Wonton Tacos.”

My usual as well. We placed our orders with the waitress, a plump and smiley woman with golden blonde hair, and she placed two waters on our table before taking our orders off to the kitchen. I took a few feeble sips from the straw. My father left his untouched. For ten minutes, we sat there without speaking, the TVs blaring with announcers’ shouted commentary, the other patrons at the surrounding tables alive with conversation. A mother cooed as she spoon-fed mashed potato into her impishly resistant infant’s mouth. A father wrangled his sons back to their seats and scolded them lightly with a playful grin. A group of children sang happy birthday in unison, their laughter like the shrieking call of crows.

Our silence was beginning to suffocate me. “Hey Dad,” I began out of nowhere. “When are you going back to work?” “Tuesday.” “I see. They need you at the office again so soon?” “No.” “Oh.” I waited for further explanation, but none arrived. “So why then?” “Why what?” “Are you going back to work when you don’t have to?” “Don’t have to. Want to.”

“Oh.”

The cheery blonde waitress appeared with our orders. We ate our meals in silence. I watched my father’s throat bulging and receding with every piece of chicken and sip of beer. It started to dawn on me that my greatest nightmare, one that I had feared for years ever since childhood, was now coming true. It was not the death of my mother, no—every child fears that—but a step even further. It was the state we found ourselves in right now, my father and I, seated across from each other but both alone, neither one of us able to truly speak with the other, sitting in silence like this for the rest of our lives.

I felt my hands beginning to tremble. I gripped my water glass tightly in my hands. “Dad, do you remember that winter a few years ago, when we went to Barcelona?” He looked up from his food to indicate that he was listening.

“It was Christmas Eve, and Mom suggested that we attend Midnight Mass at the Cathedral of Barcelona.”

He didn’t respond, but I kept pressing.

“We were waiting for forever in this long line just to get inside, the four of us huddled there together in the winter cold, and you were harping at Mom for not getting in line sooner, but then finally we got inside—”

“I was not yelling at your mother.” “No, Dad, I didn’t say you were, I just meant—” “She should have known better than to wait until the last minute. Always late.”

“Never mind that, okay? Anyway, I was thinking just now about how beautiful the lights were on Christmas Eve, and how much Mom wanted to be able to visit Barcelona again, someday when La Sagrada Família would be finished too, and I—”

I was struggling to maintain my composure. “I just miss her so much, and I wish that there was some sort of way that she—” “Your mother is gone.”

I blinked in disbelief, stunned by the bluntness of my father’s words. For a moment it was as if I was still registering that he had even said them at all.

“Your mother is not coming back. She’s not going to be here to save you anymore. And you have to be able to handle it.”

“Dad, I am handling it.” My water glass slipped through my damp hands and hit the table with an awkward clunk. “How could you even say that when all I was trying to do was—”

“Don’t make a scene. Control yourself.”

“I am controlling myself!” I stood and slammed my hands on the table. “All I wanted was to remember Mom in a moment when she was happy, when she was with us, and as always you have to come along and ruin it. Don’t you have a heart? Don’t you miss her?”

Summoning as much nastiness as I could muster, I sneered at my father. “Did you never even love her at all?”

My father was quiet. I was suddenly acutely aware of what I was doing and felt shame. I sat back down and tried to feel my pulse in my wrist with two shaky fingers.

“Of course I loved her.”

I looked up and was startled to see my father with his head bent, his hands collecting wayward tears that fell from his eyes like pebbles.

“Of course I love her.”

The Sagrada Família was not actually fully completed until this year, which made the timing of our second trip to Barcelona particularly serendipitous. Gaudí was aware from the very beginning that he would he would not be able to finish construction on the church within his lifetime and as such made sure to leave behind detailed plans, models, and instructions with the understanding and the hope that future generations would take on this project and complete his life’s work. My mother had joked that if my father had been the one in charge, his stubbornness and lack of trust in others would prevent such an undertaking from ever reaching completion. But with the sculptural work on the final south-facing Glory Façade having been finished just last summer, the Sagrada Família was finally complete, as Gaudí had envisioned it.

My father and I passed through the huge doors of the Glory Façade, which bore the inscription of the Lord’s Prayer in Catalan (“Pare nostre, que esteu en el cel…”), and found ourselves in the interior of the temple. Instantly, I felt my heart regain a sense of peace that it had been missing for a long time. The forest of columns stretched from floor to ceiling, connecting the earth with the heavens above. With their geometrically pleasing helix shapes, the tree-like columns split into branches near the top, serving not only to support more weight but also to convey a sense of being within the natural world in accordance with Gaudí’s love of and respect for nature. Beneath the overarching canopy of stone, visitors milled about, admiring especially the colors of the stained glass windows. Both the eastern and western walls of the basilica are adorned with beautiful works of stained glass, but while those of the eastern wall corresponding to the Nativity Façade consist primarily of cool tones, those on the

western wall corresponding with the Passion Façade are comprised of warm colors instead. This design is meant to follow the sun throughout its path over the course of the day as it shines through the windows, casting a calming wash of cool greens and blues in the morning followed by a vibrant blaze of reds and oranges in the afternoon, mirroring the life of Jesus Christ from His blessed birth to His passionate death. As it was nearing three o’clock, the sunlight streaming through the Passion windows cast a reddish-golden glow over the faces of all the visitors.

We walk toward the very center of the temple, where there is a space with some seats, facing a golden octagonal chandelier above a suspended wooden crucifix, that is open for prayer. One does not need to be Catholic to pray there; it is open to all who wish to pray, so long as they do so quietly and respectfully. I sit down on one of the benches and look up at the hanging Christ on the cross, haloed by the encircling gold lights of the single chandelier.

The image of my mother returns to me now. She is holding my hand as we sit upon the bench, the figure of Christ looming over our heads. I have been quiet throughout our entire visit, on the brink of tears all this time. Somewhere on the other side of the central nave, my father waited for us with my sister.

I watched my mother’s bowed head. Her eyes are gently shut, her mouth forming the words of a prayer. Her two hands, clasped together, sandwich my left hand in the middle.

“Mom, they’ve been waiting for us a while now.” “I’m almost done.” Her lips continue to whisper silently. “What are you even praying for, anyway?” She raises her head and opens her eyes, smiling at me.

“I asked the Lord for strength.” She squeezes my hand in hers. “The strength to help you and your father to forgive.”

Echoes of the prior day resurface in my memory.

Church bells tolling, announcing midnight. Golden chandeliers overhanging countless rows of pews. Men and women dressed in black robes, speaking and singing in Catalan. Dozens of churchgoers filing out into the cold night. Walking. Stumbling. Searching for the way home. Cold. Tired. Lost. Frightened.

My hunched form, cowering in the center of a large plaza. My shivering arms wrapped tightly around my knees. My heart threatening to explode in my chest.

“Go away! I hate you! I don’t ever want to see you again!”

My father’s face, contorted with anger. “Fine! I’ll go away. Just stop making a scene!”

My mother hurriedly knelt beside me and tried to wrap me in her arms, but I shook her off with a scream. My eyes locked with my father’s.

“Why did you have to be my father?” I could barely hear the own words from my mouth over the roar of my blood in my ears. “Why did it have to be you? You, who never ever loved me, ever—”

Before I had the chance to finish, my father advanced upon me and yanked me up to my feet. Staggering, I regained my footing as my father shook me and said:

“Don’t you ever say that. Of course I love you. You have to know that.”

Fearing that he was going to strike me, I was surprised when he pulled me in to a tight hug. We remained like that, my body stiff in his embrace, my arms rigid against my side, as the both of us stood silently.

“I still remember when you were a baby, and I carried you on my shoulders,” said my father.

A baby. A beautiful baby, smiling and laughing. “You were so small, and so fragile, yet so happy. And you loved me so much.” Love. Happy. The voice of a child. Daddy, I love you. “What happened? What happened to us? Where did your happiness go?” What happened? Happiness. What happened? Where did it go? “Tell me, please. Where did I go wrong?”

My father sitting down beside me snaps me out of my daze. We mull in silence for a bit, watching the people in prayer together.

“It’s time we should be heading out soon, isn’t it?” I turn to my father. “We still haven’t made plans for dinner.”

“Just a moment.” He takes out a folded-up piece of paper from his coat pocket. “What’s that?” He unfolds the paper in his hands and smooths out the creases. “A note. A prayer.”

I gave him a puzzled look. My father was not what you would consider the religious type.

“To your mother. I wrote it down so that I would not forget or say the wrong thing.”

My father hesitates. The golden light shines off the specks of silver in his hair. I notice the paper trembling in his hands, and I steady them with my own.

“It’s okay, Dad. Read the prayer to Mom.” “Alright.” He shifts his weight slightly, then begins to read, slowly.

“Mom, who is watching us from above. It is Dad. Megan and I are at the Sagrada Família. It is finished now. We have seen it in its completion. We wish you were here to see it with us. I am here to pray for your help. I have decided to make a promise—to take care of Megan as best as I can. To help her find her happiness again. Please help me enforce it.”

Dad. I’m sorry. I take back what I said.

“I have told her before that she should never make any promise that she cannot keep. Now I must do the same. I have my made my difficult promise, and I intend to keep it. Please help me keep this promise. Please help look over Megan. Please give us your strength.”

I don’t hate you. I never hated you. Dad— “God bless you, and God bless our family. There is nothing more sacred.”

Megan Pan Princeton University, ’22