INTERVIEW WITH A CATHEDRAL by Mike Ross

INTERVIEW WITH A CATHEDRAL by Mike Ross

“I’m not really a cathedral,” she sniffs in Catalonian, the native language here in Barcelona, Spain. She shrugs a little for emphasis. “I’m just a church with a fancy name, La Sagrada Familia. You can call me Sagra if you want.” Her attention is drawn to a swirl of motion on the main floor. She turns back to me. “Just a moment, please. I have to attend to something.” 

She turns her focus to a young family who has just entered. A priest approaches them and guides them to a side altar. The young woman holds a tiny infant and the scene glows like a Michelangelo painting, mother and infant, father hovering nearby. The priest mutters a prayer in Spanish, pours a bit of water on the baby’s head. It jerks then squawks and bawls, and the baptism is complete. “Sorry,” she says, smiling, as she returns. “I love these new beginnings, rebirth, renewal and all of that. I believe it’s what makes me important.”

Her importance has led to fame and all that comes with it. I ask her how she feels being gawked at and having millions of folks trample across her threshold every year?

“Well, I’m used to it by now. I seem to be a cross between Marilyn Monroe for gawking and Grand Central Station for trampling,” she laughs at her self-comparison. “After 142 years, I’ve been through it all. The thrill of my first years, the nightmare loss of Anton, abandonment, war, and finally a new start.” She sighs. “Of course I have visitors who have heart attacks, get sick, faint. One fellow took a pee in the west corner.” She chuckles, and light shines through her stained glass. “Nothing is new to me anymore.”

I ask Sagra what her earliest memory is.

She thinks for a moment. “I was inside Anton’s head, I remember that.” She’s referring to the design genius, Antoni Gaudi, whose creation she is. She will often refer to him as just Anton. “I was his vision, like a symphony was inside Beethoven. He wanted me to be a singular design, a church like no one had ever seen before, something unique. Anton wanted to reflect the symmetry he saw in nature. He believed all design was there, already created.”

Is that why the columns look like redwood trees and the ceiling supports like branches, I ask? She nods. 

“Did you notice my west facade?” She asks. Of course I had. It looks like concrete was splashed in bucketsful against the building and left to run down and congeal. “It’s fluttering leaves, you see, like in nature.” What of the bowls of fruit atop the parapets?

“Oh my, I think Anton might have gotten a bit into the wine stores when he sketched those! But it’s part of my playfulness. Makes me feel a bit like Chiquita Banana with a fruit basket for a hat. He loved the fun of the design, it made him so happy, so I didn’t complain. But when he wanted a Christ figure sitting on a giant mushroom I told him a firm no.” 

She speaks about Anton like a lover. “Oh yes, we were deeply, madly in love. We began our days together, celebrated when my tree columns turned out so beautifully, and commiserated when he tore up a design that didn’t work. We lived and breathed as one. He was 73 but with me, he was a young man, full of energy and excitement. Life without him was unthinkable. Until 1926.”

She recalls the day her beloved Anton died. He’d just left her in the late afternoon with plans for the east facade racing in his head, she says. “He never paid much attention to the outside world. I was his world and he was mine.” He was so distracted he didn’t hear the streetcar clanging its warning bell. The car smashed into him, full on. He landed several yards away, unconscious. “He was a bit disheveled and his beard hid much of his face. No one recognized him at first. They took him for a beggar. The clinic they put him in did nothing. When at last someone realized who it was and took him to the real hospital, it was too late. He died.” She pauses and glances away, voice shaking. “I died.”

The silence lasts several moments. I ask her what happened after she lost him. “I grieved for months, years probably. The loss of him is still sometimes crushing, the memory almost unbearable. I let myself go. Funding stopped and I was abandoned. That time of my life was the darkest.”

It was also a dark time for Spain. Three years after Gaudi’s death, the financial world collapsed and famine and death came to Spain, followed by another of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War. The fascist dictator Ferdinand Franco fought and defeated the forces of the Republican government. Hemingway and George Orwell fought with the Republicans, Hitler supported Franco. After millions of deaths, the war ended and Franco became dictator. “Some of his fascist thugs set fire in my office, where Anton had kept my design blueprints. They were destroyed. That was almost as hard to bear as Anton’s death,” she says in a low voice. “During the war, a few partisans took refuge in me. I hid them in tiny side rooms and in nooks in my towers. It made me feel good, to know at least I was helping people in times of trouble.” I ask how long she was abandoned. She brightens. 

“Some funds were raised in the 1950s, as I recall, and volunteers cleaned up my inside. The war had been over for 20 years and even though Franco still ruled the country, people began donating to me again. But the money wasn’t enough. That depressed me. Then someone in the city government had an idea to copy the Mona Lisa scheme in France!” I look confused and she says she’ll explain. 

“After World War II, Paris had to lure back her tourists to make money. Someone there arranged for the Mona Lisa to be stolen. It wasn’t da Vinci’s best work but it was small and easily hidden. Then the authorities flooded the world news media with headlines about the theft. The intense, months-long search dominated cultural news. When the thing was found and returned to the Louvre, the celebrations made headlines again. Tourists world-wide flocked to Paris to see Mona! Still do. It was a sensational success. The marketeers here in Barcelona wanted to do a similar campaign but how do you steal and hide something with hips as big as mine?” She laughs at her own joke. “You can’t. So they cloaked me in controversy (I supposedly am hated by the neighbors), tragedy (the loss of my dear Anton), and mystery (did I hide refugees fleeing fascism? yes, but I won’t name names). The tourists and the money have been pouring in ever since.” She shrugs. “And there it is.”

Well, not quite. I ask her how she feels about being nearly completed. 

“Oh, that. Small detail. The builders will make sure some construction is always going on. Churches under construction pay no taxes!” She waves her hand. “With my bowls of fruit, exploding stars on top of my tall, skinny towers, my redwood columns and the magical light through my stained glass, I’ll always be unique and that brings fame.” Is that enough, I ask? Is fame from unique design the most important thing? 

She shakes her head a bit. “No. Fame alone is empty. Look,” she says as she sweeps her hand across her vast, crowded interior, “my people are Christians, Atheists, Agnostics, Jews, and Muslims. They are all my people. To them I’m Mother Nature in stone, the way Anton made me. Nature means new beginnings, rebirth. That is my true significance, not design, but renewal.” She nods to another young couple who have just entered. “Forgive me, I’ve another baptism.” I thank her for her time.

In little side chapels, christenings take place hourly, couples marry, others seek spiritual help, all part of new beginnings, defining the importance of La Sagrada Famila. I watch as the light streams in through the orange, gold, green and blue glass and washes over everyone, rebirth in its wake. 

The author, Michael Ross, has flipped burgers at Burger Chef, been a County Jail administrator, a German teacher for 35 years, and a tour guide for 45 years. He lives in Michigan, with his wife, Dianna (an awesome editor), and has loads of kids and grandkids. He is a traveler, runner and skier but his first love is writing.