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One Long Sentence and a Few Short Ones, or 39 Lines by Frank Gehry: Guggenheim, Bilbao.
BY JAMES HARMS
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On a boulevard in Barcelona my watch began its backward crawl as Lani counted down the buildings by Gaudí and whistled the same song
she'd been whistling since a morning in Córdoba, when it leaked from a pair of headphones a girl had left near a plate of pears, all of us sharing plans to visit Toledo
on our way back, though all we knew of morning and each other we learned and forgot in that simple crawl through breakfast in a courtyard, a song beginning its slow construction in Lani's mind, a building
of music as lovely and eternal as any building by Gaudí, the way the memory of music can pare away the sallow air once soaked with song, with orange trees and sweat, how everywhere in Seville
diesel smoke hung like gray streamers above the crawl of traffic each evening, how even morning was a sepia fog, a breath exhaled from the last morning dream before waking, before the daily building
back of confidence and faith revived the crawl of hope—even Lani in her brand-new pair of silver sandals believed that Lorca left Granada to spare the city, not himself: once every song
was dusted over and done, once every song hardened like a bullet in a cast of mourning, little metal murmurs, once Lorca stopped dreaming of Málaga and the sea and simply swallowed another fist in a building
bruised blue by evening, his face as soft as a pear left for no one on a sill, ants crawling up the wall in a line, certain of sugar and crawling and a little mound of sand; once all the songs
and their memories stopped and a last pair of moths exploded in the light of morning ... Lani finished counting the strange buildings and began to plan. "A thousand miles to Madrid,"
she said, her finger crawling the map as she sang the same song. "But let's forget Madrid." The buildings fell away, a pair of cows in a field. "It's even farther to Bilbao."
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