Ian,
Barcelona, Barcelona. So appreciative of your ambassadorship these last few days. I had LEFT, was up in some town, had slept in the thorns across the street from a suburban bar in which I wrote in my journal Paddy Fermour style, but also, because of my characteristically slow pace, still within an easy, cheap train ride back to a different town, a new city, Canek's.

The day I was then leaving I went first to the great majestic palace museum, wandered among its skins for much longer than planned, the whole morning at least, (including other skins by Fortuny and so forth) blissful and feeling closer and closer to the saint (Patrick Leigh Fermour) and to Catalunya; then walked across town and after gulping some chickpeas went into the exhibit of photographs by Jacques Leonard, who was married to a gypsy from Montjuic, and took photographs within his large wonderful families there, Montjuic, one of my places, though my feet know only the slope above the port and the palace where you sent me.

Where I hope to go back in the next few days with Canek - the photograph exhibit I mean. He's been an angel to me, looking out for me and my backpack, has me installed currently in a magnificent building downtown on Banys Nous being squatted in by a passel of his street music brothers and sisters. Though last night one of the more unstable of this troupe woke me and kept me up, rummaging around in the rooms like a gigantic mouse, doing his laundry in the bathroom tub, things like that.

Yes, so my bicycle was stolen the second or third day here. I was in the library, el Gotic, reading about 1909, and came out into the sunlight and it was as though it had never been, this so familiar and dear machine that I had just dismembered a few days before for the bus up, and that I had worked on the bearings of in Saintes, and so forth, that had taken me across Roncevalles. I stumbled about, angrily drinking coffees and morosely wondering what Canek was doing. After a wet night on Montjuic I enlisted at a Hostel that Emily Harvey told me about, something of an upgrade, with a Henry Miller-obsessed finn to talk to, also a loser Englishman selling beers with the Pakistanis.

This isn't good reportage, its too disorganized. Hush. Since Canek Barcelona has expanded dramatically; I can go on down to the quay in front of La Barceloneta and work a way through the crowd that the band assembles, deadbeats and tourists and sane young men and women smoking weed and affably asking after my travels, talking about pruning apple trees, growing vegetables, making baskets, things like that. Tomorrow if all goes well we're to buy a shovel or something and go up to Bon Repos, to the terrace behind, and heft some stones around and begin working up a plot for a vegetable garden, me and Francois, Canek's old friend.

Hm, the beautiful women of Barcelona. A charming Alicia from Paris the other day at the quay gave me grapes, an orange, cookies, and the last quarter of her quart of orange juice, thrust into my hands as she was leaving. A Lucia opened the door - what a door. Inside is a warren of soi-disant artists, skillful guitarists, messy, tired folks and their clutter, notably an abundance of wheeled luggage, the better to carry street instruments in, as well as fragments of croissants, things like that, spread all over beautiful tiled floors in gigantic flats arranged around a wide shaft of light. The door is a palace door, eleven feet tall and six feet wide, of varnished wood, with iron lions encircled by the snake that swallows its own tail, I forget what it is called.

I don't quite know where the bicycle absence leaves me. I want to try to stay on here for as long as I can with conscience ingratiate myself; I may move to Canek's to get some sleep. Then there is this Jerome in France that gave me a five-minute ride in my hitchhiking days, near Souvingy, in a town of auspicious syllables: Gypcy, who is maybe thirty, and told me a week or so ago that he was still finishing his own house, moving in, and then would begin on someone else's, and that I could work for a while with him. I guess I would be thinking about coming home if I didn't have that work; and I may not have it, it may evaporate and never have been, unlike my bicycle, which evaporated even though it had been. I may use the work to get another bicycle and set off in another direction, don't know where.

On the other hand I do find myself thinking often of my dear parents in Quaker City and pruning apple trees. I write them letters important to me, and in the background a list seems to compile of projects I could engage in there while pruning apple trees and visiting them:  carving spoons, for example. Another week without hearing from this carpenter - hearing from him has become one of these arbitrary and fatal signposts, maybe.

I break this off according to the arbitrarily expiring time in pixily purgatory.

Much love
Willis