Guillem Piña, Calle Gaspar Pujol, Andratx, Mallorca, June 1994. We met in 1977. It's been a long time since then. A lot has happened. Back then I used to buy two newspapers each morning and several magazines. I read everything. I knew everything that was going on. We saw a lot of each other, always on my turf. I think I only went to his place once. We went out to eat together. I paid. It's been a long time since then. Barcelona has changed. Barcelona's architects haven't changed, but Barcelona has. I used to paint every day, not like now, but there were too many parties, too many gatherings, too many friends. Life was exciting. In those days everybody had a magazine and I liked that. I had shows in Paris, New York, Vienna, London. Arturo would disappear for long stretches at a time. He liked my magazine. I would give him back issues, and I gave him a drawing too. I gave it to him framed because I knew he didn't have the money to frame anything. What drawing was it? A sketch for a painting I never finished: The Other Demoiselles d'Avignon. I met dealers who were interested in my work. But I wasn't very interested in my work. Around that time I painted three fake Picabias. They were perfect. I sold two and kept one. Painting the fakes, I saw a faint light, but it was a light, which is the important thing. With the money I made I bought a Kandinsky print and a batch of arte povera, possibly also forgeries. Sometimes I would get on a plane and fly to Mallorca. I would go see my parents in Andratx and take long walks in the country. Sometimes I would just watch my father, who painted too, when he went out with his canvases and easel, and strange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead fish or fish on the verge of death at the bottom of the sea. But then I would think about other things. In those days I had a studio in Palma. I moved paintings back and forth. I would bring them from my parents' house to the studio and from the studio to my parents' house. Then I would get bored and fly back to Barcelona. Arturo would come to my house to shower. He didn't have a shower where he was living, obviously, and he would come use mine on Moliner, near Plaza Cardona.
We talked, we never argued. I would show him my paintings and he would say fantastic, I love them, that kind of thing. I've always found that oppressive. I know he meant what he said, but still, I felt oppressed. Then he would be quiet, smoking, and I would make tea or coffee or bring out a bottle of whiskey. I don't know, I don't know, I would think, I might be doing something right, I might be onto something. The visual arts are ultimately incomprehensible. Or they're so comprehensible that nobody, first and foremost myself, will accept the most obvious reading of them. Back then, Arturo was sleeping occasionally with a girlfriend of mine. He didn't know about us. That is, he knew we were friends, how could he not when I was the one who'd introduced them, but what he didn't know was that she was a girlfriend. They slept together every once in a while: once a month, say. I thought it was funny. In some ways he could be very naïve. My friend lived on Calle Denia, not far from where I lived, and I had the key to her apartment and sometimes I would show up there at eight in the morning, looking for something I had forgotten for one of my classes, and I would find Arturo in bed or making breakfast, and he would look at me as if asking himself is she his friend or a girlfriend? I thought it was funny. Good morning, Arturo, I would say, and sometimes I had to make an effort not to laugh. I was sleeping with another friend too, but I slept with her much more often than my friend slept with Arturo. Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.
Then came the disenchantment. I was teaching classes at the university and I wasn't happy there. I didn't want to explain my work in theoretical terms. I was teaching classes and my colleagues seemed to fall into two clearly distinct groups: the frauds (the mediocrities and scoundrels), and those who weren't just teaching but were getting somewhere with their art outside of work, for better or for worse. And all of a sudden I realized that I didn't want to belong to either group, and I quit. I started to teach at a high school. What a relief. Was it like being demoted from lieutenant to sergeant? Possibly. Maybe to corporal. Though I didn't feel like a lieutenant or a sergeant or a corporal, but a ditch digger, sewer dredger, a road worker lost or separated from his crew. In retrospect, the passage from one state to another takes on the harsh, brutal overtones of the sudden and irremediable, but of course it all happened much more slowly. I met a millionaire who bought my work, my magazine died of neglect and lack of interest, I started other magazines, I had shows. But none of that exists anymore: the words are more real than the actuality. The truth is that one day it was over and all I had left was my fake Picabia, my only guide, my only handhold. Some unemployed person could reproach me for being incapable of happiness, even though I had everything. I could reproach a murderer for committing murders, and a murderer could reproach a suicide victim for his desperate or enigmatic last act. The truth is that one day it was all over and I took a look around me. I stopped buying so many magazines and newspapers. I stopped having shows. I started to teach my drawing classes at the high school with humility and seriousness and even (although I don't make a big deal about it) a certain sense of humor. Arturo had disappeared from our lives long ago.