1 April 1940

The morning sun ignites the violent kaleidoscope of the Dragon as it spurts a jet of greenish water in the middle of the double staircase. Three boys with shaved heads sit astride the dragon, brandishing wooden swords. One ofthe boys—let’s say it was me, although I wasn’t a standout when it comes to telling tall tales, much less at starring in them—dismounts and cleans his bloodied sword in the water that flows from the Dragon’s mossy mouth.

Not far from this fascinating landscape the grown-ups subsist among ruins, hunger and defeat, and Europe will soon become a pile of rubble. But in the meantime, galloping bareback on the beast, the boys are invincible and the polychromatic daydream of the setting remains intact. Then a respectable and dapper old man appears out of nowhere in the middle of the staircase and warns us that the Dragon’s water is poisoned. It happened one day, he says with his smoky voice, many, many years ago in a distant land near Delphi. A monster that devoured men and destroyed crops poisoned the water in the area. That monster is none other than this Dragon, and, he adds, today marks exactly a year since it poisoned the big rainwater tank in the park, that green water that now spurts from its mouth. ‘Jeez, grandpa, you’ve got a screw loose!’ exclaimed one of us—let’s say it was me. There was nothing strange about that, lately there are loose screws all over the place, the city streets are full of screws and since the bombs have gone quiet you can see plenty of lunatics roaming in the park, not just mutilated bums or that street girl in rags who rides a man’s bicycle, flashing her tanned thighs, but authentic nutters muttering to themselves or doing other strange things. This man, who may well have escaped from the nearby Cottolengo asylum, wants to convince us that Park Guell is a representation of a sacred and ancestral land, and is warning us about the evil green water of the Dragon.