There is one place on the Rambla that Ariadna Pi has always been very fond of. This has been true of all the incarnations she has known over the decades, especially when they have taken place in and around El Chino, such as when she existed as a textile worker and mother of a family in a flat in Carrer Escudellers, a florist on the Rambla itself, a whore in Robadores, a shop assistant in Plaça del Padró, a young girl who someone fell madly in love with one night in La Paloma and never saw again, a young girl with whom someone fell madly in love one night in La Paloma and whom she never saw again, an immigrant first from the Catalan and then Andalusian countryside, and very recently from the Maghreb, living in a shabby boarding house perhaps in Carrer Ample, and earning a living rubbing scales in the Eixample. It should be noted that the aversion to this building was not so much explained by the things that were done, but by the type of staff who frequented it: haughty, bloated, arrogant characters, disdainful of the working people of the neighbourhood. The frequenters were the masters, the bankers, the landlords, the financiers, the powerful and their respective wives, the "best houses" in Barcelona, all the most uptight people, always dressed in their best clothes, hypocritically bragging to each other...
