The funicular railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child's burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil's Latin, part of the sentence in which he offered to Christ the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me, 'All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.' I don't know when the mountain received its name, but there is obviously a pretty complicated joke in the folk memory here. Is this the world Christ rejected? The Devil's world? Or did Christ make a mistake? Perhaps the suggestion is that Christ didn't take enough time to think, that a little Catalan pragmatism would have allowed him to reject the Devil but keep a piece of the worldly kingdom and glory.

LRB 28 May 1992 | PDF Download