On a beautiful late summers day Rosa and I walked along the Passeig de Lluis Companys. We heard a soft calling. The sound came from out of the sycamore trees. When we looked up, we saw a tiny little girl (not bigger than a children’s hand) tied with a shoelace hanging from a branch. She was green with yellow dots and had a long nose.

She called: ‘fetch me, fetch me!’ I wanted to continue but Rosa found it sad. ‘If in autumn the leaves fall, she might fall too and die!’ So she climbed on my shoulders and untied the little creature from the tree. When she layed in the arms of Rosa, we noticed a strong and bad smell. Possibly the creature itself could not smell it, her nose was long and the nostrils sat at the end.

She had quite a character. She immediatly climbed in my breast pocket and said: ‘that’s it. Now I have parents.’

Hearing us talking about an orphanage, she started to scream at the top of her voice, not to tell about what she did when we talked about an pet shelter.

So we were stuck with her. Time went by and I got used to her smell. But when she’d fart and a brown stripe would slowly go down my shirt, I had some thoughts. For the rest; it must be said, she was a doll.

In the house, on the street and on the market she bumped into everything with her nose. On the way back from the market she could have a strawberry or a lemon on the tip of it.

She ate enormous amounts of food. But only her nose grew, her body stayed small.

Till one day, it must have been in the second year. We were drinking tea and all of a sudden her nose fell in the cup. As a result she started to grow wildly. She burst out of her clothes. In ten minutes she became three times her size, her colour changed to a beautiful baby pink and she smelled like a divine baby too.

We still did not have a name for her. On Mondays we called her ‘Trixie’, on Tuesday ‘Footboard’, on Wednesday ‘Lenin’, on Thursday ‘Cartload’, on Friday ‘Is It This Late Again’, on Saturday ‘Hey, It’s Weekend’ and on Sunday she was called ‘No Name’.

Now that we had a real and presentable child, we had to come to a conclusion.

In the same period I had to go to a gala dinner dressed in smoking and bow tie. I was not able to make the nod and the child had small and agile fingers. So I asked her to tie it. She made all kinds of fantasy nods and I begged her: ‘please, make a gala bow tie nod, a gala nod, please, gala, please!’

When she finally managed to do so, she danced around the table and sang loud: ‘gala, gala, gala!’

That’s why we named her Gala.

Years have passed now and Gala is about to become an adolescent. So anything I say, she contradicts. But be sure, that this is the whole truth and noting but the truth about how we came to have this splendid daughter.

Barcelona, June 2017.