A flight of steps takes you from one floor to the next. If you are at ground level, you could fly upwards, as high as needed, to reach your roost; if you are floating somewhere above, you would flutter downward to reach the street.

If your ceilings are high and your walls short, a stretch of stairway may not fly you from one floor to the next. In our building, the stairs double back on themselves once between each floor. The segments in a flight of stairs are called “flits”. Our building boasts two flits per flight. My friend Sal, master of the moist (or much) arcane, would enjoy researching the veracity of this, or extending its coinage.

Certainly there are higher ceilings, or a shorter run of stairs, and buildings with those constraints may need three or even four flits to fit a floor. There are also buildings with many floors but one single flight, whose stairs turn and turn upon themselves ad minimum, where one flight = one flit = hundreds of potential landings. My brother Mike must enjoy pondering the math of that.

In each of our flits there are nine flaps. Flapping upward tends to cause puffing. The higher you flap, flit or fly, the more you puff. Flapping downward trades puffing for slapping. Slap slap slap slap slap slap slap slap slap. Then there are three steps: step step step. Then nine more slaps, flaps, flit flit flit. Flight. Flight. Door. All this counting might delight my mother Georgia.

Flying upwards is sometimes desired – your exercise for the day in a single return to the aerie; or perhaps the tiny turn-of-the-century elevator impresses you more than usual with its resemblance to an airless, fermenting coffin; when it is so desired, the flapping and a visceral measure of height begins. In the United States, where I was born, this takes the shape of a linear progression of integers (back to Mike). It looks like this:

1 – First Floor
2 – Second Floor
3 – Third Floor
.. and so on until your reach the number you wish. Then you stop.

In Brasil, it looked like this:

0 – Térreo (ground floor)
1 – 1° andar (first floor)
2 – 2° andar (second floor)
.. and so on until you reach the number you wanted, minus one. The Estados Unidos de Brasil are more grounded than the United States of America.

Here in Catalunya, it is simply not so simple. You could be flying sideways, or you could be flying blind. You are flying into the known unknown. You fly into open arms. In Catalunya it looks like this:

½ – Baixo (ground floor, but it is one flit from the ground, half a flight up from tierra firma. This is where you decide if you wish to ride the elevator coffin.

Principal – This is where the owners live. It has the big ½-floor up terrace where you can invite friends for lovely dinners, without asking them to ride the coffin or count many steps.

Primer – the first floor is 2½ floors above the street. We have now started counting.

Segon – the second floor is two flits above the first, one flight whose wings race toward the outer wall then back again to the apartment doors.

Tercer – we are still reasonably sequential. Puffing has begun.

Quart – Except that some of the Catalan ordinals look like French. This gives us something to think about while we puff louder and wonder why the elevator didn’t come down to Baixo when we called it.

Cinquè – Oh, it is because the tourist renters on the fifth (I mean 6½-th) floor were oblivious to the fact that they didn’t close the elevator outer door completely, which of course didn’t allow it to lock and move anywhere.

Átic – No. This is not an attic, but it is The attic, and this is where we live. This is where the coffin stops.

Superatic – Yes. There is a Super Attic, with a better view from their terrace (ours is delightful) and possible roof access, which would be super-super-atic, and from which birds would really take flight, or nest, or flit or float or fly.

One last bit of mathematics. There are precisely 136 flaps from the street to our dusty old attic apartment. You might think the extra wingbeat would be counted in the first flit between street and elevator. This is not the case. It is part of the second flit, beneath the feet of the Principality, making space for who-knows-what, and adding a little extra jump up (or down) to our flight path.

And that, my friends, is all you need to know about escales catalanes.