María de Orube cannot leave her house because the owner of the building has removed the ramp that allowed her to overcome the obstacle of the portal steps with her wheelchair. Nor is she able to rest many times, both because of the constant noise of renovation work in the adjacent apartments, and because she is often frightened by calls and messages from the owners who are impatient for her to leave this house that has been hers since she was a child, because her grandfather had the entire building built in 1928, even though she has a rental contract. It is one of those noble buildings on the last stretch of the Gran Vía, those that open onto the beautiful prospect of the Plaza de España and the only non-horrendous suburb of Madrid, the one that overlooks the Campo del Moro and the Casa de Campo, and ends in the blue horizon of the Guadarrama, on which it seems that Velázquez’s gaze has remained imprinted forever.
In the Plaza de España and around the Palacio de Oriente, a landscape reform of extraordinary sensitivity was completed a few years ago, populating with native plants and paths conducive to following what had been one of the usual horrors of Spanish urban planning, the ramps and avenues like highways that fragmented that space of the city and made it unlivable and impracticable, and also abolished the views that now branch out towards Via Ferraz and the temple of Debod, on that now almost rural hill where until then the Montaña barracks stood. the summer of 1936. The reform made possible the sequence of a walk in the present and in nature and also in time, because the historic buildings show before the eyes a breadth of more than two centuries. Surrounded by trees and wild plants, the monument to Cervantes was no longer lost in a suburban wasteland. In an exercise of customary municipal brutality, Madrid’s right-wing city council has imposed a large empty, treeless space that takes up much of the square and which is rented out for fairs and private celebrations. They also imposed, almost at the last minute, a giant flag and pole like Elon Musk’s space rocket, to inform that Madrid is in Spain – and not Venezuela, I suppose.
I don’t know if María de Orube can see the green spot of Plaza de España from any window in her house. What is unlikely is that he will continue to live there for a long time. The new owners of the building, until recently occupied by neighbors like María, are renovating it to dedicate it entirely to the rental of tourist apartments. For now they don’t have a driving license and in theory all rentals are seasonal. But María hears the elevators going up and down continuously, and the voices of people arriving and leaving at strange hours or celebrating parties until dawn, and she will have gotten used to that menacing noise that is already one of the acoustic characteristics of this time in cities, that of the wheels of suitcases bouncing along the sidewalks and then through the corridors of the invaded buildings.
In a report on her, accompanied by eloquent photos by Álvaro García, Álvaro Sánchez-Martín talks about the intertwining of legal traps and simple negligence and corruption with which the Municipality and the Community indulge the greed of large owners and financial funds to expel from their homes neighbors who pay their rent on time and have legitimate contracts. There is a law in the Community of Madrid called seasonal rentals, supposedly designed to avoid occupations lasting a few days. But the law has a problem, and that is that it does not indicate the minimum time that is considered a season, so a few months can be equivalent to a week or a day. When María asked for the ramp for her wheelchair to be replaced, the facility’s response was definitive: “If you don’t like it, you leave.”
The question is where. The City of Madrid has a so-called Reside Plan, the aim of which appears to be to expel existing residents so that tourists with a lot of money can reside in the homes they have left. María de Orube is a splendid 82-year-old, with bright white hair and a face of great bone firmness, and if she moves around in a wheelchair it is not due to premature frailty of age, but because in 2006 she had the misfortune of being at Terminal 4 in Barajas on the day in which ETA criminals planted a bomb, with the great patriotic result of killing two immigrant workers. One might assume that the status of a victim of terrorism guarantees at least some stability, a sufficient level of protection in life. But her helplessness in the face of the attack 20 years ago is very similar to that she suffers from the real estate vultures who want to deprive her of a right almost as precious as the right to life, as elementary as the right to food or health, the simple right to personal and safe shelter from the elements.
For the elderly, the sick, the disabled, children, pregnant women, the poor, the homeless, people with fragile souls, a city like Madrid becomes more uninhabitable every day. Even birds and dogs flee in terror from the scandal of souped-up cars and motorbikes to further irritate their ears. Those who deliver parcels or food move from one place to another restlessly in the confusion of traffic, in the merciless rush of the sidewalks. In shops it is allowed to keep the heating or air conditioning at maximum volume and the doors wide open, in order to further encourage energy waste. María de Orube, who has always lived on Gran Vía, recognizes nothing when she manages to go out into the street, as if she found herself in a foreign or future country by mistake. There is a strange Spanish ability to erase every trace of the immediate past, a vocation not only for amnesia but for crude public lobotomy. The Gran Vía that the eyes of a peer see is a kind of rubbish shopping center outdoors, in traffic-polluted air, filled with the smells of junk food. Without serious social rental policies, an admirable reform like that of Plaza de España represents an incentive for the owners of nearby buildings and a new possibility of free leisure for the privileged.
Those who feel threatened by the privatized and inhospitable city, the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant, those who have to move around in a wheelchair and never stop encountering obstacles, have the reflex to escape, to hide in the safety of the sacred place of their home. Secluded in it, María de Orube will be able to indulge in the memory of a neighborhood and a civilized Gran Vía, with American-style cafes, illuminated tents and giant cinema posters, the Gran Vía of those happily embraced women that Català-Roca portrayed in a memorable photo from the 1950s. Everyone has the right to their own nostalgia, as well as the particular atmosphere of their home, built over the years with details that are like the threads with which a silkworm works its silk cocoon. But María, like many like her, is not even left with that rabbit hole without which life is not possible. The humidity of an illegal swimming pool built on the top terrace of the building is announced on the ceiling. Every phone call, every noise on the stairs, in the elevator, is a threat. More serious than not having a place to die is not having a place to die alive.
