Madrid is here to walk. Not just the famous streets in the center, the ones that appear in Monopoli – and which some believe are I am Monopoli—, where the historical, architectural, institutional monuments and tourists gather, the hundreds of tourists, the thousands of tourists who want to take a tour and take a counterfeit piece of the city; but also the most unknown peripheral neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of people from Madrid gather, who live their Madrid life in a very Madrid way. Even if you get there and someone asks you: are you from Madrid? As if it were another world.
I lived for about three years where the Senate, what memories – blurry but intense, a little sordid -, in a strange oasis of peace which, curiously, was just three minutes from the bustle of Callao, and gave me the impression, as the Capitolines are often criticized, that there was nothing outside that handful of streets, neither political news, nor polls on television, nor large demonstrations, nor the weddings of princes, nor the dramas of the protagonists of Spanish cinema.
I felt a sort of solipsistic overwhelm and began walking around the rich neighborhoods of the north, where they don’t know what an urban landfill is (Mauro Entrialgo calls it almeideros to those wild mountains of rubbish); even in the popular neighborhoods of the south where there are real people in real bars, forgotten, for better or for worse, by tourism and the authorities, even if now they also want to transform Usera’s Chinatown into a source of profit, because decentralizing can also mean entering, and that’s what it’s all about.
Madrid is made for walking, that’s why Rosalía takes a mass bath, behaving like a nun on Gran Vía. That’s why a couple of weekends ago 700 neo-Nazis were walking absentmindedly through the center, asking for a taxi, filling the large avenues with the smell of fascist armpits. Juan Cavestany took a walk around Madrid and did it Madrid, interiora film that everyone likes. Adriana Herreros has published a small book on walking, walking for the sake of walking (Debate), which adds to the great literary production of recent times, because there is a secret society of good people who walk, for the pure pleasure of walking or because they can no longer cope with life.
In November, the Surrealist Group of Madrid organizes a conference on the “rebel city” under the beautiful motto “We will not leave” (hopefully). When we talk about surrealism, people think of Dalí’s paintings, a Buñuel film or a Breton book. But surrealism is not something buried decades ago in books and museums, but rather a living practice, for which these surrealists are poetic revolutionaries, inaccessible to discouragement, frequenters of bookshops and taverns of Lavapiés, who rediscover in walking the pleasure of casual encounters and the discovery of the marvelous and who also drink from the psychogeographical path of the French situationists.
There were and will be at the conference (in the rival bookstores Enclave, Traficantes de Sueños and Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo) scholars of the open fields and explorers of Madrid continue Strangepoetry and daily magic, investigations into the unconscious of the city, games and urban drifts. They invited me (thank you) to talk about the horrors of the city and I talked about how the walk, which indeed can be conceptualized as a fantastic exploration, ends in this city, becoming rather a passage of terror.
Like the walker, instead of abandoning himself to the adventure, he gets angry when he walks through the streets of the center where one cannot walk, because the masses do not come to live but to wander, while cosmo-palletism and urbanization spread (dancing visits, rooster-shaped pods, cells with coffee specialties, Christmas wigs, which are already arriving) and minority investors in the tourism and hospitality sector, vultures and vampires, with the connivance of the authorities, use the city, the home of the neighborhood, the place of our life, the cradle of our daughters, as a mere instrument of profit, destroying houses, shops, bars, every vestige of city life. Where will the urban novels and films of the future take place?
The drunks in the wind screaming from the balconies, the block threatened with eviction displaying its banners, the nine-euro toast, the legion of homeless people, the tuk tuk stopping for tourists to photograph me while I buy mandarins, the Formula 1 announcements to come: the cyberpunk walk through the ruins.
