In 2003, this newspaper devoted its annual special to two personalities, Sadam Hussein and Letizia Ortiz. Spain’s foolish adherence to this invasion based on false facts of all untruths was on the front pages every day until an event of an institutionally sentimental nature suddenly surfaced that colored the information.
The then Prince Philip announced his engagement to a television journalist. The newspaper asked me to do their profile. La Zarzuela had shielded the fiancée from any media interference, so I had to manage to invent a portrait without being able to speak to her. The chronicle began almost verbatim: a young, newly married journalist left work, sometimes at night, and went to the Plaza de Conde de Casal, where the Valencia motorway begins; There she would take a van, La Veloz, which would take her along with other defeated souls after a day’s work to one of those recently built housing developments surrounded by vacant lots. I wrote about this young woman’s tiredness, about her dozy thoughts at the end of the day.
After publication, the above contacted me to let me know how she felt. I have not confessed that I used my own experience to write it. I was the journalist who had her first floor in one of these cooperatives, I was the one who rode the truck every night that took us to a place in the middle of the dry plateau where there was a lot of stubble. I had the intuition that human beings are so conditioned by the place we live that this fact feeds shared dreams, of hope or frustration, of loneliness or well-being.
As a neighborhood girl that I had been until my twenties, this new location outside the city limits caused me an inevitable rock bottom. I had always thought that my independence would push me into the center and not drive me out of the city. I made the best use of the time on Calle Huertas, where the radio station was, and roamed the bars until I had no choice but to face Letizia’s journey into the void. I never had a pioneering spirit and did my best to return to the chaos, to the hustle and bustle. These cooperatives grew and now form a city where their neighbors can find what they need.
Our biography has a neighborhood name. From the one we graduated from, from the one we returned to for refuge. The literature of the cities is rich in stories of people projecting their dreams elsewhere. If the Brooklyn Bridge is so emblematic, it’s because a working class lived there who dreamed of crossing it and conquering Manhattan.
In my city of Madrid, it was something more prosaic, the M-30, which created a dramatic division between those who were inside and those who were outside, so that when my mother took us “to Madrid” to shop for clothes , it was about crossing the bridge that goes over the highway. In any case, my teenage self didn’t miss the center back then because my neighborhood had parks, patios, a school you could walk to, a gallery of shops with their stationery, ice cream and churro stands, candy kiosks , bakeries to buy chocolate croissants, and movie theaters, two big movie theaters where all the kids lined up on Friday afternoons to see a double show about the adventures of the Trinidad cowboy, whom they later continued to call Trinidad. Everything a living being needs, space and freedom to occupy it was within our reach. Neighbors enhanced this precarious urbanity with their presence, and my father, even in old age, spoke of “his town”, the place where he always found a friend to drink wine with.
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Manuel Franco, a public health researcher, wrote this week about the relationship between neighborhoods and the health of their residents. It is undoubtedly the issue of the future, as the majority of the population will be concentrated in the cities. Life expectancy in a city like Madrid varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, with a difference of up to ten years from a poor to a privileged environment. The pandemic has made it more visible. The bodies and souls of the neglected have suffered. Being a lucky neighborhood girl, like John Cheever I think, “There has to be a match between people’s dreams and the houses they live in.”
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