Marisol Condoy, at her market stall. Lisbeth Salas
We have not yet finished our first tour of the market when it falls towards us like a dark bird: that’s it, our plan has worked, I suddenly feared.
However, it took the man a few seconds to understand that I might be useful to his interests, which, by coincidence, was exactly what I thought.
What are you doing here? he asked us carelessly. I told him my intentions (although, a la Groucho, I had others ready in case he didn’t like them) and they seemed right to him. Thus, this man in black, whom we will call the father, became the master key that would unlock the trust of the working people of the market.
The father is in black
Fight, fight, fight, there are people for whom life, everything, has fought. The father is one of them.
And he doesn’t have an easy smile, he wears melancholy like a cloak, but he looks like a little bird of prey. He frees me in a trained loop what to write (what if the mostenses have been marginalized, what if they are at the minimum of their potential, what if the internal struggles, what if the power struggles, what if xenophobia) and I hear it out of one ear.
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Ecuadorian. It arrived in Spain with the millennium. He only has one child, which is rare for someone from a social status where children are usually retired, so the more the merrier. I transparently show him my surprise at this lack of offspring. They lost three offspring before the only child was reached, he tells me. Oh, that’s it.
From the hand of The Father, roads and people open to us. We continue walking through the market that is aesthetically so far removed from the boutique markets standardized by tourism. But “broken instead of patched” is of course a principle of the Iberian gentleman, which nobody here can afford: to be ragged, disheveled and torn apart would be showing off. The Mercado de los Mostenses is as tidy and cared for as a child on the first day of school.
sign it
Julius Caesar says he was the first to arrive here. That it is the oldest Latino on the market. He repeats several times that he had hair when he arrived and it takes me a while to understand that it’s his running gag.
As Julio César takes care of his customers, El Padre tells me that the pinnacle of being a shopkeeper is the moment when they can buy the job they’ve been working at. So the first thing he does is remove the old poster and swap it for one with his name on it. I think of this gesture: putting the signature. It’s nice, accept it (if even on Facebook there are those who repeat and sign their own publications). What a grace for man to culminate so much epic in something so simple. Go around the world to put up a poster: Greengrocery So-and-so. Or sign this text.
Julio César, I tell him, why do you want hair when you have laurels? He knows what I’m implying and then he looks at me differently, he starts treating me as “my love”. And even if you don’t believe it, you believe it.
Love is…
An Ecuadorian waiter old enough to be Romeo Montesco’s grandfather is one of the few newcomers I’ve run into. What brought you here? I asked Mrs Florinda. He appeared to be confessing to a crime when he answered me earnestly and directly: a mistress.
That was three years ago, after which the flame went out (it’s backed up by science, don’t hang me). This man shows disbelief. It is not found without being. Now only another lover has to show up and take him back there, I hear myself say and am horrified. This language of mine How dare I He laughs, a laugh out of proportion or control. Either I had already thought about it or the darling of the return ticket already exists.
Loving is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t ask for it. The quote is inaccurate, Jacques Lacan didn’t say that, but that’s how he traveled by word of mouth until he came up with this final pun: To emigrate is to give something you don’t have to a country that doesn’t have it, asking for it.
mother there is not just one; Neither do home countries
“My parents saved me from El Salvador,” this Salvadoran tells me, and this is the least paradoxical of his sentences. It turns out that his mother gave him to his aunt when he was a child to bring him here. That’s three decades ago. Now he refers to his aunt as his mother and also his mother.
It was sort of a loan, not a gift. However, over time, his mother (bío) felt the victim of a deception, saying her son had been stolen. “A drama,” says the discord. “The problem” – he adds – is that his mother (bío) did not put him up for adoption, but gave his mother power of attorney. That’s why he lived here “illegally” until he finally got Spanish citizenship recently.
“I used to ask my mother why,” I now hear on the recording, and I don’t know which mother she’s referring to or why. “My parents made life impossible for my parents,” he adds (take meat, Sigmund). My parents saved me from this world, although thanks to Bukele, El Salvador is better, safer and less corrupt today, he says. I ask him how he knows that. He answers me via the networks. My fucking face betrays me and he mumbles: “They don’t want this, I don’t know why…”. Now he’s going to be re-elected, although the constitution forbids it, I tell him. (I can’t help it!, interventionist journalism, maternal journalism, this one of mine). He explains to me didactically that he will not re-elect himself, no, he will run for the people to re-elect him. And he ends without blinking: The people rule. Creepy.
Either you acclimate or you acclimate
This story is different. In Colombia, he had a job in the kitchen of a Stars and Forks restaurant. He lived with his parents, single, healthy, without debts and children. O season! She studied French because she wanted to go to Montreal.
But one day they told him there were calls to work in Spain, he tells me and pauses before giving me an explanation I didn’t ask for: “They told us that we were doing a good job, which the Spaniards didn’t want to do.” I don’t get a poker face. And he adds, “I don’t know if it was true.”
Almost thirty handsome, healthy and educated men ended up with proper papers. They all put them to wash pots except him, who became straight kitchen assistant, in a place His Majesty frequently visited. Between a Spaniard and a Colombian, Su-Majes-tad-es-co-ja.
He lived in a room with no windows, literally four walls. He worked nights, saw no sunlight, slept on a cot, back-to-back with another immigrant, until what had to happen happened: he became depressed. Your story is similar to mine. When he tells me, “I’ve been to this place, I was wondering why the hell I came here,” I interrupt him, “And
what did you answer?” He looks at me in bewilderment. The question is rhetorical in his case; in mine it’s probably an epitaph.
It couldn’t be otherwise, his story has improved and now he’s his own boss. He seems content. She’s no longer learning French or English, “but now I speak Spanish better.” A cold zigzag runs down my spine. For those who don’t understand, I have no way of explaining. With this phrase he summed up his castration, the inevitable toll of the immigrant who “integrates”: dissolves.
the envoy
The father interrupts our journey through the aisles of the market to tell me what his goal was from minute one: the story of his son.
He’s twenty-two years old and a successful businessman, he says he owns an Ecuadorian restaurant in upscale Madrid, a brutal place, he adds; It is touching to hear him use these words, which are obviously not his own. El Hijo’s restaurant has been featured on TV, newspapers, radio and networks. He shows me photos. It is sort of an EU “approved” site. You understand me.
The latter is what El Padre tells me in front of Tony Rosado languishing there, on a wall poster (I’m not making it up, it would be a very chabona mise en scène). Coincidence makes me understand that El Hijo is also an emigrant who left this cumbia, fried food and ceviche market for Madrid, where Ecuadorians, if at all, wear uniform. Tony Rosado couldn’t make that jump. Tony Rosado stays in the market.
she
– I came running out of the… What’s it called?
–…
– That they said there was… the beef… the beef…
– The recession?
-It is!
A compatriot of hers earned more money here caring for the elderly than in Ecuador as a chemistry teacher. He decided to try his luck. Her husband -The Father-, less than
She didn’t see it right, how should she go alone, leaving behind the child (of months) that had cost her so much that money wasn’t everything in life… “But I didn’t pay attention to her and I am came”.
He narrates his early works without using the appropriate word: slavery. As far as it goes, it is what it was. In six months she paid off her debts, including the plane ticket, and was able to send for her husband, son and mother-in-law. “I don’t regret it, but it’s the hardest thing to go through. “I was taking care of the little ones, that’s where I had mine,” she tells me, murmuring, “my soul is broken.”
When I look at his photo, I actually see his broken soul, although calm. The vitiligo that has discolored his hands and part of his face is called melancholy in some countries. Back to Ecuador? “I love my country, but we don’t know anyone there anymore, we would be strangers.” In addition, El Hijo does not want to return, “and since I only have one son, I will stay where he is.”
“I have already suffered what I had to suffer”: this is the calm that this woman exudes after making this journey, getting to the bottom of the pain and returning to tell it.
Sorry, I’m correcting: and live to tell, because as those of us who left one day know, the same person never comes back or returns to the same place.
That’s never coming back
You only begin to understand it later.
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