Here goes a sample story, for you to better conceptualize what this long-winded endeavour to roughly get to know each other is truly all about:
Soared into the wind
My father has the ugly habit of taunting me by stating that my knowledge of the city that witnessed my birth and uprising to the boor I have grown to become is restricted to what this colourful reticulum, also called metro map, comprises. He is partially right. I have this underground mole so injected in my own blood that any extended exposure to the surface gives my moral principles rashes right away. The folks loaf about, wander as if possessed by the Holy Spirit. “People, don’t know how to walk along the street”, I mutter now once again to my Andalusian bloke, who follows me breathless, while I settle down to provide a punchy express course on the matter in hand. Go wherever you got to go and wait to figure out the little animals clouds enclose upon arrival. But then again, speaking of circus, ain’t no performance deserving the crown like the ones me and my adolescent troupe used to pull off. We called it improvised theatre back then. Its top hits: propose to the street lamps in the Retiro and disperse to enter each one of us through a different car door, start the one in the middle humming blithely (a rather mediocre alternative for those of us who had not cracked the mystery of the whistle yet) to the chihuahua hymn and shout the ones on the sides our heads off with the nuclear Chihuahua. Boom!, the shock we caused did not belong to the kind one shakes off lightly.
That was how my Madrid was like, the Madrid of this transgenic snipe who incarnates the real Madrilenian. A sleazy Madrid, a trashy one, a Madrid of streetdoing, which had nothing to do with streetwalking nor street paving, but perhaps with something in between. Meaning: to put on our skates and ride the city chasing after the turmoil it called for, despite of traffic lights and other odds and ends, represented by the very same distinction between lanes for pedestrians and wheels, rolling to the tune of the rail whirr piercing its entrails.
And one early morning, on the way back from Malasaña, the dainty predator I had hanging from my arm said:
– There is a massive amount of smoke billowing out of the building in front of your house.
Whereupon, I replied:
– No need to worry!, that’s quite normal. It is the Corte Inglés, that smokestack that serves the underground worm as respiratory tract. It is the energy it consumes to work full steam, Sundays and holidays included, at the expense of the enslaved children of the Third World and the Madrilenian sky.
He didn’t dare to add a word and his comment did not disrupt my long delayed good night’s sleep. It wasn’t until I woke up again at lunch time, when, headed to buy a pistol, that version of the long loaf we boasted about baking in in our home-made battlefield, I run into the hole, stranded in the architectonic fangs from across the street. The ashes of the Windsor building crowded the entrance hall.