Monument to Lucifer, "The Fallen Angel", by the sculptor Ricardo Bellver, Parque del Retiro, Madrid.
... Barajas is a big airport, it has halls of marble, and bathrooms.
For a good while I waited for my suitcase, until it finally appeared on the conveyor belt, it was all stained with something white, I never knew what it was... the next day, when I finally could open the suitcase, I realized that the interior was stained with that white substance, too.
With that black suitcase in my hand, and a hanged rucsack on my shoulders, I walked toward the doors, and abandoned the airport:
it was past 2 PM in the afternoon when I found myself alone and lost in the Madrid's streets.
I roamed through streets and lanes, searching for the estate agents' office which I contacted previously to my journey, I asked many people and finally I could arrive to that place, I think it was 5 or 6 PM.
Going to a "job interview" when you just descended from a plane after 20 hours of flight is weird, I probably looked weird, not shaven, carrying a big suitcase and a rucksack, surely I looked tired and my hair was not too tidy.
I arrived to the office and entered, everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at me; the woman in charge of the office walked to me, surely she thought I was a sort of strange and not very recommendable customer, we had a brief talk
"I'm sorry, we don't need anybody at the moment".
Some few minutes later, I was on the streets again, rejected and with scarce euros in my pocket, walking through the zone called Trafalgar, in Madrid, quite insecure about what I would do... I entered another barrio of the city, the small plastic wheels of the suitcase echoed all over Princesa Street
once I arrived to Plaza de España, I bought a pack of Ducados, and threw all the Argentine currency, along with my ID card to the fountain:
I knew that I'd never return.
A while later I entered a cybercafé to use a computer for a while, I don't know what I did there, then before the night would fall, I walked toward the royal palace... the place was crowded by French, Equadorian and Italian tourists, behind the palace, mountains...
... I think I ate something that night, possibly a sandwich I bought at the Gran Vía per 1 euro:
confused and anguished, I cried beside the entrance to the subway.
I spent that night on the streets, walking, until I found the ample entrance of an abandoned shop to shelter me from a rain that started falling on Madrid. Perhaps I slept some hour there, but cannot remember it.
In the following sequence I was in the subway, where I could actually sleep a bit in the morning, until a guard told me to leave.
My money was getting more and more scarce, and I was destroyed rambling through the city with my rolling suitcase when, fortunately, could find a hotelito where they rented rooms, for 15 euro/day.
The place was in the bohemian Madrid, in Malasaña, and it was run by an Argentine guy who was seated behind a desk at the entrance, with a small TV, a computer and a thermos, drinking mate constantly.
His image reminded me of a Roman governor of Judaea who collected the taxes from the subjugated population, and the place was overcrowded and sucked, but I didn't give a fuck: I could finally sleep on a bed.
During the days I was there, I woke up early, had the breakfast (offered there for free with the price of the room), usually black coffee and some toast with marmalade, and spent most of the day walking:
Madrid was magical, a myth, a tale rain and sun, of kings and queens:
Fuencarral Avenue, Glorieta de Bilbao, Chamberí, Plaza de España and Gran Vía again, Chamartín, Retiro, Carabanchel... the city was neat and lineal, austere and color creme, the light... the light was strange, strange the light of Madrid in March, as if it could be tasted, as if its taste was sweet:
I still remember the night when I stayed mesmerized in front of the Puerta de Alcalá, the buses passed beside it like lustrous carcasses of cockroaches beside an imposing megalith... I deemed it a demented mausoleum, excessive, immoderate, disproportionate, oriental almost; napoleonic...
... why that edifice was there? In the middle of..? Of nothing, what kind of European symbology with angels and harpies was this? In which feverish land or dream I submersed myself? Where I was?
ii.
Walking through la Puerta del Sol (the Door of the Sun) I stayed observing the "Km. 0 of the radial roads" of Spain, and the statue called "The Bear and the Arbutus", which represents the blazon of Madrid since the 13th century, along with seven stars, related to the constellation of the Ursa Major... I reminded then an enigmatic description of the village from the 14th or 15th century:
"Madrid, filthy and ignoble hamlet full of bears".
The last reference about bears around Madrid is from 1582 though, in which an A. de Molina narrates how the king Philip II killed "recently" a bear "de un arcabuzazo" (with a blow of harquebus).
[Like an unrelated digression, while I searched some data about the Madrid bears, I found out that the door of a church in Navacepeda de Tormes (Castile) has a 400 years old bear claw stuck to it, dated with Carbon-14.]
As the days passed by at the hotelito of Malasaña, my original idea of marching toward the northern Asturias, where I had family, started acquiring a more concrete form, although this adventure was completely insane... this second adventure:
with nothing in the world, I jumped once again into an even more rarefied venture.
My first idea was going to the hamlet where my father was born, Pousada Bisuyu, a minimal settlement lost in the mountains of western Asturias, but there aren't buses to Pousada (not even a road that communicates the hamlet with the rest of the world), so I had to buy a ticket to Cangas del Narcea, the nearest town, and capital of the parish, and from there, catch a taxi... or something.
Something. My life has been made of somethings.
One afternoon walking by the Gran Vía, I saw a travel agency, "Halcón viajes", and bought a ticket to Cangas del Narcea in an Alsa...
... the next day in the afternoon, I was at the station, waiting for my Alsa, ready to jump into the unknown north
ironically, the station was at Barajas airport.
As the bus started moving its wheels, the hills of the Madrid outskirts started passing in front of my eyes, while the autocar entered deeper and deeper the depressing landscapes of Castilla-León, which seem to have been painted by a demented paysagist, lover of the yellows.
There was a screen in the bus, I don't remember exactly the movie projected, but it was dubbed in Iberian Spanish -everything is dubbed in Iberian Spanish here-... I couldn't understand how the passengers watched the movie and enjoyed it with naturality, for me, the accent in which those Hollywood actors were dubbed, was completely anomalous, but it was completely normal for the rest of the passengers:
I watched through the window.
iii.
The innumerable small villages passed in front of my retinas, numberless towns and hamlets of the elevated but flat extensions of Castile and León (called Castile the Old in times of the
As all those lessons of Columbus, mapamundi and cartographic extravaganzas from the school returned to my mind, while we passed by the fucking and very Tordesillas, the movie with atrocious dubbing still ran on the DVD.
I still remember the bus had a stop at a gas station located somewhere in the middle of nothing at all:
I bought a sandwich there and went into the Alsa again... now without movie, the vehicle started penetrating into the north of Castile, to the north, to the north, more, more, the north, like an obsession: the north.
All of a sudden, the flat and dry panorama of the Castile was cut
an imposing mountain range appeared in front of the eye, something completely different to all the flat Castilian sameness I saw for the past 3 or 4 hours, an absolute contrast:
the Cantabrian Mountains revealed themselves in the end, here Castile ended, and Asturias began, the bus started ascending through a tortuous road, higher and higher.
vertiginous hills all covered in snow appeared through the window... I noted a radical change in everything, the window pane started getting splashed by drizzle and a phosphorescent green surged all over the place: the bus entered an enormous tunnel like a metallic tube, everything was wet in the outside, dominated by the water, as I realized that I was entering another country... somehow known.
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