In Europe there are cities, and there are cities. You have got the cute little things from the north, like Brugge or my own Utrecht, you have got the great centers of trade and industry, like Hamburg and Torino, you have got the artists’ dreams, Paris and Barcelona. And the boring administrative and bureaucratically loaded Geneva, or The Hague, at the side of the secretive and corrupt Zurich and Luxembourg... plus the urban centers of creation and riot, like Berlin and London at the side of the peaceful and friendly Lausanne or Lisabbon.
And then you have Madrid.
I visit friends and enjoy myself, in Madrid. It is not that much of a city on her own; you can’t say that is bigger than Paris or have more musea than London or more crazy people than Berlin. It is certainly less friendly than Brugge and produces way less than Torino.
But then, she is Madrid.
I believe that the spanish civil war electrified a whole generation, and then the next one too. Even mine, more or less the third down the road, still understand el no pasaran. There is nothing like a caña in a bar in Madrid, or an almuerzo del dia in the restaurant around the corner. Nothing like the gruff waiter, and the gruffer owner of the place, who, when you are willing to bear his gruffness for more than two exchanges, are both willing to tell you their whole life and then some. They have seen it all, and they will see it all again, and they will tell you about it. If you can listen, that is.
It is no coincidence that Madrid then, is the city that hosts the Guernica. Neither is coincidence that the protests that we got to know as 15M, intrinsically linked with the Arab Spring, started in Madrid. And perhaps is neither a coincidence that the political movement that started then, has been also ended yesterday in Madrid. The tale is not that strange, nor that unique. Tired of anodyne, ineffective and mostly corrupt governments, people protests. The city stops with first thousands and then millions in the street. Nobody believes, nor understand what happens, yet we all know that this is it. And then, one or two years down the road, when the street assemblies and the occupations and the spontaneous art are winding down, a new political party grows from the discontent and upends almost thirty years of the same two parties running the country. A mediatic leader owns a great deal of the protests and wins elections here and there. Eventually, almost ten years later, enters in the national government. To loose the next election to a strident right winger. Curtains.
But curtains to whom, actually?
Is it not, rather, the everlasting push and pull of our conscience, the actions and the reactions of our thoughts? Biden after Trump, or Obama after Bush. The party of Iglesias, Unidas Podemos, profiled as a new, revolutionary left. After destabilizing the long term governing and conservative Partido Popular, they losed yesterday to the same party, way radicalized than ever before. Yet a splinter party, the center-left Mas Madrid, won more votes than whoever expected. Formed by a popular mayor few years ago, they are in the up now. Perhaps what we are seeing is a rather normal european phenomenon, Madrid entering the reality of a splintered political landscape, where nobody reigns and different peoples need to enter coalitions to govern. Perhaps.
Perhaps this is all about me being too long away from Madrid, and perhaps I write about her to hold on to a dream, to a city that I can’t understand. At the end, all what I need, and all what I want is the no-nonsense of the next bartender, and the wisdom of his cañas.
So I could write about Utrecht.