This text is the fourth in a series of columns written by the author of the newsletter Too Match, Inma Benedito, exclusively for Madrid Secreto. Too Match is a diary of failed dates. A dyke version of Sex and the City, but in Madrid and, unfortunately, with less sex. You can subscribe to their newsletter at this link.
Madrid is a city where one fine day you wake up and they have set up a Uniqlo in your bed. The spiral of openings and closings of fashionable locals has reached a point of centrifugation in which, by the time you get to the opening, the joint is already in transfer.
I, who have always drawn my mental map of the city based on the continuity of storefronts (everyone knows that Atocha starts with a McDonald’s and Fuencarral ends with a VIPS), now have to stop at every corner and look up to know what street I’m on. I guess that’s why I was surprised that the appointment was at a place I was convinced had closed long ago.
It happened one winter afternoon. I couldn’t say exactly when, so it may not have happened yet. As for the facts, I know that I only remembered them when I got home, so I could not guarantee their reliability any more than I can rely on my memory, which is perhaps the only thing that exists.
Everyone knows that Atocha begins with a McDonald’s and Fuencarral ends with a VIPS.
Her name was Inma. Inma and an unusual surname. Benedito, Benedetto, something like that, like Italian forgery or dead Pope. When we matched I didn’t think much of the name match. Having a Tinder date with someone who has the same name as you can be ominous, but more ominous is when parents decide to name their daughter Immaculate Conception. Nor did I notice the familiar expression of the selfie in the mirror, or the Bruguera edition I was holding with the complete prose of Jorge Luis Borges, volume two. The same one I had lost some years before during a move.
Inma proposed to meet at La Libre de Lavapiés. It sounded good to me for the mere fact that I had believed that La Libre no longer existed and the renewed promise that it did, that perhaps it had never left.
I thought it had closed, I told her when we met at the door; that they had changed it for a Cuban restaurant with plastic hibiscus flowers climbing the walls and a bar covered with a crust of papier-mâché stone that seemed to melt, as if recreating the sensation of drinking a daiquiri in the middle of the Kilauea eruption, which is in Hawaii, but who cares, if it’s tropical. She gave me a funny look and we went inside.
Libre (calle Argumosa, 39) || Editorial credit: José Antonio Rojo
She was short, though no shorter than me. I studied her as we looked for space. She was wearing brown oxford shoes, corduroy pants, a black turtleneck sweater and a large lead gray coat with lapels that completely hid her small body, as if she were a minion dressed as a Peaky Blinder.
La Libre was the second to last bar on the odd sidewalk of Argumosa (not counting NuBel, which I’m not quite sure what it is, other than expensive). The coffee shop was the same as I remembered it. The yellow geometric pattern on the wallpaper on the walls, the typewriters, landline phones and TVs, among other unclassifiable retro objects scattered around the place, the bookshelf full of used books and the collection of mid-century tables and chairs surrounding the bar, where the owner milked the coffee pot to get all the steam out of it.
We sat on the leather sofa with capitonné at the back, next to a half-open sash window, held by an empty Mahou cane glass. I took advantage of Inma studying the menu to continue the review. I could say that she was cute, although not spectacular. Once my grandmother told me: you are not a beauty, you are pretty. The good kind, I mean. Square jaw, straight lips that widened when she smiled and a round nose, like a cherry hanging between her eyebrows. Her eyes were big and chameleon-like: brown in the distance, green in the sun, gray when she stared at you for a long time.
Once my grandmother told me: you are not a beauty, you are pretty.
She had brown hair, a little lighter than mine, although she claimed to be blonde and was offended if someone took her for something else. Over the years she had developed a refined theory that could be summed up as, if she was born blonde and now had dark hair, obviously she could only be a dark blonde. People with blonde hair are probably the first to suffer through their scalp from the mourning of the passage of time.
Inma liked good movies, good literature and good music, and her infallible method for making a statement was to assume that you knew exactly what she meant by that. He was part of the club of critics for the love of art, a Foucauldian faction of the intellectual militia dedicated to monitoring and punishing the cultural consumption of Western civilization. In other words, the @polisia of culture.
No one pays them, no one has asked them, but for some reason they feel the compelling need to let you and all of Instagram know what they thought of Sally Rooney’s latest novel. Without their opinion, the world would probably stop turning and the streets would collapse with disoriented people looking for what to read. In general, the number of book covers on their feed is inversely proportional to the likelihood that they have read them.
This select club usually spends their afternoons patrolling the Cuesta de Moyano, where they buy for five euros editions that they used to give away for free with La Razón, attending Iranian film cycles at the Filmoteca or any other event that fulfills the only requirement of being lazy. In the club of criticism for the love of art, pleasure for pleasure’s sake does not exist. Not if it does not involve an exchange of cultural capital. Art is only worthwhile if it is hard to understand; it is a quest, a college exam, a necessary sacrifice to reach spiritual enlightenment, the same as walking with pebbles in your shoes.
Of course, we talked about culture. We both liked the plays at the Pavón, a theater that for some time based its identity on threatening imminent closure at the end of each season, something similar to what all grandmothers in Spain do when they say that this may be their last Christmas. In the end it closed. It’s a shame, I said. She looked at me blankly:
– It hasn’t closed.
– Of course it has closed, I answered: Now there is a Pavón, but it is not the same. It is another one.
– It has not closed.
Art is only worthwhile if it is hard to understand.
We decided to pay for our coffees and go to see which of us was right. We leave La Libre and go up Argumosa. Argumosa street is the promenade of Madrid, my friend P used to say. People strolling by looking at the full terraces and terraces full of people looking at the people strolling by. I imagined Madrid as a Benidorm come to less, with its public relations under the canopies illuminated by neon lights, menus in English and tourists dancing inside to Bad Bunny’s latest hit against the gentrification of Puerto Rico.
We crossed the border between Lavapiés and La Latina almost without saying a word to each other. I guess we were afraid. She, of not being right, and for a moment I was also afraid of being right. We arrived at the historic building, the neoclassical façade decorated with earthy reliefs. As we rounded the corner of the Kamikaze, Inma quickened her pace, grabbed my hand and approached with long strides while with the other she pointed to the theater and said: See? See?
Okay, it wasn’t closed, but the usual black tarp had been replaced by a yellow one with a Pavón with an exaggeratedly large V.
– Yes, but it’s not the same one, I just said.
– What do you mean, it’s not the same one?
– It’s another one.
– But it’s the same name!
In Luces de Bohemia, Max Estrella tells Don Latino that “the classical heroes, reflected in concave mirrors, give the Esperpento”. That was like putting the old Pavón in front of a concave mirror and pretending it was the same.
We returned to Lavapiés. Inma said she knew a bar where there was a fixed place. The bar was on Calle de la Fe, behind a gate that looked like the door of a prison, under a wooden sign that read El Botas in a western movie typeface. It was empty.
Inside there was a foosball table, several mini reproductions of plaster Harleys Davidson, a figurine of Elvis Presley on a lighted Las Vegas sign, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe blowing a kiss and a couple of tin signs: one was a car license plate with the inscription Route 66 in Spanish and the other read: Warning, genius at work. With those props, it was inevitable not to feel transported to Texas.
We advanced towards the bar, not without some difficulty due to our feet sticking to the tiles. It looked like the genius at work hadn’t cleaned the floor since the Transition. The genius was an older man behind the bar, with a stale plaid shirt and a cigarette sewn to his ear because he couldn’t hold it in his mouth “due to the damned anti-smoking law”. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his scraggly beard patched his jaw with bits of skin. We ordered a couple of thirds.
– Which beer?
– A couple of Estrellas Galicia.
– No beer.
– Unfiltered eagle?
I think he rolled his eyes.
– What do you have?
– Mahou.
We ordered two Mahous. A Burning song was playing in the background. That guy bragged about owning the only bar in all of Madrid that didn’t play SGAE music. At first I didn’t like him. Too rude. A couple of thirds later he was still as rude, but I understood that it was a matter of survival, like the hardened bark of the suffering tree. In other words, the Spanish version of Clint Eastwood. I also realized that it was precisely the lack of pretension that made that bar an authentic place. It didn’t aspire to be a rockabilly shrine, just El Botas.
Inma didn’t care about rock. What I like is jazz, she said. Of course, I thought. But not Frank Sinatra jazz, but that kind of raucous jazz where it sounds like the instruments are throwing up sixteenth notes. He said he listened to Thelonious Monk, although it was probably Thelonious Monk’s cat pacing the piano. He told me about a jazz bar he used to go to where they played live, down by Huertas. I figured he was referring to Café Central, but no.
We left the Three-Phase Boots and headed for the jazz bar. It was already dark and the neon lights of the canopies illuminated the golden inscriptions of Huertas street, full of public relations people offering shots of tequifresa and tourists falling into the trap. We stopped in front of one of the marquees, decorated with wooden moldings framing the showcases. The bar did not look jazzy. The interior was a composite of hydraulic tiles, Eames chairs, air ducts running across the ceiling and a menu in English advertising typical Madrid dishes like tequeños or nachos with guacamole.
– Is this it? Shall we go in?
Inma didn’t answer. She just studied the façade with a serious face and an absent look, as if she were in two places at once. That had been Café Populart for a long time. I remembered spending half of my college nights there. It was like Café Central, but affordable, and I guess that’s why it closed. Like an old perfume the labyrinthine atmosphere of arches and mirrors, the orange walls with hanging saxophones, newspaper clippings and black and white photos of Nina Simone or Chet Baker, the round white marble tables and Thonet chairs, and the band in the background pinching the cello like a sleeping body came to mind. Just as Inma was pinching me to wake me up. I looked at her.
– I think I’m going home.
I tried to console her. There are many jazz bars in Madrid, I said. It’s fun to discover new places, even if others close. Rome also destroyed Greece and Christian armies dismantled Rome, and Islam wiped out Buddhist temples and the West wiped out indigenous civilizations. Hagia Sophia was a church and mosque before it was a museum and mosque (again). Why don’t we go to the Candela? It has just reopened.
Hagia Sophia was church and mosque before museum and mosque (again).
She looked at me quietly. Apparently a film producer had teamed up with an actor and a Masterchef winner and they were going to resurrect the Candela, to give it a new life. Just as it happened with the Palentino and the Pavón, with Juana la Loca and Melo’s. They were going to unite tradition and avant-garde, prioritize the essence, keep the spirit of the place. They were going to take the dead man and make him up. Make it look alive. Make it look like everything is still the same. You know, in the end everything comes back. Rock-ola returns, Gabana returns, Casa Botín returns, Zalacaín returns. Your ex is back too. As if we didn’t know that there’s nothing worse than going back to the place where we were happy. Everything comes back and we have already left.
I walked home. I walked and Madrid was lost in every street, in its thousand faces. Then I realized that I didn’t remember the face I had just said goodbye to. Maybe some gesture. No, not even that. I picked up my cell phone to look for her Whatsapp picture, but it was a landscape. A place I had also been years ago. I went on Tinder and got lost among all those faces. What was his name? It was an unusual last name, like Italian forgery, dead Pope. I kept walking. It was impossible for me not to remember. I tried to recall that night. You don’t forget so easily. What did I have for dinner yesterday? I went into the house. I took off my lead gray coat with lapels and ran to the bathroom. I turned on the faucet to fill my face with cold water. I stopped in front of the mirror for a moment before I realized. I looked up and there it was. It was me, maybe a few years older. Another me, not the me of a few minutes ago. The me of now.