Madrid deserves a map of adjectives
Madrid 1921, Un diario, by Josep Plan (Libros del K.O.) and The night I arrived at the Gijón cafe (Austral), by Francis Threshold . If something unites these two journalists, the Catalan from the beginning of the 20th century and the postwar Valladolid, it is his ability to squander adjectives without ever bogging down a sentence . Three adjectives always better than one. Who says three, says seven and always in a row, like a slide. It seems easy and it even seems imitable, but it is not. The normal thing is to accumulate words and burst the pipes.
Before being guided by Pla, the reader must be warned that we are dealing with an impostor, of “a snob with a beret, which is the last thing a snob would wear” , in Threshold's words. Pla seems like a distracted writer and he writes making us believe that the adjectives fall out of his pocket and that they are scattered by themselves by the sentence. I suspect that he used the same unconscious thoroughness, learned by heart, with which he rolled his cigarettes.
The Gran Vía in the 1920s. In the foreground, a man wearing a beret, Pla
Another warning for walkers: neither Pla nor Umbral reinvented Madrid, they limited themselves to outlining it with that disbelieving and mocking transparency of the hack who does not aspire to transcend, but to reach closure.
Pla was irritated by Madrid. He caricatured her as a city of officials and opponents alienated by coffee with milk (“it may give some people a momentary feeling of fullness; but in general, it creates a vacuum in the stomach, it accesses it, it makes it sick, it causes constipation, bile, moodiness, fanaticism, schematism, unitarism and unreality”), with soundtrack de chotis (“funeral march music expressly composed to demonstrate the pain that affects the populations of equatorial Africa at the death of an important tribal chief”). In a Dadaist delusion, he even proposed placing pistols on street corners in case an official wanted to commit suicide on the way to work. The only thing that reconciled Pla with Madrid was the sky and the air and the clouds:
"You can also see how those masses of harmless white and pink clouds rise from Castile. They rise vertically and go straight up, which is something that helps to understand that ancient observation that has been made about the sky of this country, that is, the sky comes down to look for the earth, which stretches out its arm and hugs its waist. In other regions, the earth rises in an impulse towards the sky. The color and shape of these clouds and of the light from Madrid a little bit ago illuminated postcard: stylized, of a very delicate finesse, somewhat artificial, scenic, filtered, clean, precise. This light, this sky, these clouds, are the luxury of Madrid, its finest thing . Here the air is pure, mountain air, dry, tonic, with a diamond crystallinity”
Pla reconciled with Madrid for its sky
If Pla acts as a disbelieving Catalan, who only reluctantly praises the phenomena of nature, Umbral forces the pose of a writer from the provinces who arrives in Madrid to eat the world but, meanwhile, lives poorly stumbling through dreary pensions and vaguely bohemian coffee shops, moonlighting as a journalist while dreaming of literary prizes. Threshold is a bit of a loser, a bit self-conscious and a bit elegantly outgoing: “If among the girls of Gijón you could get a crazy love for one night or a single mother, among the girls of the Ateneo the most you could get was a formal girlfriend, a wife for life or a librarian archivist with skirts, which did not prevent some girls from the Athenaeum from being very pretty and attractive, with that almost gastronomic appeal that gives chastity to young women”.
The book is not exactly a memoir, but a manual for writing profiles . There parade all the poets and all the novelists and all the philosophers; the mediocre, the brilliant and those who let themselves be wasted, and Threshold describes them all, more for the pleasure of experimenting with adjectives and stretching their legs than to fix their memory in time. There is also a certain glamor of Chicote, always distant and always inaccessible. But what interests us now are his walks through Madrid . Type Threshold:
“Ayala Street gave me the perfume of its bourgeois acacias, a calm that was breathed throughout the Barrio de Salamanca –the neighborhood that had won the war–, with the joyful bonfire of a market and the icy cry of a fishmonger in peace elegant of the streets, the slide of the official cars and the stroll of the women of Serrano, all well cured of make-up, leisure, money and adultery”.
O well:
“Fernández de los Ríos street had a fog of cheap cinemas and wet bars, and that sadness of the streets with many furniture stores”.
It could be built and possibly I will, a map of Madrid based on adjectives . Today was just a prologue, unfolding the map and hanging the first pins. I don't need more technology than enough time to reread Pla, Umbral and Julius Camba , which has not yet appeared on these pages, because he is still taking a nap in his suite at the Palace Hotel.
Madrid, 1921. A diary, by Pla