tripu

What a wonderful light there was in Madrid this evening! What an unbelievable film set in our faces, what a cinematic and fragrant show for free! Who summoned those special effects of thin rain, light, the sun setting in my back, and Humanity? It was a luxurious homage to life among all the colours and the pollution.

How great it is to live in this city.

I had to do an errand after work, so I defied the punctual beast that is the traffic around seven (a beast twice a day stuffing and paralysing the roads, like a lover pushing ever closer). I rode all along the Eastern side of the city, entered it by the South, stopped for a moment, criss-crossed secondary roads to emerge again at the core, caressed it along its saggital line, left it behind on my way home.

It was almost a perfect sunshower. When I reached the city, my clothes were still damp from the rain that hit me on the highway. Someone had just switched on the Sun again, and long shadows came back and drew their distorted shapes sharply against the asphalt. The blinding glare in the eyes and the presence of shadows felt wrong somehow. Summer daylight and warm calm were returning when all of us had resigned to rain and night already. Like a cheap science fiction film in which time changed whimsically.

I was amazed at that clean, invisible air, as if it had been stolen from Sorolla. A Sorolla summer scene improved by the absence of the Mediterranean (such a bettering being conceivable by someone born in Madrid). Such was the warm light bathing every palace in the centre of Madrid today. Sights of glass, steel, plastic and marble slightly tinted in satisfying shades of orange, pearl and rose madder. Even my usually short-sighted eyes seemed to reach further than ever and register every nerve on every leaf, every fine pattern on the stucco of the highest façades in the avenue.

It felt just right, cruising down Paseo del Prado, counting all the leaves in the trees. The leaves were still up there, still unabashed and proud waiting for their day to die, escorting me all the way up to Cibeles. Riding smoothly past those centuries-old buildings (buildings which shaped a big deal of the lives of my ancestors and everybody in this country) in the special smell of late summer — that felt like the right thing to do a Thursday of September.

The end of summer is nigh (the swimming pool in my estate closed this week) but I can still afford to be late, change to a lower gear and open the neck of my jacket to feel this new air passing through me. Refresh my neck and my humid shirt and let me be renewed, too.

At the statue of the goddess, I genlty turn right and face Calle Alcalá. Puerta de Alcalá appears immediately before me, all fair and solemn, and salutes in contempt for my fragile and mutable nature. It stands there uphill, like a giant so confident that Time will flow through its arches so many times that it will give up in the end. I cannot believe everything is so bright being so late in the day, but then the Sun is in my back. The monument is framed by glorious white, grey and yellow cotton clouds looming joyfully over the shape of the city. At the right, a thick mass of tree tops overflows the iron fences of El Retiro and offers its gradients of green — still green! The lively and exuberant foliage contrasts so gracefully against the worn-out blocks of dead stone that support the fence around the park. The skinny guy on the bike feels humbled by the vision, unable to measure it, unsure about how to get his head around it.

Such are cities, and he loves them all. He certainly loves this one.

Photo: “Three buildings”, (CC) Jose Maria Cuellar

This morning I went running in El Retiro Park with my friend Esteban, as we often do. When I came back home, I wondered how big El Retiro is, relative to other parks I know. El Retiro is fairly big — 4 laps around its perimeter sum up ~18.7 km (~11.6 mi), and that proved a great distance when Esteban and I were training for the Madrid Half Marathon. But if El Retiro is first among all parks for madrileños, it is not because of its size but because of its perfect location, the variety and quality of the sights it offers and its lively atmosphere.

To find out how some parks compare among them, I dug up some data in Wikipedia, and when that wasn’t available, in a few other pages, mainly from city councils etc. The image compares the relative areas of twelve parks in different cities of the world. Absolute areas are also shown, in hectare (10⁴ m²). Ignore shapes, though.

Disclaimer: this selection of parks isn’t intended to be comprehensive or representative of anything. It’s just a bunch of parks I love, from cities I have lived in, or at least visited (the exception to this rule is Central Park: I haven’t been to NYC, but I included Central Park as a reference, for I guess it’s the most famous park worldwide). Finally, this isn’t to prove that Madrid can boast about owning the largest park. Casa de Campo‘s eastmost side is as close to Madrid’s official “city centre” as El Retiro, but in justice it could also be called a forest… Sometimes it’s just a matter of labels, isn’t it?

“Tokyo”
by +joanjimenez
via @Xirick

Tokio, otra vez.

El lienzo tridimensional del urbanismo inimaginable, efervescente y acogedor, permanentemente extraño y personalísimo.

Sus locales diminutos continúan desafiando la escala magnífica del esquema que resume los planos del transporte público, con sus ramas de líneas multicolores hundiéndose en las sub-ciudades. Bares que son menos que un pasillo, semiocultos tras las medias cortinas. Flanqueados por otros locales igualmente mínimos que sin embargo consiguen atraer la mirada y se hacen notar; poco importa que sea solo un local en una sucesión interminable de locales idénticos, que a su vez se replica al otro lado de la estación, en otra parte del barrio y en el otro extremo de la metrópolis. «Densidad» es la palabra.

Tokio. Los vagones de sus trenes se llenan de muchachas de piernas blanquísimas y delgadas, rodillas centrípetas, andar equino, cabellos finísimos, peinados impecables; cableadas, abrazadas al Louis Vuitton; envueltas como el resto de los pasajeros en electrónica portátil; cubiertas por pieles sucesivas de microfibra, plástico, cosméticos, autocontrol y ausente dulzura. Muchachas físicamente presentes, pero apenas conscientes de su propia existencia. Como el resto de los pasajeros. Las muchachas rotan en cada estación; aparecen y desaparecen, se maquillan, miran al suelo, juegan con el teléfono treinta minutos sin levantar la mirada, duermen con la cabeza en las rodillas, raramente hablan.

Una nueva barrera se ha sumado a las anteriores: a las alergias, la hipocondría y la consideración por la salud del otro se ha unido la psicosis de la pandemia de moda, y los japoneses se han envuelto en otra capa más. Más que nunca, la población se ha escindido en dos grupos: los que llevan mascarilla, y los que no. La consecuencia es que códigos nuevos están apareciendo, y los «enmascarillados» se comunican entre sí con las manos, con los ojos y con esa voz que surge atenuada desde el otro lado del tejido tenso sobre los labios. Tantos niños que deben estar aprendiendo a hablar lo están haciendo a base de mirar a los ojos de sus hermanos y a las manos de sus madres, pues la familia entera viaja de incógnito por la profilaxis. Una generación entera a la que le están racionando su dosis necesaria de sonrisas sinceras, dientes apretados, labios temblorosos, risas nerviosas, gestos cómplices… por fuerza tiene que crecer de otra manera, y comunicarse en otros canales.

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