For years, the old man in apartment 3B of the mint-green building sat in front of a tumbleweed stack of newspapers at a wide wood desk, 18 hours a day, butt naked. I can testify to just three of them, but by the time we showed up he was well matted into the furnishings, the papers discarded at his feet curling yellow to let me know it was nothing new. Years churning by with young renters crowding into the centre of Madrid, catching glimpses of his hunched shoulders, grey shock of chest hair, space heater burning at his crossed ankles. If there was enough commotion playing out on the street below to draw his attention, he never bothered to put on clothes, leaning over the railings to watch. Frowning and nude as the day he was born. Seemed he barely noticed, to tell you the truth.
We first moved into the building across the way just two weeks before lockdown. I’d lived in Madrid more than a year, which felt like a long time back then. We vacillated between early starts and giving into the rootless chaos, learning the creaks and cracks of our new home, learning the rhythms of our neighbourhood by staring down at it from the fifth floor. Whether we found ourselves sitting on the balcony, smoking at 3am with beer cans balanced on folded knees, or stepping out in the early morning to watch the city waking up, the man in 3B was at his desk, newspapers open under the lamplight. We wondered when he slept. Watched him rotate out the space heater for a standing fan and back again through the season shifts. He was never once clothed, he never once looked up.
There was a fire. We don’t know how it started – you can blame that space heater, if you want, we did. Black smoke billowing, swallowing up the red-blue-red-blue and sound of sirens. Neighbours spluttering outside and crowding the curbside with blankets and plastic masks held up to their faces by nonchalant paramedics. We couldn’t see apartment 3B at all for the smoke, rushing out the windows like water.
When the air cleared, the naked man was gone and so were his newspapers. The room sat charred and empty for a couple of weeks before the painters came and a new tenant followed soon after. They were young, they pushed their big TV right up against the balcony door, they didn’t stay long. None of them do. Two years after the fire, I still send Google searches into the void from time to time, trying to find a report of what started it, any trace of what happened to the man with all the papers. I might be using the wrong words – I try swapping fuego for incendio, try swapping hombre for muerto. Nothing gives, but it feels fitting to not know for sure. Anything could have happened, he could be alive, could be at some other desk, seen through the window of another balcony, accumulating a fresh stack of papers at his ankles.
I fell for this city in the silence and then its sounds. In the months when the streets were coming to life after lockdown, the same group of friends would meet every Thursday, gathering around a tiny table in the street below. Growing in number and volume as the night deepened, drinking until they were merry enough to sing everything from Britney to ballads by old Spanish crooners I didn’t know the names of. Joining the fray: the smell of fried onions rising from the burger place in the afternoons, the protests and parades marching past the mouth of the street, the gay bar at the foot of our building heaving with music and bodies all weekend long.
When I watched the masses rushing in and out of Gran Vía from the bird’s-eye-view of the fifth floor, I’d think my neighbourhood. But when I stepped out the front door I’d be overwhelmed by the numbers of faceless strangers. There used to be a prostíbulo in our building, one floor below, and for the first few years I lived here, the women working the street corners were the only people I knew for sure were my neighbours, their familiar faces emerging through the sea of American students, German tourists, day trippers from the suburbs. They recently renovated that fourth-floor apartment, parceled it off into multiple Air BnBs. The women on the street didn’t go anywhere, but now there’s a steady stream of tourists staring at them unabashedly as they pass by to get in and out of the building, rolling suitcases thundering on the pavement.
The night of the fire, a very old woman and her ageing son were stuck in their apartment two stories above it. We had got to know them in passing during lockdown, calling out to one another from across the gulf of the street. She’d shuffle around her enormous terrace in a pink, fraying dressing gown, gesturing affectionately to her plants. Las rosas van a florecer pronto! The roses will bloom soon. Hope you’re doing okay, we’d shout back. Often, her voice would be unintelligible over the wind, and we’d just smile and nod. Small hand raising and lowering the shade against the heavy sun. Not knowing their names we called her la anciana and son. I don’t know if it would sound rude to a native speaker, but it sounds affectionate to me.
When the flames started below them, the firefighters arrived quickly, but it was chaos figuring out where it had spread to through the smoke – who had got out, who hadn’t. The stairwell, filled thick and blinding, pushed the woman and her son back inside and out onto the smokelands engulfing the rose terrace. We were already at the window, watching with cloths pressed to our faces. Seeing them through the dark, we flung open the balcony door. Are you okay? Can you get out? No, they were stuck. Do they know you’re up there? Pointing to the fire engines below. They shook their heads, pyjama tops pulled up over their mouths. Esperad, my boyfriend yelled. Voy. He flew down the five flights of stairs to tell the firemen while I stood uselessly on the balcony, waiting. Desperately trying to remember the words to tell them it would be okay, someone was coming.
A few days after the fire, we met them officially for the very first time. The four of us stood in the middle of the street to exchange early Christmas presents, and they told us we were the first neighbours in decades to get to know them, check in on them. She’d lived in that same apartment for 65 years, she told us. Wow, my boyfriend said, you must have seen so many changes. She nodded: like you wouldn’t believe.
Five years in one spot is nothing compared to 65, but you’ll still see the neighbourhood change so fast it’ll knock you sideways. My favourite bar was just up the hill. Stone walls, sagging armchairs, unfussy beer. The best tortilla in town. It closed for renovations and never reopened. They turned it into yet another specialty coffee shop: pine stools and pendant LED bulbs hanging over long tables lined with laptops. They’re spawning all across the city. If I want to make it out of here without white lights in my eyes and my scuffs unbuffed, it’s time to go.
I moved to Madrid at 23. I liked the unfamiliar heat and sitting in the scorched grass at the foot of the Palace to watch the sunsets. I liked being invited to drink in plazas, nights full of conversations I couldn’t understand. Smiling blankly and feeding off the energy, off the newness, off being 23. When the fridge was empty save for a bag of green lettuce and a six-pack of beer, three days before payday, I laughed and put a picture of it on my Instagram story. “Was anyone ever so young”, et cetera.
I never expected to be here long, but the months rolled into years and what started as a poorly planned, impulsive adventure turned into a real life that had started when I wasn’t looking. My understanding of the language has improved slowly, I’ve learned the names of sports stars and 80s singers, and I find myself understanding memes or puns in this language that was once a stone wall to me. Yet, I still have the sense that I’m experiencing it all from the other side of a fishbowl. Small talk distorted and understood a beat too late, social niceties still recited from a memorised list rather than escaping instinctively. Maybe it’s an unavoidable side effect of being an immigrant who doesn’t speak enough of the language, or maybe it’s an identity I’ve created and sealed myself inside. Holding everything at arms length to categorise my time here as an adventure rather than just – life. After all, I still go for walks in the low evening light and take pictures of the wrought-iron balconies and buildings in shades of terracotta. I’ll always be on the street, shadow-faced in the twilight, craning my neck to look into the warm lights of other people’s apartments, wondering what their lives are like.
I turned 30 this year and the crowds have started to close in on me, although I’m not sure that has to do with age as much as it does with over-familiarity blurring the scenery that used to make my heart jump into something still and claustrophobic. I’ve always been comforted by strangeness, always dreaming of going somewhere new, somewhere else. Never mattered much where here is, there has always captured my attention more.
So we’re moving North. Somewhere where the Atlantic meets the mountains. I still love Spain but I need to swap out high-rises for the horizon, wrap myself up somewhere new and unfamiliar. All these words to tell you what Basquiat could say in a single line: “I feel like a citizen, it’s time to go and come back a drifter.” I’ve been trying to write about Madrid since I first landed here, young like a wide open street, but maybe I’ll only be able to see it clearly once it’s framed in the rearview mirror. We’ll remember it fondly and I’ll belong in the memory of it. That time of my life when I lived in the dead centre of Madrid, in the shadow of the Edificio Telefónica. And when we come back it will be strange again, and that will be both sad and good. Someone else will move into our apartment and put their giant TV up against the balcony where we used to smoke on cool, starless nights. And we’ll stand on the opposite side of the street, craning our heads to see the warm light through the windows.
