Live in a city, no matter how beautiful, and you will eventually have a bruise with ugliness. This may be the real difference, when all is told, between city and country dwelling. Nature offers shock and heartbreak but no cruelty or ugliness unless man is involved. Take Madrid, the city where I was born, a city, whose main thoroughfare, Gran Vía, will make your neck ache as you tilt it to spot another remote stone-faced hero crown an art deco or expressionist skyscraper; whose stunning Plaza de la Villa is a subtle example of unscripted harmony and charm; whose real cathedral, the Prado Museum, is an endless labyrinth of intelligence, feeling, and beauty. Take your pick of its beauties, and there are many, but inevitably you will lower your eyes down from the skyscraper and you will land on the prostrate maimed body of a heroin user begging for scraps with a cardboard sign under his stump. You will spot a grubby shop crassly advertising its gold-for-cash schemes to the unemployed or pension-less. You will see your reflection on the show-window of its best-known department store, offering a cornucopia of mediocrity to aimless souls such as yourself, for if the Prado Museum is Madrid’s heaven, El Corte Inglés must be its hell.
Yet, for me, there are no sadder uglier places in my native city than certain cafeterias established in the late seventies or eighties: places where function completely overrides pleasure, where banality rubs elbows with despair. They often belong to some autochthonous chain, sport the glaring lights of fast food joints but are as slow paced as traditional bars, have imitation rustic pine or formica furniture, display pictures of platters of food looking vaguely American and thoroughly unappetising, food that has had all the soul and life sucked out of it, a fried egg on top of a steak with some chips and limp lettuce on the side, say. Punters there are on the brink of being out of pocket, may have come into the city centre for their annual Christmas outing, women will wear boot cut jeans with some rhinestones along the pocket line, imitation leather ankle boots, pony tail held up mercilessly high; men have neatly ironed shirts tucked into their well-buckled trousers, a comb over, a signet ring. Conversations are reruns of a reality show or, at best, of the weather forecast. Whenever I walk past one of those cafeterias, I can hear an admonition not to lose my grip on life and its secrets as it unfolds; not to let go of clever goodhearted friends; to keep my eyes peeled and my ears open to beauty and truth wherever they lay hidden.
If you ever see me in one of those cafeterias, don’t walk on by, come to the rescue, tap on the glass, beckon me out onto the fresh air of another day.
A Fistful of Olives 