Madrid, city of clay

Whatever direction I took, after a few turns my feet were invariably drawn to Madrid Antiguo, like a magnet with its narrow old streets and shadowy taverns.  The fortifications had long since been swept away, but it was easy to see where the original town had been, cramped into its irregular grid of alleyways and plazas, behind the wall of house fronts which spread out from the city’s central square, La Puerta del Sol. 

There was no gate there to justify the name, just a plain brick palace with a clock tower overlooking the hubbub of cars and buses.  But in the time of the Emperor Carlos Quinto this was the main entrance to the city, and all that stood before it was countryside and farms.  The gate disappeared soon after it was built in the 16^th century, when it was painted with a golden sun because it faced the east.  The Puerta del Sol was no longer the point of entry to anything, but the city’s traffic still noisily converged there, just as stagecoaches had done in the past, bound for every city of Spain.

The red and white building with the clock tower was the central police station, la Dirección General de Seguridad, where Franco’s opponents were imprisoned and tortured.  In 1960 everyone still passed it with a certain solemnity, and caution, under the gaze of armed sentries.

All I had to do was turn into any of the narrow streets behind the Puerta del Sol to find myself in the tangle of ancient alleyways which had as its own center the Plaza Mayor. I entered through one of the many arches in the wall of 17^th century buildings which surrounded it on all four sides. It was Madrid’s royal square, sinisterly overlooked by a palace with hooded black spires, and long before I crossed its expanse of cobblestones it had been the site of many bloody scenes.  Philip II founded it, after which the space was used for bullfights, inquisitorial trials and, also, public executions, by burning at the stake or garrotting.  The agony of fire was for the Jews who refused to give up their faith before dying, and the mercy of strangulation first was for those who broke down and accepted. 

I would exit through the arch on the far side – Arco de Cuchilleros, of the knife makers – and go down its steep flight of steps past a restaurant called Las Cuevas de Luis Candelas, named for a legendary bandit.  We never went in because it was notoriously expensive and catered to American tourists, with waiters in 18^th century costume and a “guard” carrying a blunderbuss at the door. From the establishment's various doors we could see into the labyrinth of caves and corridors which permeated the buttress under the southern side of the plaza.  They served cochinillo asado, suckling pig baked in the oven, which I would have dearly liked to try.  But my friends preferred the cheap mesones that lined the street below, at the foot of the Plaza’s flared-out bulwarks.  There, we drank our chatos de tinto accompanied by saucers of steaming callos a la madrileña, a delicious dish made of cow’s stomach and chick peas in a spicy red sauce. 

From Plaza Mayor, the streets sloped and twisted darkly away down towards Madrid’s rastro, the flea market, where you could buy anything from birds in a cage to old boots and buttons.  Madrid was not a beautiful or even colourful city, all blue-grey, rusty brown and dull yellow with, at almost every turn, the hulking palaces with their hooded black roofs.  I wondered why they seemed so un-Mediterranean, until I read that the Spaniards had copied them from the slate roofs they saw in the Low Countries, designed to withstand heavy rainfall and snow. 

And the palaces were made of painted clay – palacios de barro, as the madrileños mocked them in their day – because there was never enough gold from America to pay for them to be sheathed in granite.  But, framed by cornerstones and coiffed with helmet-like, Flemish towers, they stood out against the Castilian sky most distinctively.

Madrid was created 1,000 years ago by the Moors as a fortress protecting the northern access to their capital Toledo.  Its Arabic name Majreed meant “the pipes”, because of the ducts the Arabs built to bring water from the Manzanares River. But the Moors had long fled south when Philip II decided to make the sleepy town the capital of his country, which since the discovery of America had become the ruler of the world.  Until then, Spain's monarchs had no capital and moved constantly between Santander and Seville, Burgos and Barcelona, where they held court in the palaces and monasteries which were at hand.  Madrid was only chosen because it lay at the dead center of the square-ish Iberian peninsula, a hard-to-rule land where four languages other than Castilian were spoken.

The desire to impose cultural uniformity was so great that the language of Castile had ceased to be called by its name but, simply, as español, to drive home the idea that it was the one and only tongue of all Spaniards.  When I arrived in Spain Franco’s nationalist regime was at its zenith, and although himself a Galician, he had outlawed the use of any language but Spanish, since it had been for centuries assumed that Spain could only be a great - and governable - nation with a single heritage.  My friends at the residence told me that people could be sent to prison for speaking Basque or Catalonian in public or even on the telephone, and no book or newspaper was printed in anything but Spanish. So much that when South Americans visiting Spain spoke of their language as castellano, the term had an anachronistic ring.

As soon as my friends and I strayed from the web of streets behind Calle Mayor and Calle del Príncipe, the city was ugly and massive, coldly monumental.  Down the road from the residence, towering over the Plaza de España, was the country’s only skyscraper, a sort of staggered pyramid known as Edificio España.  From there we walked uphill along the Gran Via, a soul-less street if there ever was one, peering into the cavernous coffee shops and theaters and gloomy haberdasheries. 

At the top of the slope stood the palatial, wedge-shaped Banco Español de Crédito where I collected my monthly allowance from Canada, a rococo temple to the god of money, all in marble and stucco.  The front was adorned with a series of brass plaques carved with the names of all the branches in Spain, in alphabetical order.  Every time I went past I would look for the one with the M’s and Montefrio, the village near Granada where I had met the singer Manuel Avila that summer. 

From there it was downhill along the sprawling Calle de Alcalá to the great marble fountain of Cibeles, with the Greek fertility goddess riding her chariot through the spray, in front of the preposterously large and ornate Oficina de Correos, the central post office.    The leafy boulevard that sloped gently down to the right was the Avenida del Prado with the picture gallery and, at the end, the elaborate iron and glass façade of the Atocha station where, whenever I could, I took the train to Andalucia. 

 

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