Wandering aimlessly is an exercise that has been prohibited for seven weeks. Authors like HD Thoreau, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord or Rebecca Solnit maintain that it is a way of thinking. Six Spanish writers invite a suggestive walk through as many Spanish cities that today begin the slow path to normality.
Barcelona, a descent. By Enrique Vila-Matas
The atmosphere is completely real, although I wander late at night. I am at the top of the city, I walk through the same area in which the so-called Pijoaparte emerged from the shadows of his neighborhood on a verbena in San Juan and walked down the Carmel road, until reaching Sanllehy square, which is where I have just arrived and from where I am marching, in a continuous zigzag, until I reach 546 Sardinia Street, where one day Captain Blay's house was, a victim of war and lucid in his madness. I cross, seconds later, through the artificial grass field of Europe to which my father, because he was a friend of the adventurer Zalacaín (fleeting club president), was once linked. And soon the Travesía del Mal is left behind as I go down, with a rhythm of a walk, through the Torrente de las Flores, artery of the mental neighborhood of Juan Marsé, a subtle mix of the old neighborhoods of La Salut and Carmel, those of Guinardó and Grace. I go down and at the same time I notice the proximity of the Eixample, the darkest area of Barcelona, the same in which Carmen Laforet placed the gloomy atmosphere ofNothing , his implacable millimeter portrait of the Catalan bourgeoisie.
Anyway, I go and don't go, dropping down the Torrente, knowing that, once I have passed the plaza of Señor Rovira, my field of vision will have become more populated with grandchildren of the historic defeated, those “iron men forged in so many battles, today crying in the corners of the taverns ”. I am going and not going, almost already direct, in a straight line, towards the territory of childhood, the walk of my life, the Paseo de San Juan, which I will surely arrive at first light, when the day is already clear. He could rebuild from memory, house by house, the section of the Paseo de San Juan that goes from the corner with Rosellón (where Joan de Sagarra now lives) to that of Valencia, where the Marists are, the crazy school: the seven-minute journey that I have traveled more times in my life, since at one time I did it four times a day, from home to school and from home to school in double sessions in the morning and afternoon. And I remember how, at the end of the day, many times already on a closed night, I couldn't take my eyes off the underwater coloration of the Eixample portals, with their mystery and depth hiding my future.
Multiply more than one hundred times a month throughout fourteen courses of three hundred days each, and we will have the number of routes I took during the long school period for that walk of my life for which I now descend decisively, on the way to the Arco de Triunfo and the port, on the way to some Ramblas that are no longer what they were when a brutally local people constituted their only spectacle, that great river of humanity that went down to the sea, where it used to end our walk, so many times made of despair by the failure of our longings, a long walk that we always took downhill and that now seems to want to remind us that, over time, that which was denied us - the open city -, that which one day we wish to become Barcelona is being built , but contrary to how we had dreamed it, it is forged with the cruel material of our defeat, with everything that one day, painful to say, we believed indestructible.
A BOOK: Diario de Escudellers , by Sergio Pitol (included in The Art of the Fugue) . Extraordinary account of hell lived by Pitol in June and August 1969, in the most rogue Barcelona of all time.
Madrid, past present. By Elvira Navarro
In the 19th century, there was a legend that the souls of the dead came to Cerro Garabitas before leaving this world. Pilgrimage to Garabitas is a common excursion when you go by cable car to Casa de Campo. Through those parts, the past survives with force, as if time had stopped. A city often contains its history in a labyrinthine way, and you can get stuck in a memory that is not yours, but that builds you.
Walking through the city is also reminiscent of old walks. Twenty years ago, when I came to live in Madrid, everything seemed darker and less global. The cable car retains that spirit. From the splendorous and demodé , Paseo de Pintor Rosales, he goes in the cabin, flying over the buildings, to an anachronistic halt, like the old science fiction movies that told the future. In the distance, the amusement park is outlined with its horror film sound , as the screams of the roller coaster they call Abyss and the howl of the free fall of La Lanzadera are heard. The Abyss appears among the vegetation, like an angel at the end of the world, and at dusk everything takes on the appearance of a temple crowning the hill, to which the faithful would come bearing offerings that the cable car cabins would take to the gods of heaven.
One morning, I went from there to the lake shortly before the recent cleaning works started. Nothing had changed. The muddy water, the smelly vapors, the baskets for the kayaks on which sat quiet and shiny cormorants. I didn't know if the speedboat that allowed children to dream of a real lake was still working. For adults, riding in it must have been similar to what a duckling experiences in a bathtub. They told me that before it was typical to eat in the beach bars rich lamb chops with a splash of lemon, but I only remembered a lunch with my mother, both of us frightened on a terrace from which we observed the challenging profile of Madrid and chewed potatoes that they knew to car oil. My mother is already another ghost.
The last time I visited the Casa de Campo and its ghosts I entered the way I used to when, as a university student, I was looking for traces of the war. I am referring to the fairground, which is accessed by the Avenida de Portugal. In this bland area the shadow of a private preserve survives, with which the people could not even dream. The largest public park in Madrid was, for centuries, used only by the kings, and the feeling of inaccessibility persists due to the Extremadura promenade, which is a highway, to the subway tracks since the city is entangled here in a tangle of ships, carts and roads that make it impossible to advance in a straight line and make the journey an unknown quantity. Everything seems like a door to the unknown. That day, before I got lost, I arrived at the ill-fated Hexagon Pavilion, the best construction of the 1956 Brussels Expo, which rots like an organ with no function. There was a cemetery peace, of margin, of the one who wants to be left alone, and also of the one outside the system, of the law. No one saw you, or so it seemed, because I was observing a red-haired girl who was secretly waiting for me to leave to bend down and dump cat food on the floor. I tell myself now that those ghosts did come from the future, where we will rest under ruins, and that the ruins are beautiful.
A BOOK: My great novel about La Vaguada , by Fernando San Basilio, a wise and humorous portrait of the consumer society and of Madrid today as much of the city has become a great commercial center.
A Coruña, the walk of hugs . By Manuel Rivas
The true baptism from A Coruña was and is to escape a stray wave in the Riazor Breastplate, or on the shore of Monte Alto, where the cliffs have the name of the Souls, or in the place of magical punkism, where the sea gallops the rock called Cabalo das Pradeiras and where the menhirs have windows. The best way to end the getaway is always a hug.
The first great adventure is to climb the Tower of Hercules or Breogán's lighthouse. The oldest in the world in operation (they would just kill me if I don't say so). A mythical walk, 234 steps, with a dream crypt rest, to go up to the marine Aleph, the best viewpoint in the Atlantic. In the compass rose, Northwest Fourth West, the situationist place of the imagination. Next to the big flashlight, you can see the invisible. Ireland or America, depends on the days. But the best thing, after climbing, vertigo and drunken wind, is to imagine the hug.
The lighthouse forms a psychogeographic triangle with the old provincial prison and with the San Amaro marine cemetery. The prison is abandoned by humans, guards, or prisoners. The panoptic eye of power only has the nostalgia to watch the migrant birds that nest such interesting archeology. The marine cemetery, as generations attest, is one of the healthiest in the world. The jail and the cemetery are two other good places to hug. The entire edge of the lighthouse is, with its caves, beaches and coves of clandestine happiness. That cliff-side city space, on the shore, where people trace their own horizon line, has the hypnosis of the origin, of the oceanic feeling.
A Coruña is an amphibious city and had its amphibious painter. Urban Lugrís. He wanted to paint the seabed with a diving suit. He did it on unforgettable canvases, tables and murals, and also with red ribeiro on the bar table. The walk through Lugrís, through that timeless Coruña, that restless paradise, painted with the desire and pain of the sea, is perhaps the most real thing, facing the usury of time.
And that surreal walk widens your gaze. It allows you to see a Coruña hidden behind the corners, or hidden in a vial of saudades. That restless paradise of the small squares and gardens of the Old City, such as the Plazuela de las Bárbaras or the Romantic Garden. Where John Moore, a military hero saving lives, is visited by his mistress and adventurer Lady Stanhope on foggy days. I have not seen the cameras of the heart programs there. But it is a place for timeless embrace.
There was a time when the lights of the lighthouse held a book on the city coat of arms. On the Paseo de las Saudades, walking takes you to Synagogue Street. A Coruña is a city of printers and bookstores. And what do you tell me about bakeries? Where there is good bread, there are bookstores! It is a musical city, with a navigation route to the detour. A Coruña always had a reputation for sleeping on its feet. What has never been in crisis is the production of bohemia and the compass of the avant-garde.
The walk itself is an avant-garde. A Dadaist crowd, in their own way, strolls through A Coruña's cantons, the deck of the transatlantic city, with its glass gallery facades and its boat houses and the utopian city-garden rehearsals.
But the best walk in A Coruña is the eccentric. There is an axial line connecting the lighthouse with the Castro de Elviña, the Celtic city, the first city and, now, the last village. From childhood I remember that just in the ara solis they had spit out a large high-voltage tower, so we deduce that the Celts, in Galicia, had been electrocuted. Now they have removed it. No need to go to the solstice at Stonehenge. How not to hug in this place where one day the treasure of a golden duck appeared.
A BOOK: The Tribune , by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The A Coruña cigar makers staged the first great feminist strike in the world. This is the story of a young leader, Amparo, and her fight for social and personal freedom. Here, Doña Emilia is a wild writer. Write an unusual and courageous work in the history of Spanish literature, including our time. Published in 1883! The protagonist, Amparo, breaks all seams, to bet on radical freedom.
Bilbao, the invented city . By Aixa de la Cruz
I don't think I learned to walk until I got pregnant. Before I just ran. He warmed up joints under the Arriaga bridge and set out along the Abando riverbank, happy to speed up the Bilbao frames of the postcards and push with the tourists who crowded in front of the Guggenheim. I was looking for the best paved routes; only that. Now that I have slowed down and I am attentive to the landscape, my journey begins where my training ended, at the foot of the Euskalduna bridge, on the esplanade that belonged to the old shipyards and that now marks the border between the embellished urban landscape and the urban landscape in works. I am not the only thirty-year-old who has a predilection for this area. Many of us keep an idealized image of that industrial and shipping Bilbao, always cloudy with Xirimiri, that our parents have told us so much about but that we never suffered from, and we came here looking for their echoes.
What I like most about the Olabeaga pier is that they have tried to tame it without success. It has been a pedestrian for twelve years, but the sidewalk, which runs between the estuary and the mountain, is so narrow that it only admits walkers in single file. When the tides are high, the water level rises a few centimeters from the asphalt and then drops as if someone had pulled the cistern, making it easy to feel claustrophobic. You know that, in case of a flood, there is no way out. Even so, in the initial part of the walk, under the gray scales of the New San Mamés, they have opened an outdoor terrace in one of the old loading docks. It is a very chic place , with soft electronic music, elaborate cocktails and good views, but the estuary is capricious and the same returns you timbers as swollen corpses of rats, so I prefer to have a coffee in an old fish market that there are some meters later. It is the last bar in the area. From here, the blocks of houses follow each other, flat buildings in the fishing district with peeling paint that give way to a pediment that leads to a wall. With the wall, the charms on this side of the riverbank disappear and the one opposite: Zorrozaurre becomes relevant.
Zorrozaurre was a peninsula and is now an island. In Bilbao they like pharaonic projects very much and this is our capital extravaganza. We have flooded an isthmus to separate ourselves from the most decadent appendix of the town and, when we rehabilitate it, we will inaugurate a new bridge that connects us to it. From this shore, you can see the constant transfer of trucks, cement plants and cranes, and the live and direct deconstruction of a skyline. Every time I come there is a new empty lot where there used to be a block of flats, an industrial warehouse or a factory. A few picturesque buildings barely survive any more - a small mansion, the ruins of the old Artiach factory, an abandoned marbling with its garden dwarves exposed to the elements ... - isolated from each other as if they were serving quarantine. But it is easy to romanticize the decline in the middle of the afternoon, when the estuary zigzags with silver flashes until it is lost on the left bank.
I come home with an exotic feeling. All this that is so ugly will soon be precious and livable. Soon it will be a refuge for runners and tourists and millennials will have to move our invented nostalgia somewhere else. We will look for the traces of that mythical city that we never knew in new bastions. Perhaps in Barakaldo. Perhaps in Ortuella. Who knows.
A BOOK: Better the absence , by Edurne Portela. It is the book that best illustrates that decadent Bilbao of the 80s that has come to my generation through the songs of Eskorbuto but that in the novel resists strongly any idealization.
Malaga, arrival point. By Justo Navarro
I imagine that I went up from the boardwalk along the Paseo de la Farola in Malaga six months ago and left the old military government on my right and on my left pier 1 and pier 2 of the port, anchorage of shops and bars restaurants and a cube-museum of glass and colored vinyls, and I look for the shade of the plane trees of the Paseo de los Curas, because the palm grove of the port always reminds me of Miami even though I have never been to Miami. There are cars, even horse carriages, but not as much traffic as other days. It is Saturday and I am already in the Plaza de la Marina, a splendid day, in November. Or I have not arrived from the boardwalk along the Paseo de los Curas and it is another Saturday six months ago and I just got off the bus at the port stop.
It does not matter: I am in the Plaza de la Marina, the first thing seen by those who have just got off the cruise through the Mediterranean or the Atlantic-Mediterranean, the appearance of Malaga: a 440 parking space at the entrance to the commercial area, the fountain, the monument to the street fish vendor, the bureaucratic and financial buildings at the end of the square, the great hotel that I like so much, wedge nailed between the Cortina del Muelle and Calle Molina Larios, twelve floors plus attic and pool in the heights, architecture of the twenties or thirties for the sixties of the last century. And I'm already on Calle Larios, pedestrian. If they covered it, it would become a commercial gallery like the Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
There are people, more and more people every time, it is Saturday, noon, the crowd on a shopping Saturday, six months ago, pre-Christmas, Christmas November, soon the 180,000 festive lights will light up, and the tree of bars that appears from the street expands Larios, in bloom the happy, street drinking crowd, the happy tapas, the happy and mass marketing, like in the boarding gate of an airport, but outdoors, without the anguish of the flight and the intimidating controls, and the sky as high and as light blue as the illuminated screen of my computer, and noise from the street in the piped music, sound of the street , bruit de la rue, bruscio della strada, Strassengeräusch, som da rua , all the languages of the cruise passengers in the city is flat as a paved beach, with indigenous people playing tourists on a Saturday lunchtime and tourists playing anthropologists, all united by citymarketing , luxury and non-luxury shops, global and global brands, fluent people and fluent money and every more invisible, money-cards, money-phone.
I move through the expanded cruise and the expanded airport, hospitality and security, video cameras and visible police surveillance. I am in the Plaza de la Constitución, between the cathedral, if I follow the Chinitas passage and Fresca street, on the right, and the Guadalmedina river, if I go on Compañía street, on the left, but always shopping mall , take one way or another, always shops and bars and museums, all still open, churches and gyms, shows, a cathedral, a river, a whole Picasso city, bless the citybranding , airport city, stranded cruise, the world of recreational shopping . And there are more and more people, like preparing for the lighting of the monumental Christmas lights, thousands and thousands and thousands of people, squeezing each other, it is not long before this November morning. I am seeing everything that was and still is not. I see the past as if it were the future, science fiction.
A BOOK: Monumental Malaga. In view of this example , by Elo Vega and Rogelio López Cuenca (coordinators) . A critical and entertaining way of walking through the history of Malaga today through its monuments.
Valencia, the art of the walk . By Elisa Ferrer
I used to be little fond of walking. Lots of running, little to enjoy the ride. "Running", yes, in the second meaning of the RAE, that of going fast, not in the first, which is where we include what runners do with their brilliant clothes, their pre-marathon attitude. But no, I do not have the will to iron or strong ankles, I have always been more like running to places, being late, breathing hard, passing people who occupy the width of the sidewalk and thinking, ¿ Where will they go so slowly?
In recent years, however, I have begun to exercise in the art of walking (maturity, they say). My hobby started in Iowa City, that forest city with its leafy trees, its hidden deer, the spring baby rabbits that when summer comes grow and drag their bellies through the grass. So, when I returned to Valencia, after thirteen years without inhabiting it, I decided to bring this new hobby with me.
Since my return, I have perfected the art of the ride. The first thing I learned is that you have to leave the house without having to go anywhere. It took me a little longer to discover that the gaze should not be on the feet or on the clock, but should hover around and be surprised. The arms should be relaxed, perhaps with a subtle sway, never forcing a martial movement or standing still. Once I learned the mechanics, I began to wander around the city that in previous years had been mine, but now, on each walk, it seemed different, better, unique.
After this time of acclimatization, I can already define my ideal walk in València. It begins in the Central Park, where increasingly green gardens coexist with Renfe's old ships, them and their practical beauty, which becomes romantic when illuminated at night. I like to sit and read in the park, let the sun shine on me (knowing how to stop to savor the ride is something you learn once the mechanics are internalized, patience).
I like to continue walking through my neighborhood, Russafa, where when looking up, my eyes meet modernist buildings. I have become a collector of moldings, colors, balconies, portals. Without realizing it, while I expand my collection, I walk until I reach the Turia river bed, another park full of green (in which you have to dodge athletes and bike lanes to avoid being run over) and I stop in front of Gulliver, that giant who carries thirty years lying on the ground so that, even though we have grown, we return to being girls, boys, when we drop down their slides and break our pants with every fall (no fabric survives that giant).
When my walk lengthens and I cross the other side of the river, I return to my student years, Blasco Ibáñez Avenue returns me to the faculty, to the college where I idealized adulthood, sharing a flat. Although my legs can't take it anymore, there are few times that I don't get to the Benimaclet stop to get on the next tram (my feet demand a rest), get to the beach and go from my collection of moldings and balconies to that of tiles. The tiles of the houses of the Cabanyal, those that change color according to the light. Any self-respecting walk in Valencia has to end in this neighborhood, on the beach, tired feet in the sand, the noise of the sea, that when it gets wet is always too hot.
Today we will be able to walk again, it will be less kilometers, but we will appreciate the sun, the wind on our faces and the trees as if it were the last time. Because if we have learned anything in these days of confinement, it is that nothing can be taken for granted. Not even the common (and beautiful) art of the ride.
A BOOK: A dinar on a qualsevol day / A meal on any given day, by Ferran Torrent. It is a book that puts you headlong into Valencian society in recent years, with its corruptions, intrigues and with the stellar appearance of the odd character known in a fiction that seems absolutely real.
Feet and pages
Philosophers of walk. Ramón del Castillo.Turner
Wanderlust. A history of walking. Rebecca Solnit. Captain Swing
Walk . Erling Kagge. Taurus
Book of passages. Walter Benjamin. Akal and Abada
Walks in Berlin. Franz Hessel. Errata Naturae
The city of disappearances. Iain Sinclair. Alpha Decay
Walks with my mother . Javier Pérez Andújar. Tusquets
Walks through the fugitive Barcelona. Ana Basualdo. Boat Pass
A lonely walk among people. Antonio Muñoz Molina. Seix Barral