Madrid, capital of confusion

Patricia and Álvaro, 21, hug at ten in the morning at the Barajas airport, ghostly and lonely, with two closed terminals.

She is going to Germany to study music and does not know when she will return, he knows for sure that he will not be able to go to see her.

She plays the bassoon and he plays the violin.

There are other goodbyes on the deserted sidewalk and they are silent, there are no people or noise.

They are at the door because he is not allowed to accompany her, although she has back problems and carries a certificate, but nothing.

They may see each other at Christmas.

"I'll be back if I can," she says.

"I stay here locked up," he laments.

They look sad.

They speak of Madrid as a claustrophobic, hostile place with an uncertain future.

Madrid is already a city where people believe they live in the absurd and do not trust those who govern them.

Going through neighborhoods of the city phrases that begin the same are repeated: it is absurd ... "It is absurd that I can go to London and not see my cousin in Toledo."

"It is absurd that now people from the areas with the most contagions, which were confined, can now go out all over Madrid."

"It is absurd, these measures are not going to stop the virus and at the weekend you cannot go out to breathe in the countryside."

"It is absurd that they do not reinforce the subway, if it is full and we all move throughout the city."

"It is absurd for them to close the parks."

Everyone has specialized in detecting incongruities, commenting on them to vent, and in this jungle of paradoxes they just go about their business.

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The latest rule change is just one more episode that is not fully understood.

"I have not found out well, but how I go from home to work and from work to home," says Silvia, 31 years old.

Avoid the metro, take the Vallecas commuter train, which comes from Alcalá, another confined area, to go to work at a clothing store in the Salamanca district, in the center.

She lives in one of the 45 areas that until now had mobility restrictions, except for work or justified reasons, and where they will not notice anything.

Jonathan Rodríguez, 22, works in construction and does not know the rules well either.

It crosses all of Madrid to Chamartín on line 1 of the metro.

"We are always tight, at seven in the morning when I go and at seven in the afternoon when I return."

He is from Guatemala, has been in Spain for a year and a half and is comfortable.

You don't know if the politicians are doing it right or wrong.

Hope good.

There are many people on the fringes of the news.

The boundaries between neighborhoods brought surreal situations to the surface, and their end, too.

A good example of citizen sickness is the La Ardilla bar, on Calle Congosto, on the corner of Pico Chilegua, in Vallecas: it was within a confined area, but its terrace, in the square opposite, was not.

“The neighbors on the other side could come to the terrace, but they couldn't go to the bathroom.

Now I can close an hour later, at eleven.

But I am left without half of the terrace, which goes from 100% to 50% ”, says Milagros Albacete, 35, the owner.

She says a phrase that is also repeated a lot and begins like this: it does not matter whether you are from the right or from the left ... It continues with a statement of exhaustion from the political class, en bloc: “It does

Nothing they do makes no sense ”.

What would she do?

Then he says something that more or less everyone knows, and he also repeats himself: "It is throwing stones on my roof, but the only thing that would work to stop the virus would be to close everything again."

She has five employees, plus herself.

They don't know what the future holds.

“With fear, the afternoons are already dead;

in the morning with the schools and the subway entrance I have the pull of breakfast, vermouth time, but as soon as the cold starts… ”.

On the terrace, a family celebrates a communion.

There are 13, they sit at separate tables, to comply with the rules, which say they cannot be more than six.

"Won't you interview me?" Says a woman who doesn't wear a mask, and explains why: it's useless.

"Everything the TV says is a lie."

She also does not know whether or not she can go to a shoe store near the Retiro, and she is glad to know that she can.

This is the most amazing series of phrases that are repeated, which explains part of the confusion, and they are of this type: "I don't understand anything, but I don't watch the news anymore."

Many people live deliberately uninformed, they do not know the rules with certainty and they do not know which politician is right, they no longer care.

Villa de Vallecas is a small town and there are queues everywhere, but they are not to stockpile food, people are no longer afraid that everything will close.

There is a queue at the butcher shop, the bakery, the tobacco shop.

Also in the pawnshop, six people.

The bus line 143 leaves at noon from Vallecas to the center, to the Goya area, a commercial area that is packed.

Employees of El Corte Inglés confirm that this Saturday there are many more people.

Maybe for the beginning of the month.

The conversations, the same thing: how absurd everything is.

A woman believes that everything should be closed, and she has her reasons: she was infected in March - she suffered headaches that still last - so she knows what she is talking about.

And even more so because, by chance, he works in number 900 for information on the epidemic in the Community of Madrid.

That is why she prefers not to say her name.

She started with information, and then she has done everything: tracer, follow-up, give PCR results, and in the worst months until the search for the deceased.

"When someone died in a hospital, it was not known which of the three morgues she ended up in, the family did not know, and they had to be searched," she explains.

On the table in his house, where he teleworks, he has a stack of pages of all the protocols that have been happening, which change almost every week.

The last one is that the test is only done to cohabitants and with symptoms, not to those who have been in contact with a positive.

In this she sees people becoming more and more nervous, and endures a lot of rudeness.

"People want to take the test and they don't understand it."

What generates more doubts now are the schools, another aspect of the chaos.

Each one does one thing and families do not know what to expect.

There are also employees who call to report that there are positives in their company and they continue to work.

"As we are, people will only learn with good fines."

The bad opinion about the Spanish is only surpassed by that of their rulers.

In the shops in this area and in the Salamanca district there is a lot of animation and more people see than other days.

On the street the neighbors are just as angry as in Vallecas.

Pepe Ruiz, a 56-year-old publicist, thinks like this: “This is an outrage, it doesn't make any sense.

There are other areas with worse data, such as Navarra, and they do not close them.

If after six months the only thing we have learned is to lock ourselves up, we have learned little ”.

She has a family in San Agustín de Guadalix, a town 35 kilometers away, and she doesn't understand why she can't go see her now.

Although I thought the restrictions started on Monday.

There is life in the neighborhoods of Madrid, but the center is just a place abandoned by tourists.

There are no more neighbors, their houses have been converted into tourist apartments.

On Arenal street, from Sol to Ópera, there are eight stores with the sign “For rent”.

There is a very funny banner in a window, next to a Cádiz scarf, which sums it up: "

son of a bitch."

“This is ruin.

Cash is down 85% -95%.

My parents said that seeing the center this empty only happened after the Civil War.

There is very little joy in Madrid, people walk quietly ”, recounts Juan Gabriel Gorrachategui, from the historic churrería 1902, opened in that year and run since then next to Arenal street by the same family.

His son Héctor is the fifth generation.

They reopened on September 1.

They haven't seen a single tourist until this week, some Mexicans.

"At night you see the box and you have to rub your eyes, you don't believe it," says Héctor.

They complain about the City Council, which does not allow terraces to be opened in the center: "You send a letter and they won't even answer you."

Now the last hope of downtown businesses is Christmas: “If that fails and they don't help us, it's over, 60% of the stores will close.

Our job is to make good chocolate and good churros, and politicians are there to defend our interests, and they don't.

They only fight like children ”.

But in the center of Madrid there are unexpected signs of new life.

The absence of tourists opens up new possibilities.

Just on Friday night, when the city was going to close, a bar would open.

It's called Anda Jaleo, on Calle de la Unión, next to the Teatro Real.

They are the owners of another establishment that is nearby, which lives off the people of the neighborhood and not on tourists, and the situation has allowed them to open this one: rents go down and they have left this place at 50% for the first two years .

They had two people in ERTE and with the new bar they have been able to get them out.

“We trust that our family, which is the neighborhood, the neighbors, will keep coming,” says José, one of the employees.

At the opening it was packed.

People came to dinner with some rules and left at eleven with others, to a different Madrid.

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