Marisol Condoy, at her market stall.Lisbeth Salas
We haven't finished our first tour of the market, when it falls on us like a dark bird: that's it, our plan fell through, I suddenly feared.
However, it took the man a few seconds to understand that I could be useful to his interests, which, what a coincidence, was exactly what I thought.
What are you doing here? he asked us, without caution.
I told him my intentions (although, a la Groucho, in case he didn't like them, I had others ready) and they seemed convenient to him.
So this man in black, whom we are going to call The Father, became the master key that would open the confidence of the working people of the market.
The Father is in black
Fight, fight, fight, there are people for whom life, everything, has been fighting.
The Father is one of those.
And he doesn't have an easy smile, he wears melancholy like a cape, but he has the look of a little bird of prey.
He releases to me in a trained loop what he wants me to write (what if the Mostenses has been marginalized, what if it is at the minimum of its potential, what if the internal battles, what if the power struggles, what if xenophobia) and I I hear it out of one ear.
Ecuadorian.
He arrived in Spain with the millennium.
He has only one child, which is rare for someone from a social status where children are usually retirement, so the more the merrier.
I show him, diaphanous, my surprise at this lack of offspring.
They lost three offspring before the only child was achieved, she tells me.
Oh that's it.
From the hand of The Father, roads and people open up for us.
We continue walking through the market, aesthetically so distant from those boutique markets standardized by tourism.
But of course, "broken rather than mended" is a principle of the Iberian gentleman that no one can afford here: to be ragged, disheveled and unstitched would be a show off.
The Mercado de los Mostenses is tidy and neat, like a child on the first day of school.
sign it
Julius Caesar says that he was the first to arrive here.
That he is the oldest Latin American on the market, well.
That when he arrived he had hair, he repeats several times and it takes me a while to understand that it is his running gag.
While Julio César attends to his clients, El Padre tells me that the peak of a shopkeeper is the moment in which he can buy the position where he worked.
So the first thing he does is take down the old poster and change it for one with his name on it.
I think of that gesture: putting the signature.
It's nice, accept it (if even on Facebook there are those who redound and sign their own publications).
What grace the human being, so much epic to culminate in something so simple.
Go around the world to put on a poster: Greengrocery So-and-so.
Or sign this text.
Julio César, I tell him, why do you want hair if you have laurels.
He knows what I'm referring to and, then, he looks at me differently, he begins to treat me as "my love".
And even if you don't believe it, you do believe it.
love is...
An Ecuadorian waiter old enough to be Romeo Montesco's grandfather is one of the few newcomers I ran into.
What brought you here? I asked Mrs. Florinda.
He seemed to confess to a crime when she answered me, serious and direct: a mistress.
That was three years ago, after which the flame went out (it's confirmed by science, don't hang me).
This man shows disbelief.
He is without being.
He is not found.
Now all that remains is for another beloved to appear and take him back there, I hear myself say and I'm terrified.
This language of mine
How dare I
He laughs, a laugh without proportion or control.
Either he had already thought about it or the darling of the return ticket already exists.
To love is to give something that you do not have to someone who is not asking for it.
The quote is inaccurate, that was not what Jacques Lacan said, but that is how he has traveled by word of mouth until he reached this last pun: to emigrate is to go and give something that you do not have to a country that is not asking for it.
Mother there is not only one;
homelands, neither
"My parents saved me from El Salvador," this Salvadoran tells me, and it is the least paradoxical of his phrases.
It turns out that, as a child, his mother gave it to his aunt to bring him here.
That's what he does fifteen years ago.
Now he refers to his aunt as his mother, and his mother, too.
It was a loan, so to speak, not a gift.
But over time her mother (bío) felt the victim of a deceit and she said that she had stolen her son.
"A drama", says the creature of discord.
“The problem” –he adds– is that his mother (bío) did not give him up for adoption, but rather she gave her mother a power of attorney.
That is why he has lived here "illegal", until recently, when he finally got Spanish nationality.
"I always asked my mother why," I now hear on the recording, and I don't know which mother she is referring to, or why.
“My mother and father made life miserable for my parents,” she adds (take meat, Sigmund).
My parents saved me from that world, although today, thanks to Bukele, El Salvador is better, safer, less corrupt, he says.
I ask him how he knows.
Through the networks, he answers me.
My damn face gives me away and he mutters: "They don't want it here, I don't know why...".
Now he is going to be re-elected, despite the fact that the Constitution prohibits it, I tell him.
(I can't help it!, interventionist journalism, maternalist journalism, this one of mine).
He explains to me, didactic, that he is not going to re-elect himself, no, he is going to run for the people to re-elect him.
And he finishes off, without blinking: the people rule.
Scary.
Either you acclimatize, or you
acclimate
This story is different.
In Colombia, he had a job in the kitchen of a place with stars and forks.
He lived with his parents, single, healthy, without debts or children.
O season!
He was studying French, because he wanted to go to Montreal.
But one day they told him that there were calls to work in Spain, he tells me and pauses, before giving me an explanation that I have not asked for: "They told us that we were going to do good jobs that the Spanish did not want to do."
I can't get a poker face.
And he adds: "I don't know if it was true."
Nearly thirty good-looking, healthy and educated men landed, with their papers in order.
They put everyone to wash pots, except him, who went straight to kitchen assistant, in a place that her Majesty frequented.
Between a Spanish and a Colombian, Su-Majes-tad-es-co-ja.
He lived in a room with no windows, literally four walls.
She worked at night, did not see sunlight, slept on a bunk, back to back with another immigrant, until what had to happen happened to him: she got depressed.
Her story is similar to mine.
When he tells me: "I was in that place, I was wondering what the hell I came here for", he interrupted him: "And
what did you answer?"
He looks at me stunned.
The question is rhetorical, in his case;
in mine, it's a probable epitaph.
It couldn't be any other way, his is a story of improvement and now he is his own boss.
He seems satisfied.
He no longer studies French or English, "but now I speak Spanish better."
A cold zigzag runs down my back.
To those who don't understand it, I have no way to explain it.
With that phrase he summed up his castration, the inescapable tribute of the immigrant who "integrates": disintegrate.
the envoy
The Father stops our journey through the aisles of the market to tell me what, from minute zero, was his objective: the story of his son.
He is twenty-two years old and is a successful businessman, owner of an Ecuadorian food restaurant in the posh area of Madrid, he says, a brutal place, he adds;
He is moved to listen to it, to use those words that, it is clear, are not his own.
El Hijo's restaurant has been on TV, newspapers, radio, and the networks.
He shows me photos.
It is an EU “approved” site, so to speak.
You understand me.
This last thing is told to me by El Padre in front of Tony Rosado, languishing there, on a wall poster (I'm not making it up, it would be a very chambona mise en scène).
Coincidence makes me understand that El Hijo is also an emigrant, who has left this cumbia, fried food and ceviche market for Madrid where Ecuadorians, if any, are in uniform.
Tony Rosado couldn't make that leap.
Tony Rosado stays in the market.
She
–I came running from the… What is it called?
–…
-That they said there was... the beef... the beef...
– The recession?
-It's!
Here, a compatriot of hers earned more money taking care of old people than she did in Ecuador as a chemistry teacher.
She decided to come and try her luck.
Her husband –The Father–, less than
she did not see it as correct, how was she going to go alone, leaving the child (of months) that had cost them so much, that money was not everything in life... "But I did not pay attention to her and I came".
He narrates his early works without using the pertinent word: slavery.
From what he tells, it is what it was.
In six months she paid the debts she had, including the plane ticket, and she was able to send for her husband, her son and her mother-in-law.
“I don't regret it, but it's the hardest thing one can go through.
“I took care of little ones, having mine there”, she tells me and murmurs: “my soul broke”.
Looking at his photo I see, in fact, his broken soul, although calm.
The vitiligo that has discolored his hands and part of his face, in some countries we call melancholy.
Return to Ecuador?
"I love my country, but we no longer know anyone there, we would be strangers."
In addition, El Hijo does not want to return, "and since I have only one son, I stay where he is."
"I already suffered what I had to suffer": this is the calm that this woman transmits, having made that trip, to the bottom of the pain, and returning to tell it.
Sorry, I correct: and live to tell about it, because, as those of us who left one day know, the same person never returns or returns to the same place.
That never comes back
One begins to understand it later.
Follow all the international information on
and
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.