Madrilenians with three generations of their family born in the Spanish capital are famously known as ‘gatos’ or cats. But what about everyone else, including all the foreign residents who have made the city their home?
Published by Ybernia, ‘Stray Cats’ is a collection of essays and anecdotes from 17 foreign-born writers who have together witnessed over 40 years of Madrid’s evolution: from the period of post democratic reconstruction to the present.
The idea was dreamt up by the book’s editor, John Dapolito, who has also contributed 36 evocative black and white photos to the publication.
As writers, the task John set us was to describe the changes we’ve witnessed in Madrid and how the city has changed us.
Easier said than done, but here are some of my own recollections
As a young Englishmen recently arrived in Madrid, on 14 December 1988, I found myself walking down a completely deserted Paseo de la Castellana under an impossibly blue sky.
It was Spain’s first general strike since Franco’s death and with 95% participation Europe’s largest since the Second World War. The atmosphere was volatile and full of possibility, offering a stark and exhilarating contrast with the grey gloom of the conservative Britain I had just left behind.
I began by renting a room in a flat on Calle Atocha whose other residents included an Italian translator, her heroin-addicted brother Matteo, a lesbian couple from Mozambique, two German students, a gay Andalusian gigolo and a visiting American jazz saxophonist.
Below us, the neighbourhood of Huertas, like most of central Madrid, was also in flux – halfway between decay and renewal. By day, it was a battleground of construction and local commerce. By night, it morphed into a sprawling party zone.
As an English teacher with no professional vocation, I was mostly drawn to the music and in particular something called nuevo flamenco: a fusion of Spain’s best known art form with jazz, blues and African influences. In clubs like Café Central and Candela, I could watch musicians like Jorge Pardo, Juan and Antonio Carmona of Ketama or Raimundo Amador of Pata Negra experimenting late into the night.
But Madrid’s vibrant cultural life also had a darker side. As the 80s ended, heroin addiction surged. Back at the flat, Matteo’s addiction exploded into chaos: screaming fits in the bathroom, syringes on the kitchen table and missing money. So, in 1990, I moved to a new flat in Malasaña.
Even though the street had a line of dope peddlers whose clients often ended up unconscious in our stairwell, the flat itself was calmer with a Galician girl and a fellow English teacher the only other residents.
Madrid’s famous Movida was fading, but Malasaña was still the nocturnal playground of a generation of slightly rootless and reckless Madrilenians unburdened by the memory of dictatorship. Amid the late nights, cheap whisky and loud rock, I even fell in with a seductively streetwise Madrilenian whose charm was only matched by her love of danger – shoplifting, drug taking, illegal driving and in one case crashing into a police car. The relationship was thrilling, stupid and predictably unsustainable.
Madrid had given me three years of joyous escapism but it was no longer enough. I started a writing correspondence course but without any clear idea of what it might lead to. Then an answer came in the form of an out-of-work Spanish journalist who I met by chance at a student party in Arguelles. She encouraged me to write about the music I loved and to my surprise a small independent London magazine agreed to publish my first piece on nuevo flamenco.
Buoyed by this piece of beginner’s luck, I started submitting other articles based on my experiences in Spain. The Spanish journalist got a job producing for a new TV music show and I landed the unlikely role of TV actor and scriptwriter for an English language adult education programme on Telemadrid. With our respective music contacts, we even got to attend glitzy promotional parties frequented by the likes of Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio Carmona and Rossy de Palma.
With the upcoming Barcelona Olympics, the Seville World Fair and Madrid’s designation as European Capital of Culture, 1992 felt like the year modern democratic Spain came of age as well as a turning point in my own life.
In the subsequent years, I ended up developing a career in journalism: first as a reporter for the multilingual news channel Euronews in France covering post-Cold War upheavals, then for ITN in Britain and finally as Senior Press Officer for Amnesty International.
In 2009, after 17 years away, I returned to Madrid and eventually settled permanently in the Spanish capital.
Yes, my relationship with this city is a long story, too long to tell in its entirety here. But that’s the glory of ‘Stray Cats’. Together, the contributors to this anthology cover almost every aspect and period of modern Madrid: each with their own inimitable take on this ever-changing city and how it has impacted on their lives.
Copies can be purchased direct from Ybernia publishers or at Madrid´s Secret Kingdoms English Bookshop.