Cartography

A city is to be walked by. That’s how I live Madrid. I wish I was born as a more talented writer, to describe as I gradually made mine these streets. One day, maybe I’ll make a cartography of the streets of my life, and it will be a huge, intricate map, full of secret small streets, dark alleys that breathe age, also bright sunny days, beaches, parks, and every corner with it`s own recognizable sounds, known faces, and promises everywhere. There I’ll build a library to store all the books read during the kilometres covered along the way, read at the cafés, bars, parks where I spend lonely days and nights, and every cover I saw through shop windows and library shelves, that I never came to read. There will be a museum of all the exhibitions I worked on, the ones I visited and stayed in me forever. On the lifts one could listen to the radio playing the songs of all my life, each one I listened to. Everywhere there will be restaurants and bars of everything I tasted.

Since I started reading Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, I see the whole city as a narrative. While I followed the deliciously bohemian walk around downtown for the Noche de Max Estrella, last night, drinking the sangria that was offered to me, listenting to poets and artists, and musicians, I felt that the most interesting of all was to observe the faces of the strangers around me, thrilled with the representation of scenes of Luces de Bohemia in the streets. I recognize a new habit, to observe people. Well that’s not exactly a new habit, but it comes to me now with a pleasure that only novelties bring. I have been rediscovering so many things….

The city fills my skin. Walking the streets of every city, that’s my authobiographic project.