In Madrid, street-by-street battles are no longer about war-defeated apartments, but famous stores. For 10 years, I’ve been saying hello and goodbye as I walk with my dog down the sidewalks of the Dominican parish of Our Lady of the Rosary in the Philippines. … (“I’m the last Filipino!” the dying Mr. Focsa says to Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena and Antonio D. Olano, who greet him in Barajas.) Conde de Peñalver Street.
The buildings are in the Brutalist style (‘Béton Brut’, ‘Art Brut’) or what mediocre fools would call ‘Modern’ (in the cultural milieu of the capital, there is no Caltrano who would not insert ‘Brutal’ into every sentence), with concrete ‘marquees’ where the homeless take shelter every night, and stone staircases where, alas, the non-breakfast crowd flock every morning. The “premiums”, the state’s breakfast eaters, come from the public prosecutor’s office and the bureaucratic world of Injub. In Europe, where the legalization of theft (‘tipping’ for the Chinese, savings for the Russians, etc.) is so strict that it is seriously debated, the liberal spectacle of the homeless under brutalist signs creates one of the influences of Proust’s Madeleine on the housing issue, and in Spain, Ferreri’s ‘El Pisito’ (the unmarriageable López Vázquez and Mary Carrillo) transports us back to childhood. They don’t have money to buy an apartment). and Berlanga’s “The Executioner” (Pepe Isber appointed Nino Manfredi as the executioner in order to give him an apartment to start a family with Emma Penella).
As is known, Sanchismo cannot build apartments because it may lead to Falangism, which not only goes against Agenda 2030 (“be happy without having anything”), but also reveals the origins of this regime, where Falangism has reduced itself in the social field to giving apartments to Spaniards and defending something in Spain, to stop going to the streets and shouting “Long live Russia!” Like a calf. Madrid, of course, is in short supply of apartments, but the mayor has just read out a pamphlet (pages of thick municipal prose) to Our Lady of Almudena asking for more immigrants to live in the Ayuso marquee. Almeida is a man of values (from “Areti” to be precise) who speaks to the Virgin in the same way he speaks to the Russian comedian he pranked by posing as the mayor of Kiev, engulfing us in a “punk” sympathy not seen here since the transitionalism of Cantarello or the proverbs of Maysunabe.
In front of the brutalist canopy of the church is the functionalist canopy of the General Council building of the College of Chartered Psychologists, under which a homeless man spends the night with two Disney-like walrus dogs. This week someone tried to deter the dogs with a beautiful parapet of plastic hedge, but they endured the vision and were very gentle. Of course, Santayana says, if psychology were to be a science, it would be necessary to exclude social imagination from it. And say goodbye to the housing problem.
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