That cabin on Gran Vía

December is at a standstill at all the traffic lights. Madrid is standing in every shop window. I am standing at a corner table, lonelier than the moon, and I look a little at the crowd, through the windows, or I look at myself a little, through the mirrors, while I wait for Paula, who is already taking longer than usual. account.

I am a statue, almost, of this café, since prehistoric times, because I was a long and regular customer of the telephone booth that was opposite, right there in front, as you come out, a booth from where I called my father, back in the high eighties. , to give you the part of the hopes of my literary life as a twenty-something with a criminal heart and lyrical fever.

I always see, through the giant windows, this telephone booth, which is no longer there, but which is in me, like a confessional in the middle of the big street, like a retreat overlooking a traffic jam, where my father and I used to meet. on the phone, to talk to each other behind the world’s back. Today, the booth is not there, but it is, because I am there, and the girls go in and out of Zara, or Stradivarius, on a pilgrimage, to buy a red thong for New Year’s Eve, and the foreign whores buy lottery tickets before going to work. in the tunnel cabarets of the area. Christmas is the people who buy and the people we look at those who buy.

The newspaper just called me to commission a story. I don’t practice the short story genre much, but I do practice the commission genre, which is the genre of those of us who don’t believe in genres. Even the genre of those of us who rather do not believe in Christmas, that hubbub of mothers-in-law and nativity scenes. Paula is always late, but today she is already late. I called my father from the cabin on Fridays at eight in the afternoon, thus giving companionship to my solitary and schedule disorders to my life that was already wanted without schedules.

-What do I put?

-A cubata. Rum, Methuselah.

The waitress is a young black woman, with scared eyes and an exciting back. The waitress has in her movement all the exoticism or eroticism of the Caribbean, plus a silver piercing in her lower lip, which doubles with neighborhood grace or popular tearfulness her elastic opulences of a creature raised among palm trees or panthers. I don’t know if I like her face more, or if I like her back more, but that doesn’t matter, because I wait for Paula, who is not coming, and I also wait for my father, there on the other side of my phone call on any Friday. of the year 84, which is strictly speaking the secret and certain day of so many different days of my countless visits to this café.

Calamaro sings “I am the soldier of your evilest side, and I own your hottest side.” I listen to it in an intricate way, above or below the chorus of toasts and the circle of conversations. “I am the leader of your most urgent part and the commander of your forward side.” Something like this sings the Gulf of Calamaro.

On the street, couples tie a love knot with striped scarves and from the buses the students call everyone on their cell phones, except me. I could be the soldier of the most evil side of these unknowns, but I am not. I am, for the moment, the owner of Paula’s hottest side, who doesn’t even arrive or even give me any excuse on her cell phone. I don’t see the waitress’s cell phone, but maybe it’s time to ask her for her number, and this way I also get rid of the almost lethal nostalgia of the cabin conversations between my father and me, right there, in the cabin that He is not there, in that intimate cabin where I was telling him about my modest progress as a young writer in the city, which sometimes did not go beyond moving along the Gran Vía with my hands in my pockets, because Madrid was that, a way to get into the hands in the pockets, according to a traditional classic that my father and I really liked. I had come, from the provinces, to conquer the city, and I gave news of my adventure, weekly, to my father, when there was little or no news, but there was a renewed desire to make a place for myself in the difficult city, while He was fulfilling the double militia of the night and writing.

Today, neither my father is there, nor the cabin, and I don’t know if I’m waiting for the conversational moments of those cabin meetings, or if I’m just waiting for Paula or if I’m waiting unexpectedly for the waitress, who I don’t know her name, but at that maybe he’ll improvise the name Christmas, which is a name that doesn’t suit his dark pottery graces at all, and that’s why it does.

The commissioned story must have four completed pages. I’m not going to think about the story, naturally, because premeditation is cowardice, and because prose is already there to think about. You have to go to the hard and direct folio, like the woman. I was direct and harsh to Paula, weeks ago, at Venus, a strip bar next door, and her heart broke. He says he loves me because it’s obvious that I like all women. Paula has a boyfriend, who is a police officer, and then she entertains me, because for her I am a poet. Or she has a poet boyfriend, which is me, and then she hangs out with a police officer. I don’t know, she will know.

My father arrived one day in the cold of Madrid, dreaming of the surrender of the city under his literary vocation, but life twisted his intentions, and then the one who took up that broken ambition was me, who for years gave my own father the gloss and the detail of my achievements, as if I were finally illuminating his, always pending. I went every Friday to my booth on Gran Vía, like a casual boyfriend, and there I put my small change into the slot, which was what valued the conversation time, in a ritual that closed us both, for a few minutes, on an island of joyful confidence in the middle of the most populous street in Madrid. By talking for a while, we were triumphing. They removed the cabin one day, and it was as if they were taking the skeleton of the railway from so much talk with my father, as if they were dragging a glass corpse where he and I were going without going, who were an unusual home of purposes on the crude street. , cruel and soulless.

The girls enter Stradivarius, or Zara, and carry red panties for the New Year’s Eve party, which this year costs a penny, without dinner. The girls only think about New Year’s Eve. They are pornographic. The beggars talk on their cell phones, but not with a father, but with another beggar, to see how they quote alms in another neighborhood.

Paula works at Venus, a basement of vices, and her police never come to see her, because “if they come it means they don’t love me,” as she says. I met her there, and I return there often, but I can do it, because I am a poet, and poets “want another way,” which she also says. Poets are bastards. Paula is a disaster. I’m afraid he’s not coming anymore. Maybe he never comes anymore.

December is a wreck of lights and haste. The night lights up its crazy galaxy of taxis. Calamaro is the rogue carol of those of us who don’t listen to carols. I better not order another Methuselah cubata. I better leave pending asking the waitress for her phone number, because you always have to have a pending number, a pending woman. I’m sure Paula isn’t coming. I am, once again, the one who waits for a woman who never arrives and another whose name I don’t even know. I am the one who spends his life waiting for himself. Rains from another winter happen, back in ’84. It rains from a tomorrow that has already happened.

The waitress, yes, her name will be Christmas.

I am the one who one day had my own booth on Gran Vía. I am my father.

It’s time to go back home and see if the commissioned story comes out.