EL PEPE BOTELLA
Malasaña, Madrid · T1·E01
"…a bar with a terrace of metal tables that breathed like an old man, heavy with memory. It was small, intimate, with round wood-and-marble tables inside, their gray veins seeming to tell stories of long nights few remembered."
The origin
The name is a joke that's almost two centuries late. Pepe Botella is what the people of Madrid, somewhere between contempt and mockery, called Joseph I Bonaparte, the French king Napoleon foisted on Spain, accused of minding the wine cellar more than the throne. A bar carrying his nickname wouldn't be funny on just any corner; it's funny here, because the Plaza del Dos de Mayo is exactly where Madrid rose up in 1808 — where Daoíz and Velarde died defending the Monteleón artillery barracks, of which only the arch remains, and where a girl from the neighborhood, Manuela Malasaña, gave her name to everything around it. An imposed king, with a borrowed name, presiding over the square that rebelled against him. Few places sum up better a story of men who aren't called what they say. And there it still is, its terrace facing the square as if nobody had told it the century had changed.
The legend
The rest, the neighborhood supplied. Malasaña was the cradle of the Movida, and when the noise died down the cafés were what remained; this was one of the ones that stayed. The posters on the walls aren't decoration: they're the family tree of the place — the Spanish cinema that was conquering the world back then, Almodóvar's and Bigas Luna's, and the one hard on their heels, Amenábar shooting ghosts and Medem filming desire without asking permission. Across that terrace passed screenwriters still wearing their hangovers, actors before they were anybody, and directors shouting over a shot that never got filmed; they say more than one movie was closed there on a napkin, and some other one sank at the same table. Everybody was, always, somebody about to be. In this novel it's also where three silences crossed paths for the first time — but that's told elsewhere.
