MADRID

The portrait

A city whose evenings dissolve the Velázquez light into its sky. People still paid in pesetas, though the new coins already hung in the bank windows, round and cold, due in January like a rich relative nobody had invited. Phone booths swallowed coins on the corners; cell phones were bricks with antennas that people pulled out in bars with a shy pride. Everyone smoked everywhere. And over all of it, that fall, hung a new shadow: two towers across the ocean had fallen in September, and the world had discovered that safety was an expensive illusion.

The soul

A city that still believed the party would never end, and that blind faith was the best and the most dangerous thing it had. It was building on every corner: cranes like question marks, open lots like rotten molars. It was getting a massive root canal and nobody noticed. Money flowed without anyone asking where it came from, and some of it came from places better not looked at head-on: developers, politicians with easy smiles, men from the East with no biography. Underneath, Madrid went on being Madrid.

The appeal

The night, which in that city wasn't a time slot but a religion. Madrid didn't sleep on principle, almost as ideology, as if closing your eyes were a form of surrender. You went out at eleven and came home with the milkman, if you'd been lucky. And above all, a feeling that can't be repeated: that the city didn't belong to anyone yet, and that's why it could belong to anyone.

The scene

And in the middle of it all, a neighborhood that had just learned to say its name out loud: Chueca. Ten years earlier it had been syringes and dark doorways; in 2001 it was terraces, rainbow flags freshly hung from balconies, and a freedom that still smelled of wet paint. You cruised by day in the square and by night in the basements; glances crossed at the bar of the Pepe Botella, people went down to the saunas as naturally as going to Mass. But the law still wouldn't let them marry, and half the city still went home to lie. The street was a party; the parents' phone, a closet. Madrid had learned to desire out loud long before it dared to say it at Sunday lunch.

Light and shadow