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driver seemed to feel the same as I did – he couldn’t be bothered to talk. He was a gaunt, lean Moroccan who most likely had neither a work nor a residence permit, but had crossed the narrow Strait of Gibraltar to seek his fortune in the rich and yet so crisis-ridden European Union.Madrid’s suburbs are among the ugliest in the world, Soviet in their monstrosity. They fan out in ranks from the centre, huge and dark, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that they surround a vibrant city centre that I was always glad to come home to.
    As usual after an assignment, I felt rather empty and depressed. Not seriously, just a feeling of the blues, that something was over and with it the knowledge that, with the passing of that particular second, I had taken a step closer to death.
    The traffic snarled up completely when we reached the city centre, turned by the post office on Plaza Cibeles and drove towards Plaza Santa Ana. A few hundred metres from the plaza we ground to a halt, so I paid the driver and walked up the hill along Paseo de Prado, as the traffic, with belching exhaust fumes and honking horns, came to a standstill and the nippy motor scooters zigzagged between the stationary rows of cars. The scooters were driven by young men, their girlfriends riding pillion. The girls held on nonchalantly with one hand, their willowy legs placed elegantly as if they were sitting sidesaddle on a horse. Madrid is an affluent and elegant, yet at the same time brutal and oppressive city, but the young Madrileños outdid the young of both Rome and Paris in terms of elegance. In the heat of the night, most cities take on an aggressive tone which vibrates in the streets and bounces back and forth between the buildings and is absorbed by the inhabitants. Madrid was a nocturnal animal. A city which in the summer heat never seemed to sleep, seemed to be moving constantly, movement like that of a nomad, for its own sake, a journey with no real destination.
    Plaza Santa Ana formed the centre of my barrio , my patch of the world. I had ended up there almost by accident when I was young, and had lived in various places in the neighbourhood ever since – when I lived in Madrid, that is. Teatro Real took up one side of the rectangular plaza, with the big white Hotel Victoria taking up theother side. The flanks were made up of tall, old residential properties with cafés and restaurants at street level. On hot summer days the trees provided cool shade. Children played on the white flagstones in the middle of the square, bathed in the soft violet dusk, while mothers and fathers sat on benches and chatted, keeping an eye on kids in their blue school uniforms enjoying their freedom before going indoors to eat their supper. Every time I came home from one of my trips, I liked to spend a minute with my back to the theatre looking across the square, the Cerveceria Alemana a fixed point of reference on my left. I felt a bit like the lead in an old film where the passing of time is shown by the white pages of a calendar, with their big black dates, flying off in the breeze. Standing here, I could watch the pages of the calendar running backwards, peeling off year after year of my time with the plaza, and the differences were in the details. In the length of hair, in the cut of a dress, in the make and shape of cars, in the conspicuously growing prosperity, in the women’s make-up and, up to a point, in the children’s games. But the overall picture was the same. The music of the voices, the humming of the cars and the roar of the motorbikes, the children’s games of tag and skipping, the mothers’ and grandmothers’ murmured talk of children and love, the men’s boisterous discussion of football and bullfighting as cigarette smoke coiled around them, the smell of petrol, and the aroma of garlic wafting from the cafés and restaurants. It was as it had always been and I wanted it to stay like that for ever, even though Madrid, under the impact of