Madrid Blues

Sunday, March seventh. The Grand Via glows beneath a sun which simulates a glow all believe in. And at that moment something is breeding, an inward devil insinuates itself, but hardly any one knows of its silent gestures. How many people back then were conscious of what was to happen? Probably only a handful of people: fifteen men? two women? An eternal and impossible love story; a young journalist and an illuminated decorator, a lone child, dog-on-string types, beggars, students, and ex-soccer player for whom soccer is a global metaphor, an astrologer full unfathomable presages, a nostalgia-ridden African worker, an old union leader who believes he is Franco and his blind sister, convinced that Madrid is the Aleph in miniature… And finally, Jusef Ahmed with a gun in his pocket, against his destiny and against all, in whose hands the world hangs. Blanca Riestra presents us with a melancholic blues rhythmically repetitive that explores the bitter loneliness, frustrated dreams, time’s ephemeralityness, but also the unexplainable harmony of things, piquant and unjust, effervescent. With an anaphoric style and an extremely beautiful prose, she paints a colorful gallery of people that live, survive and are devoted in the twilight of the great beehive. Characters without a story, destiny’s victims, with nothing and everything, in a city built on a pin’s head which intones a coral symphony of love and death.