Because of work I have been lucky enough to travel a lot, from a very young age. The thing is that by now I have visited two hundred and something cities around the world. But I do not count them out of collecting instinct. I count them because at some point I realised that each new city does not enlarge my world, but focuses it. Travel is not accumulation. It is triangulation.
Amsterdam, which is where I am now, for example, surprised me where I did not expect it. Not because of the canals, which I had already idealised, but because of the domestic architecture: those narrow, leaning facades that seem to rest on one another like elegant drunks after a dinner that went on too long. There is a structural honesty framed by a history of facade taxes and of lifting furniture without ruining the front of the house. The city shows itself as it is: functional, pragmatic, pretty almost by accident.
Bruges, a few days earlier, was something else. A city so beautiful that no matter how much it has been recommended to you, it still manages to exceed expectations. Every street is a postcard, every canal a Flemish painting, every stone in exactly the right place as if someone had put it there thinking of you. And there is the problem. Bruges is perfect to visit, but to live in? I do not know. It feels like Disney World. It lacks friction. It lacks that chaotic ingredient that makes a place alive and not merely pretty. It lacks someone double-parking, a piece of graffiti, an invasion of the pavement without asking permission.
Basically, it lacks being Madrid.
And this is where things become interesting, because for years I have been repeating the same experiment without noticing. I visit a city, admire it, find virtues Madrid does not have, and each time I return more convinced that Madrid is my city. By elimination. Each new data point confirms the hypothesis. Two hundred and something iterations of the same result: the place I belong to is that accelerated, noisy, dry, disordered city, but complete and alive.
But, and this is the turn I did not expect when I began thinking about this, Madrid is making an effort to throw me out.
Not me personally. Everyone. What Madrid does is expel. Tourist apartments, investment funds buying entire buildings, rents rising twenty percent at every renewal, regulation arriving always late and always insufficient. The city does not have a housing problem as a side effect. It produces expulsion as a primary function.
So there remains a paradox I do not know how to solve: the place you belong to does not belong to you. You travel, confirm that your place is there, and when you return you discover your place is becoming something you cannot afford. It is not only an economic problem. It is an identity problem. If Madrid becomes inaccessible, are you still from Madrid? Or are you from a Madrid that no longer exists, as Ozymandias is king of a desert?
Perhaps there is something deeply Buddhist in this, although I doubt the Buddha had to deal with vulture funds. Anicca: everything changes, nothing remains. The city you love is transient. The version of Madrid that made you feel it was yours is as ephemeral as the cherry blossom the Japanese contemplate knowing it lasts a week. Only nobody builds an aesthetic around the loss of a rental flat in Lavapies. It does not have the same elegy.
That is Madrid: two hundred and something cities. None of them is this one. The problem is that this one does not want to be mine either.