Adelfas

Before it was a neighborhood, this was the poor southeast of Madrid, low ground beside the Abroñigal stream and the railway tracks. Around here stood the Cerro de la Plata —⁠there was nothing silver about it: the name was a joke about the black soot that the steam engines spewed out⁠— and the Cerro Negro, dark with clay and gypsum. Factories arrived, such as the Barón de Velasco oil works, and with them workers and migrants from the countryside who crowded into tenements built around a courtyard and gallery, flats of less than twenty square meters. This corner of low houses and industry was called Las Californias, after the vanished Calle California that crossed it; today the Plaza de las Californias keeps its memory. Whoever named the streets drew from three drawers. Plants, around the oleander: the Cafeto, the coffee shrub. Valencian towns: Gandía, seat of the Borja dukedom; Játiva, which Philip V ordered to be burned; and the Valencian Juan de Juanes, the great Renaissance painter from there. And asteroids, like the Calle Valeria, after minor planet 611. Mixed in, the old trades: the Barrilero, the man who built barrels. Lyric theater has its corner: Carlos and Guillermo Fernández-Shaw, librettists, father and son; Federico Moreno Torroba, master of the zarzuela; the Arregui and Aruej brothers, who ran the Teatro Apolo in the years of the género chico; and Los Mesejo, a dynasty of actors from that same genre. Nearby, the Calle de Ángeles García-Madrid, a poet imprisoned in Ventas who witnessed the execution of the Thirteen Roses. And on a plaque that almost no one reads, Catalina Suárez: the first wife of Hernán Cortés, who died in Mexico without it ever being made clear how.