Almenara

Before it was a neighborhood, this was the far north of Madrid: sloping fields of the old Chamartín de la Rosa and, right beside them, the poor suburb of La Ventilla, a settlement of low houses and dirt streets that grew without a plan alongside the roads heading out toward Castile. When the city reached it, in the forties and fifties, a Vía Límite was laid out to mark where the suburb ended, and a Plaza de Castilla at the gateway through which one left for the north. The humble people of La Ventilla were gradually rehoused in apartment blocks, and of those old houses the names remain of those who lived there: Marcelina, who had a stall on the street; the Mártires de la Ventilla and the Hermanos de Andrés, Juan and Demetrio, teachers at the neighborhood school shot in 1936. Much of the street map was labeled with plants, as if to give back green to an area that had lost it. There are trees —⁠the Ailanto, the “tree of heaven” brought from China; the Cedros, the Palmera, the Magnolias, the Pinos Alta after the pines that gave shade to old Chamartín⁠— and many flowers: the Geranios of the balconies, the night-scented Nardo, the Heliótropo that turns to the sun, the blue Vinca, the Flor de Lis. Even the Delfín is a flower: larkspur, whose bud recalls the animal’s snout. And amid so much dry land disguised as a garden, the Yeros, the small legume that was really grown here for fodder. Another batch looks to the north of Spain, toward where the Plaza de Castilla pointed: the Avenida de Asturias and its Costa Verde, Baracaldo and the Vizcaínos, Simancas with its archive, the Báscones that recall the Vascones who repopulated Castile. Leaping across the Strait, Nador and the Calle del Conde de Serrallo, the general who took the heights of the Serrallo opposite Ceuta, bring the echo of that African war from which Tetuán itself took its name. An almenara warned by fire of what came from afar; here, at the very top of northern Madrid, the signals that arrive are only names of places that lie beyond.