Castillejos

This was countryside to the north of Madrid, land of Chamartín de la Rosa that was gradually developed already into the twentieth century, with plots in private hands: so says a street such as that of Ulpiana Benito, owner of the ground along which the road was laid around 1931, or that of Amalia, of whom only the first name remained. When the streets were labeled, the neighborhood was divided into thematic groups, a custom of the Madrid street map. On one hand, provinces and cities of Spain: Huesca, Lérida —⁠the Roman Ilerda beside the Segre⁠—⁠, Orense on the banks of the Miño, Oñate, the Guipúzcoan town, and Bustarviejo, a village in the sierra whose name means ox stable. On the other hand, the flowers and the trees, which fill an entire corner. The Azahar, the orange blossom, a word that came from Arabic; the Balsaminas, the Pensamiento, the Rosa de Silva whose rosebush no one any longer knows; and the trunks: the Limonero, the Roble, the Lino with its blue flower, the Sófora, that cream-flowered tree brought from China that was so widely planted on the sidewalks of Madrid. The rest are people. Soldiers of the wars in Morocco, like the general Margallo, killed in 1893 at a fort in Melilla during the campaign that took his surname, or Lazaga, who commanded a cruiser in the disaster of Santiago de Cuba in 1898. And then a mix that sets the tone of the neighborhood: writers like Estébanez Calderón, the Andalusian writer of manners nicknamed “El Solitario,” or the Catalan poet Joan Maragall; painters like Juan Gris, a Madrilenian and cubist; opposing politicians who here share the map, the socialist Julián Besteiro, who presided over the Cortes of the Republic and died in a Francoist prison, and nuns like Sor Ángela de la Cruz or the very young Teresita González Quevedo, dead at nineteen. At the top of the neighborhood, the Paseo de la Castellana climbs toward the Plaza de Cuzco, the old capital of the Incas, and the Avenida de Brasil. Of that battle on the hills of Ceuta not even a slope remains here: the ground is flat and the streets straight.