Calle Antonio Toledano
The street bears the name of Antonio Toledano, a Madrid trader who in the 1940s and 1950s bought disused cemetery headstones, polished them and sold them as marble tabletops to the hospitality trade. The street runs through the Fuente del Berro neighborhood, near the Plaza de Manuel Becerra and the O’Donnell metro station.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a man named Antonio Toledano combed the cemeteries of Madrid in search of abandoned headstones. He hauled them off, polished them until the marble was clean and resold them as tabletops to cafés and taverns. The postwar years served him the business on a plate: Carrara marble had stopped arriving, and the substitute came from the graves no one claimed.
The erasing, however, was not always complete. The epitaph survived on the hidden face of the tabletop, face down, waiting. All it took was a customer dropping a spoon on the floor so that, bending to pick it up, they read a name, a date and a rest-in-peace carved beneath the table where they had just ordered their coffee.
It is worth taking the whole thing with the caution due any story passed on by word of mouth. Funerary marble serving coffee beats in the postwar air that Cela portrayed in La colmena, though the novel does not mention Toledano and that passage is the writer’s invention. The sign of the calle de Antonio Toledano, in the city’s eastern Ensanche, was put up later.