Calle Pensamiento

The pansy is that small five-petaled flower whose corolla carries a dark blotch at the center, like a little face. It belongs to the violet family and blooms when almost everything else sleeps, in the depths of the cold, which made it a favorite of urban pots and flowerbeds. Calle Pensamiento is thus kin to a whole constellation of flowery streets scattered across Tetuán. This abundance of flowers in the street map is no accident. Many of these names entered the register in the mid-twentieth century, when Madrid absorbed Chamartín de la Rosa and other surrounding villages and suddenly inherited dozens of streets with repeated names. To undo the duplicates, they reached for a neutral, plentiful repertoire: botany. Why “pensamiento” fell to this stretch between Bravo Murillo and Infanta Mercedes went undocumented.