Mei Yin changed her name as soon as she entered the nail salon – that is to say – on Pio XII Street, the epicenter of the old Fleming Coast. At the beginning of the fifties of the last century, the Madrid neighborhood that was inaugurated with the Corea building – a cement mass with 600 homes occupied by marines from the Torrejón Base – acquired manners, allowing itself to be conquered by the trendy miniskirts, whiskey and the blonde tobacco that linked the nights and days when everything was go-go. They say that, in the seventies, they asked Raúl del Pozo where he would spend his holidays and he ironically answered “in Costa Fleming”. And the name caught on. Because the capital's longing for the sea remains latent in the spirit of its inhabitants in a Madrid that has everything, except a seafront promenade.
Mei Yin never smiles. She had to be called Ana in the same way that her colleagues were renamed Alicia or Diana (for Lady Di, the boss clarifies). From nine to nine she becomes Ana, although her Spanishization process is limited to the false name and a smattering of border Spanish. Nor does its integration go much further: paying taxes and supporting slave-owning bosses. But these days her work is piling up. Calluses and calluses contravene the foot order due to the traffic in Ferraz, and Mei-Ana clears the weary feet of the protesters who ask her for a reddish mani-pedi. I observe the interaction of four Spanish women with the Chinese women who serve them: the tactic consists of forgetting about them despite giving their hands and feet to some immigrants willing to paint any flag as long as it is not theirs.
Impenetrable walls separate the different states of Madrid from the Salamanca neighborhood, renamed Little Caracas due to the arrival of so many Venezuelans with Spanish grandparents and wads of petrodollars, to Usera, the capital's Chinatown. The new Madrid residents, rich and poor, who arrived fleeing extremism and anger, attend, astonished, the street protests fueled by “bian” children willing to mix with the ultras to “putadefend Spain.”
It seems like Halloween is a little late, say the Chinese manicurists who don't dare to pronounce the word amnesty. Fatal spirits of the past revive in avenues taken by lifelong neighbors who have taken to the Borroka Cay. The posh people from Costa Fleming or Juan Bravo upload images to the networks stuffed into their gilets, their stripes on the side, their maroon V-neck sweaters and their Spanish flags as a cape. With an angry love. And they suffer the beatings and tear gas of the police as if they were in an escape room, only the injuries and destruction are real.
Their slogans do not start from any poetic idea – in the style of “comrades, let's ban applause: the spectacle is everywhere” of that 68 –, but from a rancid insult, as if shouting “son of a bitch” at the President of the Government constituted a political action. But when the right gets angry and takes to the streets, it makes them uncomfortable. Rebellion and democratic demands, so far outside his comfort zone, tire him out, which is why his calculating leaders encourage the puppies, almost all of them males, to form the first line of the protest with drawings of guns on DIN A4.
I show Mei Yin/Ana a message that just came into my phone, a simple “hello!” with the photo of a young man pointing a gun at me. Neither she nor I want to leave the manicure salon.
