Scrubbing the street

She is a tiny woman, but she alone explains an entire neighborhood to you. There is a woman in La Latina who, once a week, goes out to scrub the piece of sidewalk in front of her doorway. Theirs is a virtually infinite task, since scrubbing the street is the urban version of putting up doors to the countryside. Once you start on the first cobblestone it is difficult to find the last one. Where do you stop? When you reach the zebra crossing? When the sidewalk ends at the first vacant lot? On the sign that tells you that you are leaving the city? The lady could very well continue to Benidorm and come face to face with the Mediterranean, with millions of people after her stepping on her toes.

The world is full of invisible borders. Perhaps the most important is the one who sleeps crouched in the doorway, that domestic barricade that separates our house from the outside world. Normally, one stops scrubbing when arriving at this place, but one fine morning, she decided to go a little further. He crossed a limit when he walked out the door of his house, mop in hand, and didn’t look back.

I don’t know much about this woman, despite seeing her often. Maybe she’s a willful janitor, a clean freak, or a crazy person. Or maybe he simply crossed a border one day and didn’t know how to turn back. That she would be stranded with her mop in no man’s land and not find a way to stop this joke. This lady, I imagine, pays taxes like everyone else. You wouldn’t have to clean anything, because you are paying for the administration to do it. The City Hall’s cleaning services pass by your street (although not with the same frequency as in rich neighborhoods). Those days, she scrubs after scrubbing. It leaves about five square meters of sidewalk sparkling. He also goes out when it’s cold, although he has more work when the summer months arrive, when the kids splash the sidewalks with the physiological remains of the bottle and the lubricious of love.

I think of that lady when I see a pedestrian spitting on the ground or throwing trash on the street. I think there are many ways of thinking and living in public space and I want to do it like she does. Like the neighbors who place their geraniums facing outwards, to beautify not so much their house as their street. Those who occupy with plants the barren park of the Plaza de Lavapiés. Those who come down to shop in sneakers, making the square a bit of a part of their home. Those who, in the worst of the pandemic, threw garlands of pennants from one balcony to another, decorating the streets for a festival that never came. They looked like ropes to connect the houses in the middle of the storm, so that no one would sink. Today, five years later, some of those garlands survive, but most languished, burned by the sun and rain.

A few months ago the lady who scrubs the street got tired of scrubbing. He exchanged the mop for a couple of chairs, but it didn’t change his idea about public space. At dusk, if it’s sunny, she sits on the street and has a conversation with a neighbor, with the neighborhood as a landscape. The streets of Madrid are full of chairs and tables, sometimes it is difficult to walk without tripping over one. But these are always accompanied by beers. Consumption. That’s why it seems strange to me to see these two ladies with their wicker chairs chattering in the middle of the street, understanding it not as a place of passage, but of rest. A well-deserved rest, I dare say. I have been in the neighborhood for five years and, in that time, I have seen this woman cleaning, scrubbing and polishing the sidewalks as if her life depended on it. I don’t know her at all, but I can’t help but empathize with her exhaustion and her way of sending everything to hell: with a couple of chairs, a friend and a good conversation.