Any passerby, whether tourist or local, who wanders through the Plaza de España station of the Madrid metro, buried under the cubic meters of concrete that on the surface hold the tons of the mammoth granite obelisk that celebrates Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful Sancho Panza, will discover with no small amazement that the true tribute to Cervantes’s masterpiece is hidden on the platforms where the passengers wait for the train and not in that colossal altar that with impunity pays complicit worship to the selfie easy.
There, lining the mustard-colored walls of Line 3, the pages of the nobleman’s immortal adventure are replicated in their entirety, sentence by sentence and with black and white illustration lithographs from ceiling to floor. One chapter after another, from the digital turnstiles that click to the rhythm of the transportation pass cards to the stairs that connect to the blue Line 10, the letters flood every centimeter of the tunnel’s century-old architecture. Thus, any reader with enough time and without too much haste will be able to spend the afternoon wandering from left to right and up and down until that epic story is exhausted.
This is another of the city’s many initiatives in a crusade to bombard users of the metric system with literature with the intention of building the habit of reading in an almost imperceptible way. A laudable purpose for which the Madrid Publishers Association has been working since 1997 with its “Books on the Street” campaign, a collection of small posters with annual rotation that hang on all the cars that ply the bowels of the city. Along with the map of the next stops and the stickers that indicate the emergency exit, passengers who are not prisoners of a screen will find selected excerpts from the latest Cervantes Prize, the National Fiction Prize or essential works by indispensable pens such as Almudena Grandes or Carmen Laforet.
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Although my favorites have always been the Bibliometro, twelve kiosks distributed throughout the busiest stations where any tardiness of the train driver on duty can be alleviated by renting one of the almost 2,000 new publications on offer or by obtaining the official card of the municipal library circle. A commendable social work that was almost doomed to closure due to the pandemic, but that knew how to hold its own and that today is the most fabulous emergency alternative, like a fire extinguisher or defibrillator, for those who, in the middle of their daily transfer from home to the office or vice versa, you get an uncontrollable desire to read Vargas Llosa or Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
This is how, camouflaged among the everyday life of the mundane, literature emerges from the depths of Madrid in a clandestine synergy with the silent routine of millions of potential readers who, unsuspectingly, make innocent transfers like automatons without imagining that their next reading is lying in wait for them. a hand’s breadth away to catch them between their letters during the imminent serendipitous crossing of their next train.
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2024-03-06 05:26:30
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