I am a writer. Writers don’t drive. That’s what a veteran editor once told me: “Honey, don’t worry. You don’t drive because you’re a writer.” And I wanted to believe it because it suited me. “Look, Fernando Fernan Gomez I didn’t drive. AND Garcia neither,” he assured.
“Those are my people,” I replied.
Taxi drivers are also my people. I have taken an indecent amount of taxis in my life, to the point of parody. They have been my official, daily means of transportation. I have squandered my meager fortune on them. I liked them so much and so morbidly that I have even feigned a slight limp out of the shame of catching them for a ridiculous journey, perhaps a single street.
On the way down, although everything didn’t matter, I also limped a little, so as not to detract from the story. Theater is a very serious thing.
They have realized and have let me do. Friends are there for something.
The taxis. His green light as an approval of the adventure. I stopped them with my hand in the Chamberí wind talking angrily on the phone and then I huddled in their spaceship. I am convinced that “how are you, gentleman” are my three most used words in the language. We have told each other secrets of all kinds. We are chroniclers of the schizophrenic city.
A taxi in the Madrid of Lorena G. Maldonado.
I have secretly fought against the obvious feeling that I deserve a chauffeur. I am very good at expressing myself from the back seat with the face stripe that fits in the rearview mirror, the one with the eyes and eyebrows and forehead. But this gift is not being valued much in the modern world. For whatever.
So all that is over. I have given up. I have signed up for a driving school now that I am older than a nuo. I take tests at night like someone playing bingo while eating a tangerine. I have good will, but I don’t give one.
I have realized that I am very dodgy, practically deficient, this is what you worry about.
“How am I not going to get this off, damn it, if everyone has it,” I say to myself, encouraging myself.
But it doesn’t matter, self-esteem is not possible because reality prevails. Car licenses are held by people who have six summers left. The most retarded people I know have it, that’s true, but I won’t have it, or not so easily, because I don’t understand anything they say.
Is it allowed to turn on the fog lights at sunrise, when the last vampire is sleeping, if it is raining? Girl, well I don’t know, do what you see.
Who would you say has priority at the intersection? If a forest gnome appears to you on one side and your grandmother on a motorcycle on the other, which one should you let pass first?
What if the Frigiliana orchestra bursts in with a goat? Is it considered grazing? On the left or right shoulder?
Read the signs, what would you say this swastika with a scooter inside means?
So everything. I am under a lot of pressure. My family is starting to give up on me.
On Friday I arrived at the DGT of Móstoles, where Cristo lost his lighter, at a quarter past seven in the morning. Completely intensifiedperhaps paralyzed by my own stupidity. I hadn’t even had the strength to put on a little makeup. I was with my freckles exposed, that is, practically naked, innocent again, a student at 34. A little lamb that arrived at the slaughterhouse.
I had plenty of time until the exam, which was at a quarter past eight, but I put away my phone and didn’t take any more tests. The key is not to look desperate, I told myself.
Afternoon.
The DGT cafeteria is a world apart. There is a carajillo spirit from early on. What purity, daughter. There are men there, “real men”, as my friend says Olivawho is passionate about big, calloused hands: he hadn’t seen one in years.
They were all there, at the bar, drinking a smoldering beer in one gulp. The lack of men from Madrid is explained by the concentration of men in Móstoles.
I sat at my Pepsi table watching the calico. It was still night like in the stories. I saw refrigerators from San Miguel and some beginner boyfriends, I saw a coffee maker working like a steam train, I saw churros with sugar already arranged on small plates waiting to be dispensed and I saw Christmas lottery hanging from the hell of the Cola-Cao cans. Every time someone opened the door, a gust came in that chilled my nose.
All of that cleared my mind quite a bit, it almost put me in a good mood.
The DGT is like the hospital or the gates of heaven: pure interclassism. The DGT democratizes us. I had already assumed my destiny as a classic heroine, but I was there to play. Non-places like the DGT lend themselves a lot to fantasy. There is so much emptiness that you can fill it with whatever you want. We are all anyone and that’s fine.
Things were nothing more than average, although it was fun to live in the upside down world for a while.
For once in my life, I was the one who came out of an exam scratched, but the 18-year-old kids (with their silver chains and The North Face jackets, machines) smoked at the door with an invincible peace. They smiled like future motor gangsters.
To my laconic friends from the DGT, to those who lightly abandoned the exam after a quarter of an hour while I reviewed like a geek at the thirty minute mark: I love each and every one of you, although I never told you so.
I saw you do the test with your coat on, putting your head in the collars like you did when I was a child, with your mouth behind the zipper. I remember you. I went to school with children like that, with handsome and serious, defiant children, who got up from their desk with disinterest and went to drink water from the fountain without looking at anyone.
I’m almost a lady among the kids and I certainly don’t speak traffic law. This is your world. The macho and agile world of boys with instinct and that luminous energy full of rage at the same time. They have won! I withdraw my intellectual troops, my poetic troops, useless…
Then I remember what I paint there. Nadia He told me that he had had a very vivid dream in which I appeared on his street smoking in a yellow convertible. In the background it sounded Because you look pretty, you make yourself proud. I think I’m running after that one, but being a pedestrian I’m going very slow.
As I write this, I still don’t have the theorist’s note.
I will continue to inform you.
Let us not leave the matter still in suspense. Let’s leave it in suspense.