Londres para siempre

Mi primera vez en Londres fue en el  1977. 

Hace mucho tiempo. Aún recuerdo el día en que aterricé en el aeropuerto de Heathrow.

 Fue quando  murió Elvis Presley. Recuerdo desde mi autobús, en el interminable camino de una sola dirección que me conduciría a la estación Victoria (según el  boleto de mi autobús), la marcha de los seguidores en honor del cantante  de Memphis. 

Tenían en sus manos signos de su ídolo: "Elvis nunca morirá" o "Elvis para siempre", "Todavía vives en nuestros corazones" y cosas por el estilo.

Yo era un joven lleno de esperanza y pena, en ese momento. Iba a Londres a olvidar un amor no correspondido; o tal vez solo estaba buscando algo que aún no había encontrado.

En ese momento, había abandonado los estudios de mi universidad, sin dinero, sin trabajo, sin amor. Solo como una piedra sola puede ser.

No había sido realmente muy aficionado a Elvis; seguramente mucho más a  Jimmy Hendrix; Elvis era un mito demasiado controvertido a mis ojos; un gran cantante, por supuesto, no diría que no; pero a veces me sentía como si hubiera sido explotado por la industria exitosa estadounidense; ese tipo de negocio capaz de crear (y también destruir, si ellos quisieran) cualquier tipo de mito, cualquier tipo de estrella; '¿ya sabes? Esa clase de víctima del star system americano  como Marilyn Monroe o James Dean. Yo era bastante crítico del capitalismo en ese momento.

Pero, de hecho, ya tenía demasiados problemas por mi cuenta para criticar cualquiera cosa.

Yo solo tenía una dirección en mi bolsillo, de un amigo que había ido previamente a Londres y con quien estaba en contacto. A través de este amigo, me presentaron en un supermercado italiano, en King's Cross Road. Recientemente he estado allí. Donde estaba la tienda, ahora solo queda una insignia, cubierta de polvo.

Encontré buena ayuda allí. Un amigo del dueño, un buen tipo Marchegiani que vendía jamones italianos, queso y otra comida italiana especial, me encontró un trabajo en una fábrica de pizzas, en algún lugar de Farringdon Rd. Y George mismo, me refiero todavìa al tìo Marchegiani, me encontró un lugar para dormir: una habitación en Keystone Crescent, a la vuelta de la esquina de su tienda, donde me cobraron 5 libras por semana, mientras que en la fábrica mi primer salario eran buenas 40 libras semanales.

No estába nada  mal para un principiante.

1. continùa...

London for ever - 19

One of these was the "black giant". 

He was a tall, thick Jamaican, always wrapped in a heavy gray coat; he was constantly turning the length of the square, scratching his curly, woolly head, or his back and legs and never saying hello to anyone. 

Once, and it  was the only one, he came up to ask me for an ice cream.

 I served him a cone with some cream on it. He maybe thought  I was expecting the money, because he attacked me with a load of arrogant phrases, in his incomprehensible Jamaican dialect. His eyes were red and swollen. 

After the first series  of insults he gave a tremendous bite to that poor ice cream, swallowing  almost half of it. Then, seeing that I had remained impassive, he still uttered some bad words, with less conviction than before and went away. 

I hoped so much that I never had anything to do again with that energumen, at least  for fear of his undesirables guests. 

But as I saw him, in the distance, resume his scratching all over his body, I realized that there was no danger: the fleas were very fond of him.

19. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 15

15.

Chapter Three 
Leicester Square 

In the  morning, right in that day,  when all the white collars and secretaries in London were already at work, as previously agreed, I called  the Office to find out what would have been my place of work. Lucky gave me a hand: Jim, the guy who led a great selling point had forfeited the day before and that  made  vacant the position he occupied in one of the most important squares around the West End. 

When I got to the shop in Leicester Square I introduced myself to  an  Eastern Arab manager whose  name was Ibrahim.  He gave  a careless glance at my badge and  showed me my positon the back of the store, where I found the machine "Carpigiani", the milk to make the ice-cream, the  cones and some chocolate bars they called flakes to be served as "optionals" squeezed in the cream on top of the ice cream cone.

 In addition I had provided, right next to the ice cream machine, a dispenser with two trays, one for the orange juice and the other for the lemonade that I made it myself with running water and concentrated juice.

 Taken up position at the front of the store and, proud in my white apron, I began my new adventure of ice cream seller  in the Brian Brook Company.

Leicester Square is a square not far from Piccadilly Circus. You get access from there through  two short but commercially important streets: Coventry Street and New Coventry Street.

In the way to the wide  Trafalgar Square, instead, heading south, all  around the National Gallery, in a street called St Martin,  there is another special category of street's traders: the itinerant painters!

Students from the Academy of fine arts in London and from  the High  Artistic schools around the world, amateurs, skilful men  in the art of painting and portraiture; young emerging artists and old decayed artists; aspiring artists or assumed, all converge in this corner of London to offering passers-by the result of their inspiration onto canvas, for a fee that can range from a few pounds for a portrait or a caricature done right there, to much more  expensive  portraits in different  styles and subjects, with the hope  to leave to his descendants  maybe the equivalent of a Van Gogh. Although few tourists, to be honest, had the courage and the business acumen to invest and bet on the pictorial talent of those strangers, anonymous exhibitors;  and not least, it is certain that everyone, including the merely curious, breathed some fresh air authentically Bohemian because, beyond the artistic value of those painters not sedentary, passers-by were to appreciate the skill, ease and freedom with which they expressed in their art their existential anxieties, actual or alleged that they were.   In the more immediate vicinity of Leicester Square there are plenty of  box offices, theaters, pubs, discos, restaurants, clubs, bars and nightspots, bureaux de change and clothing stores; the latter, mostly, are the property of Indian and Pakistani traders, open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until late at night. The presence of several offices of the change machine was a safe attestation of cosmopolitan  London especially for the attraction made to foreigner visitors by this place.
.. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 6

In 1979 I was back on the road to work for the B.B.C., a company that, apart from the initials of its name, had nothing else to share with British state television. In fact, the Benjamin Building Company did not afflict people with boring programs, neither it  talked with shameless lies about national and international political events. Finally my Company did not even put its nose in the lives of the Queen and the other members of the Royal Family,  generally speaking.

The company I worked for delighted their customers  by selling ice cream and drinks, logistically relying on a chain’s shop of souvenirs, sweets and tobacco’s  strategically located at several points in the great London area known as West End.

 This vast and famous London metropolitan area, which also includes Soho district and numerous small and large parks, is bordered by a perimeter that runs through the important streets of Oxford Street, Charing Cross Rd, Shaftesbury Av and Regent's Street, forming an irregular trapeze whose four tops pass from Tottenham Court Rd to Oxford Circus; from there to Piccadilly Circus and  finally end at Leicester Square, couple of yards   from Trafalgar Square, where Admiral Nelson's statue, according to the likely intentions of the public authorities who wanted it so powerfully high, witnessed  the  British’s greatness and glory to all those who would walk from there: French people, foreigners  and British from all over the Empire.

 In those years, the greatness and glory of England, after the almost total depletion of the British Empire,  seemed more remote and far from the statue of the great conductor of the seas. And nostalgia, it’s all over known, is a feeling that more acutely manifests itself, when the best times are over and  a crisis is bound to come.

 And that Great Britain was in crisis at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, it immediately became apparent also to the "street traders" who, living among the people, felt the moods of the average citizen in an emotionally direct way.

 On the street, they felt discomfort and nervousness, though the real troubles were still to come, shortly thereafter, with the irresistible rise to power of the Conservatives headed by Margareth Tatcher (later known as the “Iron Lady"), which would mark the end of a cycle in London's administrative life, characterized by a policy of traditional securing of democratic freedoms and sympathy for the weaker social classes.

Moreover, the English metropolis had represented since the rising of the first music liberation and protest groups (born on the wave of the American Hippies movement, also known as the "beat generation") a decisive cultural reference point, helping to make London the Capital of the Rock Movement, where refugees disappointed by the illusion of the failed revolution of 1968, could find a safe refuge escape from the backflow of the reaction which  had gone through  the whole world.

And it was right there, in London, that they could still see the last glow of brightness before its definite sunset. So, in a good way, I agreed to resume my job and sell ice-creams and drinks in the street. By my side I had a refrigerating machine that turned milk into ice cream and a refreshing machine dispensing orange and lemonade.

Where  else could I work, let alone  the road? And to do what? Maybe to get into some office with air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter, and the stench of paperwork under my nose? There was no other world for me, now, if not that; no other destiny, no other life I could have wanted, than the free life  of street's traders.

 Returning to the road meant for me to relive from the very beginning my adventure in that mysterious and fascinating city that, unfortunately and superficially, is too often considered cold and inhospitable, considering also that never or almost never come into you get a direct contact with English or British people.

 This story is devoted to London and to the dear places where I have lived in.  But it is also dedicated to all the peoples that those places with such variety and vivacity animated in those years who will pass through the main scene of my story: the streets of London.

6. to be continued...