Of Pío Baroja, the image that usually comes to mind is that of the writer in his old age, with the openwork beret, the severe gesture and the white beard. It is the Baroja who had culminated a brilliant, productive career until the unattainable, thermometer of the moral and civil life of a Spain that chained dislikes and that he exposed in brushstrokes of dirty manners in deeply pessimistic novels such as The Tree of Science , which during So many years was compulsory reading in high school. It is the Baroja who received visitors in his house, with the brazier on, the grim talk and the door always open.
But Baroja, who although he wrote at a rampant pace and had to chain himself in a certain way to the leg of the table to take out so many novels, articles and even a mighty autobiography, he was not a particularly homemade man or a hermit in his protected ivory tower for the more than 5,000 books that were in his library at death, but what the French then defined as a flâneur , a walker with no exact direction for the city that, by walking and observing, ended up composing an interpretation of life That is not noticeable to the naked eye.
When he did not write, Baroja walked through the cities - or, as it was said in the old Castilian, wandered through the streets -, and that material captured in sordid corners sometimes went to a novel, and from there came the discouraging realism that It emerges in the misery scenes of The Seeker or Weed , or was saved for his parallel work as a journalist. Baroja's work published in newspapers - both in Madrid and Mexico, as he wrote as an improvised correspondent in Paris - is not known as much as his narrative, and has largely been relegated to a logical oblivion, since the novels have a undisputed weight and, as a journalist, Baroja was neither Cavia, nor Camba, nor Pla.
But the Baroja journalist had a special gift to know where to get and observe what no one else saw on the moral periphery of his time, a space as physical as psychological that a new anthology of short texts that La Felguera publisher has just published as The sinister streets - it was just like Baroja also called a piece included in his book Showcase picturesque , from 1935 -. These sinister streets are full of gulfs, beggars, brothels and the latest specimens of trades in disuse and in the process of disappearing such as maragatos, coal workers and water carriers.
Baroja realized this when he returned from his walks that were sometimes placid and nemorous in the Retiro park, but that other times took him to the banks of the Manzanares River - which, south of Madrid, was a dirty canal that carried garbage, fetuses thrown and dead animals, in their own words - or to the street of Las Peñuelas a stone's throw from the Plaza de Embajadores, and that at the beginning of the 20th century abounded in filthy, cheap lupanares and with bedbugs on the mattress . His treatment contrasted with that of the bohemian era; instead of glorifying misery for the sake of an artistic heroism in the manner of an Armando Buscaini or an Alejandro Sawa - and also in the opposite corner of the Valleinclanesque cartoon - Baroja traveled the streets, taking note of fragments of life in the tradition of naturalism, and left in writing cold observations such as "the outskirts worried me a lot then. There were strange, miserable, outlandish people there; tin shacks and dirt huts; picnic boxes, ventorros, Consumption boxes; degenerate types, of mongoloid air and a dark and mysterious life "( People outside , in picturesque life , 1935).
The sinister streets. Anthology of the eternal stroller has a great value as miscellaneous Barojiana because the work as editor of Servando Rocha - who also writes a rich prologue about Baroja who also wandered through the miserable neighborhoods of London and Paris , and an epilogue on the last walk of Baroja In 1955, accompanied by the painter Palmira Abelló, from the Retreat to the Cuesta de Moyano, where in the upper part there is a statue in her honor - it is a succulent and little beaten anthology of the less known facet of the writer, and that, without However, it is essential to understand the atmosphere of his novels.
La Felguera feels a predilection as an editorial for the anarchists, the marginal, the rare, the moral opponents of the system, the criminals for vice or hunger, and although Baroja did not participate in that idea of counterculture as the bohemian of his time did , If he knew these environments, he observed them and left a testimony that, read today, still has the capacity to transport us to an unhygienic, gloomy, shanty town and in the development phase. It is the hinge between ancient and miserable Spain after the colonial disaster, and the one that tried to get out of the hole later and did not finish it.
The selection of Sinister Streets is based on rare collections of articles such as The Harlequin Tabulation (1904) or Intermediates (1931), in addition to a picturesque display cabinet and loose pieces such as Crónica: hampa , which Baroja published in the newspaper El Pueblo Vasco on the 18th of September 1903. There are still localizable portraits of urban fauna if one looks for well - although with new costumes - like the lazy one ("he lets himself be dragged along the far niente, which cannot be blamed for more than that small weakness of losing the hobby to work in the flower of youth "), the public executor, the gulf, the bohemian or the hampon, passing through the anarchist, the walking charlatan and other variants of the rogue, the felon or the vival . Impressions that Baroja accumulated throughout his life, which he captured in flashes not always constant, nor as part of a systematic study, but that go through all his literary and journalistic work until almost the last book.
One of the most interesting aspects of the anthology The sinister streets consists in discovering also how Baroja's curiosity was not limited to the miserable Madrid of Atocha below, but also practiced its witchcraft, or its condition of flâneur of the frightful periphery, in Paris - where he recounts a fleeting crossing in the middle of the street with Oscar Wilde, that terminal Wilde, drunk, giant, "who carried newspapers in his pockets" - and especially London, where he was moved by his passionate bibliophilia to travel the famished streets and picturesque that populate the novels of Charles Dickens, and that also took him to the miserable neighborhood of Whitechapel in 1906, also moved by the morbidity of knowing that it was there that very shortly before he had committed his murders Jack the Ripper , who still with the heat The temporary proximity had become a tourist destination for the brave, as today would be an expedition to Chernobyl.
The most important thesis that emerges from these pearls of the walking Baroja is his idea that the city is not truly attractive - and a city that deserves to be called that way - if it does not preserve those decrepit corners, narrow alleys and a slight sensation of unhealthiness. "Strange and curious thing is that the prestige of the big cities descends as they clean, become hygienic and replace the narrow, winding and sinister streets with wide, straight and clean avenues," he wrote in 1935, recalling his experiences London and Parisian. "Romanticism and bohemia were born and developed in alleyways and dark places . The outdoors and the sun have driven them away, banishing them. Never have Paris and London had such a suggestion for youth as when they were dark, labyrinthine and dirty towns; when they were famous for monsters. "
And he ends up defending the subsistence of that sordid part of the city without which, the stranger in Madrid, London or Barcelona "understands that nothing more extraordinary will happen to him than in his town" and "finds that living in a large city does not it is an advantage, "so that" some cities tend to give their neighborhoods a mysterious character, as Barcelona does with that Chinatown that it has recently invented . " There is a horrendous plane superimposed on the clean and modern city, and you can visit with boldness and will. To get down, you just have to shake hands with Baroja, a new Virgil who invites us to descend to the suburb hell, the lumpen neighborhood, the slums and the corner of the alley behind which the monster hides.
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