In Madrid, there are neighborhoods that retain a lender of other times, where stone facades and carved wood portals guard the memory of those who have inhabited them. Chamberí is one of them. It is not surprising that José Luis Martínez-Almeida and Teresa Urquijo have chosen him as the scenario where they will begin to write the next page of their history. Also there lives with her boyfriend Isabel Díaz Ayusoin the famous attic of the businessman who shares his life with the president of the Community of Madrid.
After months of search, they have found their new home in one of their most distinguished streets, a few steps from her family. A wide and bright floor, with high roofs and soils that creak slightly when stepping on them, as if they wanted to count the lives that have passed through there. In its more than two hundred square meters there will be enough space for the trajín of cribs, toys and night cry that will soon mark the rhythm of the days.
It has not been a random choice. In these apples you breathe that bourgeois calm that is only found in the neighborhoods where time does not run, but slides with elegance. The house, bathed by the light that enters the great windows, opens to a square of which generations have seen generations without their essence. On the other side of the sidewalk, a row of coffee shops with waiters who still remember how to take the order without the need for a notebook. Near the department store where families well in Madrid have always bought the basket of their firstborn children.
The mayor and his wife have preferred discretion to the boato. No mansions or surveillance. A rented apartment, in the heart of a neighborhood with history, near the grandparents of the future child, so that it grows surrounded by the family anecdotes that are counted again and again in the desktop. The Urquijo are people of long lineage and fertile memory, and in those meetings stories of hunts will be alternated in the Sierra de Gredos with stories of palatial halls where the Bourbons have always been proper names and not simple references in history books.
The move coincides with the beginning of a new stage. The baby’s arrival will mark a turning point in the life of the mayoraccustomed to untimely schedules and politics as a resistance sport. Soon the early risers will change for forced awakenings to the rhythm of child crying. And Chamberí, with its recolect parks and its cobbled streets, will become the stage of the first walks with cart, of the snacks in terraces to the spring sun and of the games in squares where children run without fear of traffic.
Not so long, Almeida was the eternal single from Madrid politics. Sharp and fast verb, he had become an endearing character for those who enjoyed their replicas in the plenary session. But life has unexpected ways of turning everything. A year ago, at a wedding that brought together the aristocracy and politics in the same convite, changed its destiny. And now, far from the halls of El Canto de la Cruz, where they celebrated that link with Abolengo, begins their true life in common in a Chamberí floor, with the crib and waiting in one of the rooms.
The city, always impassive, continues its course. But in that corner of the old Madrid, between the rumor of the trees and the distant sound of traffic in Castilian, Almeida and Teresa Urquijo build their home with the certainty of those who have found the exact site where everything must happen.
