When New York stopped being Sinatra’s

When you arrived in New York for the first time, first of all, you had to call a Spanish friend who lived there, who would meet you that same afternoon, according to a deep-rooted custom, next to the Washington Square arch. A couple of years before you had fired him dressed in brown corduroy before some patatas bravas in any…

When you arrived in New York for the first time, first of all, you had to call a Spanish friend who lived there, who would meet you that same afternoon, according to a deep-rooted custom, next to the Washington Square arch. A couple of years before you had fired him dressed in brown corduroy before some patatas bravas in any traditional tavern in Madrid and he was one of those who also threw shrimp and mussel shells on the ground quite naturally. Seeing him appear now at a trot of footing Walking around a corner on Fifth Avenue you barely recognized him under that Mickey Mouse T-shirt, sneakers, sweatshirt and white peaked cap. You had left him a Marxist-Leninist in Spain and you had rediscovered him as a macrobiotic in New York and that same night, with the insistence of a convert, he would drag you to a restaurant in Soho where they served an immense salad with raisins and pine nuts and while you made your way In that spinach forest, your friend was telling you amazing stories that happened in the streets of the city.

There was a long time ago when the first trip to New York gave character if you complied with certain rites. It was obligatory to see the Guernica Picasso at MoMA, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, have a martini at the River Café, try to spot Woody Allen playing the clarinet, always to no avail, in the cafe at the Carlyle Hotel, eat half a chicken at Sylvia’s in Harlem after attending Sunday services in any Seventh Day chapel to watch devout African-American women go into a trance as they listened to the reverend’s bluesy sermon, imagine that at Tiffany’s you could buy a handful of diamonds to add to the breakfast porridge with Audrey Hepburn and sitting at the round table in the Algonquin Hotel where Dorothy Parker made her snake’s tongue famous.

That rite was fulfilled by Miguel to the letter when he first arrived in New York. That city was then a mental state or a literary genre in itself with which a writer had to measure himself, since every four years it changed its nature. At the end of the sixties of the last century, New York was violent and dirty, exciting and creative, to the point that you would be disappointed if on the first night you had not been stabbed in the so-called Hell’s Kitchen, between 42nd street and the Eighth, or if you did not see a mad prophet shoot his rifle at close range from an eave.

Among all the trips that Miguel has made to New York, he remembers seeing himself standing in the crowd on June 10, 1991 on a Broadway corner to watch the victory parade for the Americans in the Gulf War. In reality, what had been fought in the Gulf had not been a war but a great war festival, a huge musical concert with all the arsenal of explosives, and this parade was going to be the second part of that lavish performance. To celebrate the victory, the male and female mannequins in the windows of luxury stores on Fifth Avenue appeared dressed as soldiers with tunics, bulletproof vests, military helmets, knee boots and submachine guns, all the color of desert sand, the exquisite tonality of the victors, now parading through the Canyon of Heroes, from Battery Park to City Hall across Broadway through the financial heart of Wall Street, with hundreds of flags, weapons and troupes under 10,000 pounds of confetti and 6,000 tons of streamers . Nobody talked about the dead. The mob kissed the soldiers, seemed to burst with pleasure at the passing of the weapons and among all the deadly steels the most acclaimed was the Patriot missile for its phallic orange beauty, which was raised towards the sky on a truck served by two warriors. His imposing musculature aroused hysteria among adolescents who scratched their cheeks as before a diva at a rock concert.

Years later, on September 12, 2002, Miguel retraced the same path through the Canyon of Heroes in the direction of the black hole left by the collapse of the Twin Towers. He walked among waves of silent people with their heads bowed as they headed towards ground zero to pray for those killed in the attack, to be moved or to satisfy their morbidity, but even the most frivolous tourist had the air of a pilgrim drawn to the void. The 21st century had begun with the fall of the Twin Towers. Miguel thought that the future of history would not be understood if these two parades were not taken into account, one haughty and triumphant, the other humiliated and tragic, each one in the opposite direction through the Canyon of Heroes. New York, with that tragedy, had lost its seduction and its state of grace. It stopped being Sinatra’s. History no longer had the obligation to pass through that once proud and inviolable city. Miguel confirmed it every time he set foot on the streets of Manhattan again.