This article was written by Paty Mix, on the presentation of our latest publishing novel, Cuentos Madrileños (Tales from Madrid) by Emilia Pardo Bazán:
For those of us who work with words, it is a matter of primary importance how things are named in order to recall them or summon them into existence. That is why I value and highlight what happened in the Mercado de Los Mostenses. I come from a country in which, for more than forty years, neoliberal fundamentalism has redefined or deprived the name of things, spaces and relationships of profound meaning, turning the "market" into a place - not a place - of financial speculation in reality and in the national imaginary.
But there was another market there before (and still exists in some places). One was a public space, a place for buying and selling products of the earth, manufacturing, and a space for social encounters and visions of the world for the construction of citizenship. That market that still persists in some towns and cities of the deepest America, for the exchange of agricultural products and knowledge, is very inherent, by the way, with cultivation and, therefore, with culture.
That is why I welcome the two activities that Ediciones Deliciosas and Libros de las Malas Compañías (Bad Company Books) organised under the name of "Poetas en la Azotea" (“Poets on the Rooftop”) because they are resistance and, at the same time, the seed of a cause that increasingly requires greater channels. I am also grateful to her because the presentation of the book allowed me to get to know 19th century Madrid, the Las Maravillas neighbourhood and the genius of Emilia Pardo Bazán in Tales from Madrid; fourteen stories of very diverse themes, with masterly endings and subtle humour, in which what Ana Rossetti says of the author in the prologue can be appreciated with complete clarity: "She was the only daughter of a married couple who took care to give her a long-awaited education and to instil in her the idea that women were neither inferior to men nor adorable beings but that both had the same capacities, qualities, passions, and miseries".
In times of heads without bodies, faces without mouths and greetings without hugs, this meeting on the rooftop, for the poetry recital "Chulas y Chulapas", was the vindication of the belief and creation of the word of women, of making stories, motives and struggles visible through the homage to poets from Madrid, (who, according to what I found out, had been born where they had been given the right to be born), was a gift that has the warmth of the sun that accompanied those of us who were there and in each of these celebrations (which is also what the markets are for), and where the stalls of the hostelry provided the mixture of flavour and texture so that nothing was lacking in remembering Doña Emilia and San Poeta Labrador.
Paty Mix
Mayo 2021
If you would like to buy any of the books we presented that day, you can find them in our online shop:
