{"id":398672,"date":"2023-09-01T16:35:20","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T14:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/artigos\/2023\/09\/01\/city-of-westminster-398672\/"},"modified":"2023-09-01T19:16:50","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T17:16:50","slug":"city-of-westminster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/artigos\/2023\/09\/01\/city-of-westminster-398672\/","title":{"rendered":"City of Westminster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three months after he started working his mother showed up at home with a record player. He didn’t even listen to the radio much. His mother came into the room where he was living as an adult trainee and left the record player, some sausages and some cans of beans to compose, together with the coquette and the little fire, a small still life of canned life. He smiled between obliged and moved and asked: are you going to give me the records too?<\/p>

A month passed. No more sausages, no more beans. The device was still unused. It was a mile and a half from his room to work without much commercial interest. He fed at the pub and spent on almost nothing else. Mother advised that she would return by four days later to visit and replenish something to vitaminize and mineralize. She looked at the empty pantry, looked at the record player and was embarrassed. It was necessary to remedy so much lack.<\/p>

Work all week and on Saturday afternoon travel to the center. It was a safe but limited life plan. Grove End Gardens was an exclusive condominium. In St John’s Wood, in northwest London, a wealthy, respectable neighborhood, with its important people, carefully tended gardens, a synagogue and a Baptist church marking the hours with great discipline. No taverns or stores. The building was in the shape of a cross disfigured by blows, twisted at the base and one of the wings amputated. Inside lived some doctors with certain prestige, managers of the City, some intermediate nobility and a conservative deputy. He did not live there. The servants’ quarters had long since been converted into apartments for rent. Perhaps the landlords thought it was not the best London had to offer, but to him there was something indecent about people being able to pay those prices. He hadn’t argued it politically, it was intuition. His occupation ranged from boiler to lawn, taking out the garbage, putting the doors back together, fixing wires. But he had only been on the job a short time, he didn’t know the building well, or the residents, or life in a huge city. Nor did he know himself well. <\/p>

Within a day of his mother’s visit, he began walking downtown looking for a record store. If to the economic limitations is added the ignorance in the displacements the result is to walk. Walking is the sum of not getting desperate with the times and placing one foot after the other. In a city the expected happens, as the center is closer there are more people and life is more expensive. As soon as people dressed better and seemed more carefree, the thought came to him that he did not know his mother’s musical tastes. Major embarrassment. He knew nothing about her. Except that she was always there. She was quiet and practical. His mother assured him that this was a good job for him. Under cover. Neither badly paid to go hungry nor well paid to get his head blown off.<\/p>

Oxford Street was unrelated to his job: the people he came across seemed better. He was from the north and everything was picked over and expensive, even the monuments’ fondness for gilding. Perhaps he was lost. At Bond Street he turned right and came upon the dog and gramophone store. There was a certain agitation inside, the kind that precedes happiness as an apology for spending money. <\/p>

The goal was to pick out a record to play when his mother walked in the door. He discarded a small one because the visit would not be one of arrive and leave. A big record. Make it look like everything is going well, that there is a willingness to spend, that the world revolves at that size. He looked at the posters scattered around the space: Sinatra, Brenda Lee, Four Seasons. Cliff Richard was on TV in the bar and maybe Helen Shapiro once sang in his town. Her mother didn’t go to concerts. The store was truly gigantic for the size of her musical knowledge. She dismissed the imposture of playing classical music because her mother would be suspicious that it was dissimulation. Going into a booth to sample records made him lazy because it didn’t occur to him until that very moment that it was necessary to have musical tastes or an idea of music. That music was something. Music meant, in this case, I’m becoming part of the city, I’m making progress. Great evils, great remedies. He asked the clerk:\u00a0
-Which record should I be buying now?\u00a0
-Third shelf, the one with the four guys leaning over a railing.
-This one? A meaningless name.
-Funny.<\/p>

He walked out not knowing if it was the name or the band that was funny. Or both. Or that people were buying. He came back from the fair as he went to it, walking. It was Saturday night. In London some were going to and some were coming from the theater. As it got closer to home, people traded restaurants for pubs. <\/p>

Sunday. 10:30 AM. Doorbell, door, mother enters with packages in her hands. She smiles a little less than he expected. Don’t close the door, your father is coming up… No good Sunday. The mother put the sausages in the sausage hole, the bacon where there was to be bacon, the eggs in the place provided for the shape of the eggs, and a few tins which she lifted to the top of the cupboard so that the son would not go to easy without effort. The father closed the door briskly to see in what condition someone who did not strive to be a lawyer lived. Despite the paternal black cloud, he went ahead with the plan. He picked up the disc with the strange name, placed it on the plate, moved his arm, placed the needle in the first groove so that it began to spin. <\/p>

One, two, three, four…The mother turned to listen and said to the father, who was entering the room, it’s the young men in black who were on television yesterday, what a coincidence! Don’t grumble again. The son was unable to square the conversation with the tide of enthusiasm coming from the loudspeakers while the mother smiled at the good manners her offspring was acquiring. In the father’s attitude, a past with a permanently disappointed face remained unmoved.<\/p>

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Three months after he started working his mother showed up at home with a record player. He didn’t even listen to the radio much. His mother came into the room where he was living as an adult trainee and left the record player, some sausages and some cans of beans to compose, together with the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":398410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[394],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sesenta-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"narrativa","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"Three months after he started working his mother showed up at home with a record player. He didn't even listen to the radio much. His mother came into the room where he was living as an adult trainee and left the record player, some sausages and some cans of beans to compose, together with the...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1072","reading_seconds":"257","reading_time":{"minutes":4,"hours":0,"seconds":17},"reading_string":"4'17''","reading_human":"4 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Sixty","id":394,"slug":"sesenta-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398707,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398672\/revisions\/398707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/398410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}