Calle Santo Domingo de Silos must be one of the most unfortunate in Madrid. They have parked the Bernabéu stadium right next to it, between pits 42 and 44 A. A monster of cement and iron that leaves no room even for the breeze. In number 8 a TV cameraman stands guard at the La Chalana restaurant, just in case the characters in the plot, in addition to gangsters, were idiots and returned to the scene of the crime.
Every political plot, be it reality or fiction, needs a restaurant with microphones: La Camarga in the Catalunya operation and La Chalana in the Koldo operation. In Barcelona with a vase, in Madrid with masks.
Applied as I am to Quim Monzó and his columns in La Vanguardia, which the day before yesterday was talking about “disaster tourism”, on Thursday I had reserved a table at La Chalana in European time. At the entrance there is a bar and some tables facing the street (I guess that’s where the photo of El Mundo with Koldo in front of Ábalos smoking was taken). The girl at the door, when I give my name, formally asks if I would like to accompany her down the stairs. I answer: “Yes, where Koldo”. He asks for moviola and I repeat Koldo’s name. He smiles and places me on a small table. Nothing more.
The restaurant has limited glamor and with the view from my spot I could be in a pizzeria or a pretentious Japanese. The letter is laminated (horror). A grilled fish with lobster costs 65 euros and a kilo of lobster, 150. I order octopus at the lobster market. The waitress has a master’s degree in friendliness. The cephalopod was restricted and is too hard, the crustacean is demonstrably fresh. A glass of Rueda, a coffee and payment provided.
Next to me sit two gentlemen in their twenties, one of them about to explode his red bald head and, as Eugenio would say, “with round eyes and a crooked beak”. He manages to see that I’m reading La Vanguardia and, since most of the room is coming for the same thing, he asks me about Koldo. I answer him with a “this is where it all started”. They smile with a bottle of Albariño ready for the green bin. I question the waitress and she says she doesn’t know anything, just like in the movies, but I remember the restaurant in The Godfather where Michael Corleone murders Sollozzo and McCluskey.
La Chalana is a good restaurant for food, but a bad setting for plots. Photo the field. There isn’t even a cameraman. The mess continues. ( To be continued).
