I recently tried to reintegrate Candela. El Candela was, in its beginnings, a flamenco tavern where Camarón, Paco de Lucía and Enrique Morente passed. I frequented it often, later, when it was one of those bars where you could go and end the night. Then the Candela closed permanently, until in January of this year it was reactivated by a group of celebrities and businessmen like Eduardo Dabán who, together with Edgar Kerri and Laura Vandall, strive to create a nightclub scene in Madrid for their actor friends and influencers. Candela had druggies, now she has druggies with a rep. For the moment, I haven’t gone back.
I didn’t come back because they wanted to charge me 12 euros, so I opted for the option of spending my night wasting time the best way you can waste time at night: trying to scam a door. Because now the Candela has a door. Seeing that the classic triplet strategy wasn’t working (I wanted multiple people to come in and only pay for one), I opted for the “soften the heart” tactic. I kindly let a group of beautiful Argentinian women pass by and then I look the doorman in the eye, I say his name several times (I don’t remember what it was) and I say to him: “every day I deal with guiris and today a Madrid girl finally arrives”. Olé. The doorman, for whom the only nationality that matters is that of money, replied: “if you don’t want to pay, leave. Tourists will always pay because for them it’s an experience.”
“An experience.” Although they may sometimes look alike, live and experience, they are not exactly the same. I wouldn’t say that “living an experience” is sitting on a bench, taking a walk or spending hours petting a dog, but yes: traveling, going to concerts, immersive installations, kayaking, canyoning or bungee jumping, or even wine tastings at wineries. Little luxuries to make life more electrifying. The more exclusive the experience, the more expensive it is and, therefore, the more distant it is from the rest of us mortals. “Excitements and sensations are sold and experiences are bought, since every consumer is more or less like a “collector of experiences”, eager for everything to happen here and now,” explained the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky in Paradoxical happiness: Essay on the hyperconsumption society.
“For him, working is an experience,” my friend, the journalist Núria Rius, once said about a colleague we have in common who never had to work for a living. In an age where basic necessities are a luxury, the experience is beginning to spread in such a way that living in Madrid is only possible for those who “want the experience of living in Madrid” and studying at university is exclusively reserved for those who can afford a “training experience in the capital”.
In this Madrid where experiential marketing prevails, our president manages our lives through the market. From experience. One of the most sacred things in life: life itself; Health, birth, death are, for Isabel Díaz Ayuso, one more experience, a Japanese ceramics course at La Latina. Thanks to the free choice model that we inherited from Esperanza Aguirre, a system that Díaz Ayuso’s ex-partner is now enriching and which allows hospital directors to move and reject patients to make more money.
As if a hospital were a bar. Now, not dying is an experience. Being able to live day to day, an experience luxury. Some masks cost two beers for twelve euros; an illness, a vermouth; an operation, a gin and tonic in a roof; a waiting list, a nightclub queue. What more will citizens give as long as we can take care of our beloved market? Look how fast it grows. One more foreigner, one less Madrid native.
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