University City of Madrid

The University City of Madrid is recalled as a place where two people’s paths nearly crossed during a period of clandestine political activity. A Raimon concert at the university and a later arrest at a faculty entrance give the campus a double significance: it was both a public gathering place and the threshold at which a decade of underground militancy came to an abrupt end.

The Concert and the Missed Meeting

One man tells the other that he had been at Raimon’s concert at his faculty. The admission overturns the expectation that they had simply failed to meet: they had occupied the same university setting, but without recognizing each other. The concert remains a point of near-contact, a public event that, in retrospect, makes their separation seem contingent rather than inevitable.

Arrest at the Faculty Entrance

The other man explains that he had hidden in a seamstress’s workshop on Calle Moreto for six nights. He left for the street half an hour before the girls arrived and returned only after they had gone, sustaining the concealment through a careful daily routine. On the 24th, however, he attended a departmental meeting at the faculty to set the June examination schedule, judging that staying away would be more dangerous. He was arrested at the entrance and did not even reach the vestibule.

Place, Risk, and Reunion

The two recollections establish different uses of the same university space. For one, it was the venue of a concert; for the other, a place he had avoided while in hiding, then entered out of necessity and was captured. The arrest ended a ten-year period of militancy without a fall. Yet, in their later conversation, he also recognizes its unintended consequence: had he not been arrested, the two might never have met again. The University City thus marks both the interruption of an underground life and the unlikely route back to a personal encounter.