The car turned right to enter the side street at the moment my dog and I were crossing the pedestrian crossing. My dog has short legs and a calm gait, and neither she nor I are in a hurry at this moment when the afternoon light becomes oblique and golden. The mandatory stop could not have delayed the driver more than a few seconds. But he sticks his head out and yells something at me that I take a while to understand, since he says it with the booming voice of automotive fury in Madrid: “Go to Retiro!”. It is not my first encounter and I fear it will not be the last with a phenomenon that until now I did not know had a name, but that in one way or another I have been suffering all my life. In one of my earliest memories, I am walking down a street in Úbeda holding my mother’s hand and she pulls me aside just as one of those big black cars from back then rounds the corner at full speed. My mother always remembered that scare that could have cost us both our lives. Even if he hadn’t stopped, she knew who the driver was, since there were very few cars then: a well-known doctor, with the somber priestly authority that doctors had at the time. Many years later, I met a theater director who told me he was from Úbeda. His surname brought back the memory of the aggressive car, and I asked if by chance his father had been a doctor. The man must have felt some retrospective anguish upon discovering that, because of his father’s driving passion, that encounter might never have happened.
Suddenly, the habit of riding a donkey or horse, which had been pleasant and tiring, became dangerous. It was not to be feared that those tired pack animals would break into a gallop, but they were not used to the noise and speed of cars and were easily frightened, and could suddenly stop and throw one over their ears, or raise their front legs and throw one backwards. Over the years, my experience of petromasculinity has enriched what I had already been suffering due to plain male brutality, which preys preferentially on women, but which has brought many men not inclined to it quite a few hardships. In priest-run schools there were no girls, so the stupidity of macho teachers and students was poured out on the weak or shy classmates who did not participate in violent games or the roars of collective football fandom. The ape in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey becomes more fearsome when he discovers that a femur can be a weapon of dominance. The crude masculinity that civil, military, and ecclesiastical authorities alike so eagerly promoted in my childhood took a great leap forward when it found its complement in the internal combustion engine. The saber, the pistol, the mace, the donkey’s jawbone can hardly compete with the accelerator pedal and the roar of the exhaust pipe, and are even less lethal as weapons of aggression. Raquel Vidales has recounted on these pages the research of American political scientist Cara Daggett, who coined the term petromasculinity in 2018, and relates it not only to cars but to the entire field of fossil fuels: “The extraction towers, drilling, pipelines, gasoline.” Drill, baby, drill: the fierce slogan of Sarah Palin in the 2008 elections, repeated with manic unanimity at all mass events of the Republican right, takes on a sense of virile ecstasy and a piston of pornographic gymnastics: “Drill, drill…”
I have walked through countless cities and paths in my life. I have pushed children in strollers and held their hands, and slow elderly people who clung fearfully to my arm. I have ridden a bicycle daily through Madrid, Amsterdam, New York, Valencia. I have driven with the caution of a late learner and a fearful character, and therefore prone to comply even with the smallest printed rule. And in each of these circumstances I have suffered the literal or figurative collision with the petromasculine horde, which at any moment could have run me over, like that poor doctor who was driving one early morning through the tunnels of the M-30 in Madrid and had the misfortune of encountering two petromachos in a state of maximum roaring, one of whom rammed his car from behind and took his life. It turns out they had been competing with each other, stuffed with cocaine and testosterone, and for several kilometers they chased and harassed each other at 170 km/h, excited by the double roar of the engines, perhaps imagining they were in a sports car commercial or a video game. The doctor was up early to go to work or was returning from it. Because of two brainless scoundrels, his son will never see him again, and the one who was about to be born then will not know him. Seeing the black and white images from the security cameras chills the blood. Both had been on provisional release for years, and now one of them has fled, like one of those criminals from so many movies and commercials that obscenely celebrate the reckless driver, the man with a rough chin and powerful hands, leaning back with arms extended to hold the steering wheel more cockily, to get drunk and who knows if reach orgasm with the vibration of the engine and the roar of the exhaust pipe.
Another scholar, Jaime Vindel, titled Fossil Aesthetics. The aesthetics of the armored male inside his car as in the cockpit of a fighter jet corresponds with the adventurous names that advertisers invent for many of those vehicles: Rover, Maverick, Ranger, Bronco. It is a fantasy of even more perfect domination because in it the adversaries do not exist, or do not come into view. The cars in commercials accelerate effortlessly on mountain roads where no one will come head-on or through icy cityscapes of skyscrapers where no one walks. Through the narrow streets of Madrid, SUVs or off-road vehicles advance as threateningly as the infamous Israeli excavators through the ruins of Gaza. The drivers sit so high they cannot see children or dogs. Behind me on the train, a traveler celebrates on the phone the Hummer he just bought: “That’s not a car; it’s a tank.”
But the size or price of the car does not have to correspond to the petromasculinity of the driver. It is like those men who look like they have everything to be very tall, except height. There are individuals who compensate for the small size of their vehicle with fake growls of lurking beasts, or with bass drums that shake the windows of an entire neighborhood. Just as my mother always reminded me of that doctor’s scare, I keep recalling for my son Arturo the time when a thief on a mediocre but thunderous motorcycle in Granada confronted me on the sidewalk with the stroller I was pushing. I protested, calmly, pointing out how narrow the passage was where we were: “But man, get off the sidewalk.” To which he responded with an acceleration and a challenge: “Bet I catch you?”
Now the sidewalks where I walk with my dog are somewhat wider, but the motorcycles are much bigger, and the drivers sport helmets and leather jackets with buckles and straps and even carry microphones with which they seem to give instructions to their invading supermotorcyclist troops. I have become more cautious, and to avoid bothering them I step aside, taking the frightened creature in my arms. I know how angry they get when disturbed. Better I take her to Retiro.
