The word Madrid covers a huge, diverse, and ever-changing city that became larger and more complex during the course of the twentieth century. It went from half-a-million inhabitants in 1900 to close on six million today (Parsons 2003). The new city grew around the capriciously laid out center of what was known as the ‘Villa’, with its Plaza Mayor, Royal Palace, Puerta del Sol, and Retiro Gardens, to name but a few of the landmarks made famous by the novels of Galdós, especially *Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87). As it did so, it incorporated the old, reinterpreted it, and completely altered its dynamic. There was plenty of evidence of the modern: the grid layout of new middleclass neighborhoods, the spread of electricity, the changing fashions adopted by the inhabitants. But incontrovertible evidence of the continuing plight of the poor and the exploited amidst this growing prosperity made it harder to integrate the whole city into a single narrative. Pio Baroja described this new situation perfectly in *La busca:

Baroja's narrator clearly suggests that those native madrileños who may be taken aback by the poverty on the outskirts of their city do not live in those areas but rather in areas with electric light and fine living, and are perturbed lest their almost European lifestyle (the ‘almost’ is deliberate) is swamped by the African suburbs (no ‘almost’ here).

*La busca is the first novel in a trilogy entitled La lucha por la vida (1904– 05), which follows the adventures of Manuel, an adolescent who arrives in Madrid from a small town in Soria where his mother had sent him while she tried to make a living in the capital, and where her status has plummeted: she now works as a maid in a boarding house.