Chef Javier Muñoz-Calero, at the head of the Ovillo restaurant (Madrid), remembers perfectly how he met Mamady Diallo, Madybecause it changed his life. It was the end of 2010. “He was super skinny and had a look full of sadness. That boy thought his entire family was dead, he barely spoke Spanish and they put him in my hands. Today he is my son.” He doesn’t lie. He speaks of Mady with the pride with which parents share the successes of the children they have brought into the world. It doesn’t matter that the brother of his 12-year-old girl and his 14-year-old twins was born on another continent, Africa; who belongs to a different race or practices a different religion. Fourteen years later they are family. “Ours,” summarizes the cook, “is a beautiful story of love without borders.”
“Nacho de la Mata, from the Raíces Foundation, told me that he would send me some resumes of the kids they helped through Cocina Conciencia [proyecto que da empleo y formación a jóvenes sin referentes adultos en España y en el que han colaborado algunos de los mejores chefs del país, varios de ellos con estrellas Michelin]. I told him: ‘Send me the boy who is having the worst time and we will get him through.’ And he sent me to Mady.” He was 15 years old when he got into a canoe in Mauritania with almost 60 strangers. “I have never been so scared in my life,” he remembers, on the phone from Oslo, where he now lives. “There were so many of us that people were sitting on top of each other. I was bleeding from my leg because I had gotten a nasty wound from the engine and it hurt a lot from the sea salt. There was a moment when the boat broke and water began to enter. I didn’t know how to swim. He was convinced that he was not going to get out of there alive. “I don’t even wish those who attacked my family what I spent those days at sea.” By then he had been stumbling for months. “I belong to a minority ethnic group in southern Guinea Conakry and they attacked my house. They told me when I was coming back from school and told me not to come back, so I fled, first to Mali and then to Mauritania, where I got on the canoe.”
The barge was rescued when it reached the Spanish coast and its wound was treated. More tumbles: Tenerife, Lanzarote, Madrid. The first x-ray of his life; people examining their molars to try to determine their age. In the capital he met Nacho de la Mata, the lawyer who managed to change the system and prevent repatriations without guarantees of unaccompanied foreign minors with two important appeals before the Constitutional Court. The first and only time Mady, a Muslim, set foot in a church, was at his funeral. “That day I cried so much that I lost my voice.” De la Mata and his wife, Lourdes Reyzábal, the creator of the Raíces Foundation, were the first people to help him in Spain. The couple had met on the Train of Hope, accompanying disabled and sick people to Lourdes (France). On their honeymoon in Scotland, De la Mata had a crisis. Upon returning to Madrid, they detected a brain tumor against which he battled for 12 years. “When he died,” remembers Mady, “I felt a very big emptiness. But I had already put myself on the path to Javier. I don’t know what would have happened to me without them. “They changed my life.”
I didn’t know anything about restaurants. “They taught me everything,” he remembers. He started as a common waiter and managed one of the restaurants run by Muñoz-Calero, who, meanwhile, helped him look for his family. “We sent money to an uncle of his to investigate. We wrote many letters to the embassy. I told her: ‘Mady, many years have passed and we have tried everything.’ But he didn’t give up. One night, at four in the morning, he called me crying. His uncle had just told him that he had found his mother and his brothers. “Today it brings tears to my eyes when I remember it,” says the chef. After the attack, the family had fled to another country, but when things calmed down in Guinea, they returned. They thought Mady had died, but she was in Spain, serving cocktails and even inventing some new ones—“without trying them, of course, because I don’t drink”—. “With the money he earned,” Muñoz-Calero recalls, “Mady created a kind of fleet of taxis in his father’s town to take him away from the hard work in the fields. He put his sister in school. He bought them a house…”
When he met his girlfriend, also born in Guinea, but living in Norway, Mady decided to leave everything. “I was doing very well in Spain, but she was a nurse there and I thought it would be easier for me to move and work at whatever it was.” He learned one more language, the fifth; he had two children. He worked as a driver, started his own business. “One day,” Muñoz-Calero remembers, “he sent me a beautiful audio. It said: ‘Dad, thanks to you and your family, to everything you did for me and everything I learned from you, now I am a businessman, like you.’
Both often use that verb, “learn,” when talking about each other. “Mady has taught me many things,” explains the cook. “Sometimes in life, things don’t go as you expected and it’s easy to dramatize, but I had his example: I saw him fight to improve himself and to always help those next to him. He taught me that you should never forget where you come from and loyalty. All”.
When Mady, already in Norway, found out that Muñoz-Calero was going to open his first solo restaurant, Ovillo, she called him by phone to announce that she was going to Spain to help him get it started. “Then his second child had just been born,” the chef recalls, “and I told him it wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t listen to me. He told me: ‘You gave me everything and I will never leave you alone.’ When he was about to return to Oslo, the pandemic broke out and Mady had to wait, confined, to return home. He doesn’t regret it. “Whenever Javier needs me, I will go. Just as I know that whenever I need him, he will come.” It’s what families do, help each other. It was also that reason, loyalty, that led Anouar, another African boy who had arrived in Spain at the age of 14 clinging to the underside of a truck, to return to the first house where he had been welcomed in Spain to take care of Nacho de la Mata in her last year of life.
Muñoz-Calero has already worked with about 80 kids from the Raíces Foundation thanks to the Cocina Conciencia project, which has given an opportunity to almost half a thousand young people since 2010. The chef says, indignant, that some people have called him asking for migrants to work without contract. “And then there is the one who believes that the foreign person who takes care of his parents is great, but they don’t want the black man next door because he is a criminal. There is a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of lack of culture, people who live in golden castles, accustomed to being told everything is short and to the bottom. Fortunately, I was born into a wealthy, but very open, family. Mady has a beautiful relationship with my mother, Paloma. And my children have also had the opportunity to grow up seeing migrant kids at home, during the year, on Christmas Eve, sharing, learning… I am very happy about that when I see how the extreme right tries to capture kids through the internet and social networks with racist speeches.” Growing up with Mady has been like a vaccine against racism, a virus that is spreading in Spain at the hands of irresponsible politicians and activists who in recent days, after the terrible murder of an 11-year-old boy in Mocejón (Toledo) rushed to to link foreigners as perpetrators of the crime.
Outside of the family she created with the Muñoz-Calero, Mady also suffered. “Racism is everywhere. Also in my country, where we are all black, although there the discrimination was based on ethnicity. In Spain they shouted at me on the street: ‘Go to your country! Fucking black!’ They tried to attack me. Once, when leaving the restaurant, the police stopped me and another colleague, insulted us and put their hands on a car… But I prefer to take the good things: those happy people, the sun… For me, Spain will be always the best in the world thanks to Nacho and Javier.”