It was an
8-hour drive to Torremolinos, but I took a wrong turn and ended up in Cordoba.
By the time we could see the high-rises and smog against the sea, the sun was
way up and the autopista was steaming. We made it past Malaga and through the
tunnel to the sudden turn-off for Torremolinos. Paddy has family down there.
Lots of working-class English people do.
Torre was
the place to be in the 60s and 70s, and Brigitte Bardot and Frank Sinatra shot
movies there and posed with cocktails and fishermen. Spain was sunny and cheap,
and some say the package holiday was invented in Torremolinos – weather-weary
English and northern Europeans flooded in on charter flights, bought little
studio flats in concrete towers, spent their Golden Years in little ethnic
enclaves here. Many never learned a word of Spanish.
 |
| Torremolinos in 1966 |
Torremolinos
was an early bloomer. The rich and glossy soon moved on to Marbella, and Torre
headed downhill and down-scale. Think Daytona Beach, Atlantic City, or Margate.
Still fun, but scruffy, too. Sunburned binge drinkers and the people who prey
on them.
Apparently,
even on a weekday, everyone in the world wanted to go to Torremolinos, too.
Traffic was backed up onto the six-lane highway. We joined the start-and-stop
queue, inching along to a tangle of roundabouts and underpasses. I saw people
in a car ahead waving their arms and shouting, then another carload doing the
same. It was hot. I switched on the air conditioning and rolled up the windows.
I was just in time. A cloud of hornets descended from the shade of the
underpass and flowed over our car.
I looked at
Paddy. He looked at me. “Welcome to Hell,” he said.
I should
not have laughed.
We had
lunch with an aged relative in shocking decline. Something had to be done, and
soon. The reason we went down to Torre was real estate. The ailing lady asked
me to sell her apartment for her.
She sent us
over to see it with her niece.
It was in Aries
Block, a dark canyon of a high-rise development with a once-groovy zodiac theme.
There´s a little bar outside the front door that caters to Danes. Any hour of
day or night, a collection of stoned Birgits and Bendts is parked in plastic
lawn chairs, watching life go by.
“It´s
pretty bad,” said the niece, jangling the keys. “Squatters lived in there for a
couple of years. We just now got them out. It stinks in there.”
Paddy
looked at me. “What the hell,” I said.
We stepped into the elevator.
We stepped
out of the elevator, and up to the front door of the apartment. A man was
there, shirtless, jiggling, jangling something against the door handle. He was
a burglar. We asked him what he was doing. He said he was opening this door,
that this place belonged to his uncle who had died, and because it was empty
and his place downstairs was crowded, he was moving in. His child needed a place
to live, he said. I have a child, he said. He said a whole lot of things very
quickly. He was scared, angry. Probably high.
The niece speaks
fluent street Spanish, and that´s a good thing. She also has a steel backbone.
And steel other things, too. She told him to go back downstairs and we´d forget
about this.
He told her
to open the door if she had keys.
“I´m not
opening anything long as you´re here,” she said. “This man is the uncle,” she said, pointing
to Patrick. “He´s alive. This place belongs to him. He´s got children to think
about too.” (Oh great, I thought. Give
him someone to hate!)
“If you go
inside that apartment, I´ll be back here with my friends,” the man said. “We´re
all home downstairs. Five, six of us. And I have a machete. You go in there,
and I find you there, I´ll kill you. I´ll kill all of you.”
“I am
phoning the police now,” I said, pulling out my mobile. “It´s time to go home.” I dialled the emergency number, then realized
I did not know the address of the building. I didn´t hit “send.” I bluffed. I turned the phone toward the man, I
pretended to snap his photo. “Hola! Policia? Si. Un ladron, sin camisa,
con muchas tatuajes... En el
acto, rompiendo el candao…”
The man
scuttled down the stairs. We turned to
one another. “What are the chances?” we cried. “What´s the address of this
place?” I said.
And then
the man came back, swinging up the stairs two at a time, still no shirt, still
wild-eyed. And now he had a machete. Forty, fifty centimeters, silver. Japanese
style, with holes along one edge.
I don´t
recall what the niece said next. She got right into his face, and I held up the
phone and snapped away, and said, “si, si, that´s him. How soon can you get
here?” Paddy shoved his way forward, in case the guy started swinging that
knife… but the niece kept talking, kept the guy engaged, and he kept running
his mouth, threatening, angry at the great injustices of his life. I think
that´s why I never really thought the guy would use the weapon. He couldn´t
shut up. And he finally went downstairs. A door slammed.
We got the
hell out. Called the cops for real, and after what seemed like forever six
carloads of Policia Nacional rolled up in full riot gear, Policia Nacional.
They stormed into the lobby and swarmed up the stairs and bashed on the doors
til they found our man. They dragged him out in cuffs, but they made us go
around the corner and out of sight. They brought out knives, said “which one?”
and we pointed and said “that.”
The Danes
got a great show. Me and the niece got a
ride in the broiling-hot back of a police cruiser down the station, and cooled
our heels for another couple of hours before a nice man took our statements. We spent another five hours at the Night Court.
At the end of it all, the man was sent to jail for four months.
I learned
his name is Miguel. He is 23 years old, without any prior convictions. I felt
bad for a few moments… he evidently loves his child, and wouldn´t see him for
so long. But as time went on, and we talked it all over for a while, I realized
he could´ve just walked away down that hallway when we showed up. He didn´t
have to get all macho-man. He really didn´t have to come back upstairs with
that corn-cutter. He had a choice.
With Machete
Man safely away, we finally got inside the studio flat.
It was as
nasty as we´d expected, but still desirable. A neighbour told us another family
of vagrants from upstairs had been there earlier, testing the door and locks. We
scrambled to get a locksmith, a new door, someone to clear out the place and
paint it. Valuations. Powers of Attorney.
Hell.
