NEIGHBOURS

I’ve always been depressed by noise. For me, depression is noise. Depression is a fly that enters your ear, reaches your ear drum, and you have a tough time getting it out. I never know whether it’s noise that gives me depression or depression that makes me constantly hear noise, but it’s as if a fly had entered my ear and injected its infernal buzzing there. I can’t stand noises, they put me in a bad mood, so when that dull, loud thud came through the wall for the umpteenth time that day, I had to accept there was no way you could live without noises in these deafening times. And I wondered whether there was a damn apartment in the whole universe that didn’t have noisy neighbours or, better still, didn’t have any neighbours. Everything seemed to indicate there wasn’t. Perhaps I just end up always sharing walls with the same kind of noise apologists. Two weeks ago, when I had rented the apartment and moved in, it had struck me as a quiet place. In fact, I had chosen it because of the calmness and serenity I discerned there. Now I had realized I had made a mistake. What with the dull, loud thuds coming from the other side of the living-room wall, the shouts of the woman upstairs, the drills and hammers of DIY fanatics, the eternal arguments of a couple that echoed unmistakably around the light well at lunchtime, the guffaws of the boss in the office downstairs and his ugly great voice whenever he talked on the speakerphone, the ill-defined voices of television sets, which would attack from all flanks, the panting of the couples fucking noisily at night and the car horns coming from outside, all this, more than a friendly neighbourhood, sounded like the subtle bombardment of a psychological war.

In only two weeks, given the profusion and frequency of the sonorous filtrations, I had learned to distinguish the noises and voices and could pinpoint their provenance with increasing accuracy, what neighbours they came from, what their lives were like (not at all different, by the way), without ever having set eyes on them. And since my apartment was a B – that is to say, it was situated halfway between A and C – I was caught in the crossfire of the neighbours’ sonorous emissions from both sides.

I had yet to meet that many people on the stairs and in the lift but after a short time, from what I’d heard from one day to the next, I had put together a picture of most of the neighbours. So, for example, the noises coming from apartment A were of a more varied kind. The heated discussions on the phone led me to believe he was a software engineer who’d grown tired of working for others and had set up a small company in the service sector. I imagined him approaching fifty, nervous, fidgety, a little bad-tempered, with a receding hairline. She, on the other hand, sounded far more joyful and could often be heard playing around with the children. The tonalities of her voice revealed a woman of certain aspirations, a bit of a madam, a subscriber to Reader’s Circle (I’d seen them knocking at her door), probably one of those employees in the section of home furnishings at the Corte Inglés who prefer not to think of themselves as working class. I learned to put up with their noises pretty well, though it was difficult for me to endure the man’s frenetic conversations and the high volume of the television they switched on in the early afternoon and left running until nightfall.

Without a doubt, the noises that came up from the offices on the first floor, right under my feet, were much worse. Their source was the owner of an administrative agency. Judging by his voice, he was a broad-shouldered, strong man whom all the employees without exception addressed as Don Roberto. Don Roberto’s face in my imagination acquired inflexible, harsh features which only ever changed when he had a Havana cigar in his mouth. He was a member of the old school. And yet, apart from the exasperating ringing of the phones, which never let up, the office noises were mostly confined to the early morning.

As for the neighbours in apartment C, I would like to highlight their passion above all. She must have been quite a young woman, a housewife, it seemed to me, whereas he worked shifts, probably as a mechanic or a miller, in a company on one of the city’s industrial estates. It was their custom at night to alleviate the day’s troubles in bed, making it quite clear to all the neighbours what they were getting off their chests, what with the mutual groans of pleasure and the scandalous beating of the bedhead against the wall. He must have been in his thirties with a chubby face and short – very short – black hair.

I have already explained how any kind of furore makes me depressed. Nobody could ever accuse me of making noise. I even listened to Spotify on my earphones, despite the fact I lived alone. Noise set me on edge. I always associated it with depression. Well, after a couple of weeks, I was walking about the house with cotton wool in my ears, since I found the whole thing unbearable. I may be inclined to exaggerate, that may be true, it’s just the way I am. Of course, the cotton wool wasn’t exactly what I would call a reasonable solution, but my neighbours’ very public intimacy was invading my own to such an extent that I felt overwhelmed. I had never seen their faces, but listening to them I could come up with an almost perfect idea of what they were like: the sonorous emissions emerging from their homes provided me with a pretty good facial composite. I simply can’t understand why it is the police don’t use noise as a means of identification.

Having said all of that, what exasperated me most, what really made me go crazy and put me in a very bad mood, was the neurotic shouting of the woman upstairs. She had two children who with easily verifiable proof could have accused her of psychological abuse. Her verbal violence was so over the top it constituted a strangely familiar presence for all the neighbours. I find it difficult to put up with that kind of thing – any hint of verbal scandal makes me depressed. I could even say that hearing her caused a deep-seated emotional imbalance in me that forced me to pay regular visits to my psychologist. So it was that after two weeks of living in that place, I felt like I was in hell and my nerves were almost shot. That was when I started taking pills. And resorted to listening to Spotify on my earphones for ever longer periods.

The woman upstairs was very young, there was no doubt about that, and a housewife, there was no doubt about that either, since she only ever went out to take the children to school and to pick them up. They were two little devils who must have been about as deranged as she was from all that shouting. I always imagined her with very short, almost cropped hair and a slightly plump body, due to all the hours she spent at home. Her husband must have been a travelling salesman or a seaman, since I hardly ever heard any male voices in that apartment and, when I did, they were calm and barely discernible.

That day, after the dull, loud thud came through the wall of my living room from apartment A for the umpteenth time, the party upstairs also got going. First of all, I heard the sound of the front door banging, the noisy feet of the children running down the hallway and, immediately after that, the normal session of shouts directed at the little ones, who drew strength from the only system of self-defence that they had learned: irrational behaviour. The block was once again immersed in the warlike effects of an uncontrollable bout of hysteria, and my mind showed symptoms that it was swaying beyond the limits of its own resistance. So it was, that day, I decided to go upstairs to have it out with the woman and to put her in her place.

Having opened the door to me (physically she was very different from the way I had imagined), she responded to my requests for peace with a little embarrassment. She apologized, said it was the first time anyone had brought this to her attention, she hadn’t been aware it was a problem, she was very sorry and would endeavour to make as little noise as possible. As so often happens in these cases, her good words and the deeds themselves went in different directions. She carried on shouting at her children, who were becoming more disturbed by the day (without anybody in the block taking any notice), turning that building into the epicentre of some kind of collective madness. I went up to draw her attention to the fact, with ever increasing regularity, even if it was just to keep a door open to hope in the bombardment of shouts that was overwhelming me.

To avoid my having to make the trip upstairs, she very kindly gave me her mobile number and suggested I give her a missed call whenever the noise became too much. In the beginning, that was what I did. But then I realized I was missing my visits and what I really wanted was to go upstairs and talk to that woman. So I stopped making missed calls with the excuse that I had read in an email they had started charging for them.

Contrary to my first impressions, she turned out to be a very pleasant woman – I would go so far as to say that she was mentally balanced – and quite pretty, by the way. I had got it wrong, she was divorced and lived off the money her parents gave her, since her no-good husband had disappeared without a trace. She had long hair and black eyes. She was physically very attractive.

My visits to her house (initially in search of some silence) became more frequent, in part because there came a time when she herself insisted she needed someone to lay down limits so she understood the situation and could correct herself. After a short period, the neighbourly relation gave way to one of friendship and then immediately to one of love. Three months after my first visit, I moved upstairs and abandoned my own apartment. I liked her, there was nothing for it. And besides, the neighbours above seemed fairly quiet, which solved my initial problem. I moved into her house and accepted the responsibility of acting as father to the two Sioux Indians who were her children. The truth is I’m not sure what attitude I adopted in front of the children, but the fact of the matter is that a month later, in the middle of a dispute with the young ones, there was a knock on the door. It was the new tenant from downstairs, and he looked annoyed.

HOAX

From: susana.clara@aol.com

Subject: Telephone operators charge for missed calls!

Date: 28 November 2010 20:10:12

To: unrevealed recipients: ;

Missed calls to mobiles will be charged at the rate of 0.55 euros by all operators

VARIOUS EXPERIENCES CONFIRM THE FACT BY EMAIL

‘Look what I was sent by email… No comment, they’re just a bunch of thieves…’

‘Missed calls to mobiles will now be charged at the rate of 0.55 euros, whatever the phone company. It seems like it’s really going to happen. I checked with Vodafone and it’s true (what an abuse!).’

‘Careful, phone companies are charging missed calls to mobiles at 55 euro cents. I’d heard it said that phone companies were going to start charging an ATTEMPT at making a call to mobiles, meaning if you call a mobile from wherever it is, mobile, landline or public phone booth, and hang up before they answer, you will be charged a fixed rate for making use of the line.’

‘Sadly yesterday I confirmed it is true when I called from a phone box, hung up before the voicemail kicked in and to my surprise saw I was automatically charged 0.55 euros. I called Telefónica to find out what was happening and they explained that since 1999 they had made it known in the Boletín Oficial del Estado that they were going to start making the charge and started doing so a couple of days ago. They also said all phone companies are doing it; I’ve just confirmed that Vodafone are doing it as well.’

‘Well, I was just writing to let you know and to warn you to be more careful when making calls to a mobile and to ask you to spread the news, since I don’t think they’re going to launch a Christmas publicity campaign to tell us all about it. I wonder why that is?’

OLD MAN AND OLD WOMAN

Nobody ever told you, we know that. It happened many years ago, the same number of years that you have been alive, in an indeterminate and anodyne city located somewhere in the north. It laid its humid buildings down in a desolate place. As to the name of the city, nobody ever informed us.

In the narrow street of some forgotten district of the city there lived on his own a man whose name is also hidden from us. He was an Old Man and lived on the ninth floor of a half-empty building, many of the tenants of which had made off in search of a better life. In that district there only remained those who had nowhere else to go. It had been years since anyone had heard the shouts of a child in the street. So many that the Old Man, who never went out, had forgotten they existed. The buildings were getting older and falling apart, but nobody seemed to care. The inhabitants got older along with them, seeing themselves in every bit of fallen rubble or crack that ran along the walls or the façade.

The Old Man let time pass by staring at it, as if time was an invisible clock that had stopped inside the house, as if time had deprived him of sight and forced him to wait for something unspecified. Death, most probably.

That Old Man waited without doing anything, he didn’t even eat, but what he was waiting for never seemed to arrive. Even so, he was a person of great patience, as if his previous life had taught him only to know how to wait. In order not to feel so alone, he kept the television on day and night, but he never watched it; he just left it on at a normal volume so he could realize there were other voices in the world apart from his own, which he didn’t even remember because he never spoke to anyone.

In recent years, he had come up with a trick to make his life more bearable, more tolerable, and to ensure that waiting and time were not the only things that governed his existence. Every day, at mid-morning, he took a knife from the kitchen and from the end of his nail to close to his wrist made a gentle, clean cut in his hand, a couple of millimetres deep, which caused the blood to appear along an almost perfect line.

He made this cut every day on a different finger, giving each wound enough time to heal before making a new cut on top of it. He was also very careful and washed the wounds with water every night to prevent them getting infected. It seems both his hands were marked, lined by scars that were permanently fresh and timidly coloured. Since he was of a very advanced age, he can’t have had much blood – a very strong blood flow – and the red liquid hardly ever surpassed the limits of the cuts he himself traced across his skin. He then remained quiet, looking at his hands and enduring the pain for several hours.

He repeated the same operation day after day.

The Old Man realized in this way he also could lord it over time, even if it was just to make fun of himself and avoid time forcing him to follow its empty rhythm. At least he had succeeded in intervening in the present, which was the only reality in front of his eyes. He lacked past because he was dispossessed of memory. The walls of his memory were those of the space of his house, limited by the barbed wire of the spiral time he inhabited.

One day, by chance, the Old Man discovered something on the balcony of the building opposite that caught his attention. He hardly ever looked out of the window: the exterior did not belong to him, and anyway whatever might happen there did not interest him. Needless to say, the objects of his gaze started and finished in the apartment itself.

He lived in a small, narrow street. In the building opposite, separated by a discreet distance, there was a woman sitting on the balcony. She was an Old Woman, very old, who was all curled up and didn’t lift her head. He had never seen her before, but couldn’t be sure she hadn’t been there. Other old people who lived in this street spent the day peeping out of the window, constantly going on to the balcony to observe the slightest movement. He didn’t. He waited for what there was to wait for inside the house.

The Old Woman knitted. She was sitting on a chair on the balcony, and all she did was knit. She knitted and knitted. It was a kind of black, very thick cloth she knitted tirelessly, as if she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish it.

The Old Man felt a stab of tenderness, something he hadn’t been able to experience for quite some time, and shivered. From that day on, he looked out of the window frequently. To tell the truth, he only looked at her. Exclusively at her. He was unaware of the reason, but that woman inspired in him an unfamiliar feeling of tenderness.

The Old Woman knitted on the balcony. It seemed she had a dry face, devoured by the cold, with so many folds the wrinkles looked like they were made out of cardboard. He never saw her doing anything other than knitting. He was incapable of looking anywhere else than those hands that kept on knitting. When he went to bed, she carried on knitting. When he got up, she was already knitting. She seemed to live in order to knit.

On one occasion, he stayed up all night to watch her. The Old Woman didn’t budge from that spot. She carried on knitting. He was so astonished that he forgot to cut his hand that day for the first time in ages. He didn’t even realize. And there was something else he did for the first time in as long as he could remember: he went out on to the balcony of his house. He didn’t recognize it as his own; he felt as if he was in no man’s land. He sat down on a stool. From that moment onwards, he increasingly forgot to slice his skin with the kitchen knife. The Old Woman modified his habits.

The weeks went by, and she carried on knitting. The days were amazingly similar to each other. The only thing that changed was the cloth she was knitting, which grew considerably. Now, the Old Man went out on to the balcony as soon as he got up and sat there, following the rhythms of her hands, opposite her, the two of them separated by the chasm of the street. He had an old mouth organ, which he had miraculously remembered about. At dusk, he played the mouth organ while watching the Old Woman. It seems he played a Wolof song, a kind of wolf melody, the only one he’d ever learned and instinctively managed to remember. It was a sad, piercing song, a song about waiting and patience.

Nobody knows whether she heard the music or not, because she carried on knitting without looking up, as if taken up with a pressing task, as if her sole purpose in life was to knit. The Old Man played the song every night and felt himself coming back to life, regaining time for himself and making it his own. He never entered the apartment. He stayed on the balcony, accompanying the movements of her hands with his eyes.

The cloth the Old Woman was knitting became ever thicker, ever blacker and ever more complete. Little by little, without the Old Man hardly even realizing, the cloth she was knitting gradually began to envelop her. He carried on playing his mouth organ at night, but there came a time when the upper part of her body was almost invisible.

One day, he noticed she had disappeared inside the strange cloth she was weaving. She was like a worm that takes shelter inside an egg-shaped structure.

He was taken aback. One week later, he stopped playing the mouth organ out of frustration at the Old Woman’s disappearance. In the end, he took a decision. He headed to the kitchen and grabbed the knife he used to make cuts in his hands. He then went down to the street, entered the building where the Old Woman lived, climbed up to the ninth floor and gained access to the apartment without any difficulties because the front door was open.

When he reached the balcony, he found nothing he hadn’t seen from his own balcony. The unusual black cloth egg, woven out of some strange substance, had a thick, porous consistency. First, the Old Man leant against the wall and drew the blade of the knife along his hand, with all the strength he could muster, from the nail to his wrist, making a sizeable wound. Then, drawing on the energy he had left, he cut the cloth of that egg from top to bottom, dividing it in two. There was no sign of the Old Woman inside the cloth, but there appeared the shrivelled, foetal body of a blood-stained creature that, on coming into the world, burst out crying.

And even though you didn’t know it until today, that was how you were born. The reason you have those scars drawn across your hands, from the nail to the wrist, we were never told, but perhaps you can understand why it is, now you are an old woman and live alone, you suddenly got this urgent desire to start knitting at all hours.

HOAX

From: infotruth@yahoo.com

Subject: A highly dangerous virus

Date: 15 December 2010 08:13:26

To: unrevealed recipients: ;

A highly dangerous virus

Pay attention to this message, I had the virus without knowing about it, like lots of people. Follow the instructions and you won’t have a problem.

IT IS CONTAINED IN A FOLDER CALLED ‘SULFNBK.EXE’ and is very easy to delete so long as you do so before 1 June next year, which is when it is activated.

ANTI-VIRUS SYSTEMS WON’T DETECT IT BECAUSE IT ISN’T ACTIVATED YET

– Click on the Start button.

– Choose Search programs and files.

– Write the name of the folder: SULFNBK.EXE.

– Choose Search LOCAL HARD DRIVES and then any other memory where a folder can be stored, including external drives.

– If you find it, DO NOT open it; in the same place on the ICON (barely legible black-and-white letters that say: SULFNBK) click with the right button and select DELETE. It will say this is a program and if you delete it you won’t be able to use some part of Windows properly. Please ignore all these messages and choose accept.

Once it’s in the recycle bin choose EMPTY RECYCLE BIN. It’s important that it doesn’t stay in the recycle bin, since it can be activated there as well. If you don’t do this, the folder causes a virus that hides in a shell on your hard drive and, when it breaks open, destroys everything on your computer.

PLEASE SPREAD THIS MESSAGE

LIFESTYLE

Sara pressed her finger down on the button for the sixth floor. When the lift started working, she gazed at her own reflection in the mirror. She looked tired and bad-tempered. She couldn’t understand why the residents’ meetings had to last until half past twelve at night, as if none of those present had to get up the following morning. She had arrived home at eight and been surprised to come across two or three neighbours in the foyer, who were the first to turn up. She had gone upstairs to leave her things and then come back down to the foyer because obviously there was no getting away from it now. She hadn’t remembered there was a residents’ meeting and had just wandered into the foyer as normal.

If she didn’t want to go to a meeting, she would try to come in through the garage so she could reach her apartment without going through the foyer. That way, nobody saw her. But this time she had forgotten all about the meeting. She wouldn’t have minded going if the meetings lasted a normal amount of time and finished at a reasonable hour. Then she would have gone upstairs to eat something, watched a bit of telly and gone to bed. But no. It was always like that. They would start at eight in the evening and finish in the early hours. For some strange reason, nobody ever arranged the meetings earlier or spread them over several days, according to the subject matter, or took advantage of another system that might help to lighten the load. Of course, a large part of the reason they lasted so long had to do with those who spent the whole time raising objections or the annoying occupants of the building who had time on their hands and started talking nonsense. The man on the second floor, for example, who was retired and had far too much free time, would arrive with a piece of paper that was covered in notes; he kept an eye on any incident that occurred in the building as if the whole thing belonged to him. So he would start by saying there was an unsightly cable on the fourth floor that hadn’t been covered (what was he doing on the fourth floor if he lived on the second?), or in such-and-such a corridor there was a blown bulb, or so-and-so was smoking in the lift, or so-and-so’s wife shouted at the children so much on getting them out of bed there was no way you could sleep in the morning, or the children on the first floor spent the whole day playing in the foyer and spoiling everything, or it was about time they took the decision to lock the foyer at night to prevent there being a burglary, or he had taken it upon himself (did he perchance consider himself to be the chairman of the residents’ association?) to get in touch with another company that would provide gas more cheaply… The old man just wouldn’t let up!

There was something else that bothered her a lot about the meetings: it was always men who came downstairs. Of the ten or twelve people (out of a total of forty homes) that attended those meetings, there were only ever one or two women. Three, tops. Sometimes, none at all. Sara herself and the woman from the ninth floor were the only ones who systematically represented their apartments.

With a defiant gesture, she fixed her pupils on the image reflected in the mirror of the lift. She was indignant that in a city like this it was still mainly women who were given the task of putting the children to bed and making supper (which the men might not even have time to eat, given how late it was when they got back from the meeting).

There were all kinds of characters in that building, and the residents’ meetings provided a snapshot. Sara had classified and sorted them all out. It was always the same, wherever she lived. For example, there were always those who didn’t pay their monthly maintenance fees (and who therefore didn’t turn up to the meetings, just in case). That was the situation with the people next door. It didn’t seem to be because of financial problems – at least that wasn’t the impression you got from the two luxury vehicles and motorbike that were parked down in the garage. It’s also true that more and more people live beyond their possibilities on the basis of constant, never-ending loans. And we mustn’t forget those who turn cars into a status symbol, buying makes and models that are far beyond the limits of their salaries. Meaning they never get to the end of the month. Then there was the one who kept on threatening to go to court to report the dog on the third floor, which barked and barked all night. It didn’t bother Sara all that much, but in the adjoining apartments it must have been a real problem. There was no way you could talk sense into the animal’s owner, he just said he had all the right in the world to have a dog at home and couldn’t stop it barking because that was something that was out of his hands. The logic was as crushing as it was lacking in sympathy. Then there were those who never came to the meetings (except during the year when, unfortunately, they had to act as chairman or secretary of the association). And there was no getting away from those who systematically objected to everything because it turned out they’d had a problem one day that hadn’t been resolved or just because they were inflexible people or simply didn’t give a damn. This sort ended up boycotting the meetings, finding problems where there weren’t any or managing to create them. Sara had made a note of who they were. She had always come across them in the buildings where she had lived (which were quite a few, she was on to the fifth or sixth by now). Nor was there any ignoring the prevaricators, those who when it was their turn to assume the chairmanship of the association transferred all the administration to the agency of a brother-in-law or a friend. This business of agencies and administrators was a slippery topic. And of course no meeting worth its salt could be without the usual protests from neighbours all over the world: noise, insufficient soundproofing, the lack of intimacy, poor building workmanship. This led to all kinds of arguments about suing property developers and builders… The eternal return, thought Sara. She would then remember her mother, a village woman, and think how poorly people today, herself included, put up with community obligations. Individualism is a sign of urban society and is difficult to reverse. People live for themselves, she concluded.

On entering her apartment, Sara went straight to the bathroom cabinet and took out an Ibuprofen. She couldn’t bear this headache any longer. In the kitchen, she drank a glass of cold milk from the fridge, grabbed an apple from the cupboard and went into the living room to lie on the sofa while eating the apple. Things couldn’t go on like this. She was fed up of residents’ meetings, neighbours, the building, this city… her life. Her work as well, but that was more difficult to change, and besides she did pretty well out of it. Anyway, there had been problems in all the buildings where she had lived. In the previous one, after a violent argument, her ex-husband had gone so far as to assault a neighbour whose son started practising the piano every night just when ordinary people were going to bed. Now, Sara’s main inconvenience related to those on the first floor, who’d only been living there for a couple of years but already had the neighbours on a war footing. The previous owners, who’d sold their flat, hadn’t bothered anybody. The new ones had turned the light well that served the building into a continuation of their living room. They had installed an awning, chairs, deck chairs, cushions, plant pots, several armchairs, and set up a television outside from spring well into autumn, when it started to get cold. All their family life was held there. So it was that from the kitchen window Sara knew all about the father’s problems with his health, sympathized with the mother’s bad moods, worried about the daughter’s difficulties at university and laughed at the teenage son’s relationships with his friends (who weren’t to his parents’ liking). The hours the boy spent on his mobile and on Facebook were a cause of constant family conflict. Sara could have gone so far as to say she had two lives, her own and that of the neighbours on the first floor, which from listening through the kitchen window she ended up accepting as her own. The fact is they didn’t seem bad people, quite the opposite, they sounded nice people, but when it came to this, they had no qualms about disturbing the neighbours until midnight (the time they fortunately went promptly to bed), sharing all their conversations, arguments and programmes on TV with the entire block, shamelessly revealing their private lives to all and sundry. Perhaps they were so used to never missing an instalment of Big Brother that their own affairs struck them as minutiae by comparison. That said, when it came down to it, Sara wouldn’t have known whether to continue with the intimate life of the light well’s inhabitants or the scandalous shouts emitted live every night, by means of the light well, by the insatiables on the seventh floor when they got into bed. A difficult choice, no doubt.

Noise, as an absolute category, was becoming more and more bothersome. Not just the neighbours, but the city as well. She found it aggressive, contaminating – that was the role it played in her life, though there were times she didn’t even realize. Recently, everything got on her nerves: the car horns, brakes and collisions, the noise of engines, the banging of machines during repairs or in the streets, the sound of light switches in adjacent apartments being turned on or off, the insulting volume of the television… Had she ever managed to find a café where the television set wasn’t blaring, even though nobody was looking at it? And, talking of the large variety of neighbourly noises, how often had she found out, by means of the concerted roar of all the men in the building, that some team had scored a goal in a match on television? She almost didn’t realize it, but her head was immersed in an enormous, invisible acoustic cloud.

To make matters worse, she felt under a great deal of stress. She ran about everywhere. And even though her district wasn’t too far from the city centre, there was no way she could even think of taking the car. Finding a parking space or avoiding the sticky cobweb of traffic was like winning the lottery. When she needed to go to the centre, she normally went on foot, quickening her pace, or on public transport, although this method didn’t help her escape the awful traffic jams.

The following day, she went to work while trying in her head to give shape to the need to change her way of life. Her lifestyle. She spent the whole morning mulling the idea over while mechanically resolving work matters. When she left, she had already reached a decision.

It took her longer to sell her apartment than she had expected. It seems the property market wasn’t quite as dynamic as she had been told. But when she did manage to sell it, she was ready for the move. Her vast experience when it came to moving house had taught her not to accumulate too much stuff at home. She knew people’s natural tendency was to accumulate stuff, with the inevitable loss of mobility that this entailed. After her second marriage break-up she had kept only the bare essentials (which basically meant her multimedia equipment: the mobile, the Wi-Fi laptop with mini printer, the digital camera and tiny MP3 that connected to a loudspeaker in the living room). And a couple of books. She often watched television on her laptop with the help of an antenna with DTTV software, so her television set was small as well. She herself had experienced various moves that had turned into a nightmare. After the most recent one, she had decided to get rid of her superfluous belongings, a habit that was truly difficult to acquire.

Her decision to adopt a new lifestyle frightened her a bit because she wasn’t sure if she would get used to it. But her mind was made up. She needed to find something completely different. She moved to an isolated, solitary house on a cliff above the sea, thirty miles from the city. The worst thing would be travelling that distance to work every day. But if she thought about it, this was quite a usual thing in large cities. If others did it, then she could as well. She was convinced.

Another question that made her wary was the solitude of the location, but she came to the conclusion that only in a place like that would she be able to change her rhythm and her lifestyle in the way that she desired. She needed to get as far away from the city as possible to force a disconnection. A rupture. It would be a new way of confronting her existence.

She moved in at the beginning of the summer, and her new residence was like an enormous breath of fresh air, like giving herself a shot of oxygen that infused her with strength and vitality. One of the VIP areas of her house was the living room with an immense window overlooking the sea, which enabled her to savour the sunset every day. Now that was life.

She bought a mountain bike so she could go on outings and started leading a healthy life, which soon included her eating habits as well. She used this opportunity to take long walks, she read a lot more than previously and felt an inner peace filling her and going with her wherever she went. She didn’t miss the cinema, cafés, company, going out with her friends, who were a little reluctant to make the trip, except on rare occasions. The impossibility of accessing the Internet in a place like that didn’t even make her miss the conversations and exchanges she was used to on Facebook. Letting go of her dependence on social media was part of the catharsis.

The days of the week went by with a certain amount of tranquillity: she didn’t have close neighbours and hardly saw anybody at all. Without a doubt, the solitude was considerable, especially at night, but she was so in need of changes in her life that she didn’t give it any more importance than was necessary.

That said, this wasn’t a bucolic place from which civilization had withdrawn in order to set her adrift. At weekends in the summer, at the beginning of autumn as well, lots of people turned up: drivers of ATVs seeking adventure as if they were in the jungle; pilots of hang-gliders and motorized planes that flew over the house with their devilish, strident buzzing; numerous quads, those ridiculous vehicles that seemed to serve no purpose; and down below, on the sea, numerous recreational boats with their engines; incessant, untiring aquatic machines disturbing the silence with their acrobatic moves; climbers ascending the cliff and people on jet skis. It was clear she couldn’t get away from noise there, either; the end of the world had ceased to exist.

All the same, the arrival of winter brought with it a weight of loneliness. The wind and cold were overwhelming, and it rained all the time. She couldn’t walk or take the bike out. To start with, she accepted this with resignation, like a kind of spiritual retreat. But then the isolation became unbearable. The only thing she could do was watch the television, which she had reinforced with a parabolic antenna, but there was no way of accessing the Internet. No ADSL, no cable, not even 3G. In fact, she barely had coverage on her mobile and had switched phone company to get a better service. In the shop, she had been given a phone with 3G, but it was no use to her out there. Her friends had told her Nokia were giving away good phones by email as part of a promotion, but that wasn’t going to resolve her problem. As a way of escaping the solitude, when she left work, she stayed in town for supper and started coming home later. As soon as she walked through the door, her heart would sink. She couldn’t endure this. She tried to relieve the sense of boredom by doing yoga and tai chi with a CD that gave instructions on the computer. Gymnastic exercises and work-outs on her Wii also formed part of her daily routine.

She managed like this until the arrival of summer; then, terrified by the idea of another unfathomable winter taking hold of her, she sold the house.

The next step was to rent a house twenty miles from the city. This was in a rural zone located on the edge of the urban area, with a tendency to be described as a residential habitat. There were lots of people who continued to cultivate the fields, but this wasn’t their principal occupation.

The house was fine, though it was far too big for her. When she moved in, she was surprised at how much space there was left over. This caused her a certain amount of unease. Even so, she continued to abominate her previous life and needed somewhere that would suit her requirements.

Sara had lived in cities all her life. She had grown up in the city, and her upbringing had been urban. That said, she recalled the first years of her childhood in her mother’s village. She remembered it as a happy period. She couldn’t say anything about her father. He had emigrated and never come back. Her mother had taken her to the city, to her uncle and aunt’s, when she was six, but from that initial childhood she recalled the joys of communal life: parties in the hay sheds; the brandy maker’s arrival in the village; the knife grinder’s noisy activity; the gathering of neighbours around the hearth; the days spent working the fields. Things that belonged to another time. Despite her urban condition, she had opened her eyes in a rural society that perhaps no longer existed.

From those years, what was etched most clearly on her memory was an enormous sense of freedom: the ability to roam wherever she pleased; to go down to the river, which was far away; to enter her neighbours’ houses; to take to the hills with other children for hours on end without anybody getting worried. Ironically, she now had so little connection with the rural world that she barely knew when it was time to plant potatoes, even though she had seen her mother do this numerous times when playing at the side of the fields.

The house she had rented was at a sensible distance from the city, which she could reach in twenty-five minutes by motorway. The communications were good, but it was at one remove from the busiest areas. There was only a limited group of six or seven houses in the vicinity with small fields and vegetable gardens.

She liked the place because of its apparent silence. Her attention was quickly drawn to the lack of movement in the district. There were hardly any children, and hardly anybody on the roads. It felt strange. She realized she was used to the constant bustle of city streets. All the life there took place within the confines of people’s properties. Although it wasn’t exactly what you could call a place without noise, the stillness and calm that could be felt after a certain hour at night made her nervous and even a little afraid. Probably because the house was too big for her and far too empty. To tell the truth, she realized she was missing a typically urban sort of nocturnal disturbance. Perhaps in all those years she had got so used to the excessive level of noise in town that now she noticed the absence. It seemed she needed to feel it inside her, deep inside, like an indispensable part of her make-up. Or else it wasn’t the silence that disturbed her, living on her own as she did. It was the baggage that came with that silence, which she wasn’t used to: she was terrified, living in such an enormous house, that someone might come and steal from her; if they did, it was possible nobody would ever find out because, although the neighbours’ houses were close, the fields around them kept them at a certain distance. This was something that worried her a lot, so, in casual conversations with the neighbours, she tried to find out if there were often robberies or muggings in that area. All she really wanted was to feel a little calmer. She had to admit she would have felt much safer in an apartment.

Her fears were influenced by the media, the television, the accident and crime reports in the papers. This was logical enough, since they were the fears of the culture to which she belonged. In her childhood, on the other hand, she didn’t recall her mother being wary of solitude. If she was going to wither at all, that strong-willed woman would wither on account of the evil eye, or sense the proximity of wolves on the paths, or the procession of the dead in the cold early mornings. Sara found it ridiculous to think that she might bump into a ferocious wolf, even if she was driving the car high up in the mountains, nor did she think it likely that she might coincide one night with the Holy Company. Those fears, the ones her mother had, belonged to the past, and she couldn’t imagine that any of her neighbours might be worried about such things. Inevitably enough, her own fears were more tangible, urban, civilized. She was afraid of the dentist, for example. She always had been, even before that terrifying personal experience she had been through when that wretched beast she had gone to one night in an emergency had screwed her tongue to her palate. It had been awful – they had had to operate on her, it had been in all the papers, and she had got involved in an unending court case with the encouragement of Carlos, her first husband, who was a shark lawyer. How could she not be afraid of such a species? But it wasn’t a question of the dentist now. It was that thick silence that infiltrated the empty spaces in her house, that put her on her guard. It was funny, but she, an urban woman fleeing from stress, was just finding out that silence produced discomfort, uncertainty and… fear! She began to understand that retired man in a building where she had lived who hated the summer because the neighbours went on holidays and he ceased to hear the noises and voices that kept him company.

And yet, in spite of all this, she gradually learned that when she really wanted it, silence couldn’t be had there, either. Or at least not the kind she was after. She was convinced that noise formed an unavoidable part of contemporary life. As soon as she went to bed, the symphony of barks got underway: stray dogs – whose owners had decided one day to go on holiday without them and had abandoned them to their fate in that area – wandered along the roads, inciting the dogs that were in their homes, which responded desperately. Sometimes, the whole thing became unbearable. It was an insurmountable noise that reminded her of the dog that belonged to her previous neighbour on the third floor. During the week, the biggest disturbance came from the three houses that were being built nearby. But there was also the strident roar of tractors, the irritating sound of smaller tractors, the annoying noise of old motorbikes that some neighbours used to get about, the music by Isabel Pantoja, Rocío Jurado and Pucho Boedo that some neighbours let rip from their CD players, the radios that were positioned by the side of the fields when they were working, the din of chainsaws, cutters and lawn mowers that could be heard at all hours, in all places, and… of course, the cars with their exhausts, inevitable even in the most isolated spot on Planet Earth, not to mention the modified cars that raced at night on the country roads. Lest we forget, there was also the external loudspeaker of the nearby church, a premeditated acoustic attack the priest had launched against the tranquillity of Sundays, having decided that, since the people wouldn’t come to Mass, he would take Mass to the people by broadcasting it live for all the parish by means of some powerful loudspeakers that had been providentially set up outside the church. Then there was the uproar caused by the parish’s long and numerous festivals (which included a shouting competition on microphones) and the permanent open-air dances that were celebrated locally. There was also an unknown but deafening band of long-haired rockers who were prepared to give vent to their agro-rock passion by rehearsing every other day in the garage of a nearby house. She was quite sure that silence, as she imagined it, did not exist. It was probably a vestige of another age, now lost and forgotten. In any case, she felt confused. What was she really after? On the one hand, she longed for silence, but on the other she was also a little afraid of it. She needed to clarify her ideas. To soap them and lay them out in the sun, as her mother did with the clothes. She felt uncertain.

Sara was aware that the world had changed, but she was also disappointed not to come across any remnants of the communal country life she had experienced as a child. The neighbours, though they continued criticizing one another, as happens everywhere, conducted their lives behind the walls of their houses and fields. It struck her as significant that there were hardly any children in that place and the few there were hardly ever came out to play in the street (as she had done when she was little), instead playing indoors or in their yards and barely coming into contact with others. To make matters worse, although it didn’t bother her all that much, she knew she was the one who came in for most criticism from her neighbours because, despite the fact she endeavoured to get on with them, she was an outsider and had a foreign lifestyle.

A year later, Sara’s mood was one of dissatisfaction. She hadn’t come across any of the things she had been naively expecting. What was it that defined a rural society nowadays, she kept asking herself, the fact of inhabiting a house with land and maintaining four hens and a small vegetable garden so you could have eggs, carrots and lettuces? Or was specificity marked out by the way of life? As far as she could see, there wasn’t all that much difference: people there got up early to drive to work in a place that wasn’t all that near their homes, which they couldn’t walk to (trade, offices, services, hostelry, administration, perhaps the odd factory, domestic service, etc.); they enjoyed the same programmes on TV (reality shows, most of all); young people visited the local pubs and discos at night; nobody dressed all that differently to people in the cities, that is, they dressed according to the rules laid down by global fashion, television and the textile industry; teenagers also went to Internet cafés, played the same games and took part in the same chats; almost everybody wanted to have Internet at home, and they all drove the same cars on similar roads with exactly the same chance of dying in a traffic accident or from a heart attack rather than getting crushed by some bucolic tractor. Cholesterol was still public enemy number one.

There was no denying the fact that she lived in a more tranquil location, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Perhaps what she was looking for did not exist. The idyllic scenery of her childhood had disappeared, or she had turned it into such a myth that it was nowhere to be found. Life in the country was more or less the same as life in the city, the difference being that it was more solitary because her friends lived further away and she had lost the immediacy of social relations, leaving aside the virtual contact that was possible online. She had become more active on Facebook again, but the fact of the matter was that for a large part of the day her router didn’t pick up a signal and she couldn’t surf. So, once again, she made up her mind to move.

This time, she opted for a more reliable solution: she bought a semi-detached fifteen miles from the city, which was fifteen minutes away by motorway. She couldn’t get it wrong this time. She had to take out a mortgage: urban proximity came at a price. It was ironic that the publicity material emphasized the silence of the ‘private estate’ as if this was a luxury item. As for the distance to work, she had barely saved five miles, but this would enable her to establish new relationships and she would no longer view solitude as a threat.

And yet, on this occasion, it took her even less time to observe and recognize her mistake. She had only been on the estate for three months when the feeling of distaste for her new surroundings had already become too much for her. She had got it badly wrong – once again, she was having problems with her neighbours. The residents’ association dealt with questions relating to communal areas and services. With the odd exception, the neighbours were not to her liking, and she found it difficult to get on with them (they struck her as stupid, arrogant and vacuous). She saw how people in this ‘elite’ setting – who always came from the city and went there to work – had strange social relationships that were based on a game of appearances and ostentation. They endeavoured to fill their garages with fancy cars and their houses with parabolic antennae, but neglected to fill themselves. Sara wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but nor was she fond of human stupidity. Besides, her life there was practically the same as when she lived in the city, with the added inconvenience of not having the same services to hand and being forced to use the car all the time. It was a fleeting adventure. Ten months later, she sold the semi-detached at a loss, despite the fact she had been told this type of properties inevitably increased in value because of the urban market. She needed to get out of there as fast as she could. It was Sara herself who composed two short ads for the newspaper: ‘For sale: idyllic semi-detached fifteen minutes from city’ and ‘Wanted: central attic with terrace garden’.

Text © Fran Alonso

Translation © Jonathan Dunne

This title is available to read in English – see the page “Stories”.