Our Spanish Villa

Our Spanish Villa
©Ken Harris 2008

I was surprised when we moved to Spain because I thought they spoke Spanish there. You know. Spain? Spanish?

Not in Torremolinos. Torremolinos is in Andalucía (ahn.dah.loo.SEE.yah) where they speak Andalú (ahn.dah.LOO), a Spanish version of Hillbilly. To properly speak Andalú you must drop the first and last syllables of all the longer words and shout out the remainder. Adiós becomes “JO!!!” Part of the Andalú accent is volume, the louder the better. Earplugs help.

We were certainly in no way qualified to go out and rent our own house and so Honey Pettis enlisted the aid of her Spanish teacher, Carmen Wooten-Reyes. Carmen spoke English well, but rapidly and with a heavy Spanish accent. If she was emotional about something, I could hardly understand a word she said. Just what we needed. Someone we couldn’t understand in two languages.

The situation was not quite so dismal, though, because in short order we understood her well enough to go house hunting. We found a place north of town, Urbanización (oor.bah.nee.sah.see.ON) Colómbia (ko.LOM.bee.yah). The urbanización consisted of four homes, each one named for a city in Colombia. Our house was named Villa Medellín (VEE.yah may.day.YEEN). If our mail had been delivered to the house, that would have been the address. No street names or numbers.

I promise you, by the way, that I will only offend you with spelling for pronunciation the first time you encounter the word.

Our urbanización fronted the highway connecting Málaga and Cádiz (KAH.dees). Built by the Phoenicians to connect their two sea ports, it was the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula in Phoenician times. In 1974, our time, it was still the busiest road on the Iberian Peninsula, and what with a nationwide epidemic of poor ignition and faulty mufflers, it was also the noisiest and smelliest.

When you see the Spanish word urbanización you think of the English word “urbanization.” Nothing of the sort. Our urbanización lay next to our noisy, smelly, loud highway to the south and vacant fields to the north, west and east. They were nice vacant fields, though, with wild asparagus in season and chamomile.

The houses themselves had rubble walls plastered over and built right on to the ground without benefit of even a mud sill. This method of construction had some curious consequences for us in winter. When the ground was wet, the walls acted as a wick with the result that the inside of the house was colder than a teacher’s wit.

Also in the winter it never got completely dry in the house. Clothes tended to mildew and we had to procure some hot rods for the closet, heating rods you could plug in to at least keep your closet dry. We had the same kind of rods on Guam, but the weather was much warmer.

We had heavy wooden shutters controlled by pulleys and cranks from indoors. It kept out intruders and also noise from the highway. Since in the two years we lived there we were never bothered by either, it must have done a good job. A tile roof completed our architectural ensemble.

We had one green feature to the house that we really liked, a passive solar water heating system. Coils of copper pipe lay in a shallow box, glassed on the side facing the sun most of the day, and with a black interior. The low end of the coil connected to the domestic water supply. The high end fed into a 60-gallon water tank on the roof that fed scalding water by gravity. And the whole thing operated without computers. Just the laws of science and nature. What a concept.

However, the water functioned through another force, this one national rather than natural. The mordida (mor.DEEdah). The “little bite.” And we weren’t fond of that at all. Mordida is a Spanish custom that predates the Romans. In America we call it bribery and we do it secretly. In Spain, and maybe the rest of the world for all I know, it is done without secrecy or compunction. Grease for the wheels of commerce.

Our urbanización owners, Mr. and Mrs. Boli, lived in Algiers. Once each month they would cross the puddle to Torremolinos to collect the rent and pay the mordida to the sanjero (sahn.HAIR.o), aka the water guy, to make sure we received the water that had already been paid for by conventional means. But just to make sure, we paid another small mordida to the man who lived with his family in the tool shed-sized building behind the four houses. (Come to think of it, they may have lived in the tool shed.) He was the Boli’s “full time” maintenance man. Although the Bolis didn’t pay him much, he didn’t do much either. If we really wanted something done, we had better come up with 100 pesetas (about $1.34).

You couldn’t run a household without mordida. I remember the garbage men coming by on Christmas day to collect their gift. There were two of them and I gave them 1000 pesetas (about $13.40) to split between them because I didn’t want them to suddenly start making deliveries.

I’ve been off topic here with my rant about mordidas, but I’ve always disliked them, primarily because no one ever saw fit to give me any.

To finish off our house description, we had three bed rooms, a maid’s room where I set up for writing, a living room and a kitchen with built in scrubbing board riffles so you can wash your socks with the dishes. Actually, the riffles were great for draining the dishes before you put them away. There was no garage, but we were thinking about trying life without a car since we were within walking distance of the school.

And so we began our lives as temporary ex-pats.