LA COMMUNIDAD

It seems incredible that I am on the verge of losing my voice when the effing bleeder's wife next door hasn't shut up for nine years. The month of August required someone or other from the community to ring the police due to the shennanigans of her husband and her good self. He first started to take a nap in the hallway nine years ago and since then has slowly progressed up the stairs and drops right outside my door in a state of inebriation. Now he has decided to go the other way and starts nodding off by the letter boxes downstairs, the very letter boxes he stole from with the aid of tweezers and when he was caught out and reported he decided to break them instead. He opened all our mail which then led him to tell everyone in the lift that he had paid his mortgage off but we, the neighbours however, were 'hipotecados', mortgaged up to the hilt. He still tries to push this argument when I tell him off for lying in a state all over the floor and proceeds to tell me I have 'nothing', unlike him who has paid off his mortgage presumably, as the rumour goes that he embezzled the bank where he worked, believed to be Santander a while back. He recently had his phone cut off as his wife has to bang on our door at four in the morning to ring the police for her when he goes on one of his rampages.The police have been known to come round four or five times in one day thanks to his wife locking him out or leaving her keys in the door so he can't get his in. This sparks a massive row and him banging the door and screaming at her to open up. The other day he faked a robbery. I heard him shouting downstairs and ran down thinking someone was being attacked but there was no one there just him hallucinating again telling me he had been robbed by some gacho (?), his money and ID taken. The next day he couldn't get in so started to ring all the door bells and then the police came again and told him to look for a room at the Hostal San Marcos who didn't want to know and sent him packing. He came back, did a repeat performance and was then carted off by the police who threatened to take him to Santa Clara which might mean the nunnery down the road or slang for the 'manicomio', the local mental institution. Maybe they should have called Saint Jude the patron saint of lost causes. The following night a woman with no teeth was calling up at the window asking him or telling him 'por dios', to let her in. I could then hear her high heels prancing around the flat till his wife slung her out. I say his wife but theirs is a weird relationship as they argue morning noon and night and really should enter a contest as they have had thousands of arguments all around the same time of day that you can set your clock to them. Henderson says he found the woman in a magazine, the neighbour, not Henderson and says she is really a Brazilian prostitute and as a man of the world I don't doubt his analisis. The woman seems to be deliberately driving the man insane and to drink in what appears to be an attempt to kill him so she can inherit the flat but he is a typical Aragonese, very stubborn and despite a pickled liver has no intention on going anywhere for a while. He must be about 80 by now and she not much younger than him. Outstanding really. Chapeau as they say here, I take my hat off to them. They defy any medical advice. I call him the effing bleeder but Henderson uses another more appropriate but unspeakable to polite ears word and begins with the letter c. He is actually called Antonio and is on first name terms with the police. He also has 'mucha fama' when it comes to court houses too and the community where we live has denounced him several times. The worst was when I had the unfortunate task of being 'la presidenta' of the community for a year and ended up denouncing him for having a J Arthur in front of the flats. If you are not familiar with rhyming slang the above is also known as a cab rank, but if you are still none the wiser let's just say he was masturbating which was the word I had to use when the judge asked me to explain what exactly it was that Mr C was up to that night he caused so much misery and disbelief amongst the neighbours. The denouncement on behalf of the the community was termed 'humiliating injustices'. Mr C was unaware that someone had filmed him in the act of self abuse and despite having a young ambitious lawyer grill me as if I were San Lorenzo himself, the judge found him, Mr C, guilty of what the judge classed as 'movements which evidently constitute an action which goes against the most elemental, moral and ethical norms of a citizen'' and which 'perturb the normal daily life of the rest of the community who shouldn't have to put up with such behaviour'. He added that Mr C's complaint or appeal that someone had had the audacity to film him having a good old tug was invalid as it wasn't as if said movie maker had filmed Mr C in the intimacy of his home, 'the very place he should have carried this act out in the first place'. I particularly liked the judge's conclusion that  my testimony in his opinion was one of 'forma verosimil and con franqueza' which shouldn't need a translation.
I think his priceless behaviour though was when he went to Brazil with his lovely lady wife and came back here without her. Mercedes upstairs asked about said wife and Mr C said 'oh her, she died'. A week later the woman in question came back to Spain and almost gave Mercedes a heart attack as she came spinning round the corner on Mercy Lane. There was also the time he flew head first down the stairs at Bar da Vinci and ended up in hospital for six months. We all thought we had seen the back of him but there he was, delivered by taxi, back to do it all again, a real trooper, smoking like a bastard and standing naked on his balcony pissing off it. He tried that again recently despite being denounced and just missed a copper's head, the one who had only moments before told Mr C that if the police were called out once more he would be fined 3,000 Euros. Perhaps his defining moment was when he was caught having a piss in the hallway just by the famous letter boxes and was again caught on camera and as he zipped his trousers up he waved a finger at the camera and said, 'Yo no', 'not me'.