Chapter 4 --- Construction
I started work on my house in February 1977 and construction was completed by the end of April. I was living and teaching at the Rota Navy Base about 90 miles from Gaucin and I would come up on weekends to pay the workers and then to discuss what we would do next. My master builder or avenil was Christino, who had a portion of his left arm missing, but could lay bricks as fast as anyone. He was ably assisted by two helpers or peones.
I have always referred to the construction of this house as a “happening”, since there were no blueprints or even drawings as to what should be done. Of course, the house was already there and so my builders had to tear down or build walls and put windows where I told them to do so.
One day I decided that I wanted a large window on the ground floor of the house next to the door. I took a pencil and drew a rough square in the wall and said: “Put the window here.” The next day one of the peons began to make a hole in the wall using a hammer and chisel and by evening the hole was large enough for a window. The amount of dirt and rock that he knocked out of the wall filled two trucks.
The exterior walls of the house were about a yard thick and were filled with rock and dirt. Cement was prepared by a peon who put a few buckets of sand and cement on the floor. Then with his shovel he made a small hole on top of this mixture added water then mixed it all together. The prepared cement was put into plastic buckets and then taken to Christino, who was laying the bricks.
The second floor of the house in the front was only about a meter and half high and so you had to walk around the room bent over like a number seven. On a Monday morning when I was getting ready to return to Rota, I told Christino that I wanted him to make that room another meter higher and put two small windows in the front. When I returned to Gaucin the following Thursday evening the room was now about two and a half meters high, the windows were in place and the roof with large wooden beams had been replaced.
Based on a rough drawing I gave him, Christino built a fireplace in the living room and another in the back of the house where the combination kitchen and dining area was located.
As the walls were being built and plastered, I told Christino that we needed to get an electrician to wire the house. He said: “No problem, I can do that myself.” So I took him to Ronda, where we bought a hundred meters of electrical cable and he then proceeded to wire the house, expertly.
In order to get the plumber, Jose, to work at my house , I had to bribe him with a carton of cigarettes and a number of “copas” of “vino tinto” at Clemente’s bar. This did not help too much, since he showed up whenever he felt like it anyway.
Most Fridays, I was at the building site. The workers broke for lunch from two to four in the afternoon and so one Friday Christino invited me to come to his house for lunch. His house was located in the upper part of the village and was like so many others in Gaucin. The rooms were small, naked light bulbs hung from the ceilings and the kitchen had a small gas stove backed up with a stove that used wood, which served both for preparing food as well as providing warmth in the winter. I noticed that there was a sink in the kitchen, but no running water. In fact there was no running water anywhere in the house and of course any hot water except what was heated in a saucepan on the stove.
The lunch
was a typically Spanish worker's lunch. It began with a thick soup prepared
with white beans, pieces of carrots, celery, onions and meat. This was followed
by the main plate which consisted of a piece of fried pork, two fried eggs, french fries and served with a carafe of vino tinto. The dessert was a piece de résistance, a homemade
flan. It was probably the best flan I have ever eaten in
That
evening Christino invited me to watch television at his house. He was the first
and only Spaniard in Gaucin then who had a color television. We watched an
episode of Holocaust. While we were watching we snacked on tapas
of jamon Serrano, manchego
cheese and vino tinto. In
On the day that the work on the house was completed, I invited Christino and his helpers for tapas and wine at Clemente’s. The total cost for purchasing the ruined house and renovating it was about $10,000.00.
When I purchased the house, there was already electricity in it. In front of the house there were two live wires that were secured to the house with insulators. From inside the house two insulated wires with hooks on the ends were used to connect to the live wires in the street. These two wires were connected to a small electrical meter next to the front door. The voltage was 120. During the renovation process Christino hooked the new wiring into the meter.
Before the
house was completed I talked to Pedro the electrician about coming down to my
house and re-attaching my meter to the grid, but to no avail. I had now been
living in the house for a few days without electricity and feeling quite
frustrated. One morning I was standing in front of the house talking to my
neighbors Maria and
There was a drawback, however, to having 120 volts. At night when people were using more electricity, a normal 100 watt light bulb would just have a reddish glow, since the amperage would drop precipitously. So it was virtually impossible to watch television without a voltage regulator, which was a tranformer like device that kept the voltage at a steady 120.
I was told that the solution to this low voltage problem was to get my house hooked up to the 220 grid. Thus a few weeks later and two more cartons of cigarettes, Pedro got around to connecting my house to 220 volts. I was there when he made the final hook up to the grid. He told me that he did not have a 220 transformer, but that he would simply bypass the transformer so that I could have electricity right away and later (manana maybe?) he would come with a new transformer.
That "manana maybe" extended for at least two more years until he finally got around to installing the meter.
I had not been in the house very long when Maria, a neighbor down the street, offered to clean my house. Since I realized that she was not used taking no for an answer, I told her that she could clean whenever she liked. A great deal of her "cleaning" consisted simply in re-arranging the considerable dust in the house. She mopped the floors with dirty water and when I bought some cleaning solution for her to put in the water, she refused to use it. Even though I had plenty of hot water she refused to use it for either cleaning the floors or the dishes, I got just a blank stare. Later I realized that since she had been cleaning houses all her life in a certain way, she was not about to be told how to clean by a man, who also happened to be a foreigner.
One Friday evening after I arrived in my house and turned on the electricity, I heard a loud pop in the kitchen and the smell of something burning. When I checked I realized that Maria had disconnected the 120 cord of the refrigerator from the transformer and put it directly into the wall socket. So that was the end of that refrigerator. Form that point on I always checked to make sure that no 120 appliances were plugged directly into wall sockets. When I asked Maria why she removed the fridge plug from the transformer, she just shook her head and said that she could see no reason to have the fridge cord plugged into a transformer. In fact she had never seen a transformer before.
Even though I told her not to remove any other plugs from transformers and put them directly into the “enchufes” in the wall, she still persisted in doing it. After all what does a man know about these things? The final toll of ruined appliances came to one refrigerator, two electric heaters and one electric fan. Since Maria refused to be fired, I could do nothing but to check every appliance in the house before I turned on the electricity.