Back at the cortijo, the neighbour above us, Marino, was getting tedious (we used to spend some weekends up there, to keep an eye on the place). He kept going on about a great piece of land he had for sale and I’d say, ‘No, the only bit that interests me is this bit,' and I'd point to the terrace of avocados overlooking our pool. We finally gave in and followed his van up into the sticks.
This piece of land he'd been convinced we'd want to snap up was tiny. And to get to it you had to scramble across a narrow ridge, holding onto someone else's boundary fence to avoid falling into the abyss. I couldn’t believe he was showing it with a straight face. In order to use it you'd have to build a bridge.
When we pointed this out, he said:
'Mira, that's not such a big job. You just build a support here and another there,' and he started talking gibberish.
'If it's that easy,' Adrian replied. 'You do it.'
We had got into hiring big diggers, re-sculpting land, knocking entire top terraces off land and so on in Spain but I drew the line at learning how to build expensive bridges in order to get to crap pieces of land in the middle of nowhere.
'What would anyone do with such a small piece of land anyway?' Adrian asked.
'Build a cortijo. It's a great piece of land,' Marino argued.
He thought we were as thick as he looked.
One thing he wasn't though, was thick. How could he be when the logic always worked in his favour?
You make a mistake when you think these peasant-types with their scruffy clothes and old berets are thick or simple. Two hundred years before our stay in Spain George Sand had written, referring to the 'peasants' in Mallorca:
‘They do not lack shrewdness, however foolish they seem from their appearance.’
That about summed Marino up. He had land all over the place - presumably the spoils of his time as Mayor in the 70s. The local mayors always ended up very wealthy after a spell in office, despite receiving only a small salary (strange, that).
But for the first two years we owned the cortijo, we couldn't have a falling-out with him and were forced to humour him. This was because our cortijo was built on land that had formerly belonged to his wife, but which he had swapped for his lower terrace of avocados that overlooked our pool. The arrangement had been informal and there was only one flimsy piece of paper proving the swap had taken place. We were now aiming to get a proper legal document signed in order to improve our legal position if we chose to sell. We had asked him many times to get his wife to sign, but they always had some excuse. This game of cat and mouse went on for 18 months.
So we had to be as Machiavellian as him, talking politely to him and regularly visiting his wife with the children in the nearby village where they lived. We did this until finally we got the requisite signature and photocopy of her NIE. It took several visits because – if he wasn’t there, she would say: 'I can’t sign anything without him being here.'
We succeeded in the end by catching them both in at the same time and getting an elderly Spanish friend of ours whose sister was related to Marino's wife by marriage to accompany us.
'She'll do it, if I'm there!' the neighbour said, after we'd explained the trouble we were having.
It worked and the wife at last signed and handed us a copy of her ID.
And what a relief it was to finally be able to treat Marino with the contempt he deserved.
A month or so after this, one night at about 1am Adrian woke up and thought he could hear water running outside the cortijo. He went out only to see Marino had twisted our big irrigation pipe again (which was now cracking where he'd bent it) so that it just about got to his lower terrace of avocados. He was stealing our water.
'That's it!' Adrian was fuming. He pulled on his trousers, grabbed a torch and marched over to where he could see the scrawny figure in the darkness. Marino saw him but just carried on, holding our pipe with the water gushing onto his land.
'You've broken our pipe, you cabron!' he said and he grabbed the pipe out of his hands. He then caught Marino with both hands on his collar and said:
'Don't you ever do that again. Use your own water and don't touch our things!'
By the time he got back into the house, Adrian was shaking. He was never violent, but he'd finally cracked.
'I'll kill that f*cking weasel the next time I catch sight of him on our land!'
Oh, I forgot to mention he was a pervy Peeping Tom. One night I'd been in the shower in the cortijo. The bathroom was located to the side and back of the house with a window overlooking our vegetable patch. It was completely private and no-one could see inside unless they were standing on our land a metre from the window, staring in. As it was eleven o' clock at night, this was highly unlikely.
As I got out of the shower that night, however, completely starkers, I had a strange feeling; as though there had been a slight change in the quality of the light outside; as though there had been the slightest of movements.
'Adrian!' I called. 'Can you check outside? I've got a funny feeling someone could be there.'
'Okay,' he said and walked out onto the dark patio.
There was Marino, having just clambered down from his terrace and crossed our vegetable patch!
'What are you doing?' Adrian asked, shocked.
'Nada,' he answered and, mumbling something, scuttled off to his van and drove off.
'Oh, shit,' I said when I realised he'd seen me. I felt sick at the thought of the old perve gaping at my naked body.
To see the end result of all the work on our casa, take a look at the house now:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p86636
And also another of our completed projects:
http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p475271