Vroom, tuut tuut, klabam!, boom!, vroeeem. So (about then, I can’t put it into words better) sounds the torment that made me scream in my bed, took me to the doctor and almost floated out of our otherwise nice apartment. Before the big move to Spain, I’d seen a lot of bears on the road, but not the grizzly that would eventually devour me by a hair: the Madrid City Council’s nightly garbage collection.
Don’t get me wrong, I value hygiene and cleanliness like everyone else. It’s about that night time. As in other Spanish cities, at nightfall in Madrid a small army of dirt fighters begins to march through the narrow streets. In fluorescent yellow uniforms, these troops empty wheelie bins and dumpsters, and clean the cobblestones, freshening up the city for another day.
Why at night? Because there is less traffic that gets in the way of the trucks of the waste and cleaning service, the municipality says. There doesn’t seem to be much to argue with. Until you lie on your bed in an apartment with rickety, not-one-decibel-stopping balcony doors and try to fall asleep.
The concert starts every (!) night around half past eleven with the emptying of the wheelie bins. Vroom, drive the truck ahead. Thump tut tut, the parking alarm sounds. Klabam!, opens and closes the lid of the click. With a boom! the wheelie bin is again in front of the door, and the truck steams on to the neighbours. Because our building is at an intersection, the same sounds again a little later, followed by the equally deafening ’empty the paper and plastic containers on the corner’. The final chord comes from the waterspouts, who take their task seriously and take at least ten minutes to pass. It is now about three o’clock.
There are people who can quietly put this aside. And there are people who are completely crazy. Unlike my girlfriend, I don’t fall into the first category. With each night in which I fell asleep after hours of tossing and turning, the fear of the next one grew. Frequently I gave in and sat on the balcony, watching the cleaning fanfare with my mind on that dark spot between anger (“they should arrest those guys”) and despair (“why the hell am I letting myself be known like that?”) .
Although I never saw them on their balconies, and Spaniards seem to thrive on (and excel at making) a lot of and loud noise, there are indeed neighbors who sit up straight in their beds. Every once in a while, the media stage angry, small-eyed local residents. Madrid’s latest annual report on all complaints received states that residents view the time at which their waste is collected as ‘inadequate’ because of the noise, probably a nicer word than the complainants themselves used.
The doctor did not want to prescribe addictive sleeping pills, but advised me to talk to the landlord about new balcony doors. I did, without expecting much. Two days later a man came by to measure the window frames and after six weeks the new double glazed doors were in – for those who think Spain is still manana, manana is governed. In my soundproof bedroom I now imagine myself in a hut on the moor, one balcony door away from that noisy, clean, great city.