vecinos

The ground floor of the building across the street from ours hosts a storefront which, for the first eight or nine months of our residence here, was occupied by an Italian pizzeria. The proprietor was a middle-aged Napolitano, a soft-eyed, smiling, ever-gesticulating character who, rather than attempting to learn Spanish, spoke in his Italian dialect and, on the rare occasions that these deeply similar languages failed to match up, was content to smile and nod.

Enzo was assisted in the shop by a strange host of cooks and cashiers. His primary kitchen help came from a burly Milanese twenty-something who wore a pointy goatee and had tattoos wrapped around the considerable girth of his flabby upper arms. He would spend hours seated in front of the restaurant, smoking and chatting in drawling Italian on his cell phone. He sold weed to the waiters of the plaza cafes, sometimes in broad daylight, and once kicked in our front door for us when we locked ourselves out.

On the register was a thirty-five-ish Brazilian woman and her pretty teenage daughter who, despite her youth, was blissfully unoccupied while her peers were at school. These women, like Enzo, seemed to be entirely lacking any skill in the local language, and tended to respond in Portuguese, be the language of their interlocutor Spanish, Italian, or Napolitano. 

On our fairly frequent evenings of culinary laziness, Levi and I would stop by for a slice of the mediocre pizza and always enjoyed the strange conversations that tended to ensue. We came to presume the Brazilian woman the wife or girlfriend of the proprietor, and although their language barrier, age difference, and unexplained shared presence in this obscure European corner seemed unusual, as expats of initially dubious Spanish skills ourselves, we felt ill-suited to judge.

But after a couple months of patronage, we noticed that this wasn’t just an unconventional family. Our Milanese friend wasn’t the only bulldozer Italiano in Enzo’s employ. In fact, the soft-spoken old man never seemed to be without one of these surly hulks. Nor were Enzo’s supposed paramour and Kamila, the teenager to whom Levi was now giving English lessons, without the company of their countrywomen. It was impossible to keep track of who or how many, because they were constantly changing and some appeared at the restaurant only once or twice, but in an isolated and distinctly homogonous town like Zafra, it just isn’t normal to see that many people of the same age and sex from the same distant country.

In the spring after our arrival, Enzo was absent for several days. Levi asked after him in a class with Kamila, and learned that he had raced back to Napoli to be with his son, who had died soon after. The man had been murdered by a cop. The weapon was a fork to the jugular.

Enzo returned and business continued as usual. Kamila, homesick and lonely, returned to Brazil, and although we saw less of our pizzeria friends, we continued to observe the bizarre and constant staff turnovers.

Then one day they were gone. The neon sign lay on the ground, the kitchen was dismantled, and the metal grate was pulled down over the door.

Around this time, a friend of ours (presumably conveying local gossip rather than knowledge personally acquired) mentioned that the brothel on the edge of town was staffed by a strangely high number of Brazilian women. 

Later, during an afternoon of paella at the country house of our sweet old neighbor Pepe, the landlord of the storefront, we learned the details of the unexplained disappearance of the business and its operators. After accepting their deposit and signing them to the lease, Pepe had fought with them for nearly a year, and had never seen a dime. Ten thousand euros they stiffed him. When they left, it was as sudden to him as it was to us, and despite the magnitude of the sum, his dealings with Enzo, our gentle, smiling local pizza vendor, had led him to believe that it would be wise to let the matter rest.