The Sounds of Calle Cruz de las Tinajas

My neighborhood is noisy. It always has been, but I've been dealing. Now, I am really tired of it. Am I spoiled by my nice, quiet San Francisco neighborhood up on a hill, hidden from most people's view? Am I ready to leave Seville and finally noticing things that otherwise I endured? Is it because I am still tired from my return from Morocco with 2 hours of hysterical laughing on the bus? Who knows, but my neighborhood is noisy.

There is a constant sound of babies and children crying. One small baby, maybe 8-10 months old sounds like a cat in heat. He cries in the middle of the night when everything else is silent (mostly). There are also the sounds of people talking at the nearby bars that echo through the streets, or those who walk down the street talking at normal drunken levels oblivious to the fact that it is past midnight, or one a.m., or three a.m. or later.

In the morning there is a little period of calm and quiet, after the drunks have gone home and the babies are exhausted from crying all night. At about 7:30 - 8:00 a.m., the construction workers arrive. When I first came here, there was only one construction site, now there are three, and one has a guy with a truck that needs a muffler (among other things) so when he arrives, we hear the sound of a noisy, rumbling truck motor echoing through the narrow street for the 10 minutes or so that it takes him to park.

And then construction begins. Since most buildings here are made of brick and stone (maybe all of them) and they are old and mostly being renovated, the construction consists of drilling into stone and lately sawing metal with an electric saw, which not only makes a lot of noise, also produces a pretty horrid smell. The worst noise is first thing in the morning, but today it lasted pretty much up to siesta.

A little after the construction noise, if I have not been woken up yet, comes the children. The building across the street seems to have mostly African women and one man, and about 10 children. One woman in particular is pretty rough with her kids. She is always yelling at them and they are always crying. She has two cute little boys and a cute littler girl. As she takes the boys to school in the morning, there is always a lot of yelling and crying.

Usually at this point, I am ready to go to the gym just to get away from the noise.

When I return, the prostitutes are usually on duty. There are 3-4 African women who stand in the middle of the two little streets outside of my window. Most of the time they look bored, or proposition any man who walks down the street (they stopped trying with me), and eventually they start talking to each other, often laughing. That goes on amid the noise of construction which by that point is mostly hammering, for a few hours.

And comes the siesta. Things quiet down, for a moment or two, as the construction workers go off to wherever they go, the prostitutes disappear all until the children return from school, usually announced by the same yelling and crying that begins the day in the neighborhood.

It's about this time when my neighbor down the hall comes home. When I first arrived, he was quiet, but at a certain point he got a girlfriend. He keeps his door open, I guess for air, and it was fine when he was alone, because he was quiet, but now with this girl, and sometimes her friends, there is a constant chatter of American Exchange student talk - "and I was like yeah, you know and it was like, I don't know, you know what I mean?"

After siesta, usually around 4 p.m. construction begins again, the end of which is now signaled by the sound of the mufflerless truck making its way out of its tight little parking space and down the street. Soon after the rest of the Africans return home. Today there was a major drama. It all started with one woman coming out of the building with a child in a stroller. She was joined by another who also had a child in a stroler and there was a lot of loud talking. The kids for once were quiet, but the adults made up for their silence. The guy came up the street with another child in a stroller while a fourth woman hung out the window and a fifth arrived with a stroller and child. The second woman to come out was shouting in some combination of languages which included some English, perhaps French and Spanish and who knows what else. The man began speaking quietly to her to try to calm her down, but she continued shouting to the point that he began to lose it. Then he was shouting too, and she was shouting and they were shouting at each other and at the woman hanging out the window and the two other women there with children in strollers who sat as quietly as I've ever seen them sit. This went on for about 20 minutes, right outside my windows which I had opened because the construction was done and it was a little cool today with a nice breeze (in the mid 80's).

Finally, the whole group, except the woman hanging out the window rolled children and strollers down the street as the arguing, discussing, whatever it was, faded into the distance, only to return shortly and continue for quite some time, now joined by the crying of the children, who were being mostly ignored. I couldn't take it anymore, so I went for a bike ride.

When I returned most of the shouting and crying had stopped, but it was now time for the baby who sounds like a cat in heat to begin his nightly sounds, and my neighbor down the hall and his girlfriend to see how many times they can use "like" in a sentence without ever saying anything.

I have my windows closed, the air-con on and am listening to the radio, but I know that if I turn off the radio and open the windows, somewhere out there the sounds of Calle Cruz de las Tinajas can still be heard. They are always there.