A War I'm Willing to Win · 7:50pm Dec 22nd, 2021
I want to make one thing clear: this blog has been dramatized for ease of reading, and some scenes are shown in non-chronological order so that it all flows better. Everything written here is real, though. The dialogue is mostly literal to the best of my ability and memory. This all happened.
It’s important you understand this because this story is about two things.
The first one is the time my father called me on the phone, and went: “Son, I’ve been talking to the police. Your life has been officially threatened, and it sounds serious. We should really consider suing. Please be safe.”
The second, more important one, is that I replied: “Wow. That’s so fucking funny.”
Let’s talk about how weird it is that I’m still alive.
There’s two main characters in this story. The first one is me. The second one is my neighbor. She’s the one I’m going to talk about the most.
I’m no stranger to strange neighbors. I do live in Barcelona, after all, and once you move here you realize that everything you’ve heard about Europe is true. Everything. And weird is fine! I lived with a woman who did tarot readings over the phone for most of my childhood; my roommate’s girlfriend was a nudist italian for a year. I technically stole a TV once. I can do weird. I can adjust to weird.
Mundane crassness, though, that’s my one weakness—especially when brought to the limit.
I hear her scream slurs at her own children, and there’s clearly more cocaine than blood in her body by the cubic millimeter. I’m too fucking angry to joke about it. I see her hock phlegm to the floor of her own house before burping something racist, and I’m like. I wish I still lived next to the guy who cried while porn blasted off his speakers. He seemed fun at parties, y’know?
This neighbor of mine wasn’t here when I moved into this house; she came a year later, when it was too late for me to run away. We’re next door neighbors, share easily half of the walls in the house, and they are not thick enough to block out the noise.
She’s noisy, obviously—she can’t talk, she only screams. Constantly, no matter the time or the day; her screaming at the top of her lungs at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday is not an extraordinary occurence, it’s just fucking Wednesday. She listens to music all the time, so loud that I literally cannot hear the TV unless it’s at maximum volume; more than once I’ve seen my windows rattle, because she likes it when the bass goes boom boom boom.
She has two children, a boy and a girl. The girl is older, and by far the neighbor’s favorite. She hates her own son, because he reminds her of his father, who left her for a younger woman when the son was two years old.
She likes to hit him whenever she’s angry. She never yells at the daughter, but she yells at the son constantly. Son of a bitch, piece of shit, I wish I had aborted you. You fucking f****t. You fucking disgrace. I hate you, I’m going to break your fucking face. Come here. Fucking f****t. Then the kid screams back, calls her a whore, a slut. Then come the screams and the kid running away, and the loud thumping noises.
That’s when she’s hitting him.
He sometimes cries, but not always. I’m bad at judging ages, but he cannot be older than thirteen.
I hate my neighbor. It’s not funny hatred, it’s not quirky. It’s arsenic. It’s fire and brimstone. She’s pus and heroin. She slurs every word, dragging the consonants through the ground like a corpse. In my mind, I can smell the rot in her breath.
The walls are so thin that I can hear everything—I know the highschool her daughter goes to, I know where she works, the name of her ex-husbands, the reason why she left her old house. She talks over the phone all the time and yells every word so loudly that I need to make an effort not to eavesdrop. I’m an expert on her private life, and it is entirely against my will.
I haven’t called social services on her for the mistreatment of her children. I meant to do that; I even recorded the screaming as best as I could so I could show something to the cops—but I got sniped. Someone else, probably another neighbor, called the cops on her. Charges of domestic violence.
The cops did absolutely nothing. The children still live with her.
I heard her brag about it over the phone. She said she told the cops, straight up, that she does hit her children whenever the fuck she wants, because “that’s discipline”, and “they deserve it.” According to her, the cops agreed. I don’t know the degree to which this is a true story. I know that, in the same conversation, she joked that her parents insulted her daily when she was a kid, so it’s “[her] right to call [her] son a f****t and to punch him if [she] fucking wants to, because he’s mine.”
I know this woman’s name. She’s yelled it enough times when talking over the phone. I never think of her that way, though. In my mind—and whenever I talk about her to my friends and family—she’s just La Vecina. The Neighbor. People immediately know who I’m talking about when I say “The Neighbor” even though I have eight of them.
So that's the protagonist in this story. Then there's the antagonist. Me.
I assume you know me if you’re reading this; if you don’t, hi, I’m Aragón. I am always busy, and I am always tired. I’m studying to become a judge—like, a judge of law, with a gavel and everything—and it’s not an easy job. I have to study most of the day because the exam I need to pass to be a judge is frankly ridiculous, and I only get one day off a week. No holidays. It’s hell.
It’s also very hard to focus on what you’re doing when your shitty neighbor is yelling slurs and shaking your windows with bumper car music.
So, my relationship with my neighbor started on the wrong foot, what with me clearly hearing how she spewed hateful shit at her children, and also just, you know, in general.
At the start it was somewhat—it wasn’t civil, but we can call it mundane. She’d make a lot of noise very late at night, or blast music so loud I couldn’t hear my sister when she talked to me, and I would bang on the wall, and she would yell something and then lower the music or stop making noise. It’s something, at least.
This didn’t last long.
As the months went by, she got more and more comfortable with being loud and just not giving a shit when people complained. She got in a fight with the family living upstairs—they have very young children and La Vecina won’t let them sleep—and there was, of course, the whole “social services called on her” deal. The cops came, she bragged about being an abusive piece of shit, and then the cops left—which made her go, holy shit. I’m untouchable. I can do whatever I want. The SKY is my LIMIT.
And stuff started getting real funny.
The song she blasted was a weird flamenco version of Despacito. It didn’t sound like music, it sounded like a racist joke in an Adam Sandler movie. I was not having a good morning—I’d woken up at 6am to study five lessons in a row, because I had to go visit my instructor and recite everything at 200 words per minute. I was stressed, and sleep deprived, and full of adrenaline and legal knowledge.
And my fucking windows start rattling with the bass of racist Despacito.
By the time this happened, it was 11am. There were people walking down the street outside, and I could see them looking up in surprise at my neighbor’s house. Some people actually pointed—this shit was echoing through the entire street, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be heard across the entire neighborhood.
So I let out a groan, and banged on the wall. Three times. BLAM, BLAM, BLAM!
And then I hear La Vecina yell, over the music: “CALL THE COPS, YOU F****T.”
I blink.
Listen, I’m no stranger to slurs, and I’m no stranger to this woman yelling slurs—but she hasn’t actually called anyone outside her house that, as far as I’m aware. So I don’t immediately think she’s talking to me, I assume she’s talking to someone else.
The music is still loud. I bang on the wall again. BLAM, BLAM, BLAM!
“I’M NOT TURNING DOWN THE VOLUME! YOU FUCKING F****T! CALL THE COPS IF YOU WANT!”
I go, what the utter fuck. What the shit is this woman on.
Her dogs are barking—of course, of course she has dogs, how could she not, who else would piss on the front door otherwise—and she starts loudly joining in on the racist version of Despacito. Laughing her cocaine laugh and singing along.
Motherfucker, I think. Is she taunting me? Is she genuinely taunting me?
Oh. Oh, this ends in tears.
So I get dressed, go to her front door, and start ringing the doorbell.
The music is so loud it resonates through the staircase and I feel the bass in my chest—by this point, Despacito is over, and she’s listening to something else equally terrible—but I can still hear the doorbell clearly, because it’s a really high-pitched sound. More importantly, her dogs can hear it too, and they start barking at me from the other side of the door.
The neighbor doesn’t reply and she doesn’t yell at me again. The dogs stop barking after about ten seconds. The music is still going.
I ring the doorbell again, two times.
What follows is just ten minutes—three songs, I fucking counted—of me ringing the doorbell every few seconds, to make sure the dogs never fucking stop barking. Because she hates it when the dogs bark, and they’re not going to stop as long as I’m here, and I’m not going to stop until she lowers the volume.
The fucking cavalcade of unbearable noise that the entire house is suffering right now is satirical. Eventually the neighbor starts yelling at me from across her house, screaming that she’s in the shower and that’s why she won’t open—and when I yell back “SURE SOUNDS LIKE NOT MY PROBLEM”, she starts yelling expletives.
The dogs are barking. I’m ringing the doorbell. She keeps calling me slurs, and her insults get both more elaborate and more nonsensical, cause I assume she’s too angry to really think. “Why don’t you go fuck your girlfriend”, she yells at one point, which I just find really funny, because I thought I was a f****t, lady.
She won’t open the door. The dogs won’t stop barking and the older one is like three seconds away from a heart attack. I won’t stop ringing the doorbell. She’s fuming.
I’m just laughing.
‘You’re a coward’, I think. ‘You can yell through the door and through the wall, but you’re so scared of talking to anyone face to face, because I’m not a thirteen year old child who’s scared of you.’ I start to think that maybe the story I overheard, of her taunting the cops, was a bit of an exaggeration.
It’s been ten minutes, as I said; she’s still yelling that she’s in the shower. No neighbor has come out to see what’s going on, and while I know there’s more people in her house, they’re staying silent.
I get bored. I don’t want to actually kill these dogs and they sound like they’re going fucking crazy, and I actually need to go back to studying sooner than later. So I think, well, this has been annoying enough, I can just continue later today when I’ve got the time—and I retreat to my own house.
Two minutes later, I hear her front door unlocking.
I fucking bolt out of my living room towards my front door, because I know what this is. This is someone sneaking out, this is someone who was waiting until I was out to leave the house because they felt incredibly awkward about actually talking to me face-to-face.
The person leaving was also running; so fast that he was almost out by the time I made it. Still, not fast enough—I catch him on the stairs, and go “Hey! You just came from [neighbor’s name]’s house, right?”
Me saying the name is what gets him. That makes it personal. He freezes and looks at me, laughing nervously. “Uh-y-yeah? I need to go.”
I recognize the lad—it’s the daughter’s boyfriend. Must be anything from seventeen to twenty; he’s got a baby face that makes it hard to tell, though his teeth are yellow. He was hiding in the house while his girlfriend’s mother got in a shouting match with a neighbor, and he clearly wants to get the fuck away from here as fast as possible.
Poor kid, I think. He’s so embarrassed. This must be mortifying. And then I press on anyway. “Excuse me,” I say, very politely, because the hypocrisy of politeness has a way to get on anyone’s nerves, “I hate to be a bother, really, but could you please tell [neighbor] to lower the volume? It’s impossible to work with this much noise. ”
The kid starts sorta moving again, though slowly. He laughs nervously. “I-I don’t know, I don’t live here, I just left—“
“Oh, I know, but you have her phone, right? Just send her a message, please? I think you couldn’t hear me, but I was ringing the doorbell earlier.”
“Right, ahahah, sure, listen, I gotta go—”
“Sure! Just, please let [neighbor] know? This noise is very annoying. I’m sure she’ll understand.”
Dude gets out of there like his ass is on fire.
I smile, and then I look at my neighbor’s front door, and smile again. Then, very slowly, take two steps forward and ring her doorbell.
She opens immediately, fucking foaming at the mouth.
See, confrontations are easy to avoid. You can wait anger out, you can ignore me till I leave. But embarrassment? Me saying her name out loud, so any neighbor who’s eavesdropping—and oh, they were eavesdropping—knows who she is? Me acting polite, as if I hadn’t made a point of driving her dogs to barkhalla two minutes earlier?
Oh, that fucking got to her. The boyfriend waited until I was gone to leave for a reason—they wanted to avoid this conversation that just took place. This is, in a weird way, ten times more humiliating than me simply ringing the doorbell, because now it’s obvious she’s avoiding me, and I’ve called her out. I knew she’d be looking at me through the peephole, as I talked to her daughter’s boyfriend.
So when I ring the doorbell, she opens the door, and bares her teeth at me.
I’m still being polite just to aggravate her. “Oh, hello,” I say. “I’m really sorry, can you lower the volume? It’s—”
“I am not going to do that. Wear headphones, I don’t care, it’s my house.”
And she tries to close the door on my face—
And I put my foot down, between the door and the doorframe, so it bounces and stays open. “No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
Oh, that makes it.
In the blink of an eye, she goes from wanting no trouble to aching for a fight. I am not exactly a scary-looking guy—I look like what comes out of the mirror when you chant “twink lawyer” three times at midnight—and she very clearly starts to think that she can beat me the same way she beats her children.
I’m not making wild guesses, here, by the way. She yells: “I’m going to beat the SHIT out of you!” and gets in my face, right. Full peacock stance. Full “wanna take this outside” guy at the pub.
And I think, oh, wow. She’s coked up to shit, isn’t she.
I mean listen I’m not an expert in drugs, but you can tell when someone is high as a kite, and this woman is moving her jaw side to side like she’s trying to bite her own teeth out.
I am not exactly scared.
“Right. Let’s calm down.” I do that thing where you talk in a very calm, polite tone, when someone else is screaming, because that’s such an annoying thing to do and I know exactly what I’m about. “Please turn the volume down.”
“I’m going to KILL YOU—“
“Calm down. Turn down the music.”
“NO!” She tries to close the door, but my foot is still in the way. Behind her, the dogs are barking. “LEAVE!”
“Turn the music down.” I’m not moving, I’m speaking very slowly, and she’s so angry she’s fumbling her words, but I’m not backing off and that makes her so nervous. “I’m trying to work and it’s impossible like this. I’m not saying you have to turn it off, just a more normal—“
“Go fuck yourself! Go fuck yourself! Get away! GET AWAY!”
I take my foot out of the doorway, and she slams the door shut. She starts yelling at me, now that there’s a door between us, but I just smile at the peephole and go back to my place, because I do need to study. “Fine,” I say. “I’ll just call the cops then!”
A couple minutes later, the music stops completely. I get to study in peace for the rest of the day. My sister asks me what the FUCK was going on, because she heard the whole thing—she was in a call at work, and her boss actually paused it so they could eavesdrop.
“She freaked out,” I say. “I think I scared her. At least she stopped the noise.”
“Isn’t she dangerous?”
“Nah, she’s too much of a coward.”
My sister makes a face—she dislikes confrontation, and has told me before that she’d rather I just ignore the neighbor and withstand the noise, because she doesn’t wanna make a fuss. “You do know that she’s angry now, right?” she says. “This is going to get worse.”
“Oh, I’m counting on that.”
I don’t have to wait long.
Here’s the thing—I am studying to be a judge, and part of my training implies memorizing the law. On top of that, this whole street is owned by one guy, and he’s everybody’s landlord. I know, because I asked and they told me, that every single apartment is rented using the same basic contract.
Meaning, I know the law, and I also know the clauses on her lease.
Meaning, I can fuck this woman’s life up if I want to.
She’s breaking three clauses in her contract—no dogs allowed, for starters; that alone is more than enough—and she also, y’know, sells drugs from her apartment, which adds criminal charges to it. The fact that she’s breaking local laws regarding noise pollution is just the cherry on top, really.
But I didn’t want to call the landlord on her, because I don’t like my landlord. I have never talked to him, only to an intermediary—he hired a company to do all the paperwork, essentially—and the woman in charge conveniently waited after I had signed the lease and paid the deposit to go, oh, by the way, Mr. Landlord is a white supremacist.
I went, “excuse me?”
“Yes, he’s very adamant on only wanting white people here. We once rented a house to a very nice man but he’d married a black woman, so we had to kick them out—and they sued us.”
No shit they sued you. This is the definition of anticonstitutional racism. This is beyond illegal.
And the woman shrugged, and said, “Yeah, I don’t like it at all either, but I just can’t ignore what the owner says. They sued, and they won, so Mr. Landlord paid the fine. But he still won’t rent to non-whites.”
It was too late for me to walk away without losing money I couldn’t possibly afford to lose, so now I am paying rent to a racist piece of shit, because the law only applies if you can’t afford to pay the fine.
So, I don’t like landlords in general, but I absolutely hate my landlord. As a result, I could get La Vecina kicked out—but it felt like it went against my core principles to do that.
Cue the neighbor blasting the fascist anthem of the Falange, at top volume, the very day after our confrontation. I bang my fist on the wall, she bangs her first back, and calls me slurs, and sings fascist lyrics.
Now, you can already guess I oppose fascism, because I am not a fucking idiot—but remember: I’m Spanish. My country was a fascist dictatorship till the fucking seventies, and the third biggest political party in Spain specifically want those good ol’ days to return.
Fascism was never defeated here, we just waited Franco out. If you’re American—and most of my audience is—imagine that Trump hadn’t been president for four years, but rather thirty-six. My grandfather was in a concentration camp; my grandmothers lost many siblings during the war. Advocating for fascism, in Spain, is not an edgy joke. It’s a threat.
So my neighbor blasted the fascist anthem, and I realized she’d probably been the one pasting stickers with fascist propaganda around my street lately. Mind, I knew La Vecina wasn’t a social justice warrior, what with all the slurs, but—still. This is way more hardcore than I thought.
Which means I contacted the fuck out of my landlord.
Motherfucker, moral conundrums stop applying once I’m sic’ing one bastard onto another. I had to send an email, because the fucking music was so loud that I couldn’t hear myself talking, least of all hold a conversation over the phone. I explained our confrontation the day prior, as well as everything else that’d been going on lately. I talked about her and her kids loitering and spitting on the common zones, about her dogs pissing all over the place and barking endlessly because they’ll leave them alone in a tiny apartment for days. I talked about the screaming and the slurs, the drugs, the violence going on in that apartment, the fact the cops had to come once already.
And then I hit send, and I tried to work through the noise, and waited.
Some hours later, the woman running the building in the landlord’s name called me.
“I wanted to apologize,” she started, which immediately gave me hope. “I tried to talk to her and explain that she can’t insult and threaten the other tenants just because they’re trying to work in peace.”
I nodded, even though this was a phone conversation. “And…?”
“And she started insulting and threatening me. You should really call the police.”
Then she apologized again, and promptly hung up.
So I went, you know what. Fuck it. In for a penny, in for a pound. This is war.
And I called the police.
The local laws in Barcelona indicate that you can’t go louder than 35 dB of noise in the living room area on a consistent basis. If it’s stuff like redecorating the house, or incidental sources of noise, it’s allowed—sometimes you need to make noise—but music? Especially when it’s so loud the windows rattle?
Yeah, no, that more than justifies a noise complaint. The cops took less than fifteen minutes to arrive, because the police station is like two streets away.
They rang my doorbell first, so I came down to greet them. “You can pretty much see why I called,” I said as soon as I saw them, talk-yelling to make myself heard above the music that resonated through the entire staircase. “And she actually lowered the volume a bit.”
“Yeah, we can see that.”
There were two cops; one was older, the other was younger. They were both incredibly tall, and upsettingly broad-shouldered. The old one was bald, and the young one had a moustache. They were the most cop-looking cops I’d ever seen. Out of instinct I looked at their belts, and sighed in relief when I saw they had no weapons—then felt oddly guilty about it. Hey, I’d been the one calling them. Why so nervous, it’s not like anything is going to—
The old cop looked in the direction of my neighbor’s house, and squinted. “Are they…?” He leaned closer to me. “You know. From here?”
And then he did that gesture with his eyebrows. The one that’s like, hey, c’mon, you understand what I mean.
Are they white?
Suddenly I was like you know what, it’s good that I checked if they had any guns. I don’t like cops. I’ll be a judge one day, and I don’t think there’s any issue with me not liking cops. The more I think about it, the more it looks like a good thing.
“Yes.” I didn’t bother trying to hide my distaste for the question. “I don’t see why that matters, but yes, they’re from here. The issue is the noise.”
The cop either didn’t notice my reaction, or he simply didn’t care. Only the old one talked—the young one with the ‘stache never said a word I could hear—and he talked slowly, with a bored edge to his voice. “Yes, this is very illegal. You said she listens to music like this every day?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s an issue. Our fellow officer on the phone said you said this lady threatened you?”
I clicked my tongue. “No she didn’t,” I said, waving a hand. “I mean, she yelled that she was going to beat me up a couple times, and she called me stuff I’d rather not repeat—but I don’t think she actually meant to physically assault me. I think she was just trying to intimidate me.”
The cop looked at me. “That counts as a threat.”
It does not. If we’re following the letter of the law—article 169 of the Spanish Criminal Code—then, yes, this is a threat. But Spanish jurisprudence and doctrine both agree that a threat must create a founded fear or suspicion in the victim that the threat might actually come true; it doesn’t count unless there’s evidence of actual danger.
Of course, since fear is subjective, I could still try to sue, but if you excuse the cynicism—I am not rich, or important enough, for this to be an actual case. If I were a judge already, I still wouldn’t sue, but it would hold in court. I’m a nobody, though, so it won’t.
So I said, “I guess,” and idly thought that it was good how the neighbor got tired of the fascist songs and was now listening to normal stuff. It’s fun to think who the cops would’ve sided with, otherwise. “I don’t mind that as much as the noise, though. I need to work, and it’s impossible to do it like this.”
“No problem. Please, retreat to your house. Let us handle this.”
So I went back to my house and closed the front door, and then shamelessly looked through the peephole, because how could I not?
The cops rang the doorbell, and at first the neighbor didn’t answer—I theorize it’s cause she thought it was me, and the plan was to ignore me. But the cops kept ringing the doorbell, and eventually the older cop yelled “OPEN UP! IT’S THE LOCAL POLICE!” and that got her to open the door alright.
And then she started yelling.
At the cops.
“Oh, nooooo,” I muttered to myself. “She’s coked up…”
Boy, was she coked up.
She came out guns blazin’, jaw unhinged, eyes bloodshot. She came out wearing dark pants and a white t-shirt, her hair tied up in a ponytail, her nose reddish and running. She asked them what they were doing there, and told them to fuck off. She said she could do whatever she fucking wanted in her house. She said she would not lower the music, because I was a [slur] [slur] who fucking [slurs] with [slurs].
The cops tried to reason with her, and that didn’t work. She kept yelling that, since it was her house, she could do whatever, and the law didn’t apply.
“Ma’am.” The term the old cop used was señora, which actually registers as a bit more formal, I think, but I’m translating so ma’am is what you get. “That’s not how it works.”
“IT IS HOW IT WORKS.”
“No.”
“YES.”
“Okay, if you think so, then, sure. Please show me your ID.”
The neighbor yelled some more, but the cops just kept asking for her ID, and suddenly she changed pace. She kept insulting me—pointing at the door, saying I was a fuckhead, a bastard, etcetera etcetera—and that she was going to sue me for…
Okay so technically what she said was she was going to sue me for “fake testimony”, but what she obviously meant was slander. This confused me at first, cause first of all I had not actually accused her of any crime, I had just notified the authorities and they had done the accusation on their own will after noticing the situation—an important distinction, cause that meant that she’d have to accuse the police of slander and good fucking luck with that—and second of all, like.
Lady, you’re literally telling the cops to fuck off because you don’t want to turn down the volume. You are eradicating any claim of ignorance, negligence, or misunderstanding by explaining that you are aware of the illegality of your actions. This is the definition of criminal intent, and you are, I cannot stress this enough, screaming this in the face of a cop.
But then she kept talking.
“He already called the cops on me once! Said that I abuse my children! He keeps slandering me! That’s fake testimony, why don’t you go get him?!”
“We’re not here for that,” said the old cop. “ID, please.”
So that was eye-opening. Apparently, at some point she assumed that I was the one who’d called social services on her before, and that’s why she suddenly developed a specific animosity towards me. Which was immensely funny from my point of view, really, because she kept threatening that she was going to sue me, she was going to get my ass, and I was going to see her in court.
And like. I’m a law graduate. I’m studying to be a judge. Half of my social circle are lawyers, and the other half are magistrates. If you sue me, that will be slander, and unlike our landlord, you’re not rich enough to strongarm me.
So the cops just kept asking for the neighbor’s ID, and I guess it eventually got to her that she was not getting rid of them by yelling, and they were holding the door, so she couldn’t close it on them. Suddenly, then, she changed tactics—and asked the cops to come in.
“Let’s talk in private,” she said. “Let me just explain myself.”
The old cop didn’t even look up from the little notebook where she was writing. “No. ID, please, or I’ll have to fine you for not bringing it when we asked you to.”
“Listen let’s just talk about it in my living room—”
“We’re not coming in.”
“I would rather talk in private.”
“I would not.”
The neighbor peeked at my door and I thought, oh, she doesn’t want me to hear what she says to the cops. That’s interesting—I wondered what she was planning, but the cop clearly, painstakingly, did not give a shit.
“Ma’am.” He tapped the little notebook. “We know that this is your address. We can fine you even without your ID. So just give us your ID now and make it easier for all of us.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Driver license is fine.”
That one worked. Don’t ask me why or how.
The cops nodded, and were about to leave—and the neighbor looked at my door and went: “Wait! I’ll go down with you, too!”
She disappeared for a moment, to grab the keys, and then rushed downstairs. The cops were already out—they didn’t wait for her—but she caught up to them, and I heard the front door opening, closing, then silence. I looked out of the window, see if I catch a glimpse, but they were already gone.
Well. She got her private talk in the end. I wasn’t worried, though; she’d started on the wrong foot, and these cops didn’t look like the forgiving type. Whatever she was planning, it probably wouldn’t work.
Not two minutes passed, and then I heard the front door again, then the furious footsteps of someone who wants you to know she’s angry just by the way she moves. Stomp stomp stomp.
The neighbor appeared and approaches my door. I check through the peephole, and I was about to open the door and face her as soon as she rang the doorbell—
But she didn’t.
Instead, she flipped the bird, and disappeared into her own flat.
Eventually I got a call on my phone—the cops were back downstairs and wanted me to open the front door so they could get to my neighbor’s flat, cause she wasn’t opening it for them. They looked bored still, but now they had an official-looking envelope with them.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yes. What a piece of work.” The old cop looked like he wanted to take a nap. “If she does this again just sue her for harassment or something.”
She didn’t do harassment, but sure, whatever. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. What’s that envelope?”
“It’s the fine.”
Oh, so she got fined for the noise then—makes sense, seeing how she reacted. At a guess, this was going to be around four hundred euros she’d have to pay, which was going to sting alright. I know it’d sting for me, at least, and we live in the same building, so our financial situation can’t be that different.
The cops told me to go back to my house; I complied, because I really needed to go back to studying, I’d wasted like an hour on this. They rang the neighbor’s doorbell, and now she was all smiles and politeness, thanking them for bringing the envelope in person, trying to chitchat—but the cops, I can’t stress enough, did not give a shit. They replied with a “you’re welcome”, and then promptly fucked off.
The music was, by the way, still blaring. But she yelled, so loud that I could hear it over the sound of spanish guitar. What she said sounded like this:
“FOUR HUNDRED EUROS?!”
And then I heard her front door open, and her yelling right at my door.
“THIS ISN’T OVER, NEIGHBOR!” Technically, she said vecinito, “little neighbor”. Twink lawyer and all that. “YOU HAVEN’T HEARD THE LAST OF ME. YOU’RE GOING TO PAY FOR THIS!”
She actually said this. It sounds incredibly forced in real life. She was trying to sound ominous, but it came off as TV dialogue, and it really, really didn’t work. I can tell she noticed, too, cause she sorta petered out on the last sentence there.
And then she slammed her door shut, and that was that.
I went out anyway, and rang her doorbell—hey, if she wants to talk, we can do it face to face! I’m civilized!—but she ignored me. I rang it again, and she ignored me a second time, but the music stopped.
Silence reigned.
So I went back to my house and kept studying. No more music that day.
Time went by, and I left my house for a week—I had planned a trip to Germany, after quarantining for ten days before going and then five more on arrival. It was fun, and everybody was vaccinated, and we all wore masks at all times, and overall it worked out just fine.
Then I came back, happy to get away from work for an entire week, and got a phonecall from my father.
“Son, I’ve been talking to the police. Your life has been officially threatened, and it sounds serious. We should really consider suing. Please be safe.”
And I replied: “Wow. That’s so fucking funny.”
So yeah! Turns out, while I was out, my sister decided that my house counts as a hotel, and invited a relative I really, really, really want away from my house, into my room. Behind my back. To spend a week there, by themselves, while my sister went on holiday.
That caused a fight in itself, and I’m still angry about it—said relative stole some of my stuff, among other things—but what matters here is, this relative heard of the ongoing feud with the neighbor. In what may charitably be seen as an attempt to bury the hatchet, they went, “Oh, silly Aragón. He probably fucked this up. I’ll fix it for him!”
So they rang the neighbor’s doorbell, and tried to use hardcore, unhinged, top-of-the-line diplomacy.
The result is that after that conversation was over, my life was officially in danger, legally speaking.
Now, this relative and I haven’t been on speaking terms for the last few years, so all that I know I had to piece together from context and secondhand info—but essentially, my relative went “Heyyy we don’t want to fight! What if we just let bygones be bygones?”
And my neighbor saw this older relative, and thought, oh, Aragón is scared. He went crying to someone else to face me. I’m finally winning!
And then she said: “If he pays the 400 euro fine for me, I’m willing to forgive him.”
Now, as you can assume, my reaction to hearing this was to tell the neighbor to sit on my middle finger and spin, but I wasn’t there when this happened. My relative, master of the spoken word as they are, said something like “He can’t do that because he is too stupid and poor to pay,” or something of the sorts.
And that pissed off the neighbor, because she wasn’t expecting a ‘no’ here, she thought she was winning. So she said: “Either he pays, or I’ll get some of my friends here, and beat him to a fucking pulp. I know where he lives, and I know that he returns late at night on wednesdays.”
I don’t know what my relative replied.
The neighbor added: “I know some people. The guys in the bar at the corner of the street are family, and they’re not going to help if he screams for help. If he doesn’t want a pocket knife in his stomach one day, he better pay up.”
I don’t know what my relative replied.
Then my neighbor called me a slur.
Then my relative went “Yeah he’s probably that.”
And then my relative went ‘welp, nothing I can do here’ and went back to my house. Eventually they contacted my father to go oh hey by the way, like. I got someone to threaten your son with a knife. Lmao. Anyway do you have any cash to spare.
My father didn’t have any cash to spare.
I learned this, mind, literally as I was getting home from the airport. My father was reasonably scared—he had been led to believe that I would be stabbed on sight—and had contacted the police already, only to learn it would be better if I sued. I immediately waved his suspicions away; I was still sure that the neighbor was a coward, and nothing would happen to me.
He was still afraid, though, so I said, listen, dad. Half of my social circle are lawyers, and the other half are judges in training. I have followed every step of the proper procedures to have all the evidence in my favor—including contacting both my landlord and the cops. If she actually tries to assault me, all that will happen is she’ll have to pay my tuition, and I’ll get a week off at the hospital. Not a bad deal.
Somehow, however, “getting stabbed has many benefits” did not convince my father that I would keep safety as my top priority. I waved him off, and went, okay, I’m home now though so if you excuse me I’ll hang up. And then I hung up, got into my house, locked the door, took off my headphones—
And heard someone yelling.
“I’M GONNA KILL YOU! I’M GONNA KILL YOU! YOU FUCKER! YEAH, RUN AWAY!”
A child’s voice.
“YEAH! WE’RE GONNA KILL YOU!”
Actually, no, two children. What the fuck.
So I took off my coat and listened for a moment. I recognized the voice—this was my neighbor’s child, the one she yells at every day, constantly. He was running up the stairs, seemingly chasing me, and only made it to my door after I was completely gone. He was with a friend of similar age—a classmate, I assume?—and they were both pointing at my front door and yelling.
He started calling me slurs in the style of his mother, and then said that he would beat me up with his friends if he ever found me in the street.
Which would, admittedly, be unnerving—if this kid wasn’t thirteen.
So I opened the front door and went “Sorry? I was wearing headphones, were you talking to me?”
But the kid and his friend ran away immediately, screaming all the while, and I didn’t have a chance to strike up a conversation.
I told my friends about this whole thing as it went on. This is how Mousse, one of my closest confidants and fifty percent of my self control, reacted to the liveblogging of my ongoing feud:
This is how I reacted to her reaction.
So you know what happened? I put my money where my mouth is. I kept going around my routine like usual, and by simple chance—I need to leave the house often for groceries and to check on my instructor, and my neighbor has two dogs she’s gotta walk daily—I run into her or her children often enough.
Sometimes it’s at the stairs, sometimes it’s outside in the street. A couple times we’ve walked into each other at the supermarket, with or without her children. I often meet her son when he comes back from school.
Every single time I just smile very wide and wave, and say “Good afternoon!” or “Good evening!” so they know I know they saw me. I make eye contact and never fucking blink. “Helloooo!”
And every time they act like they don’t see me and fuck off immediately. I make sure to speak as loud as possible but they still try to ignore me, or walk by like they’re in a hurry. The son has replied a couple times, but only when he’s alone.
The neighbor herself, oh, she stares, but mostly she stares while running away. I am nothing but open politeness to her, pleasant smiles and cute little waves, and she’s fuming so hard. Whenever she’s sober, she’s so incredibly embarrassed she runs away. When she’s high or drunk, she stares more openly, but she doesn’t yell. She simply walks off.
I can hear it when they talk aloud though, cause, again, thin walls. This is especially prominent when I go to the bathroom—both our windows go to the patio, and if theirs is open I can hear absolutely everything—and a couple weeks after this whole thing happened, I heard them talk about me.
It was the three of them—La Vecina, the daughter, and the son. The son was saying that, since I always turn the same corners when I come home, he could very easily ambush me with his friends. The mother said that they could beat me up by sheer numbers alone; the daughter interrupted and said, no, you can’t say that, that’s a threat and he’ll call the police if he hears you.
They all laughed. I laughed too. Yeah! I would do that.
The son then said that one of his friends—well, he called him ‘El Gordo’, ”the fat one”; I’m assuming that’s the friend’s nickname, and oh god I feel for that kid already. Anyway. Son said that El Gordo was bigger than me, so he could probably hold me in place while the others punched me in the stomach.
The mother suggested they went for the face—“break it in two” is how she put it—and then said she’d do it herself. Call me when you’ve got him, she said. I’ll join in.
The daughter said, we could probably just get him on our own, all three of us. We don’t even need El Gordo.
The mother and the son agreed.
I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and went back to studying.
That very same day I had to take out the trash. Since it was a nice night out, and I had nothing to do the next day, I told my sister—hey, we could just go grab some noodles? I feel like Wok. Better yet, let’s go to Wok but then let’s bring the food home and eat it on the sofa, I don’t feel like cooking.
And she was like, sure! Wait for me, I’ll get dressed in a bit.
So I took out the trash, and then I waited by my front door, leaning on the wall literally right next to it, playing on my phone. It was dark out already, and the street was empty—nice night out, yes, but it was already getting chilly and this was a weekday. Even the bar at the corner of the street had nobody sitting at the terrace. No cars in sight. No bystanders.
I heard a motorcycle revving up.
And La Vecina parked her vespa right in front of me.
I want to point out that there is a designated parking lot for motorcycles at the other side of the street, but the neighbor always parks hers right in front of our door, which is illegal, but like, literally fucking whatever. She parked right in front of me, took off her helmet.
Looked at me.
Eyes went wide.
I smiled real hard.
If this wasn’t the perfect chance to assault me, nothing would be. The street was empty, and the neighbor made sure that everybody was used to the sound of screaming, so even if I tried to ask for help, I doubt anyone would come help me. My sister was about to come down in short notice, but the neighbor didn’t know that—and even then, it’d take a while.
So I just smiled real hard, and made eye contact. I was right next to the front door—if she wanted to come in the house she’d have to walk past me. No way she could pretend she hadn’t seen me this time.
She took her sweet time fumbling with her bag, looking for her keys, looking through her phone. She tried to act like she wasn’t waiting me out, and utterly failing at it. I just waited, hands in my pockets, smiling still.
Time ran out.
She felt so awkward, holy shit. She was completely red in the face. She had her keys in her hand, to minimize the amount of time she’d have to spend at the door—but she still had to stop there to unlock it, and she fumbled it a little.
I just looked at her, again, nothing but politeness. “Heeeellooo,” I said, savoring the word. “Nice weather tonight, isn’t it?”
She shot me a glare. I snorted.
She blushed deep crimson, opened the door, and scurried off. I was left alone, unstabbed and unbroken, and I just grabbed my phone and sent Mousse a message. “I am the FUNNIEST person alive.”
My sister came down and saw me typing on my phone. “You wouldn’t believe who I met at the stairs just now,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied, putting my phone down. “I can guess.”
I have, as you can guess, not been stabbed yet.
The neighbors kept loudly talking about their plans to kill me, but eventually me just confronting them in public every time I had the chance made them stop. The music has been way lower lately—there’s still screaming, and there are still days when I need to bang on the wall, but they’re back at quietly lowering the volume once more, which is a relief.
This is kind of how the story ends, bittersweetly, since those children are still trapped in the house and I don’t know how to help them—but at least someone confronted that woman. I am studying ways to get social services here, but the kids are old enough to decide, and from what I understand, they want to stay with their mother; I am just a neighbor, and can do nothing to help.
There’s an epilogue, though.
At some point, last month, I got an email from the landlord—asking for an explanation of all the events I talked about in here, as well as a basic rundown on how La Vecina is behaving lately. I kept it neutral, but I didn’t spare any words—every accusation I made, I pointed out how what I was saying could be verified, and I kept it entirely formal. I did everything by the book, because I knew what was coming, and I needed this shit to be ironclad.
The landlord replied soon enough.
“Thank you for your cooperation. We will not renew her lease come next summer, and we wanted to know the whole story first. If anything else happens, please contact the police immediately.”
And I went, oh, right. She did threaten the landlord, didn’t she? I’m legitimately surprised it took this long for that to have consequences because, and I can’t stress this enough, she literally threatened to beat up the landlord to a pulp over the phone.
I believe the neighbor hasn’t been told of this decision, though. According to the law, the landlord has to notify the tenant four months in advance, and her lease ends in June—which means nothing will happen until January or February.
And more importantly: I don’t know what the landlord will tell this neighbor when he tells her she’s losing the house? But I know how she thinks, and I know she will blame me. And in a weird way, she will be right—I definitely contributed to this situation a lot, and it wouldn’t have happened without me. So she’ll have a grudge, a real big one, and she’ll accuse me of being responsible for her grievances.
Which means, holy shit. Wait for an update next year, people, because she will say this is all my fault.
And I will agree with her to her face.
This has the potential to be the funniest thing I’ve ever done.
I cannot wait.
I had to fucking edit the way my neighbor talks because she genuinely, unironically, talks like the fucking Riddler. It sounded so incredibly fake that it just came off as me not knowing how to write dialogue, right? So I just. I made it a little more believable for readability's sake. For the sake of immersion, though, assume she sounds at least 40% more unhinged whenever I write what she's saying.
The actual meaning of what she said and the slurs are left intact. I just made the wording less cringey.
God Bless, Aragon.
I kinda want to see what happens if you're called into court over this, just to watch the whole thing blow up in her face. Best of luck, and may your future be filled with peace and quiet.
Oh man, I've had bad neighbors; but never anything even approaching that completely unhinged, even with drugs involved.
Just, you know, don't get stabbed; cause I'm not sure how funny that would actually be.
If you get stabbed, I sorta expect a comic about it now.
That said, stay safe!
That is so batshit insane, im left a touch speechless.
Oh hell Ara you've an extraordinary amount of patience. I don't think I could have handled that situation
Remember how I joked that life is a sitcom and you're the protagonist? Apparently we've hit the Very Special Episode and they tried to cram every variety of that into a single villain so that they don't have to do another one.
5619551
It probably starts with him giving a significantly less formal greeting to the judge than would normally be warranted, on account of the judge being an established member of the supporting cast (this is a sitcom and I'm going to describe it as one). The camera cuts to her attempting to delude herself into thinking that she still has a chance, with the laugh track going to remind everyone that we know something she doesn't know.
First things first:
Holy shit LMAO
Anyway, I appreciate how deeply you embody the brass-'nads-millennial energy of "Go ahead, stab me, I could use the tuition check and liquor money," especially in response to a dumpster-fire fascist being (somehow) the IRL equivalent of a keyboard warrior.
I hope you either don't get stabbed or become intensely hilarious soon.
So what you're saying is we will either have the best blog update of "I GOT STABBED THIS IS THE GREATEST" or a funny as fuck comic based off of this.
Either way, we all win!
I met you at Bronycon once. It was brief and I believe I'm one of the randoms who signed your book because, well, that's what we were doing that day.
Yes, I would say that you're not scary in the "I'm going to regret my life tomorrow morning from a hospital bed" way. But I can absolutely believe you're scary in the "I'm going to regret the next decade-worth of perfectly legal repercussions" way. Because there are two main types of combative people with your stature: those who try to make up for it, and those turn it into just the first salvo of their arsenal.
Keep being awesome Aragon. We here are all rooting for you, whether that means acing your judicial exams, or getting stabbed to... ...make a point? ...put someone down? ...bask in the amusement?
And I thought us from the US were nutty.
If it helps, I'll just take my luck back now.
Wow this is wild. I think you're probably fine at this point but god this still makes me anxious thinking about your situation.
Yikes, this b$&@h sounds like she deserves what’s coming to her, and more!
Though she seems to be a bit more bark than she is bite.
This was so great to read want to read again 10/10
You are a very strange person, and I approve whole-heartedly. That said, do remember that cocaine and rational decisions have a, tenuous, relationship at best. Good luck with your studies!
Dang, that's a crazy story. During the moments of you being annoyingly polite, I can visualize The Professor from Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) during his moments of feigning innocence.
I'm mostly curious on how one can be Italian for just a year.
5619598
How are you so consistently funnier than me in my own blog. It is astounding.
You are a braver and more patient man than most, Aragon.
This sort of situation is exactly why I now live a half mile from my nearest neighbor.
While reading this, I had a growing suspicion about something. I've just checked it to confirm it, and indeed, the Wikipedia article is just a complete copy of this blog under the entry Fighting Smart.
It has been a while, but from past photos you were like 98 lbs soaking wet. I'm curious how big, by that I mean how tall, exactly is your neighbor? As in, a proper scrap, who would theoretically come out the victor? If she ever did work up the courage, liquid or otherwise, to attempt to stab you and did actually somehow, miraculously, insert sharp and pointy bits into your flesh, then I can just imagine a cartoony you smiling and saying I win right before collapsing. There's also the amazing image of her being trussed up like Hannibal Lecter ala silence of the lambs.
You're a good person, Aragon.
It's a crummy situation for those kids, but like most awful things in life you can't control, the only thing you can do is laugh.
I imagine getting stabbed still hurts like a motherfucker though, so please be careful.
Next we will find out you have asked her to stab you so you can make a joke.
5619564
I've met Aragon IRL and can confirm the accuracy of his descriptor. He's also quite sweet and considerate. And a damned snappy dresser.
Not sure why he's bothering with all this "law" stuff when he could just put on a nice suit and dazzle the judge and jury his way.
Tl;dr: Aragon tries to get stabbed, fails.
For now.
(Please don't get stabbed for real though, you and your sense of humor are too precious to sacrifice even in the name of a really, really hilariously fate-tempting murder)
Starting to see why you're not a fan of this relative.
Wow, buzzkill. D:
It amazes me that I know two people who possess this level of both chutzpah and also getting themselves into and out of deep shit on a regular basis.
Getting stabbed is fine, so long as you live to tell us about it. :)
5619564
I know, right? XD
5619622
Can confirm, all of this is correct.
Good grief, what a tale. Please stay safe and I hope she's sent packing soon.
And I thought the guy from Hello Neighbor was bad...
Well, I dunno about the neighbors, but here in the ol' US of A, cops and landlords are basically the same.
5619599
Aren't you worried about the Neighbor's kids being raised into assassins that'll kill you later in life?
Or something?
Kind of surprised you didn’t record one of their “How do we get him” conversations and present that to the police. I can understand blowing off steam and bullshitting about planned actions but that goes far enough to wonder if one of them will eventually just snap.
Holy fucking shit, my dude.
I hope you are alive next year.
Do you need a GFM to move to a safer location? Like, the place in Chicago where gunfire is a daily occurrence?
It's not like I didn't pay for your return airfare.
In the whole mountain of crap that is the situation with your neighbour, the part that saddened me the most was when both of her children were plotting your demise with her. The son, especially. Fiction would have you believe that he would be reluctant to abuse others because of his experience, but no, he seems perfectly happy to do unto you what she does unto him.
I really hope they find some way to get a more positive influence in their lives, because, bloody hell, it looks like she's halfway done turning them into horrible little clones of herself.
5619543
Christ. Student life hasn't changed much in, what, 800 years? Plus fascism. If she'd started blasting the Carmina Burana it would have been just too perfect.
Do you mean the Frank Gorshen Riddler or the Jim Carey Riddler? Because Frank Gorshen could do a stone-cold Rod Steiger impersonation.
5619574 Are you sure the two of you aren't related?
This is by far one of the most entertaining stories I've read on this website, no exaggeration!
It'll be interesting to hear how she reacts to learning her lease will not be renewed. Even if it's more of the same.
I love how by the end of it, their hatred for you is actually mending a broken family. They yell less, they're making plans together, they're united against their horrible neighbor who won't let their Mom listen to music and harasses their dogs.
How the fuck are you alive, the stress of trying to study for the shit you study for with this shit going on would have given me an aneurysm.
you should get a doorbell camera though.
That's pretty fucked, Aragon, however I must ask something
35 dB is basically nothing. Like, most major appliances make more noise than that. Did you maybe mean 55 or 65 dB?
This just makes appreciate living on a street with less than fifteen houses, with closest one being like a thousand feet from where the property ends.
5619744
No, no, it's 35 dB. From 8am to 11pm that's the max volume of constant noise you're allowed to make; keep in mind that this is in the living room area, not the bathroom or kitchen (which are allowed louder noises, since that's where most appliances are). It's roughly the sound of a normal-sounding conversation -- while you are indeed allowed to make occasional bursts of louder noises, you cannot, for example, scream at the top of your longs for three hours in a row, which is what the neighbor is doing. Up to like, an hour of noise, that's allowed. Likewise, if you have a party one day and it lasts for a while most people will be okay with it.
The problem is when the noises are constant, neverending, and happen every day, which is the case here. That's where the limit applies.
5619638
It's illegal to record other people against their consent if you're not participating in the conversation. Me recording the noise of screaming and hitting is different cause it was less 'evidence on trial' and more 'hey so like this is the shit that I hear every day and I worry', and the actual words that were said were hard to parse on the recording.
So like, if I want to record them planning to get me and beat me up, I'm really toeing a line I don't need to toe -- the neighbor has made it clear she wants to beat me up in front of the cops, so it's a needless step. On top of it, it's easier said than done? You can hear them speaking very clearly, but the recording app on my phone struggles to catch the sounds clearly through the walls; they come out muffled and hard to parse. Likewise, these conversations tend to happen all of a sudden and without warning, and I catch them halfway through; most of the time I simply aren't ready to record them at the drop of a hat, and by the time I might try they might have changed topics.
5619777
Fair enough. In America the legality of recording others conversations for evidence depends a great deal on which state you are in at the time.
Ara, I like your comics. It would be a pity if you stop making them. Because, you know, dead couldn't draw and use Internet.
Also, removing toxic mother from her abused children would do them a ton of good. And don't forget the neighbors (normal ones), they'd be very grateful for silence.
So... maybe you ought to sue her? For everybody's good?
Also, Aragon, now it's official: you're more awesome than Rainbow Dash and Cecil Stedman COMBINED
All children deserve parents but not all parents deserve children. This woman is a good example of why we should require a test to become a parent. Psychological test along with a few other factors... .
If you do get stabbed make sure to get a lot of pictures!
Now that was one hell of a tale. You the best, Aragon.
That being said, your Dad’s right. Please don’t get stabbed. I don’t think Peor Vecina here is going to do anything, but don’t let your guard down.
Bruh, that was a hell of a ride. Here's hoping you don't get stabbed!
I feel like i just read an unfinished "redditter tells of their best-worst neighbor experience" article.
Please be safe, but also screw that lady!
Can't believe no-one's posted this.
external-preview.redd.it/-shd2gSws8hyg8DKPfScL4cddTvJ59ksgNmNRkQxSQ0.jpg?auto=webp&s=378154a565ee3193d5bab7ebc7e9b91d7675acf9
Aragon walking home one night in February:
imgur.com/tClOz.jpg