To gain access to the mentioned pool you had to be a bona fide resident of Sea View Heights. That is to say, you had to live in one of the forty-odd apartments housed within the four-storey building. If for any reason you wanted to bring in any guests, you were required to sign their names in a water-stained ledger-style book that was kept chained to a small wooden table by the swimming pool entrance.
Residents are politely reminded that they can only bring two guests at any one time to the pool and that they are at all times responsible for their guests’ behaviour. Any resident who breaks the rules will be reported and banned from using the pool. THANK YOU. BY
The Sea View Heights Management Company.
You were also asked, by means of a large plastic notice attached to the actual glass door, to take responsibility for your guests and their behaviour within the premises: A fine sign, needless to say. A very clear and thoughtfully worded sign, you might even claim. The only problem was that, just like in my native Malta, signs don’t mean much in Gibraltar unless there is somebody there to enforce their prohibitions and proscriptions. From Monday to Friday, yes, there were barely more than three or four solitary individuals to be seen sitting around the swimming pool’s whitetiled perimeter. You could observe them scattered here and there at
a respectable distance from each other. The fat English schoolteacher from the third floor who wore her pink swimsuit so low across her chest that you could glimpse the edge of her leathery purple nipples. The bald German bank clerk from the first floor who always seemed to be reading the same book (a creased and yellow paperback version of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg). The old Gibraltarian retiree (Mr Bensusan? Or was it Mr Bensadon?) who would sit for hours cross-legged and poker-faced at the far end of the pool. A nice bunch of people. Very respectable and formal. Not the kind who’d be asking you for a light or pestering you with small talk, at any rate. But when the weekend came, alas, it was a different scenario altogether. Taking advantage of the fact that there was no pool attendant or lifeguard to enforce any of the management’s regulations, the Gibraltarian residents would throw caution to the wind and smuggle in three, four, five, sometimes as many as six or seven relatives into the pool. These ‘illegals’ always came with large sun umbrellas and inflatable beach balls, a herd of noisy, foul-mouthed, chattering monkeys whose constant whining and horsing around was enough to drive anyone half-crazy. They’d position themselves in clusters around the pool, all of them sitting there stuffing their faces with homemade calentita or torta-de-patata. Each family always sat in the same place, too. The Gomezes, for instance, plonked themselves near the fibreglass diving board. The Gonzalezes, for their part, gathered around the ladder leading into the shallow end of the pool. The Sanchezes, creatures of habit, occupied the raised terrace behind
the Gonzalezes. The Viñaleses, by nature slightly standoffish, bunched together just in front of the female changing rooms. The result of all this unspoken territoriality was that you could hardly walk anywhere around the premises without feeling that you were intruding on somebody else’s patch! However, this wasn’t the worst of it. What was far worse — what in my opinion was positively and utterly disgraceful — was the way that these interlopers would sit there and let their children do whatever they liked. That kind of shit pissed me off. Seriously, seriously irritated me. Eyes rolling, half-heartedly shaking their heads, they’d tell off the brats once or maybe twice — and then refocus on their albondigas and their tortas and never bother scolding them again. Meanwhile, the children would be getting up to all sorts of mischief. Jack-knifing from the diving board. Splashing each other with water. Running round and round the pool’s perimeter. Even sprinting out through the exit and rushing up and down the different floors, screaming out Anglo-Spanish obscenities as they galloped their way through the tower block’s carpeted corridors! For an obsessive lawabiding Anglophilic, borderline misanthropic reactionary such as myself, the situation verged on the intolerable. How could these people sit there sipping their Thermos coffees and munching their tortas de aceite while their kids were running riot inside the block? Did they have no shame? Had they somehow got it into their heads that everybody else viewed their bratty progeny with the same forbearance as themselves? From my own Maltese upbringing, I knew that certain Mediterranean women can be less than mindful when it comes to controlling their children, but this was something else. This was infantile criminality. No, criminality is too mellow a word. Terrorism, that’s what it was. Sheer prepubescent terrorism.