She points the way. Only those who know where the place is will be able to avoid calling the wrong portal. Therefore, before he dares to press any telephone at number 30 of this street in the heart of Carabanchel Bajo – where the appointment had been made – the woman – who does not provide information on her identity at any time – appears on the opposite pavement, peeping out from under the metal closure of a place that would seem disused if it were not for her strange presence. “Who knows, who knows… here,” he says. To begin this journey into the depths of a 256 square meter garage divided into four rooms rented by the hour for those who have no privacy in their shared apartments, you need to know that discretion is the most important maxim. The address, following this premise, will always be false.
There are sites like Milanuncios or social networks like Facebook where adverts offering rooms to rent by the hour in Madrid proliferate. The price varies from 12 to 25 euros for each of them. These rooms, located in conventional homes or garages like the one the woman shows off on a Friday night, have become a silent phenomenon among those who are prohibited from having any kind of company in their rooms or whose apartments are so overcrowded with tenants that they do not have any kind of private space with their partners. “You were lucky, today I had two seats. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow we are full”, warns the woman as she diligently opens an adjoining door that leads into a long corridor.
Payment will always be made in cash. The woman, dressed in a flannel robe and with a bunch of keys in her hand, walks along the corridor decorated with Buddhist symbols until she reaches the second of the four rooms created after the garage renovation. “It is forbidden to go out and move around here, except to go to the bathroom,” he warns. “If you want, you can change the color of the lights,” he says before going to turn on the washing machine, which will never stop working. Plastic-coated plasterboard walls let in noise from adjacent rooms. The room is scented with a strong aroma of incense to counteract the atmosphere fraught with lack of ventilation – there are no windows except a bricked-in hole in the ceiling – and the smell of tobacco. Inside the garage, the presidential suite is the one that has, in addition to a bed and a chair like the others, a large television. There, a man, apparently alone, laughs out loud at a soap opera while couples come in and out of other rooms.
Luis Eduardo Ospina, 59 years old, is one of the regular users of this type of room. “There is something inside me that encourages me to talk about my life,” says Ospina, who arrived in Spain in 2006 from Pereira (Colombia). Their “places of trust” are in another apartment in Carabanchel Bajo and in the Portazgo area (Vallecas) managed by the same owner. However, Ospina has lived in Getafe for 19 years. “I don’t want to take the risk of anyone recognizing me. That’s why I go there,” he says. Inside those rooms Ospina does not live a double sentimental life from hour to hour, but rather frequents the various stable companions he had in Madrid. “My sister, who works as an intern, uses them with her husband,” she says.
Ospina is a night caretaker on a farm north of the city. He earns 1,275 euros, around 50 a day. He says that since arriving in Madrid he has known nothing but shared apartments. There was only one season in which he himself, he admits, tried to “do business too” by subletting an apartment to a group of Argentinians who ended up “making his life impossible”. At the moment he is in a house in the center of Getafe, where 6 people “officially” live, although some mornings he wakes up and sees many more: he has counted more than a dozen. “Sometimes I find people sleeping in the corridors or in the living room. I go to the bathroom and I can’t get in, I go to the kitchen and it’s full. At night strangers try to come into my room and make the mistake,” he points out. A bedroom for which you pay 300 euros. According to him, the house could make around 1,500 euros a month.
Those moments of intimacy in the time rooms leave Ospina with a trace of sadness when he leaves. Above the what, the how, the with whom, Ospina worries about the where. “I get up from those beds and say: what am I doing here?” he says. “The good life is expensive. There are cheaper ones, but that’s not life. This is what we’re living,” he adds. In his apartment, as in most cases, it is forbidden to bring company “unless you pay 150 euros more” and he has no choice but to use this type of clandestine places. “I always take my sheets because they smell terrible. “For me, basically, it’s hell. If staying in a shared apartment means being on loan for use, without rights, in places of this type it is even worse. You open the door on your way out and there’s another couple waiting to enter. They need to push you,” he says.
During one of those exits from the room for hours, Ospina says that his “most bizarre” idea came to him. According to him he saved 6,000 euros. “The last time I came I thought I would take out all my money and stand in the middle of the street shouting ‘Who will rent me an apartment? I have the money to pay for it’. But it’s one thing to say it and another to do it. I’m not that brave,” he says.
“The migrant group is facing increasingly acute problems,” says Margarita Barañano, doctor in Sociology and researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid with studies that address roots in big cities as a support against vulnerability. “This discovery of rooms rented by the hour in apartments is another step in deepening the degradation and precariousness we are experiencing. Since the first waves of immigration in the 2000s we have seen that one of the forms of survival was overcrowding. This is another form of expulsion from society”, he underlines. “The lack of private space generates insecurity. It’s terrible. Transforming the city into a kind of Gruyère in which houses are now in spaces with people who don’t even know each other, aggravates inequality. Privacy is also a right”, he adds. “Migrants need to be given roots and a place to feel at home,” he concludes.
David is responsible for Hostel 13.13, a licensed hostel space in the Tetuán neighborhood. There are also rooms offered by the hour, as well as for nights and days. “This situation has been going on for three years. Almost all users are Latino. Demand increases in poor neighborhoods because that is where many immigrants are moved. Increased immigration in these areas means shared apartments where you cannot stay,” he says. “People of all ages come to us. Right now a couple in their 60s has just left. They come from every area of Madrid, not just Tetouan,” he adds. “This room per hour was originally an invention for wealthy people in expensive hotels. Now it is starting to occur even among the humblest because of the need,” he concludes.
Meanwhile in the Carabanchel Bajo garage not even a minute is allowed. The woman waits on the other side of the walls, in the half-empty room, waiting to be called to open the door. When someone goes beyond an hour, no matter how little, they become serious:
—It took you 10 minutes. That’s 20 euros more.
