Bullets, Banks and Bandits

When living abroad, a bar can be one of the best places to go if embracing the local way of life is your goal. In small Spanish villages, for example, you’ll find elderly men drinking brandy with coffee for breakfast. They’ll probably still be there when the office workers arrive to eat tapas with their beer at lunchtime. The camaraderie engendered over the course of a very long morning chatting to the ancients isn’t easily replicated elsewhere.

These elderly Spanish gentlemen are happy to share local news with their ex-pat neighbours. The ex-pats then pass on these often mistranslated snippets of gossip to other ex-pats. In this way information is disseminated and eventually ends up being repeated in a way that would, no doubt, shock the originator of the news if they ever got to hear the end version.

One of the reasons for these deviations from the truth is that the people telling the story don’t speak any English, and often the listeners don’t understand Spanish quite as well as they think they do. The result is a more confusing form of Chinese whispers than anything ever played at school and it nearly always results in hilariously exaggerated versions of local events.

A prime example of this took place when I lived in Spain. I’d been about to walk into town for my Spanish lesson when my mobile rang. The call was from one of the ladies who attends the class, very excited because stirring things were happening in our town square. She warned me not to go down because there were armed gunmen on the loose, and the centre of town was chock-full of the Guardia Civil.

Her husband’s brother, over the course of a few beverages, had heard from his Spanish friend that three armed men had stormed the local bank, shot the manager, and made off with a small fortune. The fortune would have to be small – it’s a tiny bank. Apparently, one of the robbers had been apprehended almost immediately, but the other two were holed up in town, armed to the teeth and ready to fight to the death.

By the next day the story had changed somewhat. It had been passed along the ex-pat line, discussed at length in the bars, and added to by the local inhabitants who were in the know. From Spanish to Spanglish to English and back again the tale grew wonderfully in the telling.

The latest news was that where previously all three bandits had been armed, now only two had been carrying weapons. The unarmed man was believed to have been caught, with various versions of his capture. One of the armed duo had supposedly fired point blank at the bank manager, who was critically injured and not likely to survive the day. The two desperadoes had then emptied the vault, taken the cashier hostage, and run for the hills.

The true tale eventually emerged via the local press. This was a much more mundane version, showing that this had been a case of Spanglish whispers at its very best. It transpired there had only been two, and not three, robbers, only one of whom was armed. But even that might have made the stuff of legends if the tale hadn’t turned into an episode from a Carry On film.

The two desperadoes had entered the bank, demanding money with menaces. The cashier, deciding he wasn’t paid enough to cope with armed bandits, called the manager to deal with the situation. The armed would-be thief waved his gun at the manager and demanded that the vault be opened and all the cash handed over.

It was at this point that the drama descended into farce. Instead of doing as he was ordered, the bank manager refused, which left the Spanish Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid completely nonplussed. They hadn’t prepared for resistance and didn’t know what to do next. After a short discussion, the unarmed one took fright and ran away, but the other (clearly made of sterner stuff) stood his ground. He repeated his demands, the bank manager was equally resolute and a stalemate ensued.

The standoff could have gone on for several hours, but it seems something must have spooked the bandit because he fired his gun – straight into his own foot.

The bank manager, the one our local Spanglish whispers had left for dead, was completely unharmed. The robber, on the other hand, was taken off to hospital to have the hole in his foot dealt with.

Those of us who had been following this enthralling tale by word of mouth were disappointed when we read the true story. Left to the Spanish whisper service it had clearly been only a matter of time before the bank manager would have shot both robbers and absconded with the money himself.

If you're planning to move and live abroad, you can find tips and advice on both integration and dealing with homesick blues in the You're the Foreigner section of The Greatest Moving Abroad Tips in the World.