#24 The Cheese Is for the Second Mouse …

“What …!” Heidi exclaims as I push her away. She regains her balance, turns to face me, and bursts out laughing, for I am standing on my right leg, my left leg drawn up, as Boris the little terrier dangles in his harness from my outstretched right arm. Heidi follows my gaze to the cow pat next to me, which just unrolled and snapped at my leg.

The dirt road we are walking on crosses a country road. Rarely any traffic on that road, but if a car passes by, Boris gives chase, so I just put him on his leash. Just before we crossed that country road, what I had taken for a cow pat turned out to be a coiled snake, which snapped at my leg. Simultaneously, I pushed Heidi away, lifted Boris off the ground, and pulled up the attacked leg. The snake coiled up again, and … “That’s a big snake,” Heidi cuts my thoughts short as I put Boris and my leg back on the ground. I shuffle away from the snake and say, “Can’t be an adder; they don’t get that big. Probably …” “Montpellier snake,” Heidi interrupts me.

“How do you …” “Since that incident in Germany,” Heidi interrupts me again, “I always check what I don’t want to be stung or bitten by when arriving someplace new,” and my thoughts wander to the hotel Heidi and I once bought and renovated near the German village of Hannoversch Münden. As we did every day, we closed the back door of our hotel behind us one afternoon and set out for a walk. Moos the German shepherd—who was still alive back then—stuck her nose into a pile of car tires in the garden, and in the same instant, we sprinted into the woods, a swarm of wasps on our heels.

Moos, after we had shaken off the wasps, whimpered pitifully every now and then. What she didn't know and we did know was that the burning sensation from the wasp stings we had sustained would quickly pass. But about a kilometer into our walk, Heidi said her ears were buzzing. Shortly thereafter, she collapsed.

“Just leave me here,” she mumbled. “It’s okay. Tell the children I've always loved them and take good care of Moos,” and her eyes rolled back.

Not remembering how Heidi, that afternoon, got into the shower of the hotel room we ourselves were occupying—our apartment still under construction—I do remember the dilemma I faced. Stay with Heidi or leave her alone and run to the telephone at reception, which was a long way from our room? Not really a choice, so I ran through halls, rushed up and down stairs, ran through the café that was part of our hotel, called 112, ran back, found Heidi in the shower just as I had left her—red blotches covering her body, barely able to breathe—and was surprised to hear a siren after only a few minutes.

Since our arrival in Germany, Heidi and I had been confronted with little pünktlichkeit, gründlichkeit, and zuverlässigkeit, character traits, we discovered, that only manifest themselves in Germans when they are being managed by someone cracking the whip. The three paramedics who strode into our hotel were more pünktlich, gründlich, and zuverlässig than I had dared to wish. One of them turned off the shower, knelt over Heidi, and, after I had said, “Mehrere Wespenstiche multiple wasp stings,” he took an ampoule and a syringe from the leather bag he was carrying, inserted the needle of the syringe into the ampoule, drew the plunger, looked up at me, and said: “Adrenaline. Gut?”

“Bitte please,” I replied, and the syringe’s needle disappeared into Heidi’s thigh. Another ampoule emerged from the leather bag.

“Kortisone. Gut?”

“Bitte.”

“Antihistamine. Gut?”

“Bitte.”

“Mehr adrenaline. Gut?”

“Was wenn es Ihre Frau wäre what if it were your wife?”

“Mehr adrenaline.”

“Bitte.”

Two paramedics lifted Heidi onto a stretcher. With the stretcher between them, they strode through halls, walked up and down stairs, and as they slid the stretcher into the ambulance, they made clear that there was no room for me in that ambulance. Leaning over Heidi through the side door, trying to convince her that everything would be all right as the paramedics called out which hospital they were taking Heidi to, someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Entschuldigung pardon me,” a woman standing behind me said. “Wir haben im Hotel ein Zimmer gebucht we've booked a room at the hotel, aber es ist keiner da but there is no one there.”

“As soon as my wife is on her way to the hospital,” I answered over my shoulder, “werde ich Ihnen helfen I'll help you.”

“But can’t you at least let us in and give us the key to the room?”

Germans! Not a day went by without an incident of that kind, and knowing it usually got a rise out of Germans, I said over my shoulder: “Ihr Zimmer ist kostenlos storniert your room has been canceled free of charge.”

“Was …!”

Heidi had recovered quite well when I found her at the hospital the paramedics had said they would take her to. A doctor at her bedside advised her to spend the night in the hospital because, he argued—and I knew he was right—a severe anaphylactic reaction is sometimes biphasic.

Early the next morning, I was back at the hospital. Another doctor stood by Heidi’s bedside. He suggested that Heidi spend another night in the hospital and then explained how the forest is more dangerous than people realize. His own daughter, he told us, was no longer allowed to play in the forest because of spiders that spin webs whose silk is lethal on contact, and… “Ich gehe nach Hause I'm going home,” Heidi had interrupted the doctor.

“That seems irresponsible to me,” the doctor responded, shaking his head. “Ich bin …” “Tödliche Spinnen!” Heidi interrupted the doctor again. “Du spinnst you’re nuts.”

“Aber but …” “Could you perhaps,” I interrupted the doctor in turn, suppressing the laughter Heidi’s pun had prompted, “thank the paramedics on our behalf?”

“Ach, diese Polen those Polish! They're not German, but they're trying their best.”

As I look over my shoulder at the coiled snake, we cross the country road. I unleash Boris and let my gaze glide over our surroundings, yellowish brown until a few days ago but now, after only a few days of rain, greener than green. For about three months, Heidi and I have been living in Montelobado, a village in the Spanish nature reserve of Arribes del Duero. We love living there, and if it had not been my naivety that had brought us to Montelobado, it could easily have been a final destination.

Half a year ago, about the time Heidi and I realized that Andalusia, where we were living then, held no future for us, we received a message from a Belgian-Spanish couple living in Montelobado, where, I thought I understood, the village council does everything in its power to turn the tide of Montelobado’s depopulation. We visited the couple and the village, about six hundred kilometers from where we then lived, and on the way back to Andalusia, Heidi skeptically shook her head every now and then as I rattled on about ideas that came to mind whose implementation could possibly persuade people considering migration to set their sights on Montelobado. On the last day of July 2025, despite Heidi’s skepticism, we received the keys to the house we are temporarily renting in Montelobado. Temporarily, because as luck would have it, relatives of the couple who had sparked our interest in Montelobado are selling a house, in Montelobado, that meets all Heidi’s and my requirements.

The mayor of Montelobado, when I presented my make-Montelobado-great-again ideas, looked at me in disbelief, and one of his concejales scoffed that I would never earn enough money with any of those ideas.

“Pero no estoy hablando de dinero but I’m not talking about money,” I retorted. Jaws dropped, and assuming something biblical would resonate, I joked, with the prophet Haggai in mind, “If we want to make Montelobado great again, we must go into the mountains, gather wood, and rebuild the temple.”

More disbelief, and even in a brain department as sparsely furnished as mine, a bell should have rung.

A week later, the couple who had sparked our interest in Montelobado invited me to a gathering of villagers, the purpose of that gathering, I thought I now understood with certainty, to discuss the future of Montelobado. During a walk with Boris, it took Heidi and me some effort to return a sheep that had escaped from a pasture to its flock—Boris not exactly helpful—and I slipped into a room in the town hall half an hour late. Before I could make myself invisible at the back of the room, the couple beckoned me onto a stage, which I did not like at all. I knew no one in Montelobado. The T-shirt I had that morning grabbed from my pile of T-shirts in a closet, I realized too late, was orange, which could—Heidi and I being Dutch—create a wrong impression, and I reeked of sheep. And yet, not to be a naysayer, I took the chair I was offered on that stage and bravely orated about my ideas to make Montelobado great again. Now I am quite used to disbelief on the faces of people I address during lectures, but never had I been confronted with so much disbelief. No bell rung.

That bell only rang when the couple who had sparked our interest in Montelobado informed us that the house their relatives are selling would be rented out if we didn't make an offer to buy immediately. Convinced I would easily find another house for sale in Montelobado on the internet, I switched on my computer, and … man, I know—and knew, damn it!—that all over Spain there are initiatives to repopulate depopulated villages. Those initiatives usually provide the initiators with some EU funding, and that is about it. Dozens of websites seem to open doors to a pleasant rural life, but pueblos remain depopulated. If a village council goes public via the media with the news that a village is offering houses, jobs, and lightning-fast internet, it means that said council is looking for someone working from home and willing, alongside her or his day job, to staff the counter of the local café on weekends. Anyway—and all the stupider now that I look back on it—the make-Montelobado-great-again fairy tale had met with little resistance in my head.

Hundreds of houses in Montelobado. No more than thirty occupied. No house for sale apart from the house the relatives of the couple who had sparked our interest in Montelobado are selling. No house for sale in the entire region! One or two ruins for sale in most villages in the region. That seemed like a strange phenomenon, but a few minutes of research taught me that unoccupied houses without movement in the real estate market is actually a well-known phenomenon in the region. And precisely in the few ruins for sale, I suddenly realized, lies the origin of the make-Montelobado-great-again fairy tale, a fairy tale no homeowner, concejal, or mayor is aware of.

For years, migrants have set their sights on the east and south of Spain, where every village has its local quack, often a migrant her- or himself. Once a freshly arrived migrant has purchased a home, the quack—for a modest fee—is quick to assist with applying for documents and permits and with finding the right people to renovate the purchased home. Gradually, the quack has begun to discover the depopulated villages in Spain. She or he tries to steer prospective migrants toward such a village, mediates the purchase of a ruin—double the price but still peanuts—assists with applying for documents and permits and with finding the right people to renovate the purchased ruin.

It is the quack who gives Spaniards their bad name. That quack, after all, has to keep so many balls in the air—without being a juggler proper—and makes, in order to secure commissions, simple business transactions so complicated that everything she or he gets involved in gravitates toward chaos. And when the chaos is complete, the quack shrugs and says: “Well, that’s how things go in Spain: mañana, mañana.”

Migrants who conduct their own business in Spain discover that Spaniards are puntuales, minuciosos, and confiables, and … “Great, walking Boris with you!” Heidi interrupts my thoughts, and she is right. We are walking back into Montelobado, which means I have been lost in thought for quite a while.

“We trapped a mouse,” says Heidi as we step into our not-so-temporary house. A moment later, I carry a mousetrap to a ramshackle shed just outside the village, where I open a hatch in the trap, set the trap in the grass, wait for the mouse in it to scurry toward freedom, and think about how I stood here last night in my underwear. Sometimes, like last night, we forget to remove the two mousetraps that are always on red alert somewhere in the house, and only Boris sleeps through the noise a mouse makes when trapped.

Rain and wind last night. The trapped mouse took its time to scurry toward freedom, and I thought of the raccoons we trapped in the attic of our hotel in Hannoversch Münden. Man, what a commotion those animals made if allowed to run free. Every trapped raccoon entailed a smuggling trip of about thirty kilometers, for trapping raccoons is illegal in Germany, and a raccoon released too close to where it has been trapped will soon be back. Wet and shivering with cold, I let my thoughts wander from German raccoons to the Montelobado of yesteryear, a bustling village where no one spent time peering over the oleander hedge to hustle a few pesetas from a lost migrant. People laughed, danced, and sang, and I wouldn’t have gotten far, in the dead of night, without the sereno, the night watchman, tapping me on the shoulder. Man, what a pity not to live then …

Traditionally built houses, dusty streets, and children horsing around. Millers, tanners, stonemasons, joiners, rope makers, carpenters, potters, basket makers, shoemakers, beekeepers, saddlers, coopers, blacksmiths, weavers, spinners, seamers, and alpargateros, who made shoes from rope. The water distributor and the water carrier, the town crier and the farolero, who lit the streetlights every evening. Midwives and the surgeon, who still truly healed people and was also a hairdresser. Goat and pig herders and donkey drivers. Winemakers, olive pressers, cheesemakers, bakers, and butchers. For virtually everyone, the daily workload was rapidly dealt with. People helped each other with chores they couldn't perform alone, weeded their huertos, their vegetable gardens, played cards or chatted in one of the more than ten cafes Montelobado boasted, and laughed, danced, and sang. But no lightning-fast internet! That must have been a setback.

Back home, last night, I toweled myself dry in the bathroom. I pushed Boris, who had taken my place, to the middle of the bed, crawled under my duvet and chuckled inwardly as I thought about how Heidi and I, earlier that day, spent hours on our hands and knees scraping beeswax off floors, walls, windows, and furniture.

A beekeeper along the road to Salamanca, from whom we bought bee pollen, gave us a few blocks of beeswax from old combs. Heidi melted the wax and created thick candles by pouring the wax into molds. To check whether the wax had hardened properly, she squeezed one candle, only to discover that the outside had hardened, not the inside. Beeswax everywhere. Good stuff to make candles from. Bad stuff to scrape off floors, walls, windows, and furniture. But my chuckling gave way to worry. The studios we need to support my book The Caveman Code, which we would build in the one house for sale in Montelobado, should have been up and running by now.

Early November 2025. Long before sunrise this morning, Boris and I walked past the ramshackle shed where, a few hours earlier, I stood waiting—and shivering—for a mouse to scurry out of a mousetrap. The early bird catches the fattest worm. Certainly true. But the cheese is usually for the second mouse, and it is frustrating to have been the first mouse in Montelobado …

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