Benidorm has always been a modest fishing village. When someone died he usually left the fertile inland lands to the most industrious sons and the barren lands on the coast to the lazy people and the women.
Things changed in the 1950s thanks to a mayor, Pedro Zaragoza, who saw tourism as a gold mine. He urbanized the city (highly) and advertised in Norway, Finland and other cold countries to attract their frozen citizens to the beach of the sunny new brick paradise.
At the end of the 80s, Benidorm was a rich city in which there were no fishermen left nor a measly piece of land left to develop. Well, actually there was one left, a seafront plot belonging to a lazy heir living in London.
Rafael had a bar where his wife, Lola, cooked some delicious and famous sardines, and a nightclub where alcohol and drugs spread among a clientele made up mainly of foreigners reddened by an inclement sun.
The man made a living, but he could not help but observe with envy how the residents of Benidorm around him became rich without any greater effort than selling land for which a few years ago no one would have given a penny.
Determined to get on the bandwagon of fortune, Rafael had the brilliant idea of ??selling that plot of land that was yet to be developed. The fact that he wasn’t his didn’t stop him. He found some unsuspecting and rich Basques who wanted to invest in the Alicante coast and, thanks to a few tricks and a couple of cronies, he sold the plot for a whopping 400 million pesetas.
Elisa Ferrer has known Rafael all her life, “he is from my parents’ town,” explains the writer. “When he found out that I was a novelist and screenwriter, he insisted that I tell his story, but I was reluctant,” he adds. Rafael pursued Elisa by giving her bits of his adventures that took him to Utrecht, to be persecuted by the police of several countries and by Interpol and a few prisons.
“Rafael, an invented name under which a real person hides, is now just over 70 years old, he is a short guy, somewhat conceited and very nice. A true snake charmer whose story fascinated me more and more every day, but I kept giving her shit because she was neither prepared nor too interested in telling his life story,” the writer recalls.
Until Ferrer, who had already published Season of Wasps (Tusquets) in 2019, got a scholarship to follow literary creation courses at the prestigious University of Utah. “I entered a workshop where I had to write something non-fiction. The rest of the students turned to their own lives, but I didn’t see myself capable, Rafael’s story appeared over and over again in my mind and in the end I decided to tell it.”
It was the genesis of The Dutchman (Tusquets), Ferrer’s new novel, which has just been released, where there is a lot of reality and also a lot of fiction. After years of long conversations with Rafael, a search through newspaper archives and witnesses of the time and a necessary trip to Utrecht, the writer has composed a character who is very much a scoundrel, but without losing his charm and has also reconstructed the Benidorm of the years of the real estate boom.
Ferrer puts the narration in the voice of Alba, a character who is still his alter ego, but “who is not me, although he agrees with me in the way I work.” Alba talks with Rafael, studies Rafael, and ends up telling the exciting life of the man who hit the big time and pocketed 400 million pesetas selling the last treasure of the cement paradise, a treasure that did not belong to him.
