The municipal police of Madrid intervened in a clandestine party in Coloreros street, with 80 people, this weekend.
The DJ slams the music off.
A shhhhhhhhhh runs through the room.
People are silent.
Those in charge of the party open the windows and suddenly a night breeze sneaks through the rooms.
The cigarette smoke begins to dissipate.
The cold hits the attendees in the face, who play with the clink of ice in their glasses.
People communicate by miming, holding back laughter.
It looks like a scene from a silent movie.
Nobody wears a mask.
After a while, the windows are closed and the DJ turns the volume up to full.
There is still a lot of night left.
The organizers of clandestine parties in a state of alarm, like this one that took place a few days ago in an apartment in the center of Madrid, ventilate the place every 30 minutes.
It is a pause to which attendees end up getting used to.
Before entering, everyone has received very precise instructions: "If the police arrive, you say that you did not pay to come and that you brought your own drink."
Lorenzo García, 27, listened attentively to this explanation.
Then he paid with a credit card the 20 euros it cost to enter that apartment that, before the pandemic, was rented to tourists through Airbnb.
The ticket did not include a drink, says Lorenzo.
The drinks cost eight euros.
"I ordered a gin and tonic and started dancing like it was a normal Saturday."
It was not.
The day before, the Government was looking for a formula to declare a national emergency in the face of the increase in cases of Covid-19, the highest rate of infections in the world.
Parallel to this was approaching another major event for a twenty-year-old: the birthday of a friend of Lorenzo.
There were 24 hours left and they didn't know where to celebrate. They did what any stranger in need did: go to the basics, no weird inventions.
They called in a nightclub public relations the same way they would have before the pandemic.
Success.
They wrote them down on a list and received an invitation.
The only thing that changed this time is that the address of the party did not appear on it: “Saturday, October 3, 00.30-6.00.
Last night ”read the invitation distributed by WhatsApp.
On Coloreros street, near Calle Mayor, at around 12 at night, a tall man, dressed in black and with a Latin accent, waited for them to lead them to the inside of a portal of a residential building where the organizers of the party they had rented three tourist apartments
The kitchen was the bar counter, the living room the dance floor with DJ and the room a small room with sofas.
All windows and doors were completely sealed to isolate the sound of music.
"They had mattresses against the windows, it was very hot," Garcia recalls.
When he arrived, it was still very early and almost no people had arrived, so he could still see how the organizers moved the furniture from here to there and how they were opening the suitcases where they kept dozens of bottles of alcohol.
The building soon filled with people: 10, 20, 30, 40 ... up to 100 became.
“No masks, no distance and no shirts.
A party like the usual ones. ”At three in the morning someone knocked on the door with force: it was the Municipal Police.
This body has intervened in the capital during the October 12 bridge in more than 200 private parties and meetings that exceeded the maximum allowed of six people, according to data from the City Council.
"We panicked, but the organizers told us that they could not go up because it was a private house," says another of the attendees, Ángel, 29 years old.
However, the party never resumed.
Instead, they had to wait an hour until they were told they could get out of the apartment.
While the agents identified them, the young people responded with the same litany: they did not pay to enter, nobody sold them alcohol, what they drank they had uploaded.
They all lied.
Behind some of these parties, as this newspaper has been able to verify, are those in charge of an old Malasaña nightclub, which has been closed since the summer.
They use the same advertising, delivered by the same public relations that worked there.
When consulted by phone, one of the members of that business denies it: "It's not us."
The evidence, however, is overwhelming.
Angel has attended several.
The first weekend in September, some friends invited him to one.
The adrenaline of the police knocking on the door, as if we were in the Chicago of the 1920s, mixed with alcohol and some drugs, triggers the nighttime fun, in his view.
Two days after that September party, four friends Angel had attended the party with tested positive.
His friend Pablo Marín too.
They don't seem very concerned: "We're not going to stop having fun."