A year of saving up to pay 5,000 pesetas in 1987

5,000 pesetas and a year of saving: the first time in 1987

On 4 October 1987, at nine in the evening, a 17-year-old boy rang the doorbell of an apartment a few metres from his home. He had spent an entire year saving the pocket money his relatives gave him until he had put together 5,000 pesetas. Inside, a woman who said she was 27 was waiting for him; he had phoned her minutes earlier. He paid the fee in advance, went into a very large room and, according to his own account, had the first sensual experience of his life. Almost four decades later, he has told the story in public, with nostalgia and with a memory he himself describes as indelible.

What 5,000 pesetas meant in 1987

The figure is not decoration: it is the axis of the story. That teenager did not work; his only source of income was the allowance from his family, and it took him twelve months to gather the amount. One of the most quoted replies was not sarracena but arithmetical: quite a fortune for a boy of that age and that year. The account includes no current price to compare it with, only the observation that payments today are made in euros, so the comparison is left open. What is clear is the setting: money up front, a service arranged by phone and a house that, according to the author himself, belonged to a network of exchanges between his city and the Basque Country.

The economic-exchange thesis

The most uncomfortable reply has nothing to do with the room. Some argue that every relationship between a man and a woman is, at bottom, an economic exchange of some kind, and that that afternoon merely made the mechanism visible. The author, for his part, offers a nuance: he maintains that society back then was less materialistic than today's and that the change has been outrageous. These are two ways of looking at the same thing. The first reduces the episode to a contract with a price tag; the second turns it into an emotional fossil of a supposedly more innocent era. Neither can be proven with the available data.

An anecdote book more comic than clinical

A good part of the replies argued nothing at all: they made jokes. There was the usual gag about the father receiving the news, and someone jokingly reminded him that it was nothing new in his own biography. The original account, however, is not looking for laughs: it describes nerves, physical difficulties, an ending without a climax and a kiss on the mouth which, he says, was the first he had ever been given. The detail the author himself highlights is precisely that: there was no ejaculation. He tells it without drama, like someone filing an after-action report of an afternoon.

In the end, the author settled his own anniversary with a phrase that sums up four decades of rereading: it was not such a big deal. In a later message he places the experience 39 years back and adds that, seen from a distance, it was not all bad.