CUCO ’88

I was walking down Calle Gerona in red high heels, a short red dress, my hair long down my back. My hotel was tucked in the old quarters and I was heading toward the center—girl on a mission. Traffic crawled, thick and impatient. The catcalls were just part of the local weather, but one voice cut through the noise: raspy.

It came from a head leaning out of a Japanese 4×4—long, sunburned curls, friendly brown eyes, a wiry frame draped in the window. I smiled. He pointed to himself.

“Cuco.”

Years later, I found myself in his house—or rather, his sanctuary for the overdone, the undone, and those in between. I had come with a mutual friend, Arturo, a musician. The couch was long, crowded with bodies—animals and people alike, some asleep, some drifting. It made sense. His place stood on the street of all the discotheques. Cuco took them in, let them recover, then released them into their lives, most went back home others to homeless.

He was as bohemian as his house, a child of the 60s and 70s who never quite came all the way back.

I met him again a few years later. We worked together, making stained glass for a pub—colour and lead under our hands, breaking light into obedient pieces. That was in the 90s.

Fast-forward.

Four years ago I crossed paths with him again, this time in Altea. He invited me over. The house was bigger now but the essence unchanged: young strays everywhere, human and animal alike. He made paella. I met his daughter, born late in his biography. Her mother was there, and the mother’s current boyfriend, all of us around the same table, this constellation was for him the most logical thing in the world.

I went back once more, two years ago, with my youngest. Then the line went dead again.

Yesterday I learned he had died.

I still have the portrait he drew of me from that first visit—his version of my face, his proof that I passed through his weather.

I.Ph.

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange | All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.