Bigamists who Live in Glass House Should Always Wear Clean Pants

The street cleaners here in Madrid don’t just sweep pavements. They check the walls, street lamps, benches, trees and telephone booths. People here with something to sell advertise with photocopied fliers which they tape to walls, street lamps etc., with tear-off slips which have their phone numbers. I’ve seen lawyers advertise themselves this way. I even saw an flier for a psychologist. If you phone one of the numbers you can borrow up to 6,000€. But for the most part they are from painters, decorators, plumbers and electricians; or art class teachers, dance instructors and school tutors. The saddest one are from Rumanian women offering help around the home. They are always hand-written in blue biro. These are people who can afford paper and pens but can’t afford the cost of photocopying. It’s also very normal to see flats for sale advertised this way. Have you got a spare half a million euros? Well, call this number and you could soon be the proud owner of a three bedroom flat with a terrace. Prostitutes, by the way, would never advertise in this way. They use the national newspapers. But, whatever is being advertised and however it has been copied, the street cleaners tear them down and put them in with the rest of the rubbish.

I didn’t find my flat this way. A friend saw it advertised in the weekly magazine Segundo Mano (literally Second Hand). He phoned the owners. I went to see it a couple of times and about a month or so later I had bought it. Notice I said that my friend phoned the owners. He didn’t phone an estate agent or a lawyer. No, this sale, like many in Spain, was a private one. And there was more. To be precise, twenty five thousand euros more, stuffed into an envelope and which I handed over to the owners. You see, everyone here under-declares the value of their property once it is sold. This way you cut down on taxes. Everyone does it. The banks connive in it. The government knows but, in the end, that’s just the way they do things here. As the buyer you need to bridge the difference between the declared value of a house or flat and the price at which you are buying it. At any given time there must be hundreds of thousands of euros, possibly millions, being carried through the streets of Spanish towns wrapped in envelopes. I’ve yet to read one report of even a euro of this money being stolen. It’s as if even the criminals accept that this practice is so essential to the stability of Spain that it cannot be abused.

A system like this, be it buying a house or employing a painter, with few, so it seems to an extranjero or foreigner, formal legal safeguards, clearly requires a lot of trust. It’s the same in the bars. The camarero will ask you at the end of the night when he’s working out your tab:
-"¿Cuantas cervezas has bebido?" How many beers have you drunk?
A Spaniard would never lie about how many he’s had. He pays his three euros forty and walks home happy. Compare that to Glasgow where the answer would be a very slurred:
-None.
Followed by a loud crash as the speaker falls to the ground unconscious.
Jokingly I once said to my girlfriend that the Spanish only trust their mothers and then judge the trustworthiness of everyone else according to the distance between them and her. She looked me evenly in the eye and said:
-Of course.
I immediately made a mental memo to myself:
-Never make fun of Spanish mothers.
However, it was my girlfriend who also said:
-There must be a lot of bigamists in Britain.
Her reasoning was this: as a country that has no DNI ("documento nacional de identidad") it must be easy for people to claim to be somebody or something that they are not. To marry in Spain you must present your DNI to prove who you are and to show that they you are not already married. Therefore, Great Britain, a country which does not have a DNI, must suffer from many bigamist marriages. And, given that fact that while buying my flat I also had to show my DNI to prove who I was, and, given the fact, that I had admitted on many occasions that Great Britain does not have a DNI, it must also be very easy, according to my girlfriend, to buy a house when you have no right to do so. I wondered if all Spaniards saw us this way: a nation of bigamists living in other people’s houses under assumed names. God only knows what they would think if they knew that in Scotland we can change our name to whatever we want, whenever we want as long as we tell our bank who to send the monthly statements to.

Apart from saying “No, you’re wrong” I couldn’t really put up much of an argument. After all, she was right. We don’t have a national ID and identity theft and fraud is a problem. If we had a national system of identifying ourselves we wouldn’t have these problems. So, what is it that stops us from descending into a abyss of bigamy and serial house buying? It was my girlfriend’s sister-in-law that gave me the answer. At lunch one day we were discussing the differences between the UK and Spain. Told that we didn’t have a DNI she asked incredulously:
-But what would you do if you were stopped by the police and they asked you for your name?
To which I could only reply, somewhat lamely:
-I would tell them.
But that’s what we would do, just as we don’t marry bigamously, on the whole, or buy homes and pretend to be someone else, generally speaking. If you do you generally end up being arrested, put on trial and the judge makes a long speech about the need for people to be able to trust public institutions and then he sends you to jail. Everyone thinks you are a nasty person and when you come out of jail your friends always pretend to be out when you ring their doorbell but you know they are there because you can see them hiding behind the curtains.

Of the many things not to do in life, such as fighting a war simultaneously on two fronts, is lie to the police. It’s wrong and it’s very, very stupid. Looking at the stunned disbelief on the face of my girlfriend’s sister-in-law that I would, without a second thought, tell the truth to the police, I realised that this was not an attitude universally shared. Another Spaniard expressed it this way: the moral issue with cheating in Spain is not the act of cheating it’s being caught. Now before we get all high-and-mighty about all this it should be remembered that in Spain, a country where it is essential to be "enchufado", literally “plugged in”, that is, to have a relative who can help you with that all-important job promotion or stand the aval, financial guarantee, for your "hipoteca" or mortgage, anything you can do to give yourself that all-important advantage is quite permissible.

In the last month or so the Spanish government has decided that the British in Spain will not have to renew their ID cards. Perhaps they think that since we can be trusted it’s not worth getting us to carry them. If I say I’m Dave Macdonald then that’s who I am and not the late Elvis Aaron Presley, who never really died but instead, tired of the pressures of stardom, decided to jack it all in and start life again as a Financial Risk Assessor from Kilsyth. Whatever the reason for the decision, it means that we will not have to stand in line in the "Comisaría" waiting to be ignored/insulted and/or patronised by the "funcionarios" who work there. You might think that this would make us very happy. But a lot of us are quite worried by this change to the law. The ID card is such a part of life in Spain that without it buying a pair of pants from the pants shop and finding out that you don’t have cash and need to use your cash card and the owner of the pants shops asks to see your ID before he hands over the pants, well, it’s going to be difficult. So, what will I do then when the police stop me and ask:
-So, Mr. Presley, are you wearing clean pants?