Cometh the Camareros, Cometh Spain Triumphant

I have a theory. If Spain was run by the camareros (barmen) it would still be a world-power feared, and probably, respected by all. Why do I believe this? Because they get things done. If there is a secret oath sworn by camareros (and I like to think there is one) it might be “Let the customer ask and if I have it or I know where it is, I solemnly swear to hand it over at a very reasonable price”.

But before I get too fanciful here it might help if I contrast the efficiency of the average camarero with the attitude displayed by the funcionarios. These are the people who have sat their oposiciónes, public competitive exams that you have to sit if you want to enter the civil service, which includes everything from being a teacher to being allowed to stamp building permits. The Spaniards will only ever accept a document once it has been stamped. I once saw a scribbled handwritten notice outside a bar announcing a temporary closure. It had been stamped. If it hadn’t it wouldn’t be real and people would have wrongly turned up for asking for a drink. I like to think all these stamped documents are later transferred to a national archive which includes everything ever stamped in Spain. Including the stamp collection of Alfonso XIII. Which, of course, has been stamped.

The higher the mark in your oposiciónes, the higher you are placed in the list for your particular job. As vacancies come up, the people at the top of the list get them first. If you are at the bottom you have to wait until everybody ahead of you is dead. There is no attempt to find out how good you are, say, as a teacher. If you’re at the top, then the job is yours. This has one very important consequence, as I found out when I applied for my tarjeta de residencía. THEY DON’T CARE! They know that if they pull out a gun and shoot you then they might go to jail but they wouldn’t necessarily lose their job. Spain didn’t lose her empire because she failed to develop quickly as a modern European country in the nineteenth century. She lost it because some funcionarío refused to stamp the navy´s form requesting ships-that-didn’t-sink.when-hit-by-small-stones.

There are no oposiciónes for being a camarero. In fact I’m not sure how they are recruited but I wouldn’t rule out some form of press gang. The last group of people that would ever be allowed to be camareros in Spain are students. Here being a camarero is a skilled job which takes years to learn. Being a student, on the other hand, involves living with your parents until you are in your thirties and actively not looking for a job. Would you entrust your food and drink with someone whose mother still irons his shirts? And he’s thirty seven?

Just for starters, as a camarero you have to know how many combinations of coffee and milk there are. At least ten, and that doesn’t include the little sachets of instant coffee, decaffeinated just to make things more complicated, served templada, that is with milk that isn’t really hot and isn’t really cold. Oh, and in a glass. An English friend who speaks excellent Spanish worked as a camarero in a Spanish bar in Lanzarote (the owners thinking, presumably, it would be good to have him to deal with the British tourists). He was asked to leave after a couple of hours. He just didn’t know his coffees. Instead he went to work in an English bar where people only wanted beer or a decent plate of fish and chips and the most exotic thing you can ask for is a cappuccino.

A camarero, unlike the funcionario only knows how to serve. Without being servile. He’s not your friend. He’s not your brother. He’s not your dad (unless of course he actually is). He is the means by which the stuff he keeps behind the bar gets across to you. It’s that basic. He doesn’t like the idea of anyone going hungry or being thirsty but that’s as far as the relationship goes. He’ll never let you marry his sister (unless of course he actually does). Walk into most bars in Madrid and the first thing you’ll hear is “Dime”. Literally “Talk me”. He doesn’t want to hear about the weather; the game last night; the lies told by politicians or the latest scandal involving building flats on land that not only belongs to your cousin but actually doesn’t even exist in the first place. That’s what you have your family for. All he wants is that you talk him. Tell him what want. You.

A word of advice. When talking to a camarero never use the conditional tense. It makes no sense to him. The only reason you are in his bar is because you want something to drink or eat. So why waste valuable time by saying “I would like...” or “Would it be possible...”. Worse still is if you say “Could you get me...?”. By saying this you are raising the possibility that he wouldn’t get it for you, which for a camarero is as close to an insult as you can get. If you listen to Spaniards ordering in a bar they tend to say “Me pones una cerveza por favor?”. A very simple phrase which I struggle to translate. I suppose the closest would be “Give us a beer please” or perhaps “Will you give us a beer?” . Literally it would go something like “Me put beer, you, please?”. I’m not even sure about the question mark. Intonation in Spanish can be so subtle for someone from Britain as to be almost invisible. The real test for a non-native speaker is to be in a group of Spaniards, with the usual level of noise that tends to come with more than two Spaniards, and to know that the person standing behind you has just asked if it’s true that British people spend all their time in the pub and children are forced to leave home at eighteen.

It can be a delight to watch a camarero at work, especially when he’s at the top of his game. They tend to be in their late forties or early fifties, often carrying a few extra pounds and always, always smoking. I don’t think Spanish law allows you to employ non-smoking camareros. The best time to watch them at work in Madrid is in June or early July, before everyone leaves for the beach. This is the time of year when the bars spill out on to the streets and people escape from the heat by drinking in the terrazaz that cover the pavements. Carrying a tray in one hand, balancing on it glasses and bottles of whisky, gin, coke, tonic and the wonderful but dangerous patcharan, he weaves his way between the tables, accepting orders shouted by other customers with a “Muy bien” and swapping comments with the other camareros.

Dressed in the obligatory white short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, his face damp with sweat these camareros will regularly put in eight hour shifts six nights a week, often finishing at three in the morning. Like nearly everything in Spain their work is six parts hard graft and four parts pure theatre. The good camarero will get your drinks onto the table and pour them with such an understated flourish that you hardly notice he’s been there. They don’t want your thanks. Sometimes they don’t even want a tip. To be honest I’m not quite sure why they do it. But when you see the number of young guys doing the same job, putting up with being called “chaval” by the older camareros (imagine in a British pub one of the older barman saying to one of the younger ones “Hey boy, get those drinks out now” and you get the idea of the strict hierarchy that operates in the world of the camareros. In my own bar in the barrio the oldest camarero there, Juan Antonio, helps prepare the tapas, a job usually done by the owner. The young guy who shares his shift gets to sweep the floor) they must really want to do it. You should also keep in mind that it is very rare to see a camarero in his sixties. A good camarero can reckon on having thirty years at the most in his job. The lucky ones end up as owners of their own bars. The others? Maybe there is a rest home somewhere in the north of Spain where they go to retire and talk about the old days. A bit like priests. Except they’re not allowed to marry anybody but they do get to hear confession.

So what would Spain be like if it was run by camareros? For a start you could forget the “jobs-for-life-so-screw-you-mentaltiy” that characterises the attitude of the funcionarios. If can’t do your job, the criteria being that there is somebody out there somewhere who is lacking something, then don’t bother turning up for work on Monday. Foreign policy would be characterised by an mixture of common sense, which they all learned from their mothers in the pueblo, and outright obscenity. It brings a smile to my face to think of Spain’s representative in the United Nations admonishing the world’s leaders with “¿Gillipollas, que coño haceis?” or “¡Me cago en la madre le parió!” I’m afraid that I can’t translate any of these words on the grounds of decency but trust me, they make their point. Forcefully. I can’t say for certain that the Spanish navy would once again command the respect of its enemies but at least its ships wouldn’t sink at the first sound of gunfire and if you wanted an amphibious landing backed up by tanks, jets, missiles, heavily-armed marines and submarines wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic. No problem. You’re the customer. Dime.