Of Metaphors and Meat

The doors of the train opened and the beggar got on. He was well dressed; jeans, a jacket, clean shaven, no obvious signs of mental illness. But I knew he was a beggar by the way he stood at the end of the carriage. Like an actor walking onto stage, he took up his position, composed himself and began to speak.
-Disculpen las molestias señores y señoras. Estoy de paro mas de un año por una enfermedad muy grave. Tengo una familia y comemos poco y mal. Les pido unas monedas para aliviar sus hambre. Disculpen las molestias y muchas gracias (Forgive the interruption, ladies and gentlemen. I have been unemployed for over a year due to a serious illness. I have a family and we eat little and badly. I ask you for some money to relieve their hunger. Forgive the interruption and thank you.)

As I may have said before Spanish is an expressionless language. It is spoken, with the possible exception of parts of Galicia and Asturias, in a monotone. If I had a cent for every time a Spaniard spoke to me in a crowded room without realising that he was talking to me I would have approximately 3 euros and 78 cents. Another exception are the beggars. They speak in a singsong voice that stands in contrast to the castellano spoken in Madrid. No one would think of making fun of them for this. Begging, if it is to be done properly, has to have a story and the proper delivery. Had Cervantes been on that train he would have at least recognised the beggar as something that had not changed since the seventeenth century.

I would claim that begging in Spain, while low on the social totem pole, does not carry the same stigma that it carries in Britain. After all, shitty as it is, it is a job. Some people sit behind a desk all day to earn their wage. Others kneel motionless with their hands stretched out in front of them for hours at a time. The pay is not as good and the pension scheme is limited but it does put money in your hand and if there is a Spanish word for “jakey” I have not yet come across it. Therefore as a job it is permissible to display publicly stumps of missing limbs, festering sores and babes in arms as your means of standing out from the run-of-the-mill beggars that fill the streets of Madrid.

If this sounds heartless then you are very likely not Spanish. A person standing in a street asking for money in Spain is, well, a person standing in a street asking for money. In Spain. It is not a damning indictment of the failure of modern society to care for its citizens. It is not a cry to action. Politicians do not pledge themselves to sweeping initiatives. Targets are not set. Task forces are not set up. Editorials are not written. People’s hearts are not moved. The famous do not appear on TV specials. Here begging is not a sign that things have gone wrong in the world. It is simply, that for one reason or another, someone has decided to stand in the street and ask for money. And if, as I have seen, you walk out of a supermarket and see someone begging, you can reach into your bag , take out the loaf of bread you have just bought and hand it to the beggar if you so wish.

I would argue that because Spain is not a country of symbols, signs and metaphors that such an attitude exists. I will now say that, of course, I am not claiming that Spain is a country without signs, symbols and metaphors. Quite clearly it is. If you are wondering what all that meant, you are very probably Spanish. To be British is, I feel, to live in a world of, if not symbols, then at the very least clues. We dance around our conversations using, for the average Spaniard (the very phrase “average Spaniard” while being a useful symbol for us is an invitation to the Spanish to argue long into the night ending, usually, with blaming it all on the Catalans), far too many conditional tenses, the suffix “ish”, the phrase “I gather...” and the word hated by all Spaniards, “indeed”. A painting by Turner for us can never be simply a big ship being pulled by a little ship; while in Spain a man walking into bar wearing a big floppy hat, a cape and a sword is just that. Contrast that to Glasgow where the drinkers will ignore the details of the big floppy hat and the cape and concentrate on the sword and all that it represents.

When pointed out to him he was standing in the Calle Ortega y Gassett, a noted Spanish philosopher, someone I know very well shouted in a very loud voice “That’s ridiculous! There’s no such thing as a Spanish philosopher!” My girlfriend, far from being offended, simply laughed and agreed with him. What, for us, the lovers of signs, represented a social gaffe was, for her, simply stating the obvious. To be a philosopher is to read the symbols with which we surround ourselves. In a country where the butchers in late autumn put pictures of cuts of meat in their windows under the title “La Semana de Matanza” (“Massacre Week”) what is there left to decode?