My friend John has been here for over fifteen years so I reckoned if anyone would know it would be him.
-Why, I asked him, do people in Madrid put covers on their books?
I’d noticed on the metro that a lot of the readers wrap covers on their books, usually pages from newspapers (not the brown paper my dad used for my school reading books).
-That’s a throwback from the days of Franco, he told me, when you didn’t want other people to know what you were reading.
I thought:
-Franco’s been dead for a long time. What are people wanting to hide now?
Looking at the books on the metro without newspaper covers, I’d say a lot of Ken Follett. Not only do the book shops have his novels, you can also buy them in the quioscos (where you buy your newspapers, DVDs and models of the world’s taxis, “This week: Albania”) and they are even given away free by Spain’s equivalent of The Guardian newspaper. Which is a lot more than The Guardian would do. The books I see being read have titles such as The Thief of Donkeys, The House of Carrots and The Holy Sisterhood of Socks. I exaggerate but, as my observations on the metro tell me, not by much.
What people are clearly not reading are the books that they are told to read by Metro de Madrid. Under the title Libros a la Calle (Books to the Street) most carriages have stuck by the doors an illustrated poster with an excerpt from the chapter of a book. Where the text ends in an ellipsis there is a strap line encouraging us to search for the book and read it in its entirety. These admonitions vary. It might be Leer nos hace libres. Y mas felices (Reading make us free. And happier) or Si quieres conocer, pregúntale a los libros (If you want to know, ask books). The posters with poetry always end with Ni un día sin poesia (Not a day without poetry). Looking at what they do read it is clear that the people of Madrid, at least those who use the metro, don’t want to be free, happy or ask a book a question and it is very possible that months go by without even a hint of poetry.
This state of affairs, at the very least, is unnecessary. One of the many reasons for living in Madrid is that the metro system has its own library system. Even better, they do not call the libraries “branches”, instead they are called “modules”. I would have preferred “pod” myself but I imagine we will have to wait until the 22nd century before every bus stop has its book pod. There are eleven of these modules and they go under the name of Bibliometro. They are self-contained, sealed, I have to use the word “pod”, pods that stand on the stations’ platforms, curved and asymmetrical in the modern fashion, staffed by two Biblionauts (I’ve made that word up), usually women, and they are open Monday to Friday from 1.30 to 8.00. You can take out one book at a time (consult the computer screen on the outside of the module because you cannot browse as the books are kept inside under the watchful eyes of the Biblionauts). Everything about them says “speed”, “efficiency” and, of course, “books”. They even have their own logo, a B on its side, two trains head-on in each of the semicircles.
I decided that it was time to play my part to get more books to the street. I would apply for my library card and read the books I had seen on the posters. I decided to go to my “surface” library staffed largely by Elois (I’ve made that up to but I suppose you saw it coming) here in the barrio. With my reader’s card I would be able to take out books from there and from the realms of the Morlocks (Oh God, there’s a whole novel here where youthful and innocent Eloi librarians in bikinis are eaten by subterranean Morlock librarians who are then burnt alive). What can I tell you about my experiences so far? To begin with, it is pleasing and reassuring to note that public libraries in Spain are as much a refuge for the timid, the socially inept, people who are “special” and those that are quite clearly insane as they are in Britain. I’m talking here about the staff and the public. It’s possible that libraries here have an even more important role in this respect. Given the level of noise and physical contact in any public space in Spain, libraries give their staff an environment where they can be free of the compulsion to curl up into a ball, rock back and forth while making soothing animal noises. As for the books, I do have some slight criticisms. The book I took out on the writer Miguel Unamuno had no details (date of acquisition, cataloguing information etc.) on the back of the title page nor did it have the book number stamped on page 21. Some pages had been stamped with the libraries’ stamp of the Communidad de Madrid but apparently at random and after page 43 the person charged with this task had simply given up. Most serious of all, not only was the book cover not stuck with sellotape there was no clear plastic cover on it. I’m happy to say that the book I borrowed that same day from the Bibliometro in Nuevos Ministerios, La lluvia amarilla (The Yellow Rain) by Julio Llamazares, had a stout cover on it and was clearly identified with a very fetching sticker. However, once again, it was let down by a lack of cataloguing details. Those of you accustomed to the rigours of the British public libraries’ cataloguing protocols will share my disappointment. The rest of you will not give a monkey’s.
I have to add that I have also been disappointed by the reaction of my fellow Madrileños. Basically, there hasn’t been one. However, it is early days yet and I’m sure I can expect a letter of thanks from the President of the Communidad any day. At the very least, a cheery wave from the driver of the next metro train I go on and a jolly:
-Hoy un día mas bueno y acuerdate, ¡ni un día sin poesia!
(Turned out nice again and remember, not a day without poetry!)
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Spain. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Spain. Mostrar todas las entradas
miércoles, 19 de marzo de 2008
martes, 5 de febrero de 2008
Ooops seems to be the hardest word
There must come a time in the life of every country when it says a collective “Ooops” For Britain this may well have happened in 1956. Responding to Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, British paratroops were dropped into the El Gamil airfield and told to stay there until Nasser stopped nationalising the Suez Canal. Nobody in the British government had thought of telling the Americans. After all, we were still an imperial power and what was the point of being an imperial power if you couldn’t drop paratroops onto Egyptian airfields. It wasn’t long before the Americans found out what we were doing. Paratroopers are lovely people but when dropped onto enemy airfields they tend to be rather noisy and, thus, annoy the neighbours. The phone in 10 Downing Street duly rang. The one that connected with the Oval Office in the White House. Anthony Eden, the British Prime Minister, picked it up and was heard to say:
-Oh, so you’re not going to support us?
Ooops.
Here in Spain they have just had a competition. The Spanish Olympic Committee decided it would a good idea if the Spanish national anthem had some words written for it. I think they felt it was undignified for Spanish athletes to be seen humming to the national anthem when they won medals. It never occurred to them that there may have been very good reasons why no one has written words for it, namely it would be impossible to find two Spaniards who would agree that:
a. it was a good idea for the national anthem to have words,
and
b. it was a good idea to have a national anthem.
Oh, and nobody thought of telling the king (you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?).
But the Spanish Olympic Committee not only went ahead with the competition they even said whichever of the Five (Four? Three?) Tenors was not dead would sing the winning entry. A winner was announced. The lyric was published in the newspapers and it became very clear to the Spanish Olympic Committee why no one should hold a competition like this in Spain. Ever. The Catalans refused to sing anything with the word “Spain” in it. The Basques didn't even return the Committee’s phone calls and as for the rest of Spain there was a unanimous rejection of the winning entry on the grounds that they would all have to agree, unanimously, that it was, in fact, the winning entry. “Unanimous” is not a word that comes easily to Spaniards unless they are disagreeing about the same thing at the same time.
The entry formerly known as the winning entry was, when I read it, very innocuous. It spoke of the mountains of Spain, tall and green, and the sea, wet and blue, and the sun, big and very hot. And that was pretty much it. I suppose it was this very innocuousness that attracted the Spanish Olympic Committee. “How could such a song offend anybody?”, they probably thought. It makes me wonder if any of them was actually Spanish. As the storm of protest grew the Spanish Olympic Committee cancelled the competition claiming that whichever of the Two (One?) Tenors was still alive was refusing to sing the winning entry (possibly in protest at the absence of any mention of the canals of Spain) and the man who wrote it said he was so upset that he would never write another national anthem again.
And nobody said “Ooops”.
In 1492 Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel. Promised that their religion and way of life would be respected, the muslim defenders handed over the keys to the city. In 1499 Cardinal Cisneros ordered that the books be taken out from the city’s muslim university and burnt in the town square. 700 years of learning went up in smoke. In 1898, with the American fleet in Cuban waters, Admiral Pascual Cervera ordered his fleet out of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba. His plan, if he had one, was to order his boats out of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba and see them sunk by the Americans. In this he was successful -within two hours all his boats were sunk and four hundred years of Spanish rule in Cuba was ended. In July 1936 General Jose Sanjurjo, one of the principal conspirators of the right wing uprising, stepped onto the plane taking him to Burgos. The pilot warned him that he had too much luggage for such a small plane. Sanjurjo ignored the warning. A few minutes after takeoff the plane crashed and Sanjurjo was killed. In September of the same year Franco was named leader of the nationalist cause. There may have been discussion about any or all of the above but, as far as I know, nobody has ever said “Ooops”.
Am I going as far as to say that the Spanish are incapable of saying “Ooops”? Quite clearly, yes. What I am not sure about is whether this is a good or a bad thing. Britain has a long tradition of saying “Ooops” and yet we can still regard Captain Scott as a hero (“Sledges pulled by ponies? What a jolly good idea. And at the South Pole, you say? Even better!”) and claim that the evacuation at Dunkirk was a victory. Which it was. Therefore, we get the best of both worlds: a spate of national hand-wringing and some very good documentaries on the BBC. The Spanish don’t get to watch good documentaries but neither do they indulge in acts of national hand-wringing. They have survived a loss of empire, massive political and social upheavals, a rocky transition to democracy and by a stunning act of national stubbornness defied the attempts of an unelected body to foist on them a national anthem to be sung when the synchronised swimming team wins gold in Beijing. But a bit of Spanish hand-wringing might have been worth it to see the king, opening whichever large building he was opening that day, turning to the person next to him, very possibly the queen, and saying, as the officials and public broke into song as the national anthem struck up:
-No one told me about this.
Ooops.
-Oh, so you’re not going to support us?
Ooops.
Here in Spain they have just had a competition. The Spanish Olympic Committee decided it would a good idea if the Spanish national anthem had some words written for it. I think they felt it was undignified for Spanish athletes to be seen humming to the national anthem when they won medals. It never occurred to them that there may have been very good reasons why no one has written words for it, namely it would be impossible to find two Spaniards who would agree that:
a. it was a good idea for the national anthem to have words,
and
b. it was a good idea to have a national anthem.
Oh, and nobody thought of telling the king (you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?).
But the Spanish Olympic Committee not only went ahead with the competition they even said whichever of the Five (Four? Three?) Tenors was not dead would sing the winning entry. A winner was announced. The lyric was published in the newspapers and it became very clear to the Spanish Olympic Committee why no one should hold a competition like this in Spain. Ever. The Catalans refused to sing anything with the word “Spain” in it. The Basques didn't even return the Committee’s phone calls and as for the rest of Spain there was a unanimous rejection of the winning entry on the grounds that they would all have to agree, unanimously, that it was, in fact, the winning entry. “Unanimous” is not a word that comes easily to Spaniards unless they are disagreeing about the same thing at the same time.
The entry formerly known as the winning entry was, when I read it, very innocuous. It spoke of the mountains of Spain, tall and green, and the sea, wet and blue, and the sun, big and very hot. And that was pretty much it. I suppose it was this very innocuousness that attracted the Spanish Olympic Committee. “How could such a song offend anybody?”, they probably thought. It makes me wonder if any of them was actually Spanish. As the storm of protest grew the Spanish Olympic Committee cancelled the competition claiming that whichever of the Two (One?) Tenors was still alive was refusing to sing the winning entry (possibly in protest at the absence of any mention of the canals of Spain) and the man who wrote it said he was so upset that he would never write another national anthem again.
And nobody said “Ooops”.
In 1492 Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel. Promised that their religion and way of life would be respected, the muslim defenders handed over the keys to the city. In 1499 Cardinal Cisneros ordered that the books be taken out from the city’s muslim university and burnt in the town square. 700 years of learning went up in smoke. In 1898, with the American fleet in Cuban waters, Admiral Pascual Cervera ordered his fleet out of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba. His plan, if he had one, was to order his boats out of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba and see them sunk by the Americans. In this he was successful -within two hours all his boats were sunk and four hundred years of Spanish rule in Cuba was ended. In July 1936 General Jose Sanjurjo, one of the principal conspirators of the right wing uprising, stepped onto the plane taking him to Burgos. The pilot warned him that he had too much luggage for such a small plane. Sanjurjo ignored the warning. A few minutes after takeoff the plane crashed and Sanjurjo was killed. In September of the same year Franco was named leader of the nationalist cause. There may have been discussion about any or all of the above but, as far as I know, nobody has ever said “Ooops”.
Am I going as far as to say that the Spanish are incapable of saying “Ooops”? Quite clearly, yes. What I am not sure about is whether this is a good or a bad thing. Britain has a long tradition of saying “Ooops” and yet we can still regard Captain Scott as a hero (“Sledges pulled by ponies? What a jolly good idea. And at the South Pole, you say? Even better!”) and claim that the evacuation at Dunkirk was a victory. Which it was. Therefore, we get the best of both worlds: a spate of national hand-wringing and some very good documentaries on the BBC. The Spanish don’t get to watch good documentaries but neither do they indulge in acts of national hand-wringing. They have survived a loss of empire, massive political and social upheavals, a rocky transition to democracy and by a stunning act of national stubbornness defied the attempts of an unelected body to foist on them a national anthem to be sung when the synchronised swimming team wins gold in Beijing. But a bit of Spanish hand-wringing might have been worth it to see the king, opening whichever large building he was opening that day, turning to the person next to him, very possibly the queen, and saying, as the officials and public broke into song as the national anthem struck up:
-No one told me about this.
Ooops.
martes, 15 de enero de 2008
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?
-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?
miércoles, 30 de mayo de 2007
Pandora's Box, and the opening thereof
-Los catalanes huyeron y recorrieron por la universidad. No se pararon hasta cuando estaban en Argüelles. Y por eso los moros enteraron en la ciudad.("The Catalonians fled and ran through the university. They didn't stop until they reached Argüelles. That's how the Moors entered the city")
The guide paused and looked us each in they eye. No one spoke. No comment was made but I knew everyone in the group was thinking the same thing. Except me, who was thinking:
-There's nothing a Spaniard likes doing more than blaming other Spaniards when things get fucked up.
The left blame the right for rampant urban corruption. The right blame the left for the growth of nationalism in the Basque Country. The Madrileños blame the Catalonians for speaking and being Catalonian. And everyone thinks the folk from Seville are great to invite to parties but are just the kind of people who would leave a baby on a bus and forget all about it.
I had gone on a guided tour of what was the site of one of the most important battles in the Spanish Civil War, the Siege of Madrid. From November of 1936 to the early Spring of 1937 the people of Madrid endured daily air raids, artillery bombardment, hunger, cold and the presence of enemy troops on their doorstep. When I write of a doorstep I am not speaking of a collective and metaphorical doorstep but rather of the unsettling feeling of waking up one morning and finding the enemy on your own, and very real, doorstep. Today this battlefield is largely hidden by the modern development of Madrid. Largely hidden, that is, if you ignore the countless bullet holes, bunkers, trenches, artillery emplacements, republican command centres, air raid shelters, craters and battle scarred buildings that litter much of the city.
It took a good four hours to walk through the site of the battlefield, the ten of us in the group and the guide. To be honest I had pretty worked out the sequence of events from my own visit a few months before and reading Jorge Reverte's book La Battalla de Madrid. But it's always interesting to start a visit to what is a site of major historical importance and the guide begins by saying:
-Voy a hablar de la historia del sitio. No voy a opinar a las actos de las protagonistas ("I'm going to talk about history of the siege. I'm not going to voice an opinion about what the different sides did"). It's hard to imagine a guide at Culloden or Bannockburn saying the same thing. We just assume that what we are going to hear is history and not opinion. But you have to remember that in a country like Spain, British authors who write about the Spanish Civil War are more trusted than Spanish authors because they are:
a) Not Spanish and
b) They are British.
Spain is a country where not only was history written by the winners but, unlike the Scots, the losers did not get to set it to music. Spain is a country where opinions matter greatly, particularly when you are leading a group whose members may have grandparents who shot at each other.
The guided tour took us from the Puente de los Franceses where the men of the International Brigades held back wave after wave of attacks by the legionaries and the moors, crack troops of Franco's army; the Facultad de Filosofía where the men barricaded the windows with the works of Hegel, Plato and Aristotle; the Clinico where the men fought from ward to ward and where the English poet John Cornford manhandled his Lewis machine gun across the blasted landscape and knocked seven kinds of shit out of the fascists; all the way to Argüelles where General Miaja, dismissed by his contemporaries as mediocre and devoid of imagination but who gave Franco his first defeat, pulled his revolver on the fleeing Catalonians and made them turn and face the charging moors. And how many monuments did I count to these, and many, many more, examples of devotion to the democratically elected government of Spain? Let me put it this way: there is a street in Madrid named after one of Franco's Generals, General Yagüe, whose Nationalist troops, after their capture of the Republican city of Badajoz, massacred between 1,500 and 4,000 civilians, many of the men being castrated before they were killed.
There is one very good reason for this collective amnesia about what happened here in the Winter of '36. After the death of Franco the politicians negotiating the shape of the new democratic Spain decided it would be better if no one mentioned the war. Nobody would go to jail; nobody would have to account for what they had done; Spain could join the family of democratic nations and everyone would be happy. As for the thousands of families who didn't know where their father was buried, well, no one bothered to ask them. Franco had made sure the victims of the forces loyal to the Republic were exhumed and reburied with honours. As for the socialist mayors of the little pueblos outside of Toledo; the leaders of agricultural reform movements; or the people with the appellido Rojo or Red, they could stay where they were, in mass graves, many of which still remain unopened.
There have recently been a few attempts to affect a cure for this amnesia. The socialist government has passed a Ley de la Memoria Histórica. Amongst other things it will allow the families of those sentenced by Franco's tribunals to have these sentences annulled. This will include those sentenced to death. The Partido Popular (the party of the right) has called it "innecesaria, extemporánea, errónea, hipócrita, falsaria y jurídicamente irrelevante" ("unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant"). I'm not quite sure what they would have made of the family of Gregorio Mazariegos Sebastian. In 2006 they had him, and his seven companions, lifted carefully out of the mass grave where their francoist executioners had left them on the 14th of October 1936, just outside the town of Hornillos de Cerrato. Their coffins, draped with the flag of the Second Republic, were then buried, following a public ceremony, in the local cemetery. Presumably they would have said "We're very sorry for your loss but we think what you did was unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant". Gregorio was 40 years old. He worked as a labourer and he had seven children.
The guide paused and looked us each in they eye. No one spoke. No comment was made but I knew everyone in the group was thinking the same thing. Except me, who was thinking:
-There's nothing a Spaniard likes doing more than blaming other Spaniards when things get fucked up.
The left blame the right for rampant urban corruption. The right blame the left for the growth of nationalism in the Basque Country. The Madrileños blame the Catalonians for speaking and being Catalonian. And everyone thinks the folk from Seville are great to invite to parties but are just the kind of people who would leave a baby on a bus and forget all about it.
I had gone on a guided tour of what was the site of one of the most important battles in the Spanish Civil War, the Siege of Madrid. From November of 1936 to the early Spring of 1937 the people of Madrid endured daily air raids, artillery bombardment, hunger, cold and the presence of enemy troops on their doorstep. When I write of a doorstep I am not speaking of a collective and metaphorical doorstep but rather of the unsettling feeling of waking up one morning and finding the enemy on your own, and very real, doorstep. Today this battlefield is largely hidden by the modern development of Madrid. Largely hidden, that is, if you ignore the countless bullet holes, bunkers, trenches, artillery emplacements, republican command centres, air raid shelters, craters and battle scarred buildings that litter much of the city.
It took a good four hours to walk through the site of the battlefield, the ten of us in the group and the guide. To be honest I had pretty worked out the sequence of events from my own visit a few months before and reading Jorge Reverte's book La Battalla de Madrid. But it's always interesting to start a visit to what is a site of major historical importance and the guide begins by saying:
-Voy a hablar de la historia del sitio. No voy a opinar a las actos de las protagonistas ("I'm going to talk about history of the siege. I'm not going to voice an opinion about what the different sides did"). It's hard to imagine a guide at Culloden or Bannockburn saying the same thing. We just assume that what we are going to hear is history and not opinion. But you have to remember that in a country like Spain, British authors who write about the Spanish Civil War are more trusted than Spanish authors because they are:
a) Not Spanish and
b) They are British.
Spain is a country where not only was history written by the winners but, unlike the Scots, the losers did not get to set it to music. Spain is a country where opinions matter greatly, particularly when you are leading a group whose members may have grandparents who shot at each other.
The guided tour took us from the Puente de los Franceses where the men of the International Brigades held back wave after wave of attacks by the legionaries and the moors, crack troops of Franco's army; the Facultad de Filosofía where the men barricaded the windows with the works of Hegel, Plato and Aristotle; the Clinico where the men fought from ward to ward and where the English poet John Cornford manhandled his Lewis machine gun across the blasted landscape and knocked seven kinds of shit out of the fascists; all the way to Argüelles where General Miaja, dismissed by his contemporaries as mediocre and devoid of imagination but who gave Franco his first defeat, pulled his revolver on the fleeing Catalonians and made them turn and face the charging moors. And how many monuments did I count to these, and many, many more, examples of devotion to the democratically elected government of Spain? Let me put it this way: there is a street in Madrid named after one of Franco's Generals, General Yagüe, whose Nationalist troops, after their capture of the Republican city of Badajoz, massacred between 1,500 and 4,000 civilians, many of the men being castrated before they were killed.
There is one very good reason for this collective amnesia about what happened here in the Winter of '36. After the death of Franco the politicians negotiating the shape of the new democratic Spain decided it would be better if no one mentioned the war. Nobody would go to jail; nobody would have to account for what they had done; Spain could join the family of democratic nations and everyone would be happy. As for the thousands of families who didn't know where their father was buried, well, no one bothered to ask them. Franco had made sure the victims of the forces loyal to the Republic were exhumed and reburied with honours. As for the socialist mayors of the little pueblos outside of Toledo; the leaders of agricultural reform movements; or the people with the appellido Rojo or Red, they could stay where they were, in mass graves, many of which still remain unopened.
There have recently been a few attempts to affect a cure for this amnesia. The socialist government has passed a Ley de la Memoria Histórica. Amongst other things it will allow the families of those sentenced by Franco's tribunals to have these sentences annulled. This will include those sentenced to death. The Partido Popular (the party of the right) has called it "innecesaria, extemporánea, errónea, hipócrita, falsaria y jurídicamente irrelevante" ("unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant"). I'm not quite sure what they would have made of the family of Gregorio Mazariegos Sebastian. In 2006 they had him, and his seven companions, lifted carefully out of the mass grave where their francoist executioners had left them on the 14th of October 1936, just outside the town of Hornillos de Cerrato. Their coffins, draped with the flag of the Second Republic, were then buried, following a public ceremony, in the local cemetery. Presumably they would have said "We're very sorry for your loss but we think what you did was unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant". Gregorio was 40 years old. He worked as a labourer and he had seven children.
domingo, 27 de mayo de 2007
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?
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?
Marble on the Brain
We were meeting friends of my girlfriend in a bar in the Santiago Bernabeu, home of the football team Real Madrid. Now whatever you might think of Real Madrid, and the camareros in my local bar, fans of their arch rivals Atletico Madrid, would certainly have some strong feelings about them, they are not short of a bob or two. Although lacking the important silverware in the trophy cabinet over the past few years, they have made some very neat property deals. Very, very neat property deals. To put it bluntly, they have shitloads of money. Now, a dedicated fan of Real Madrid might ask themselves why, with all this money, can’t they buy a team that is just that, a team and not a bunch of talented individuals who play as a bunch of talented individuals? I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but think, as I stood in the bar, eating baby squid in their own ink, “Why do I feel as if I’m in a brothel?”.
I suppose it could have been the amount of marble used in the bar. Apart from the chairs and tables, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t marble. The bar, the walls, the floor - everything was made of marble. Now, I’ve got nothing against marble. In fact, it’s a lovely material which in the hands of a Michelangelo can express the very essence of what it is to be human. In the hands the of the designer of the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu it said quite simply “We have shitloads of money”. It may have been the pictures on the walls. The visual presentation of food, in the hands of a crack advertising team, will tend to emphasis its sensuality, its eroticism. Everything that a brothel, for example, where sex is simply another commercial transaction, can never do. Looking at the photographs on the walls of the bar it appeared that Real Madrid had given someone a disposable camera and a selection of plastic food. Out of focus and underexposed, populated with blurry images of what you could only guess were Spanish celebrities, they would have shamed the greasiest of greasy spoon cafes. In their own way the photographs were also saying “We have shitloads of money” while adding “And we don’t care”.
You see, I have a theory about the Spanish. They don’t have the shame gene. For example, a British person running for a train will, when the bus or train pulls away, break into that special slowing-down jog which says to the world “I wasn’t really running for it. I was just exercising a little”. A Spanish person, on the other hand, will, as the train is moving, run even faster, press the button on the door in an attempt to open it and when that doesn’t work will hit the door. In fact they only stop their attempt to get on the train because it is accelerating away at sixty kilometres per hour. At traffic lights, people who have missed their bus, will knock on the bus doors very, very loudly to attract the attention of the driver. Sometimes they even have conversations. To this day I haven’t found a way of embarrassing a Spaniard in public. It was this lack of public shame that lay at the root of my reaction to the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu and nowhere was this clearer then when Guillermo, one of my girlfriend’s friends, took me on a tour of the place. There, on the way to the gents, just where there was no need for it, was a huge fucking chandelier.
I sometimes think that the Spanish got to the eighteenth century and everything went a little weird. On the one hand you have a genius such as Goya hiding his pictures of nude women from the Inquisition (imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury turning up on William Blake’s doorstep telling him that the neighbours were a little bit upset at him and Mrs. Blake sitting naked out in the garden and if they didn’t stop it he’d have to, well, burn him; all this would be done in embarrassed, low voices, with no eye contact and William Blake saying “Yes, yes. I quite see what you are saying.”) and on the other the wholehearted embrace given by Spanish culture to the Baroque. An embrace which can be summed up in a simple phrase: “huge fucking chandeliers”. It’s as if the Spanish all went on a day trip to France and despite the very careful explanations given by the French on the nature of form and function, the importance of achieving balance in the elements of a building, they all got off the bus in Madrid, turned to each other and as a people, "el pueblo de España", said with one voice:
-Huge fucking chandeliers.
You only have to go to Zaragoza, up in the north east in Aragón, to see the Spanish baroque in full flow. On the spot where the Romans had built the forum, the public expression of the city’s civic values, and where later the Moslems would build their mosque, the visual expression of a faith that shunned images, Saint James built himself a cosy, little gang hut with twigs on the spot where Mary had appeared to him and gave him a nice statue of herself. Eighteen hundred years later the Spanish came along, kicked over his gang hut and built a marble Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar the size of Hampden stadium. Clearly I’m exaggerating here (the gang hut “burned down”). But only slightly. It’s the kind of building that, if transplanted to presbyterian Edinburgh, Scots would ignore very, very pointedly. As in: “Look how carefully I am ignoring this building”. It’s that baroque.
After eating our baby squid in their own ink and the roasted red peppers, we went through to the night club. After my reaction to the bar I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I have to admit I was impressed by what I saw. The night club with its dance floor and bars had been built on a deck that extended out into and over the pitch. It was open air and you could look up into the stands and the night sky above. It had begun to rain, that gentle, warm, summer rain that falls in Madrid in July. I turned to my girl friend and her friends to say
-"Impresionante. ¿Verdad?"
But there was no one there. They had vanished. I looked around me and saw them, five Spaniards, adults, clustered under a plastic column that could just about give shelter to a small child.
-"Llove." (It’s raining) They said as if the rain was lashing down in torrents. If they’d had umbrellas they would have opened them and probably said:
-"Raro ver a lluvia tan fuerte en julio, ¿no?"
Which could be roughly translated as
-Unseasonable weather for the time of year, isn’t it?
Shameless. Utterly shameless.
I suppose it could have been the amount of marble used in the bar. Apart from the chairs and tables, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t marble. The bar, the walls, the floor - everything was made of marble. Now, I’ve got nothing against marble. In fact, it’s a lovely material which in the hands of a Michelangelo can express the very essence of what it is to be human. In the hands the of the designer of the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu it said quite simply “We have shitloads of money”. It may have been the pictures on the walls. The visual presentation of food, in the hands of a crack advertising team, will tend to emphasis its sensuality, its eroticism. Everything that a brothel, for example, where sex is simply another commercial transaction, can never do. Looking at the photographs on the walls of the bar it appeared that Real Madrid had given someone a disposable camera and a selection of plastic food. Out of focus and underexposed, populated with blurry images of what you could only guess were Spanish celebrities, they would have shamed the greasiest of greasy spoon cafes. In their own way the photographs were also saying “We have shitloads of money” while adding “And we don’t care”.
You see, I have a theory about the Spanish. They don’t have the shame gene. For example, a British person running for a train will, when the bus or train pulls away, break into that special slowing-down jog which says to the world “I wasn’t really running for it. I was just exercising a little”. A Spanish person, on the other hand, will, as the train is moving, run even faster, press the button on the door in an attempt to open it and when that doesn’t work will hit the door. In fact they only stop their attempt to get on the train because it is accelerating away at sixty kilometres per hour. At traffic lights, people who have missed their bus, will knock on the bus doors very, very loudly to attract the attention of the driver. Sometimes they even have conversations. To this day I haven’t found a way of embarrassing a Spaniard in public. It was this lack of public shame that lay at the root of my reaction to the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu and nowhere was this clearer then when Guillermo, one of my girlfriend’s friends, took me on a tour of the place. There, on the way to the gents, just where there was no need for it, was a huge fucking chandelier.
I sometimes think that the Spanish got to the eighteenth century and everything went a little weird. On the one hand you have a genius such as Goya hiding his pictures of nude women from the Inquisition (imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury turning up on William Blake’s doorstep telling him that the neighbours were a little bit upset at him and Mrs. Blake sitting naked out in the garden and if they didn’t stop it he’d have to, well, burn him; all this would be done in embarrassed, low voices, with no eye contact and William Blake saying “Yes, yes. I quite see what you are saying.”) and on the other the wholehearted embrace given by Spanish culture to the Baroque. An embrace which can be summed up in a simple phrase: “huge fucking chandeliers”. It’s as if the Spanish all went on a day trip to France and despite the very careful explanations given by the French on the nature of form and function, the importance of achieving balance in the elements of a building, they all got off the bus in Madrid, turned to each other and as a people, "el pueblo de España", said with one voice:
-Huge fucking chandeliers.
You only have to go to Zaragoza, up in the north east in Aragón, to see the Spanish baroque in full flow. On the spot where the Romans had built the forum, the public expression of the city’s civic values, and where later the Moslems would build their mosque, the visual expression of a faith that shunned images, Saint James built himself a cosy, little gang hut with twigs on the spot where Mary had appeared to him and gave him a nice statue of herself. Eighteen hundred years later the Spanish came along, kicked over his gang hut and built a marble Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar the size of Hampden stadium. Clearly I’m exaggerating here (the gang hut “burned down”). But only slightly. It’s the kind of building that, if transplanted to presbyterian Edinburgh, Scots would ignore very, very pointedly. As in: “Look how carefully I am ignoring this building”. It’s that baroque.
After eating our baby squid in their own ink and the roasted red peppers, we went through to the night club. After my reaction to the bar I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I have to admit I was impressed by what I saw. The night club with its dance floor and bars had been built on a deck that extended out into and over the pitch. It was open air and you could look up into the stands and the night sky above. It had begun to rain, that gentle, warm, summer rain that falls in Madrid in July. I turned to my girl friend and her friends to say
-"Impresionante. ¿Verdad?"
But there was no one there. They had vanished. I looked around me and saw them, five Spaniards, adults, clustered under a plastic column that could just about give shelter to a small child.
-"Llove." (It’s raining) They said as if the rain was lashing down in torrents. If they’d had umbrellas they would have opened them and probably said:
-"Raro ver a lluvia tan fuerte en julio, ¿no?"
Which could be roughly translated as
-Unseasonable weather for the time of year, isn’t it?
Shameless. Utterly shameless.
A Long Day's Journey to the Doctor's
I looked at my finger. I’m not a doctor but I could tell that it wasn’t meant to be that red and swollen. Not being a doctor also means that my knowledge of anatomy is limited but I was sure that a finger should be able to bend at the joints. Otherwise the human race would have evolved into a race of finger-pointers rather than the creator of clay pots, serge worsted material and spaceships. With a heavy heart I realised I would have to pay a visit to the ambulatorio or doctors’ surgery.
My heart was not heavy because the quality of public health care in Spain is poor. Far from it. Without an appointment I was seen by the nurse who then contacted the emergency doctor. Within half an hour I had my diagnosis of an infected finger and a prescription for antibiotics. However, I do want to add that being Spanish neither the nurse nor the doctor could hide their disgust at the state of my finger, the nurse actually taking a step backwards and saying words to the effect of:
-That’s not right is it?
No, the reason my heart was heavy was that I knew I would have to cope with the Spanish inability to cope with a queue.
I’m not going to claim that I’ve made a startling discovery here. The difficult relationship that Spaniards have with queues of any description is well-known. For some reason little old women (being Spain there is a definite shortage of tall old women) are the worst offenders. If violence doesn’t work (being small they are closer to your vital organs and a blow to your kidneys with a walking stick can leave you paralysed long enough for them to skip in front of you) they resort to persuasion.
-¿Te molestará si paso adelante? They’ll say. Solo tengo tres cosas (Do you mind if I go in front of you? I’ve only got three things).
Other Spanish women are never taken in by this and, without looking at the little old woman, will reply:
-Pero señora, yo también (But madam, so have I).
I would claim, however, that I have identified a major difference between Spanish and British culture. The British see a problem and write strong letters of complaint to the newspapers. The Spanish look at a problem and turn to the person next to them and talk about it. So, instead of organising a tannoy system that announces your name and the doctor you are to see; putting outside the doctor’s room a screen that shows your number and place in the queue; even sticking a handwritten list of all the patients due to see that doctor that day, the Spanish rely on three words without which Spain would grind inexorably to a halt:
-¿Eres el ultimo? (Are you the last?).
If you stand still long enough in Spain someone will ask you this. It’s as if Spaniards rather than see queues in the way that the British do, sense them with a gland that we don’t have. So that, if you are, say, standing near but not actually in a shop then to a Spaniard you may be waiting to be served. To avoid the possibility of jumping this queue, which of course does not exist in the sense that we would think of it (certain scientists are beginning to argue that these queues do exist but in an alternative and theoretical universe), they will ask:
-¿Eres el ultimo?
The person to whom this is asked may not be the last person and, as in the ambulatorio when I returned to have the finger lanced, may then indicate a very elderly woman who is quite clearly at the opposite end of the waiting room and, in fact, is sitting at the door of a different doctor. However, as any Spaniard, will assure you, she is, in fact, waiting in the queue. Your queue. Up to now the waiting room has been fairly quiet. However, with this simple question the flood gates open. People compare how long they have waited. People who are in the wrong queue are guided to the right one, rather unnecessary in my opinion since it appears that if you stand anywhere in Spain you are, in a very real sense, already in your queue. Surprise is expressed that surprise is being expressed that one has to wait for such a long time. People in white lab coats stick handwritten notes on doors announcing the closure of a doctor’s room. People, to check if this is the case, knock and then enter the examining room, presumably to the surprise of the doctor and patient still in there. Voices are raised. Chaos threatens and anarchy is only avoided when the doctor comes out with a list of all the patients (where the hell did he get it from?) and gets everyone in order:
-¿Señora Garcia Lopez?
-Aquí.
-Eres la proxima. ¿Señora Rodriguez Zapatero?
-Aqui.
-Eres la proxima. Señor ...
Like schoolchildren caught being naughty by the teacher everyone is suddenly very quiet and you half expect someone to say:
-It wisnae me. Big boys did it an ran away.
God knows how the Germans cope with all of this.
As British people it is very easy to be self-righteous about this. I remember hearing of a friend, a very tall and very statuesque British woman, while waiting in a queue for a bus, being lifted, gently but lifted nonetheless, by a very small Spanish gentleman and put down to one side so that he could get on the bus before her. This is just the sort of behaviour that a century ago would have seen the prompt despatch of a fleet of British naval gunboats and the burning of various small villages by an expeditionary force led by a man with a large moustache. But the more time you spend here the greater the danger of “going native”, which is why British expeditionary forces were always led by men with big moustaches, this being the only guarantee that the small villages would indeed be burnt down. I remember going to the pictures with my girlfriend. We bought our tickets and went to wait outside the cinema. Very quickly I saw that, without meaning to, we had, in fact, skipped the queue and would get into the cinema before people who had been waiting longer than us. I pointed this out to girlfriend who reassured me that we were in the queue, the Spanish queue. I looked around at the people waiting with us, chatty, smiling, relaxed. I could see no one who looked as if they were mentally composing a strong letter of complaint to a newspaper. I could be British and go to the end of the non-existent queue or go in the cinema, sit down and watch the movie like everyone else. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. After all, would you want to be el ultimo?
My heart was not heavy because the quality of public health care in Spain is poor. Far from it. Without an appointment I was seen by the nurse who then contacted the emergency doctor. Within half an hour I had my diagnosis of an infected finger and a prescription for antibiotics. However, I do want to add that being Spanish neither the nurse nor the doctor could hide their disgust at the state of my finger, the nurse actually taking a step backwards and saying words to the effect of:
-That’s not right is it?
No, the reason my heart was heavy was that I knew I would have to cope with the Spanish inability to cope with a queue.
I’m not going to claim that I’ve made a startling discovery here. The difficult relationship that Spaniards have with queues of any description is well-known. For some reason little old women (being Spain there is a definite shortage of tall old women) are the worst offenders. If violence doesn’t work (being small they are closer to your vital organs and a blow to your kidneys with a walking stick can leave you paralysed long enough for them to skip in front of you) they resort to persuasion.
-¿Te molestará si paso adelante? They’ll say. Solo tengo tres cosas (Do you mind if I go in front of you? I’ve only got three things).
Other Spanish women are never taken in by this and, without looking at the little old woman, will reply:
-Pero señora, yo también (But madam, so have I).
I would claim, however, that I have identified a major difference between Spanish and British culture. The British see a problem and write strong letters of complaint to the newspapers. The Spanish look at a problem and turn to the person next to them and talk about it. So, instead of organising a tannoy system that announces your name and the doctor you are to see; putting outside the doctor’s room a screen that shows your number and place in the queue; even sticking a handwritten list of all the patients due to see that doctor that day, the Spanish rely on three words without which Spain would grind inexorably to a halt:
-¿Eres el ultimo? (Are you the last?).
If you stand still long enough in Spain someone will ask you this. It’s as if Spaniards rather than see queues in the way that the British do, sense them with a gland that we don’t have. So that, if you are, say, standing near but not actually in a shop then to a Spaniard you may be waiting to be served. To avoid the possibility of jumping this queue, which of course does not exist in the sense that we would think of it (certain scientists are beginning to argue that these queues do exist but in an alternative and theoretical universe), they will ask:
-¿Eres el ultimo?
The person to whom this is asked may not be the last person and, as in the ambulatorio when I returned to have the finger lanced, may then indicate a very elderly woman who is quite clearly at the opposite end of the waiting room and, in fact, is sitting at the door of a different doctor. However, as any Spaniard, will assure you, she is, in fact, waiting in the queue. Your queue. Up to now the waiting room has been fairly quiet. However, with this simple question the flood gates open. People compare how long they have waited. People who are in the wrong queue are guided to the right one, rather unnecessary in my opinion since it appears that if you stand anywhere in Spain you are, in a very real sense, already in your queue. Surprise is expressed that surprise is being expressed that one has to wait for such a long time. People in white lab coats stick handwritten notes on doors announcing the closure of a doctor’s room. People, to check if this is the case, knock and then enter the examining room, presumably to the surprise of the doctor and patient still in there. Voices are raised. Chaos threatens and anarchy is only avoided when the doctor comes out with a list of all the patients (where the hell did he get it from?) and gets everyone in order:
-¿Señora Garcia Lopez?
-Aquí.
-Eres la proxima. ¿Señora Rodriguez Zapatero?
-Aqui.
-Eres la proxima. Señor ...
Like schoolchildren caught being naughty by the teacher everyone is suddenly very quiet and you half expect someone to say:
-It wisnae me. Big boys did it an ran away.
God knows how the Germans cope with all of this.
As British people it is very easy to be self-righteous about this. I remember hearing of a friend, a very tall and very statuesque British woman, while waiting in a queue for a bus, being lifted, gently but lifted nonetheless, by a very small Spanish gentleman and put down to one side so that he could get on the bus before her. This is just the sort of behaviour that a century ago would have seen the prompt despatch of a fleet of British naval gunboats and the burning of various small villages by an expeditionary force led by a man with a large moustache. But the more time you spend here the greater the danger of “going native”, which is why British expeditionary forces were always led by men with big moustaches, this being the only guarantee that the small villages would indeed be burnt down. I remember going to the pictures with my girlfriend. We bought our tickets and went to wait outside the cinema. Very quickly I saw that, without meaning to, we had, in fact, skipped the queue and would get into the cinema before people who had been waiting longer than us. I pointed this out to girlfriend who reassured me that we were in the queue, the Spanish queue. I looked around at the people waiting with us, chatty, smiling, relaxed. I could see no one who looked as if they were mentally composing a strong letter of complaint to a newspaper. I could be British and go to the end of the non-existent queue or go in the cinema, sit down and watch the movie like everyone else. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a decision to make. After all, would you want to be el ultimo?
Zombie Squid and Shops the Size of Wardrobes
The daftest thing I’ve ever done in Spain was to go into a shop with a recipe for a bean stew. In the great scheme of things this might not seem that important compared to, say, when the guy in charge of building the Titanic said “Is that how much watertight doors cost? Ooooh that’s expensive!”. But context is everything and in Spain walking into a shop which sells Asturian food with a recipe for fabada (which is what I did) is a bit like walking into a fish shop with a picture of a fish and then telling the man who sells the fish how fish work. You see, fabada is much more than just a bean stew. Made well, as it is in Asturia in the north of Spain, it’s everything it shouldn’t be. As a dish made with large white beans, or fabas, smoked morcilla, a little like black pudding but sweeter, chorizo, Spanish sausage, and a lump of pig fat, and a large lump at that, it should lie heavy in your stomach, a warning against eating a pig. And yet it doesn’t. It’s the kind of food you could give to someone recovering from a tropical illness or an elderly relative who needs to eat food that is both nourishing yet very light. You feel that the Asturians had a good look at chicken soup and said “This is nice but can you imagine what it would be like if we made it from a pig?”. In fact this is just what you would expect from a race of people that is slightly insane but like a challenge.
I suppose there is a recipe for fabada. But Spain being what it is, a large country with lots of people who like talking, you just know everyone’s recipe, which they naturally got from their grandmother, is better than, well, everyone else’s. This is the trouble with oral traditions - nobody can agree on anything. I downloaded my recipe from the internet and this is what I handed over to the man in the shop. An Asturian man, wise in the ways of Asturia, above all its greatest export - fabada. A man, doubtless, with a grandmother. In fact, very possibly, with two of them. Each with their own recipe for fabada. When you included his wife, there in the shop with him, an Asturian woman, even wiser in the ways of Asturia, you now had four Asturian grandmothers, all with their own recipe for fabada. True, my recipe had the word “Asturia” printed in a nice shade of blue but the few seconds spent printing it out was a dagger aimed at the collective heart of Asturian grandmothers. But here’s the weird part. The guy in the shop read it. Something which he must have known by heart he read carefully before scurrying off to find the ingredients (given that the shop, like many in Spain, was the size of a wardrobe he didn’t have to scurry far to find them). Each time he came back he placed them on the counter, re-read the recipe, looked at me (I could swear I saw a line of sweat on his upper lip), looked at the recipe once more and resumed his scurrying.
Throughout all this his wife stood in the back of the shop watching me carefully. She said nothing and took no part in the search for ingredients. She did draw a little closer to her husband as he explained the importance of soaking the salted pork before putting it in the fabada. She clearly suspected something was not right: either her husband’s recipe or the tall foreigner who seemed to be taking up an unnaturally large amount of space in her shop. I don’t know if Spanish women think that every foreigner is a spy but I’ve met this reaction quite a few times. I’m in a shop and the husband is serving me. In the back of the shop is his wife, standing, looking at me, not saying a word. Not long after my experience in the Asturian shop I decided I’d like to make pulpo a la Gallega, a wonderful dish of squid served on a bed of boiled potatoes, covered with olive oil and paprika. Like a lot of Spanish food it sounds ridiculously simple and is stunningly delicious. The fishmonger explained the importance of using fresh squid and cooking the potatoes in the water with the squid. His wife folded her arms and stared at me. As I paid for the squid she suddenly said:
-You must put the squid in the boiling water three times before you cook it. In and out. Three times.
I now realize that this was a test because cooking a whole squid is, frankly, a little weird. Following her instructions I dunked it three times in the boiling water. Now, the squid was quite clearly dead before I put it in the water, a shapeless form of tentacles and suckers that slid easily from the serving spoon. However, when I took it out for the first time there, staring at me, was the liveliest dead squid I’d ever seen. It was sitting up on the spoon and if a squid has eyebrows then I’d swear this one had cocked one of them at me. Each time he surfaced from the boiling water his cooked body was firmer then before, the tentacles stuck in their pose of casual disinterest at all that was happening. I guess the fishmonger’s wife thought that if anybody could cope with the Beast From The Deep and then eat it must be alright after all.
Even buying something as ordinary as ham from a woman can be an experience akin to making an appointment with the Inquisition. Below my flat is a fiambría, a shop that sells cold meats. Being Spain this includes the wonderful jamón de serrano. I started going there about six months ago. If the guy served me we’d chat a little about the weather. Being Madrid the conversation tended to go along the lines of:
-Hace calor (It’s hot).
Or:
-Hace mucho calor (It’s very hot).
Or sometimes
-¡Que calor! (It’s bloody hot!).
If his wife served me I always had the feeling she was thinking of calling the police. But by then I was used to this level of suspicion exhibited by married women working in shops the size of wardrobes and thought nothing of it. Then one day as she put away the things I had bought she said:
-¿Como le comes, el jamón? (How do you eat jamón?)
I wasn’t sure how to reply. After all, up to that moment all she had ever said to me was
-¿Mas?
That wonderful way the Spanish have of asking
-And would sir be requiring anything else today?
Perhaps it was a trick question and she was simply keeping me in the shop long enough for the police to arrive.
-Con pan. I answered nervously. With bread.
She thought for a moment
-¿Mantequilla? (With butter?). She had obviously heard of the unspeakable practices of the anglosajones with bread and butter.
-No, I answered, solo con pan. No, only bread.
She thought for a moment.
-Mejor, she finally answered, mantequilla le moja (Good, butter makes it wet).
And with that she handed me the bag with the jamon. She probably gave some kind of secret sign because by the time I left the shop the police snatch squad was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what would have happened if I had answered yes but I might well have been writing this from the prison of San Marcos in Leon, Spain’s very own Bastille, and where apparently it is very, very cold.
I’d like to think I could reassure all the married women of Spain who work in shops the size of wardrobes that I’m not really a spy, here to steal the secrets of Asturian grandmothers. I’m just a very tall foreigner who likes to eat (and cook) Spanish food. I know they’d be reassured if they knew that the fabada I made was far too salty and the pulpo a la Gallega too tough. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spanish had a pithy saying about this, along the lines of:
-You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Which I like to think would translate into Spanish as:
-Show a foreigner a pig and he’ll tell you it’s a chicken.
I suppose there is a recipe for fabada. But Spain being what it is, a large country with lots of people who like talking, you just know everyone’s recipe, which they naturally got from their grandmother, is better than, well, everyone else’s. This is the trouble with oral traditions - nobody can agree on anything. I downloaded my recipe from the internet and this is what I handed over to the man in the shop. An Asturian man, wise in the ways of Asturia, above all its greatest export - fabada. A man, doubtless, with a grandmother. In fact, very possibly, with two of them. Each with their own recipe for fabada. When you included his wife, there in the shop with him, an Asturian woman, even wiser in the ways of Asturia, you now had four Asturian grandmothers, all with their own recipe for fabada. True, my recipe had the word “Asturia” printed in a nice shade of blue but the few seconds spent printing it out was a dagger aimed at the collective heart of Asturian grandmothers. But here’s the weird part. The guy in the shop read it. Something which he must have known by heart he read carefully before scurrying off to find the ingredients (given that the shop, like many in Spain, was the size of a wardrobe he didn’t have to scurry far to find them). Each time he came back he placed them on the counter, re-read the recipe, looked at me (I could swear I saw a line of sweat on his upper lip), looked at the recipe once more and resumed his scurrying.
Throughout all this his wife stood in the back of the shop watching me carefully. She said nothing and took no part in the search for ingredients. She did draw a little closer to her husband as he explained the importance of soaking the salted pork before putting it in the fabada. She clearly suspected something was not right: either her husband’s recipe or the tall foreigner who seemed to be taking up an unnaturally large amount of space in her shop. I don’t know if Spanish women think that every foreigner is a spy but I’ve met this reaction quite a few times. I’m in a shop and the husband is serving me. In the back of the shop is his wife, standing, looking at me, not saying a word. Not long after my experience in the Asturian shop I decided I’d like to make pulpo a la Gallega, a wonderful dish of squid served on a bed of boiled potatoes, covered with olive oil and paprika. Like a lot of Spanish food it sounds ridiculously simple and is stunningly delicious. The fishmonger explained the importance of using fresh squid and cooking the potatoes in the water with the squid. His wife folded her arms and stared at me. As I paid for the squid she suddenly said:
-You must put the squid in the boiling water three times before you cook it. In and out. Three times.
I now realize that this was a test because cooking a whole squid is, frankly, a little weird. Following her instructions I dunked it three times in the boiling water. Now, the squid was quite clearly dead before I put it in the water, a shapeless form of tentacles and suckers that slid easily from the serving spoon. However, when I took it out for the first time there, staring at me, was the liveliest dead squid I’d ever seen. It was sitting up on the spoon and if a squid has eyebrows then I’d swear this one had cocked one of them at me. Each time he surfaced from the boiling water his cooked body was firmer then before, the tentacles stuck in their pose of casual disinterest at all that was happening. I guess the fishmonger’s wife thought that if anybody could cope with the Beast From The Deep and then eat it must be alright after all.
Even buying something as ordinary as ham from a woman can be an experience akin to making an appointment with the Inquisition. Below my flat is a fiambría, a shop that sells cold meats. Being Spain this includes the wonderful jamón de serrano. I started going there about six months ago. If the guy served me we’d chat a little about the weather. Being Madrid the conversation tended to go along the lines of:
-Hace calor (It’s hot).
Or:
-Hace mucho calor (It’s very hot).
Or sometimes
-¡Que calor! (It’s bloody hot!).
If his wife served me I always had the feeling she was thinking of calling the police. But by then I was used to this level of suspicion exhibited by married women working in shops the size of wardrobes and thought nothing of it. Then one day as she put away the things I had bought she said:
-¿Como le comes, el jamón? (How do you eat jamón?)
I wasn’t sure how to reply. After all, up to that moment all she had ever said to me was
-¿Mas?
That wonderful way the Spanish have of asking
-And would sir be requiring anything else today?
Perhaps it was a trick question and she was simply keeping me in the shop long enough for the police to arrive.
-Con pan. I answered nervously. With bread.
She thought for a moment
-¿Mantequilla? (With butter?). She had obviously heard of the unspeakable practices of the anglosajones with bread and butter.
-No, I answered, solo con pan. No, only bread.
She thought for a moment.
-Mejor, she finally answered, mantequilla le moja (Good, butter makes it wet).
And with that she handed me the bag with the jamon. She probably gave some kind of secret sign because by the time I left the shop the police snatch squad was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what would have happened if I had answered yes but I might well have been writing this from the prison of San Marcos in Leon, Spain’s very own Bastille, and where apparently it is very, very cold.
I’d like to think I could reassure all the married women of Spain who work in shops the size of wardrobes that I’m not really a spy, here to steal the secrets of Asturian grandmothers. I’m just a very tall foreigner who likes to eat (and cook) Spanish food. I know they’d be reassured if they knew that the fabada I made was far too salty and the pulpo a la Gallega too tough. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spanish had a pithy saying about this, along the lines of:
-You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
Which I like to think would translate into Spanish as:
-Show a foreigner a pig and he’ll tell you it’s a chicken.
jueves, 17 de mayo de 2007
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.
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.
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