Spanish manners..

Spanish manners

We had a fiesta for Alexander and Lara’s birthday last Saturday. It ended with a bang – a Spanish fiesta must have fireworks - but there was quite a bit of whimpering before.

The end was the best part: Pablo turned up to help set off the fireworks and did all the requisite igniting, then yelling, running and shouting to make the fireworks fun, though he came pretty close to going up in flames as a result. The Spanish are not big on health and safety and in fact I was pretty surprised the children came off OK, given that various little boys were dancing uncontrollably in front of Pablo as he lit the fuses.

Generally, things were not in control. I had the idea of inviting all the children – Spanish, English and German – and putting on a real show. The Spanish contingent arrived in one van, and proceeded to go mental – filling their pockets with sweets, stuffing down food and running off with it, nicking the handheld fireworks and stuffing those up their jumpers, and so on. The Brits, meanwhile, tut-tutted and said “the Spanish” (which is how all the kids refer to the Spanish children at school) had no manners and were not properly brought up. Jack and Becky, managing the barbecue for me, cursed at the worst Spanish girls – a trio of rather tarty witches, Fatima, Marta and Sara – in their fluent Spanish, while the latter whined that they didn’t like any of the food and didn’t I have any “lomo” or chips? When I produced ham, they ran off with it into the field and devoured it like wolves, only coming back to push themselves to the front of the birthday cake line. Meanwhile, the Brits wound them up by yelling “paella!” when there wasn’t any, and getting them all to jump up and run to the kitchen. Sara then practically snatched the cake from my hands, only just holding back while the Brits loudly made everyone sing “Happy Birthday” – drowning out “Cumpleaños Feliz” – but then holding her plate aside until the best piece of cake was about to be doled out, at which point she stuck it under my nose and gave me the evil eye. The boys were marginally better, only jumping over the bonfire and pushing a bike into the swimming pool. At the end, they all disappeared into the van that picked them up, without saying goodbye – there was quite a lot of shouting but none of it sounded like “thank you for having me.”

In the morning, I walked round and picked up hundreds of bits of exploded tinfoil and firework shreds, and rubbed the relics of silly string into the garden. Never again, I said to my neighbour, Consuelo, as we went for an evening walk on Monday. (Up and down the main road: the Spanish don’t walk on footpaths, except farmers going to their crops or with their goats.) She shook her head disapprovingly and said the children were naughty, but that it was true Spanish people don’t say please or thank you, in general. I pointed out that her children would never misbehave like that. This is true: Noella, aged 6 or so, would not say boo to a goose, and Oscar, 2, seems well enough behaved for his age. I cant imagine your children going into rooms in someone’s house and taking stuff? No, she agreed, but you know, we Spanish don’t generally let people into the house “de la calle” – from the street. We don’t do that! You have to keep the house closed up! I pointed out that the children had to go to the bathroom, but she shook her head. I don’t know how they manage it, but certainly in a Spanish house you rarely get beyond the front room – a kind of designated receiving space, which is sometimes the hall, sometimes the outside terrace. After the party, only the father of the little shy German girl, another Sara, came in and was extremely polite, inviting us over and thanking us effusively for the party. I received him with gratitude: another polite northern European, who would understand the concept of thank you, and would invite me into his house in return.

Sylvia has said to me before now that every now and then she needs to go back to France, for a dose of good manners. The English are not as well-mannered at the French, but nor are they as bad as the Spanish, who really can be appallingly rude, by our standards.

More Javier Marías

I continue to read the Javier Marías trilogy, now the third volume. Compelling reading for anyone thinking about what is is to be Spanish - Marías, himself is a Spaniard who was, inter alia, an Oxford professor, works the two cultures together so elaborately and fluently that you are never quite sure where you are.

On the dust cover of my edition of the book there are the usual “this is the best book ever” stuff, and some English journalists have compared Marías to Proust. What does this mean? It could be just a way of saying he is brilliant, or that his sentences are very long (Spanish sentences are much longer anyway, often a page long, joined up by commas). At first, I thought he was not at all like Proust, which, from my memory, shimmers like a Manet – the colour of water recollected in mirrored cupboard doors, sunsets sinking on girls’ faces on the beach – and all that visual jazz. Marías is pretty dry and abstract by comparison – no lingering at all. I wonder if this is quite Spanish: the literature I have read seems rarely to dwell on landscape and by the same token is brisk and unsentimental.

Later, I thought that perhaps the journalist meant that his books are like Proust because the narrative repeats itself, referring back constantly to one or two themes, in variation. Reading it is rather like being enclosed in someone’s brain, or maybe ego and that seemed to me both quite like Proust, but also, in this case, extremely Spanish. Human behaviour, and particularly cruel human behaviour, and how it might lead to death, are never far off: there is a lot of hands-on sadism, and there is the dark shadow of Franco, and the narrator’s father’s experiences at his hands, standing behind everything and not so long ago. It is a hard world: civilisation, empathy or sacrifice might exist, or pointless little cashmere airline blankets that only give the illusion of luxury and then slip off. Manners, therefore, are pretty much a waste of time. In the middle book, the narrator notes that a disabled toilet in a British nightclub is respectfully left empty, whereas in Spain, people would just barge in, either not noticing the sign on the door, or ignoring it.

One of the things that most struck me about the book was the repeated assertion that you should always pursue an observation or a thought long beyond the point where most people would drop it and I have not gone nearly far enough in pursuit of my cultural point; perhaps I have not been here long enough anyway, and it will take a number more runs at it to get it right. In any case, whatever generalisations I have made about Spain, it has writers like this, and journalists on El Pais, who are presumably have dinner parties, read academic books, and whose children never leave a birthday without saying thank you.

Before I gave up on the thought I was chasing, though, I did wonder, if Almeria has a thinner coat of civilisation, manners, whatever, than Kent – how much difference does that make? I am guessing the sadist in Marias would have you believe it doesn’t change anything: cruelty and death are always with us, whether you go to pig stickings, or cocktail parties, have a tumble dryer or a washing line. Is less comfort – or too much comfort a good thing?

Telebasura, y más..

When I came here on holiday, I never noticed how different that made Spain, nor how in many ways it is still a place with a small, very refined upper echelon, and, below that, thousands of people who litter, shout, don’t read, and watch more utter crap on telly than anyone else in Europe, according to an interesting article last week in El País. According to this, more “telebasura” – junk TV – is watched in Spain than anywhere else in Europe and perhaps beyond. The article linked this to the physical rubbishing of the landscape: the booming construction industry, with its harsh, insensitive development of Spain’s coasts. Why Spain, it asked – why are we so much worse than anywhere else?

Recent history, maybe: this is a country with only a small, and recent, middle class and all the things that go with that, like reading, and dinner parties. In living memory, it had Franco and the brutality of the Civil War, times when there was no time for niceties. Not that anywhere else – say Germany - wasn’t brutal, but you have the sense that the polite bourgeoisie went on giving dinner parties and turned a blind eye to what went on under the white dinner tablecloth, while in Spain, the tablecloth, if there ever was one in the first place, was pulled right off: Spaniard against Spaniard and it was out in the open in every village.

But my own sense is that El Pais might have looked beyond junk TV and construction. The Spanish engage with the world around them in a different way from other Europeans, certainly northern Europeans. They are less interested in the environment, countryside, and their surroundings, into which they routinely chuck rubbish – and more interested in human society – but it goes beyond that. You could go further, particularly on a bad day, clearing up the crap from a fiesta in your garden, and say that the indulged children they used to be makes them strong, boisterous and entitled adults, who want to impose themselves on the environment, squeeze fun from life and chuck the rubbish out. The individual man, perhaps even the ego, seems to me to loom huge and dark here, sometimes even menacing. From here, England might seem like the pale figure of a gentleman walking in a pastoral landscape, and Spain like a dark, powerful man staring into the camera like a mirror, while the family and people in the room behind him push to get their faces in the lens. Whatever maketh man, it isn't likely to be manners.

I’m not saying it’s that scary all the time, but sometimes you feel a bit too close to the bullfight.

More about donkeys

Meanwhile, Penelope and Luca, the donkeys, now have a large field and it appears they either don't want to escape, or can't. They are far more different from horses than I imagined and much less cute than the idea of donkeys I had from the English seaside, etc. Like horses, a whim or a scent will take them, and they will decide not to move, or to move at high speed, but they are far less docile than most horses. Luca, in particular, comes up behind you and bites and shoves for no apparent reason - he eats everything, from his own halter to people's hair, and jackets. We take them for a walk most early evenings, along the rambla - Luca plods along at the back most of the time, yawning, and twitching his furry ears - if they go backwards, it is a sign he has suddenly been possessed by a bad mood and will start butting you, biting his rope and dancing about: he charges into the back of Penny, or jumps into the air. Penny, most of the time, walks along placidly, unless she sees tarmac, which seems to be a signal to gallop and try to push you into the side of the road. The walk goes over the rolling low hills, through the olive and almond trees, and we wander where you like as none of the land is fenced in: farmers with goats stop and look at the strange English woman and children leading two disobedient donkeys, then usually shout "La burra!" in an exultatory way - donkeys command some kind of respect, or pleasure - perhaps because there are so few now. I come in tired, with my hands rubbed on the bridle, and at times I think they are quite unsuitable pets - but they look very nice in the field, and it seems to complete the land seeing a couple of grazing animals there. How English, indeed!