My lawyer once told me I could park my car in this country wherever it didn’t say I couldn’t, because in Spain, where the law is written in stone and justice is too often buried beneath mountains of paperwork, anything that is not expressly prohibited in writing is allowed.
This partly explains some of the extraordinary court decisions made in this country over recent years, where a man who stabs his wife to death gets a minimum sentence based on a law that denies common sense, because common sense is not written into law, while another man who stabs his kidnapper to death gets a maximum sentence because he exceeded the number of stabs deemed necessary to protect himself and his wife, still tied to a chair, from violent death.
I was thinking of the law while sitting in the shade of a chiringuito on a beach near Marbella a few weeks ago, wondering if they were going to stick to the letter of the Ley de Costas and tear it down. But on the way to Marbella from northern Spain, I had passed a few dozen of the ninety Osborne bulls sitting on hilltops all over the country. Due to the introduction of a roadside advertising law some years ago, they too were in danger of being torn down, but in the end, wiser heads prevailed and they were declared to be part of our national heritage.
In the meantime, I read in the newspapers, the fate of each chiringuito is to be decided individually, not collectively, and many are likely to be saved from the Ley de Costas. This is a huge step ahead for the law in this country.
But they could go a step further. They could declare all the things and places we love as national heritage, and write laws with built-in loopholes for common sense to peep through.
They could declare legal those beautiful fishermen’s houses in the Canary Islands, which they have already started to knock down because of the Ley de Costas. They could leave the colourful rowboats and sailing boats in the bays of coastal towns and villages along the Spanish coastline and not insist that their owners move them to marinas because, even if they make the bays more beautiful, they do not comply with urban planning laws.
They could realise that in the ‘state of law’ they love to talk about, the rights of the people are best protected by protecting people one by one and not collectively, and if some people purchased houses legally, they have a legal right to live in them, even if that means trampling on some collective rights.
If they can find a way around the law as it stands in relation to Osborne bull-boards and beach bars for the good of all the people, they can surely find a way around the Ley de Costas for the good of some of the people.
The law may be an ass, as Mr Bumble said, but I read somewhere that in Spain, even the asses are protected by law.
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I asked for a café con leche, using as few words as possible because I was not in a talkative mood. My coffee arrived in a cup and saucer, and I thought nothing of it until my daughter walked into the bar and asked for the same. Hers arrived in a glass.
She is blond and blue eyed. She used more or less the same number of words to ask for her coffee. The difference, of course, was her accent, and the fact that she probably managed to make her request without saying ‘please’ and without it sounding unmannerly. It was evident that the waitress recognised me, who has been living in Spain for almost thirty years, as a foreigner, and failed to recognise my daughter as such, although she has been living out of Spain for the past decade. At least it was not a restaurant and I was not automatically seated in the sun, as often happens in Andalucía.
I wondered if there was something about my appearance that marks me out as more foreign than my daughter. She had been for a swim, and had asked me to hold her handbag, so I looked around the bar to see how many other men there were carrying a handbag and wearing five rings on their fingers. None were.
On trips back to Ireland over recent years, I’ve frequently been mistaken for a foreigner. Perhaps it’s the shoulder bag I carry and the rings on my fingers, or the clothes I wear to look less conspicuous here in Spain. In any case, the sad fact of the matter is that I am now forced to regard myself as a native of nowhere; a foreigner in my country and in the country of my adoption, and given my age, that’s the way it will always be.
None of this would be important were it not for the occasional comment I foolishly make on social or political issues, and then the you-know-what hits the fan. It happened on my last trip back to Ireland.
“A language test for buying a house in an Irish-speaking area?” I said. “They’ll never get away with that.”
“Well, if you were living in the area…” was the reply, meaning who do you think you are to comment on matters that do not concern you and that you obviously know nothing about?
“That would be illegal,” I go on. “Anybody in the EU is free to speak any language he likes without being penalised for it. It seems to me a typical case of the local government overstepping its authority.”
This is the wrong thing to say. I, perceived as a foreigner, have dared criticise the local government. The reaction is now of anger, whether in Ireland or in Spain. The wall of misunderstanding goes up. Anything else I say will be taken as an attack on the nation as a whole, and defended vigorously, if illogically. The conversation ends, and I have shown myself, once more, to be a foolish, meddling foreigner.
But I console myself, somewhat pathetically, with the fact that whenever I ask for coffee in Ojén, the Andalusian village I lived in for twenty years, it comes in a glass.
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‘Could I have one like that, please,’ I said, pointing to the half bread roll on the plate beside me on the counter, ‘half, with olive oil and garlic?’
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘It has to be a half or a whole bread roll.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ I explained. ‘Half a whole bread roll, like the one on that plate just there.’
She glared at me and went into the kitchen, coming out a few minutes later with half a toasted bread roll and practically throwing it at me.
I had been there on a previous trip down to Andalucía, I then remembered, and had had to deal with the same unfriendly waitress. I had also sworn never to go back. But more and more these days, all roadside restaurants and cafeterias tend to look alike, and one tends to stop and eat on the way when one is hungry, wherever one happens to be. I ate the half bread roll quickly, gulped down my coffee, paid and left. I’ll never go back.
On the way out, I noticed there was a tiny village just beyond the restaurant and decided to investigate. There was nobody in the streets and hardly any cars to be seen. I drove to the main square – probably the only square – and found a shop open. I went in to ask if there was a bar, apart from the huge restaurant and service station complex I had just come from beside the main road, where I could have a decent cup of coffee the way I want it, which is in decent company. The shop owner escorted me outside to a small bar in the same square. Inside was a group of old men, all of whom stopped talking when I walked in. I greeted them, they greeted me, I ordered another coffee and we started chatting.
‘Beautiful little village,’ I said.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ one of them replied. ‘But there’s not much life here anymore. All the young people have left to work in the big cities.’
‘I hadn’t expected to find a place like this here in the middle of nowhere,’ I said. ‘I only stopped because of the restaurant complex on the main road.’
None of them made any comment. Perhaps they had nothing to say. Many small villages in Castilla y León have either been abandoned years ago or are in the process of losing residents, and the little life they had left in the recent past has been destroyed by the main road bypassing the village, as has happened all over the country for the benefit of motorists in a hurry.
We chatted some more. I wasn’t in a great hurry to leave.
I drove out of the magic little village onto the main road to continue my journey feeling much happier than when I had arrived. Despite the trend towards uniformity all over Europe’s highways, the main roads of Spain can still surprise the weary traveller.
I turned my head to read the name of the village on the sign I had missed on the way in. It was named Milagros, meaning ‘Miracles’.
That made me even happier. Miracles, even small ones, are always very welcome.
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There is no place quite like Marbella in the early summer. Breakfast in the fresh morning air, toast dripping in virgin olive oil with garlic, the usual sounds of children screaming and adults talking, the clatter of crockery as the waiters clear tables, because in this part of the world we can still enjoy the pleasure of real coffee in real cups, and the ever-present noise of traffic, although less than in previous years, I’ve noticed.
All in all, relative calm for any public place in Andalucía. Then I hear the deep rumble of high-powered motorbikes, and it does not come from the road some distance away. It is creeping up behind me. It gets louder and louder, and like everybody else in the bar, I turn around to look. Two big bikers are winding their way through the tables, revving their engines in the spaces between them and slowing down to avoid flattening sandaled feet sticking out from under them. I move my chair to make way.
As they pass, I see that these are two members of Marbella’s Green Patrol. They park their noisy bikes and get off. One has a cigarette in his mouth, and I watch to see what he does with the butt. He drops it on the pavement and stubs it out with his boot. They take their helmets off and wander into the bar beside me.
There is no place quite like Marbella anytime.
The feria starts tonight and the fun has begun. We sit in a small bar in the centre and chat to the owner, an old friend. Is he looking forward to the festivities, we ask, the question really being about how much money he expects to make over the festive period.
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘although they shouldn’t have moved it out of the old town. There’s nobody here in the centre anymore.’
‘Why did they move it out?’
‘Because most people were drinking at the stalls.’
‘But you did good business all the same?’
He shrugs his shoulders. I look around his empty bar. I pay too much for the few drinks we had – because this is Marbella – and leave. Back in the underground car-park, I pay nine euros for the car I parked three hours ago.
Dinner at night with friends. One of them is a man in his mid sixties whom I had never met before. He is Argentinian, and has something to do with television in Buenos Aires, they told me earlier. He is an excellent conversationalist, attentive to everybody at the table in a voice that is music to the ears. I wonder what exactly he does in television.
Then a man approaches the table. He would like, if our visiting Argentinian didn’t mind, a photograph to show to his children in Mar de Plata. Cameras are produced and photographs taken, with a promise that the picture will be printed with a signature and sent on if he would like to leave a name and address. The man would like very much. Then we all carry on with our meal. There’s no place quite like Marbella.
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I’ve just read an article by a regular contributor to El País newspaper about a twenty-five-year-old Majorcan girl who won 126 million euros in a lottery recently. The writer wonders what will become of the girl, given that many people who win unusually large amounts of money end up ruining their lives. It reminded me of a man who lived near me many years ago. She should, perhaps, not employ a lawyer to protect her interests.
He was a plumber who, following an exhaustive search, was identified by the executors of the estate of a Texan oil millionaire as being his nearest living relative A letter from the executors informed him that he had inherited nine million dollars.
Over the first few months, the delay in the transfer of the money was put down to routine administrative problems. Meanwhile, he kept his job with the local county council and went to work every day as a plumber. He resisted all offers of loans from the managers of the two banks in the town, accepting a relatively small sum only to pay for a party for his family and friends in an expensive restaurant.
His son was a friend of my brother’s, and they remained friends over that first year of the inheritance, the young man insisting that his family’s life-style had not been changed by their good fortune.
My mother was a teacher in the local convent school, and she was shocked at the comment of the reverend mother when she saw the plumber walk up the school avenue.
‘I hope he’s coming to give us some money!’ she said.
He wasn’t. He was coming to fix their plumbing.
As the months went by, the banks increased their offers of money, each outdoing the other in an attempt to capture his account. One day he took their money and decided not to go to work. Unfortunately, he had never spent much time at home before, and soon he and his wife were having marriage problems. He started gambling and drinking, and ran up huge debts.
His wife left him and his son took to drugs. None of the money ever arrived. It was said that his American lawyers had used it all up.
He died a few years later, very likely as a direct result of just the promise of a large inheritance.
Some years ago, a magazine commissioned me to write a very short story. I called it ‘Brief Story’, and this is it:
A rich man called his sons to his deathbed.
To his first he said:
‘You’re an accountant. You’ve kept the taxman off my back all these years so I could increase my fortune. You get it all, if you use the lawyer I appoint to protect your inheritance.’
To his second he said:
‘You’re a doctor. You’ve kept me alive all these years so I could enjoy my fortune. You get it all, if you use the lawyer I appoint to protect your inheritance.’
To his third and favourite he said:
‘You’re the lawyer. You get the brief.’
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My friend Donal called me during the week asking for advice on setting up as a translator on the Costa del Sol. With an Irish mother and Spanish father, he speaks English and Spanish fluently. Our conversation went like this:
‘How should I start off?’
‘Creatively, just as you’d start off in any other business on the Costa del Sol. You invent a background, invent the required qualifications, invent a client list and dream up a fancy company name.’
‘But that would be dishonest. I’m not sure I could live with myself if I did that.’
‘You wouldn’t have to live with yourself. You’d be in good company.’
‘How do I go about attracting clients?’
‘You point out the mistakes made by other translators to their clients and claim you can do better.’
‘And if they make no mistakes?’
‘Mistakes are what you make of them. If they translate loosely, you can claim the job is sloppy because they changed words, and if they translate literally, you can claim it’s sloppy because they didn’t change words.’
‘The problem I have is that I don’t write English well.’
‘No problem at all. People who need your services, quite logically, don’t know what they are getting. Commissioning a translation is the nearest thing to buying a pig in a poke.’
‘Should I buy special dictionaries?
‘Don’t waste your money. Just run the text through one of those free software programmes on the Internet and send back the result.’
‘Oh, I thought they didn’t work properly…’
‘Well, they tend to lose a little in translation. You run a story about your granny waiting for her boyfriend in a leather chair in the airport, for example. An employee asks her if she would prefer to wait in the VIP lounge, where she could have some chocolate. She says she won’t be embarrassed waiting there, but will be when her boyfriend comes along and sees her like that.
‘The software programme would tell us that she was sitting naked in the airport waiting for her boyfriend, and that the employee asked if she would prefer to smoke a joint while waiting in the VIP lounge. She says she won’t get pregnant by waiting there, but will when her boyfriend comes along and sees her like that. Then you send the story back as translated and the client is happy because he hasn’t a clue what it says.’
‘What should I charge for it?’
‘The rate should depend on the difficulty of the text, but if you rent a fancy office with a fancy secretary, you can charge what you like. Everybody else does.’
‘It still all sounds a little dicey to me, What if somebody discovers what I’m up to and reports me to the police? I could be brought before the courts and end up in prison.’
‘Why on earth would that happen? You’re not a politician,’ I said.
‘And anyway,’ I added, ‘You’ll never make it to court. You’re thirty years old. You won’t live that long.’
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If I did not know the town where I live and fancied a round of golf there, I would turn off the motorway at a sign pointing to a course one supposes to be close by, but which is, in fact, a long way from the town on a winding country road.
Another sign points to a service station that is not there, but some kilometres on the other side of the town, which is itself a few kilometres from the sign, and which is easier to reach from further along the motorway.
A third sign points to a well-known cave which is nowhere in the area, but far away in the opposite direction, and which one can get to from the town by a route no sane person would take.
In the town, numerous signs invite me to visit the shopping centre. The town has no shopping centre. They mean the central shopping area of the town, but they do not say what they mean.
On my frequent car journeys south to Malaga, I have learned never to trust road signs pointing to hotels or restaurants along the way, because they are often not along the way. I now know how easy it is to fall victim to a misleading road sign taking me to a place I do want to go to.
When I get to Madrid, I have the choice of going through the city centre or taking the M-30, the M-40 or the M-50 around it. The signs pointing to the M-30 do not tell me how to cross the M-40 to get to the road I’m looking for out of the city. Signs pointing to the M-40 will get me out if I can resist the temptation to take the M-50, which was unfinished the last time I used it and which brought me into the city instead.
On the coastal route west from Malaga City, I find myself on a motorway I happen to know to be toll free as far as Fuengirola. I also happen to know that to avoid paying a toll, I must veer off it at Fuengirola. But the first time I used this road I missed the small sign high over my head telling me to veer off, and was forced to pay a toll to use a road I had no intention of using. Many drivers who do the same are Moroccans who sleep in their cars on the way from Northern Europe and cook in lay-bys on the side of the road to reduce travelling costs. They can ill afford this toll fee. When I complained to the motorway concessionary, I was told all the signs were designed to European Union standards.
One of my biggest surprises on a road was once seeing a huge sign in front of me saying ‘Go back.’ It was on a one-way street in Ireland, and I was driving down it the wrong way. I went back, happy that - EU design standards apart - somebody had come up with a road sign that said exactly what it meant.
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I was chatting to my older brother on the phone last night about his latest girl-friend. He wants to bring her over for a week or so before moving on to the next one, but is worried that I might confuse her with the last he brought over, whom I mistook for the previous one when she was here. Keeping track of them would be easier if he brought them all together.
But that is neither here nor there. What really interests me is how a man so physically unattractive manages to seduce so many good-looking women much younger than him. They are not after his money, because he doesn’t have much. They cannot be drawn to his intellect, because he doesn’t have any, and they are probably not lured by his charm, because that too is a quality he clearly lacks. I’m beginning to think the secret of his success is his age. I’m not much younger, so maybe my time will come.
The conversation brought me back to the World Fair in Seville in 1992, when I spent the summer in an apartment rented by a Malaga newspaper for the duration of the fair. My companions were the newspaper’s editor and photographer, whom I shall call Ramón and José.
Both men were in their mid-to-late fifties; both bald, fat and ugly. They lacked any obvious charm, and judging by their sense of dress, were obviously not wealthy. But they truly believed they were God’s gift to women, and managed to convince most women they met that this was indeed so.
Being accredited journalists, we had easy access to drinks and meals at reduced rates within the vast complex, but if the person in charge happened to be female, we got most of our drinks and meals free. And it wasn’t on my account.
One day we were interviewing some bigwigs in the Brazilian pavilion, and on the way out we started chatting to the Brazilian dancers. Or the other two did, because I don’t speak Portuguese. Ramón and José didn’t either, but that had not occurred to them. I was anxious to get back to the apartment for dinner, and had to drag them away.
As we left, I heard Ramón shout back: “Midnight tonight. Don’t forget!.” I laughed. These were stunningly beautiful women, all of them, dressed in practically nothing, and my two workmates were old, fat, bald and ugly.
I half woke in the middle of the night, vaguely conscious of a lot of noise coming from somewhere and somebody shaking me, but in too deep a sleep to wake fully. I was first out of bed the next morning, and found the sitting room in a shambles.
Later, after breakfast, Ramón and José appeared, looking very much the worst for wear.
“What happened last night?’ I asked them.
“What happened to you last night?” José answered. “We sent one of the dancers in to wake you, but you told her to go away. So she left you sleeping.”
Maybe she saw I was not old, fat, bald and ugly.
But maybe now my time has come.
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Driving backwards along the lane leading up to my house the other day and pulling into a space where the ostrich couldn’t get me to let Manolo’s father pass (he is incapable of reversing; hence, one backs up every time one meets him on his way back from visiting his cows), it occurred to me that my life is not as dull as it was before moving to the countryside.
The trip into town and back again for my newspaper is a journey of surprise and adventure, to be undertaken with disregard for schedule. The four kilometres could take a few minutes or a large part of the morning, depending on road workers, shepherds, cowherds, stray ostriches, tractors, floods, trees knocked down by high winds or Manolo’s car parked in the middle of the narrow lane making up the first half of the journey.
The usual delay is meeting one of the old women struggling along the road on her way to or from the local clinic. In the old car, they would consider the offer of a lift slowly, eyeing the doors falling off at the hinges and the tattered interior before accepting, and would grip the dashboard in terror all the way. One had to drive slowly too, because the wobble in the steering wheel tended to frighten them, and on arrival, one had to park and open the door to haul them up from the depths of the ancient upholstery.
In the new jeep, they are more ready to accept a lift, but balk at the height of the seats once the door is opened. All the old women of Spain have at least one bad leg, I now know, and if you have never helped an old lady with a straight leg into the seat of a large jeep, you have not experienced life on the edge.
The most effective way of doing this, I’ve learned, is to manoeuvre the straight leg inside the door first and push from behind. The danger here, of course, is that the leg will give way, so one lifts as well as pushes, like trying to heave a sack of potatoes onto a high shelf. The problem is getting a grip. These old ladies are not built like you and me. They have nowhere to grip. You grab one part and push and another part flops out on the road again. You try to grab all the parts together and discover they have none that can be identified and held in place. You finally bend low, put your shoulder to the general area of the lower body and heave. Then you sit gasping for breath and trying to focus your mind on not having a heart attack.
Sometimes I think of doing us all a favour and letting them walk, as they have been doing for years before I arrived and others will be doing for years when I’m gone. But then I remember just how exciting life in the countryside can be, and I always stop.
And sometimes they take one look at me and my jeep, put their heads down and walk faster.
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I sat down the other day to have a serious conversation with my godson about his career prospects.
“I’ve been giving the matter consideration over recent months, and I’ve finally reached a decision. I want to do nothing useful in life,” he said.
“Why not take a more positive approach towards your future?” I advised. “Why not become a petty criminal? Mug people in the streets, swindle money out of old ladies, work in Telefónica, snatch purses in supermarkets, perhaps become a genuine scumbag and take up a trainee position in the banking sector.”
He rolled another joint and reflected on what I had said. “The bank sounds good,” he replied, “although I’d rather rob them. If I have to work, I’d like to make a more permanent impact on society, something that people will remember me for. If I decide to be a criminal, I’d like to be a real criminal.”
“Why don’t you become an architect?” I suggested.
If he takes my advice, he will have plenty of scope for his talents. He can design apartment blocks in Madrid with holes in the middle costing more per cubic metre than the apartments themselves. He can design opera houses in Valencia without views of the stage. He can design pedestrian bridges over the rivers of Europe that pedestrians can slide across. He can design airport terminal buildings in Northern Spain that will give people terminal pneumonia waiting to greet passengers. He can design concert halls that flood and museums that leak. And best of all, he can design ugly high-rise towers that destroy the skylines of some of the most beautiful cities in Spain.
With the ridiculous argument that contrast complements, he can design buildings that do the opposite of fit in with their surroundings.
Architects and artists are one of a kind, with a fundamental difference: we are not all forced to live with the work of the artist. He can do as he pleases, and we can see it or not, as we please. What we are forced to see by the architect may be a delight to the eye, as is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, to give just one example, but too often the result is more a delight to the architect’s sense of self-importance.
The shockingly new of today will become the classically aged of the future, they tell us, but they are wrong. The material and technological limitations of even the recent past ensured that works of architecture were anchored in time and place, regardless of how far architects had strayed from the fundamental aesthetics of form and the space it occupies. We have some magnificent buildings in this country, designed by both foreign and Spanish architects and built in hi-tech materials without severing the link between building and location. But we have also fallen victim to one of the diseases of our time, which is to value impact over aesthetics and choose difference for its own sake.
My godson was impressed by my little speech. “I like the idea of becoming an architect,” he said. “It’s very old profession, isn’t it?”
“The second-oldest in the world,” I assured him.
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