“Shades of meaning,” my English friend said, as I’ve heard so many others say over the years. “No other language has as many different shades of meaning as English. No other language is as rich as ours, or has as many words.”
He reminded me of Bill Bryson, author of the biased and factually inaccurate “Mother Tongue”, in which Bryson makes the same kind of wild claims about the superiority of the English language. I know too little about other languages to be able to point out all his mistakes, but he tells us that only 250,000 people speak Catalan, and gives us facts about the Irish language that I also know to be untrue. (I noticed too that on the blurb of his “Dictionary of Troublesome Words”, a Guardian writer describes the book as ‘deserving of fulsome praise’. Inside, Bryson reminds us that ‘fulsome’ means ‘unctuous and insincere toadying.’)
Another friend asked me if it was true that Spaniards use their hands so much in conversation because they don’t have enough words in their language to express their thoughts verbally. It is evident that he, like Bryson, speaks only one language.
Whenever I hear or read this rubbish, I ask myself what words are missing in Spanish, and spend the rest of the day looking at things and wondering if words exist in the language to describe them. I also wonder what thoughts and ideas can Spaniards not express in their own language. Then I watch word-game shows on Spanish television at night and ask myself how on earth they keep coming up with so many rare words in Spanish.
Perhaps these English-language experts believe the rest of the world simply don’t bother naming things and have fewer thoughts than English-speakers.
It is impossible, I believe, to count the number of words in any major language, because all of them have so many words bordering between rare and extinct. The size of any dictionary thus depends on which words the compiler regards as being in current usage, however rare those words might be. The only certainty I have is that there is a word for everything in every major language, even if some of these words are borrowed from other languages. And given the fact that English has now become the international lingua franca, and it is the language of business, science and computers, it is undoubtedly true that more words are borrowed by other languages from English than vice versa. But this does not help much with a word count.
I made the same mistake of language chauvinism some years ago when speaking to a bilingual friend visiting from the West of Ireland. He is a romantic type, and was smitten by the beauty of the Marbella girls in their Sevillana dresses during the feria. But not speaking Spanish, he couldn’t talk to them. I offered to interpret.
“It would be useless,” he said sadly. “Compared to Irish, English is a poor language of love, and when I see these magnificent creatures, I can think only in Irish.”
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“It’s spot on. I love it!” says my client.
“I’m glad you like it,” says I, knowing from long experience that he does indeed like it now, but his wife hasn’t seen it yet, or his daughter, or her boyfriend, or his brother-in-law, or the woman next door, or the guy who cleans the pool, or whatever Tom, Dick of Harry will be dragged off the street in the days ahead to judge it.
I don’t mind. By this stage in my largely unsuccessful career as a portrait painter, at least I know the score. As early 20th century American portrait painter Eugene Speicher once observed: “A portrait is a picture in which there is something wrong with the mouth.”
This time it’s the left eye. Sadly, I failed to spot the mistake, as did my client, but his wife’s sister-in-law’s noticed it immediately.
“The left eye is wrong!” she shrieked as soon as she saw it. “Can you not all see that? It’s totally wrong!”
“Well, it looks okay to me,” said my client. “That’s the way the eye is.”
“It certainly is not! Just look at it! It’s nothing at all like the other eye. Here, gimme a photograph and let’s compare. I bet it’s different.”
The photograph, taken under different lighting and from a different angle, proves that I made a hash of the left eye, while the merest glance at the portrait itself shows it to be different – as all eyes are – from the other eye. It takes the loudest and most opinionated of the group to convince the rest, and despite the evidence before their own eyes, they are gradually convinced. I get the call from my client a few days later.
“I hate to have to ask you to change it, but we are all agreed….”
I tell you this, not so you can commiserate or send pennies to my piggy bank, but because it reflects the essential problem with the Lisbon Treaty.
Any treaty involving twenty seven countries is twenty seven portraits in the painting. It will never be right. Oh yes, it may delight the Germans and the French, and it may be touched up to suit the special sensitivities of the Irish, but somebody out there will find something wrong with the left eye. This time not the Irish, who signed the wrong treaty and left me out of the Schengen area.
Now it is the turn of the Czechs. I’ve never known one intimately, but any nation whose language can czallenge us with sucz an awkward spelling of its very name, and which can have up to four consonants in a five-letter word, has to be suspect, The result is anybody’s guess.
Not that it matters. If the Czech president signs, somebody else will not. And if, by some miracle, all twenty seven nations agree, then somebody – the loudest and most opinionated of the group – will find something wrong with the left eye and convince the rest.
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One of my favourite occupations is doing nothing. Sometimes I get out of bed early to get a head start, and spend the entire day wandering about doing nothing, taking a break before lunch to go into town to sit in my local and do nothing, and then back to the house again to continue doing nothing.
Doing nothing is not as easy as it might seem. Temptation lies around every corner, from the unread books on the shelf and the tools in the garage to the wife’s pitiful wailing about what needs doing around the house and promises unkept.
Then there is work; at my age, the penance for a lifetime spent not really doing much. My ambition had always been to work progressively less and earn progressively more, but as in many aspects of this one life we are given, things didn’t turn out as planned. The opposite happened.
I think of retiring every so often, but cannot think what exactly I might retire from. Besides, here in Spain, the act of retiring has been formalised in such a way that one cannot simply stop working – even for oneself – and retire, as in other more rational societies. Here one must pay the government to be self-employed, whether one is actually employed or not, and to retire, one must sign off the Social Security system and forgo one’s full pension. So I keep working. I figure, like, since I’m paying for it, I might as well keep at it. Even if I’m not actually working.
You can imagine, then, how disturbed I am about the growing trend among young people in Spain to do something all the time. It was brought home to me during the week as I listened to the wife deal with parents unsatisfied with the scheduling of their children’s after-school English classes.
“I can fit Juan in on Mondays at five, Tuesdays at eight, Wednesdays at six or Thursdays at nine, which may be a little late for him.”
“None of those times suit,” they say, “but he’s free from ten to eleven on Sunday mornings.”
They rattle off the extraordinary range of activities the poor child is subjected to after his long day at school, leaving none out that might result in him becoming a concert pianist, a new Picasso, another Einstein, a champion show jumper, a Real Madrid footballer or anything else that will realise the ambitions of the deluded parents. And that is apart from the academic subjects the child would need no after-school classes in if he simply paid attention at school. Little Juan is a better bet than the Christmas lottery.
In a more innocent time, most of these were activities that children used to do in their free time without formal tutoring. Now they don’t have any time to do them, so they have to take classes. They are receiving an early training in never being bored, and thus never having to think for themselves about what to do, or not do, with their free time.
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The format worked itself out years ago, and it has never changed.
“I’m off to the supermarket this morning. Would you like to come?” she says.
I wouldn’t. I have better things to do with my time on a Saturday morning. One of them is staying in bed, but that ceased to be an option the morning after we got married.
“Yes, I think I’d like to go,” I say, as if having given the matter serious thought. Anything more enthusiastic might arouse the suspicion of sarcasm. We go to the supermarket. She drives, because she knows, deep down, who is bringing whom.
There is hardly a vacant space in the vast car-park. I wonder what it’s like on Monday mornings, but say nothing. Pointing out the obvious was never an option. Inside, we separate. My function is to help pack the grocery bags at the checkout and unload them into the car, but I have to be careful.
“I’ll catch up on you later on,” I say. “I want to look at the hardware section.”
Timing now becomes crucial. The drinks section is at the end, and I know the format never changes. But the supermarket management could be up to its tricks again. The drinks section could have changed.
I take the risk. The alternative is to traipse behind her with the trolley up and down endless rows of food, none of which I have any interest in, stopping occasionally while she examines numerous labels on numerous packets, tins and jars of tomatoes that all contain nothing more than tomatoes. Then she moves on to peppers. I head for the hardware.
When the time is right (I know from long experience) I head back to find her. This is one of the reasons I’ve come.
“The gin is on special offer this week. Will we get two?”
“We’ll do no such thing,” she says.
“Baileys is quite cheap this week too. It’s been a while…”
“No Baileys,” she say. “You drink it like milk.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “I mix it with whiskey, which reminds me…”
“It’s whiskey or gin. Your choice,” she says.
“Have you ever tried tequila?” I ask.
“Forget it,” she says, “or I’ll put the gin back.”
At about this time I re-consider the benefits of accompanying her to the supermarket, but realise it could be worse if I were not there in person. She might forget the chocolate biscuits as well.
The check-out queues are long. We pick the wrong one, as always. The woman in front has bought two dozen pairs of socks and panties which need to be folded and wrapped one by one, or a piece of gardening equipment with a part missing, or a tin of something or other with no barcode. I suggest moving to the fast check-out and taking our shopping through ten items at a time. She thinks I’m joking.
Finally out and on the road again. I sit and think of all the things I could have done this Saturday morning. But I would have done them alone. That’s the other reason I’ve come. Love is many things, and one of them is pushing a supermarket trolley on Saturday mornings.
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Food is a subject close to my heart, I’ve discovered, as my options for bodily amusements diminish. I even watch food programmes on television these days. The latest is one in which four people – a New York restaurant critic, a large American chef, a Hollywood actress and a beautiful Catalan girl I’ve never heard of before – eat their way around Spain.
They travel by convertible sports cars in interchanging pairs, generally visiting places they know about or have been before, all of them being knowledgeable about Spain and its gastronomy. The pace is easy, with lots or irrelevant banter and a subtle sexual tension between the restaurant critic and the beautiful Catalan, who outshines the actress in every respect except, to my knowledge so far, acting.
Curiously, the actress is vegetarian and vegetarian cooking does not feature in the programme, but perhaps they hired her without knowing this. The programme opens and closes with Willy Nelson singing “On the Road Again” accompanied by a well-known Spanish gypsy on guitar.
I mention it because it highlights certain aspects of Spanish restaurants which were brought home to me by their absence in another programme I watched recently about top restaurants around the world. One of these aspects is not getting what you want, which I’m sure never happens in any of the posh restaurants featured in the second programme.
One showed the head waiter pointing out how the chairs are lined up in perfect symmetry with the tables, and how each piece of cutlery is exactly one and a half centimetres – he measured it with a tape – from the plates. Such attention to detail, he explained, is what helps make his restaurant a genuine pleasure to eat in.
I don’t know about you, but obsession with absurd detail is not one of my genuine pleasures. As for the other restaurants featured, there was not a single one I would choose to eat in over any of the run-of-the-mill restaurants featured in “Spain: on the road again.”
The difference is that most ordinary Spanish restaurants are anchored in place. They do not import special foods from all over the world, but use the products around them, cooked to a regional taste developed over centuries rather than an international taste developed for the benefit of people with more money than a genuine love of good food. You probably get exactly what you want in these places.
You don’t always get what you want in a Spanish restaurant because you don’t always know you want it until you get it. The service might not come with a smile every time, but it usually comes with a surprise. The meal served in a good regional restaurant in Spain is not generally available anywhere else in the country, let alone the world, and is not likely to be on the menu of any haute-cuisine restaurant anywhere out there.
And this regional quality is what makes Spanish restaurants, in general, rather than any few in particular, such a joy to eat in. Just don’t ask for what you want.
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I was thinking of Rosie the other day as I watched a television programme about cosmetic surgery in Spain. With more than 300,000 operations performed here each year, this country is European leader in the field and fourth in the world after Brazil, Venezuela and the United States. This means that, calculating over a ten-year period, an average of at least one in 15 of all the people I know in Spain have undergone cosmetic surgery. And most of them, the report tells us, are women who have had their breasts enlarged.
I was thinking of Rosie because she was the first woman I lusted after. The passage from Cakes and Ale that I remember from childhood was the most erotic I had ever read, and I went through my library this morning to find the book and read it again.
“Her breasts when she leaned over me were heavy on my chest. In a little while she got out of bed. I lit the candle. She turned to the glass and tied up her hair and then she looked for a moment at her naked body…”.
Fairly innocent stuff, but perhaps because I had never read anything more erotic than the adventures of Desperate Dan up to then, it left me with a life-long (and so far, unfulfilled) desire to feel the weight of large breasts on my chest.
But I realise this desire has been kindled by constant reminders in the media of how much more desirable women are with large breasts. In reality, I’ve never admired a woman for the size of her breasts alone, and fail to understand why other men apparently do. I believe the question of male appendage size, so often discussed in women’s magazines and television programmes on sexuality, and generally agreed to be unimportant, should apply to women rather than men. Public debate on the issue, especially with regard to the reason women feel the need to stuff their breasts with silicone, would probably reduce the number of these largely unnecessary and – in Spain – risky operations. There are approximately 6,000 surgeons working in the area here, according to the television report, and only 600 of them, we are told, are fully qualified.
But I fear there will be no public debate on the issue as long as women like Pamela Anderson and Dolly Parton continue to be held up as sex symbols, and men continue to express admiration for women whose only asset is large breasts.
The question is: why do men who claim to admire women for the size of their breasts also admire top models, most of whom are quite small on top? And why do women who plan to have their breasts enlarged not simply look at themselves in the mirror and compare their breasts favourably with those of top models?
Even more curious is why an increasing number of men in Spain have their pectorals (the currently acceptable word for male breasts) enlarged. It is not, I must admit, an issue that concerns me much, but I’m glad Somerset Maugham didn’t write an erotic passage about it in Cakes and Ale. It could have changed my life.
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Many of my most precious memories have been drowned in dogpiss.
Faces with no bodies, bodies with no faces, disfigured shapes like zombies stepping out of the tomb, scraps of recognition in appalling images that the dogs pissed on. Old photographs are supposed to fade, and I could live with that. But not get wiped away by the acidic effects of urine.
I tore them apart and left them out to dry. Then I put them in a box which I happened to come upon in the garage the other day. They were still as grotesque as when I packed them away all those years ago, but the passage of time has alleviated the pain of loss, as it tends to do.
There is something almost poetically just in the fate of photographs not granted the sanctuary of a proper photo album while the selection process was being made, I now realise. I should have let the dogs out to pee when they asked, and if they found a suitable spot in the attic to do it, who can blame them?
Some of the photographs date back to a time when they were small and square, partially documenting a different life, before Spain became an essential part of it. Almost all of the older people in them are long dead, and one looks at the images with nostalgia. But many more show a life in Spain when we were all young, and one looks at these with fascination. Who were they all?
They show ferias, parties, outings, picnics, days on the beach, Christmas dinners, drinks at the poolside and people who stayed with us for a few days on their way through. They show us having lunch on the terraces of ventas throughout Andalucía, on excursions to festivals of all kinds, to cities we visited and places we stayed, many in the company of friends whom we have long since lost track of. And although I have vague memories of most of them, I cannot even guess where they might be now. I wonder if they have old photographs of us, and if they wonder who we were and where we are now. They were as young as we were then, so barring premature departure, they must be somewhere.
And then there are the photographs of the friends who remained friends, whose faces we can see growing older, like ours, in the photographs taken over the years. In some, time has turned beautiful faces and bodies into frumpy middle age; in others, time has been kinder, dogpiss notwithstanding. But all show that a photograph of a friend is more than a visual record of that person in a time and place, but also an unseen image of the person who took the photograph.
Photographs of friends, whoever they were, are part of our past, and since we don’t know how long our past will last or how our attitude to it will change, we should never throw them out. And we should always let the dogs out to pee when they ask.
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One of the media issues over the summer has been casual dress in the streets. Barcelona, the first city in the country to expressly ban much of what makes Spain different (excess noise, spitting in public, tossing waste paper in the streets etc), once again took the lead in an effort to prevent people (foreigners etc) from dressing too casually off the beaches. The sight of barebellied tourists strolling along the streets with no shoes on, it is believed by the municipal authorities, brings down the tone of the cities in question.
This is a continuation of the related issue of nudism – not just on the beaches, but everywhere in this country. In 1989, the law prohibiting public scandal, which penalised offences against “morality, good customs and public decency”, was abolished. The result was a legal vacuum regarding nudity in public places, with some Town Halls taking nudists to court and losing, and other Town Halls attempting to contain public nudity by extending facilities to nudist associations that would keep them away from public view most of the time. In any case, while nudism in not expressly allowed everywhere in Spain, it is not expressly prohibited. As the law currently stands, one is free to wear what one likes in any public place in Spain, and if one likes to wear nothing at all, one has the right to do so.
I love it. Not the nudism, which I am largely indifferent to, but the fact that our national political representatives, for once, appear to have more to do with their time than spend it legislating one way or the other on what people should wear in public.
But I wonder why people like to practice nudism collectively. Staring at naked men and women all day is not as exciting as might first seem to the average art student, who soon realises that the sight of a partially clothed body is always more pleasurable than total nudity. If Spanish law with regard to nudity changes, it should be on aesthetic, rather than moral, grounds.
The Basques, I see from occasional news items on television, like to run collectively in the nude. In the interior, nudist associations organise rambling trips in the mountains, and in Barcelona, one can go to discotheques in the nude. All well and good – a few thorns in the backside and probable damage from swinging body parts – but one of the latest forms of drumming up support for nudism is collective cycling in the nude.
Well, I don’t know about that. Most men are not designed to cycle in the nude. Bicycle saddles tend to be long and narrow, to fit comfortably between the legs. Certain male body parts hang if not supported, and excess pressure applied to some of them can led to intense pain. If ever I had the urge to work as a harem attendant, I think I’d rather ride a bicycle bare-bottomed than have somebody take the knife to me.
Perhaps nudists would gain more popular support if they simply took their clothes off, as the law permits. And perhaps the Barcelona city fathers can count their blessings and put up with a few foreigners only taking their shirts off in the streets.
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Ending up where one started is a luxury few have the privilege to enjoy. With the passing of the years, time and place can often turn from memory to illusion, and attempts to make the return journey are usually a reminder that life is indeed a one-way ticket. This is what made our trip back to the Basque Country such a pleasant surprise.
Apart from the new housing estates surrounding almost every town and the fact that everybody now speaks Basque openly in the streets, nothing much had changed in thirty years. One’s first impression of Spain on the way through from France, especially if the journey was made late in the evening, was one of life bursting at the seams, a world away from the ordered tranquillity of the average French town. This was glorious chaos; cars choking narrow streets filled with people, children dressed in their Sunday best every night of the week playing in parks and turning shopping streets into playgrounds. Old people sitting on park benches, churros stands in every town square, shops open late into the night and restaurants filling up when the rest of the world is watching late-night television at home. There can be few frontiers in the world between countries of more or less equal standard of living where life on each side is so different. Churchill’s soft underbelly of Europe is clearly defined, and it makes for a soft way of life in a way he missed.
The Basques are, nevertheless, a taciturn people, lacking the instant friendliness of the Andalusians but making up for it in different ways. Like the invaders before them, foreign tourists tend to pass through, and the nation survived as such over the centuries, complete with its own language and customs, by treating foreigners with a certain reserve. No great effort is made in a restaurant to find an available table, for example, and the chalked menu may well be in Basque only. But once seated, every effort is made to accommodate, and if the service comes without the easy smile and idle chat of the southerners, the food makes it all worthwhile. No region of Spain offers the same level of cuisine as the Basque Country, where the most basic product, whether animal or vegetable, comes cooked to perfection and usually dressed in the most delicious sauces.
Going back is a risky enterprise. Most of the rest of the Spanish coastline has changed beyond recognition in three decades, and a visit to Sitges, Benidorm or Marbella after this much time has passed would be a visit to a very different place. We went to show our daughter, now in her mid thirties, where she spent the entire summer of 1978.
The country road leading to the campsite beside the rocky cove was the same. The restaurant on the hill was the same, and the families spending their entire summers away from the cities, arriving in lorries transporting enormous tents and much of the contents of their houses, were probably the same too.
I asked if she remembered any of it.
“No,” she replied, “but it hasn’t changed.”
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My first bike was a tricycle with one of its wheels missing. As luck would have it, the wheel that fell off was one of the back wheels, and I quickly discovered that the tricycle worked very well on the two remaining wheels, with a slight twist of the saddle and handlebars.
Subsequent bikes were often conglomerate contraptions, made useable with a basic knowledge of how bikes work, gained by necessity rather than love of mechanics. Quite simply, if I didn’t fix it, it would not work.
I used to wonder why people took photographs of me on my two-wheeled tricycle in the streets, riding along without a care in the world, and now that I look back to that time, I realise it was the only time in my life anybody I didn’t know personally took a photograph of me. Fame is ephemeral.
But that’s neither here nor there, nor is the fact that the upper limits of my mechanical capabilities reach thus far and no further.
And now that the bikes in the house are used almost exclusively by nieces and nephews, godsons and the like, I find myself constantly amazed at the depth of ignorance these youngsters have about the working parts of bikes. And that’s if they deign to mount the fine old machines I keep in my garage in the first place.
One of them called from the nearby town asking to be collected, because, he explained with admirable – if mistaken – concision, the chain broke. He had pushed the bike a few kilometres along the way, holding the back wheel up, to get into town before calling. When I got there, I put the chain back and asked the obvious question.
“What do you do at home when your bike breaks down?”
“Call my father,” he replied. Of course he did. Don’t they all?
Some have an impressive knowledge of the various parts of a bike, and can talk to me about torques and spindles and plates and other stuff I thought only lawyers and Formula One mechanics know about, but this, I realised in time, is because these youngsters have to know this gobbledegook to be able to tell the mechanics in the bicycle shops exactly how they want their bikes customed. They know exactly what they want, but they still cannot fix a puncture or replace a few ball bearings on their bikes.
Perhaps this culture of ignorance is linked to the built-in obsolescence of the gadgets they all use these days. One does not even think of fixing an I-pod or mobile phone when it breaks down. One throws it out and buys another.
The beauty of a bike is that it lasts forever. As parts rust or fail to work, they can be fixed or replaced, and that’s the way it has been for a very long time. But I fear the end of the bike as we know it is drawing close. My nephew wants a new bike. It costs five thousand euros, and comes with various electronic working parts. And when it breaks down, he will not be calling me.
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