Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

There is a period during the Spanish day – between 2 and 4pm – when scarcely anything moves. People simply disappear. But on public holidays like today, the entire day is like this. Ghostly. Only the cafes and the pastry shops open. The calm and silence are wonderful.

Which reminds me… My new neighbour, Antonio, is not at all silent. In fact, he takes the Spanish love of talking to new extremes. My first glimpse of him was down in the garden, conversing with a tree. And yesterday, I caught him talking to the drainpipe on his garage. And when he isn’t chatting to himself or some inanimate object, he is shouting at anyone who comes within his orbit. As he works on petrol tankers, I assume he has adopted this default mode because of engine noise. But he is a nice man and, despite his decibel quotient, we much prefer him to the Catalans on the other side of us, who have yet to speak to us in almost 4 years.

Given the Spanish adamantine refusal to accept that work dignifies, when a public holiday falls on a Thursday or a Tuesday, the corresponding Friday and Monday are always treated as a semi-holiday. In fact, there is a word for these days – puente or bridge. On these days, Spain is semi-quiet. Or, to put it another way, much like most other countries on a normal day.

Today is the day of the annual military parade, the one in which French cheese-eating surrender monkeys have replaced US troops because the socialist government is bent on distancing itself from America and snuggling up to the Franco-German – dare I say? – axis of the EU. So, all the more strange that the same socialist government should have invited a survivor of the Spanish division which fought with the Nazis to share the podium and so lay itself open to the charge from political parties to their left of being fascist. It’s all to do with reconciliation, they say. To which the answer has been, “Opening up old wounds is a strange way to achieve this goal”.

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