Read "A book and a blog" From The Beginning*
Sunday, 23 January 2011
3. The First Cubata
On this Tuesday, the 5th of December 1995
He parked his car scarcely five minutes walk away from where it had been all afternoon. It took him ten minutes to find a place to park and another ten to buy a packet of Winstons and then with the change pay for a blue zone ticket. This all frustrated him more than it should have - and so, quite despite himself, affected little by little his mood and how he felt more generally about what had seemed to take place at lunch.
A creeping sensation of oppression began to overwhelm him and so it was that in little more than half an hour his earlier optimism became something quite different and much darker.
He walked along V_____ Street with an increasing desire not to have to arrive anywhere, not to have to achieve anything, not to have to battle with any person or fact, not to have to answer anyone or take any decision - not to have make any effort whatsoever, indeed, except that of seeing, watching, observing, appreciating. Looking, that is to say, to perceive and not be perceived.
The evening was getting colder now. He continued walking until he arrived at the entrance to the building where he had his offices. He greeted the porter, entered the lift and went up to the fourth floor.
His secretary was waiting for him.
"Hello Salvador," she said. She was a woman with a weary aspect: grey clothing, apparently slim without really being so - almost as if she were a plant which someone had forgotten to water for a while and which had dried up inside without communicating in time to the rest of its being this sorry state of affairs.
"Hello Teresa."
"You've got rather a lot of calls." She sounded less than pleased.
"Right. Well, I've had a couple of meetings, bank stuff, you're going to be paid on Monday for sure, I did the transfers this afternoon with José Luis. We've spent the whole afternoon in the branch, you see?" He gripped more firmly his cigarette with his left hand and picked up - with a certain lack of competence - the call book with his right.
He looked quickly over the calls, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the second page.
"These guys from the newspaper - what the hell do they want now?" he exclaimed.
"Well, it's that invoice they're always ringing about ... the TV advertising contract ... that one, you know ..."
"Which one?"
"Don't you remember? The one that weird girl phoned you about last week, the one who dresses all modern like, that salesgirl ... You really don't remember?" Teresa began to look in the diary she had next to her Canon typewriter. "Yes. Chus. Surely you remember ..."
"Nope. I'm afraid I really don't. Don't remember anything."
"Well, they were pretty cross, I can tell you. I mean, they were already threatening us, you know? Really threatening us, I mean."
"Well, I'm telling you we're not going to do anything right now. Tomorrow's a holiday, Teresa. Everything'll be shut. What else do you want me to say?"
"Yeah. OK. All right. Just remember it's there. You know best, of course. You've got some others though. Elisandro, papers and stuff. The funding bodies, all the usual. He said you'd know. I don't know. Well. You'll know, I'm sure."
"All the usual, yes. I do know about all the usual. I do know that." He put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the counter.
"Oh," she then added, "Paco's called, he says the papers for the tax return, everything and all, well, it's time to get it up and running. He doesn't want what happened last year to happen again - if you remember what happened. So if you can ... if you can go over later and talk to him ..."
"Today?"
"I don't know. He told me he was going to be there until about ten. I mean, what he said is he didn't want what happened last year to happen again. But it's your shout, isn't it? I mean, if you want to leave it till Monday, well, next week is what I'm saying ..."
Salvador left the call book on top of the Canon and lit another Winston. He saw the diary that was next to it.
"Lovely diary."
"A gift."
"Who?"
"The translators."
"Nice."
"Well. Actually, if truth be told, it's actually for you, but since you've already got one for next year ... you do have one, don't you?"
"So you thought you'd take advantage of the opportunity, eh?"
"Well, I mean you ..."
"Oh it doesn't matter, Teresa, it doesn't matter. You can make use of it, right?"
"Well ..."
"Right." For a moment, he looked at one of the books on the bookshelf next to the desk - and then at none of the books. He took out another cigarette and lit it. "OK, Teresa. That all then?"
"If you can sign these cheques here ..."
"Give me the list and I'll see what I can do. If you don't need me any more, I'm going to my office." He opened the door to the passage.
"Hey, Salvador, I completely forgot," whispered Teresa, with a sudden movement as she closed the door and, finding herself too close to her boss, suddenly aware of his alcohol, his tobacco and his day's work, as well as the work he hadn't done; and then perhaps also something different, something impossible to define, something - perhaps - yet to define.
"What did you completely forget?" said Salvador.
"Julian's here."
"Julian?"
"Julian."
"Today?"
"He's been here for almost an hour."
"Almost an hour?"
"I told him you were coming. I mean, because of the cheques. I mean, I didn't say anything specific, of course. But he imagined, I'm sure."
"You told him I was coming but in fact he imagined it? Right. OK. Brilliant. And why the fuck did you tell him that? I mean, exactly today. I can see it now. I've got this to deal with now till it's time for bedtime stories - and pretty damn late ones at that."
"I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"Honestly, no."
"And how come you suddenly know so much about Julian?"
"He's here with his wife.·
"Fuckity fuck. What I really needed. Cheers, Teresa. Thanks a bunch. You've certainly outdone yourself this evening. But mightily. Oh fuck."
And all of a sudden they could hear footsteps on the other side of the door. And he knew he had no alternative but to stay and speak, and even sign - sign, that is, if yet another moment of no alternative should yet again present itself.
Four hours later, he stepped out onto the street and breathed the air with gratitude, and looked across the small square, and saw that the B_____ (a bar of allegedly German extraction) was still open. It was a long and narrow bar, with a big and revealing window looking onto the square. He could see a young woman sitting inside. She had long straight hair, blonde highlights in fact. She was sitting next to the window, the glass a little steamed up, the owner of the bar already clearing away as he looked up at the television on the wall and at his watch; she wasn't though, she looked elsewhere: she was looking at some personal place, some place her own, interior, private, just a Coca-Cola in front of her - and now he could see some pistachios or peanuts on a small white plate, almost translucent it was, she'd clearly been waiting for a while.
He reached the other side of the square and entered the bar with decision.
"Hello Salvador."
"Ana! Anita! But what are you doing here? Waiting for me, I bet. Really so? Are you really still waiting for me?"
"I ask myself the same question, Salvador. I ask myself the same question."
"Hey, Freddy. Time for a cubata?"
"I figure we do, Salva. I figure we do. I've got my wife with the mother-in-law until Sunday. Guess I really don't know have anything else to do."
"Thanks muchly, Freddy. Thanks very muchly!"
He took out his Winstons and offered her one. Whilst she took it by one end, she looked at him fixedly, pressing her lips together and shaking her head.
"You've certainly taken your time this evening."
"Yeah. I know. I know. Oh fuck. What do you want me to say? All this holiday stuff, I get so damn anxious. People behave like idiots. Damn fool idiots. I really can't deal with it. One day, it's going to do me in." He looked up at the ceiling for half a pregnant minute, then looked back down. Then he continued his little speech, now with a certain tone of complicity. "I've been so damn busy. With that damn fool José Luis all afternoon. His machines couldn't read my diskettes properly. He had to call Barcelona to ask some idiot of an IT guy - what's more, using my mobile phone to do so! The sons-of-a-bitch have billed me three times, you know? Three times for these shitty invoices. Thanks Freddy."
"Don't mention it, mate. Don't mention it."
"What do you want?" Salvador asked Ana.
"I'll have another Coca-Cola, I think," she answered, "I think ..."
"Well, that's another Coca-Cola, Freddy - do you hear me? With the usual. You know what I mean."
"Okey dokey, Salva. Let me clear all this away." He came out from behind the counter and looked at Ana for a moment whilst he cleaned the table. "I'll bring it right over."
"Thanks, Freddy," Ana answered, now much calmer. "Although I'm not absolutely sure if it's a good idea. She looked back at Salvador. "Got to get up early tomorrow. You remember?"
"Right. Right. Yep. I remember. Fuck. Jesus." He stretched out his cigarette lighter. Then all of a sudden, they both realised he was unable to maintain his hand steady - it trembled as if he was in the grip of a terrible, perhaps supernatural, cold. It was a short moment, like so many others which people are so often ignorant of on a daily and generally insignificant basis - and yet, for them both, it proved a revelatory understanding fully shared like perhaps no other in their short acquaintance.
And if, at the time, an observer had been able to ask either of them to evaluate its proper meaning, neither of them would have known how to express themselves with a relevant or useful accuracy.
"Three damn times. Once, for the computer program which they say we need to get the invoices onto their systems, and even then they give it us in Catalan. Twice, because in the end they had to type it in manually, since their fucking computers don't work with the fucking program his Catalan-speaking IT friends choose to distribute. And three times, for the telephone call. So you can just imagine the scene. Me and him, 'clickety click' on the computer. Typing in the data with two fingers. Me doing half the job. And him billing me for the honour." He exhaled slowly. "So you can see, can't you? You can see why I'm so damn anxious. And a holiday tomorrow ..." he raised his hand "... and this is where I've finally ended up. And my people won't get a peseta until Monday or Tuesday and they're going to rip into me - really rip into me. All when, really, it's got nothing to do with me. All I do is pay, you know? All I do is pay ..."
He took a sip of his cubata and exhaled once more.
"Oh dear," responded Ana finally. "I didn't realise. Looks like things are getting a little complicated for you."
"Well," he half-smiled, "I'll think of something. What do you want me to say? The more you work for these people, the more they want to fuck you." He looked at her with an air of confidence, he gently tipped his head to one side, he moved towards her, and he started, once more, to gain her complicity, to win over the opposition ... in this case, a young woman, earlier that evening a man old beyond his years, looking for retirement, looking for release. It didn't matter who or when or why he had to do it; all that mattered was that he still could, that he still might convince with his words and the whispering sound of his certainties, the wily hints dropped cleverly, the rumours, the gossip, and the silence also - also the silence, that moment so empty and useless for some which, nevertheless, in his hands, in the right hands, could prove so powerful and devastating.
Freddy closed up shop at around half past one in the morning. Salvador offered to take Ana home. It was a dark night and there were few people out on the street. It was sensible to offer and it was sensible to accept.
She accepted.
He parked his car scarcely five minutes walk away from where it had been all afternoon. It took him ten minutes to find a place to park and another ten to buy a packet of Winstons and then with the change pay for a blue zone ticket. This all frustrated him more than it should have - and so, quite despite himself, affected little by little his mood and how he felt more generally about what had seemed to take place at lunch.
A creeping sensation of oppression began to overwhelm him and so it was that in little more than half an hour his earlier optimism became something quite different and much darker.
He walked along V_____ Street with an increasing desire not to have to arrive anywhere, not to have to achieve anything, not to have to battle with any person or fact, not to have to answer anyone or take any decision - not to have make any effort whatsoever, indeed, except that of seeing, watching, observing, appreciating. Looking, that is to say, to perceive and not be perceived.
The evening was getting colder now. He continued walking until he arrived at the entrance to the building where he had his offices. He greeted the porter, entered the lift and went up to the fourth floor.
His secretary was waiting for him.
"Hello Salvador," she said. She was a woman with a weary aspect: grey clothing, apparently slim without really being so - almost as if she were a plant which someone had forgotten to water for a while and which had dried up inside without communicating in time to the rest of its being this sorry state of affairs.
"Hello Teresa."
"You've got rather a lot of calls." She sounded less than pleased.
"Right. Well, I've had a couple of meetings, bank stuff, you're going to be paid on Monday for sure, I did the transfers this afternoon with José Luis. We've spent the whole afternoon in the branch, you see?" He gripped more firmly his cigarette with his left hand and picked up - with a certain lack of competence - the call book with his right.
He looked quickly over the calls, stopping for a moment at the bottom of the second page.
"These guys from the newspaper - what the hell do they want now?" he exclaimed.
"Well, it's that invoice they're always ringing about ... the TV advertising contract ... that one, you know ..."
"Which one?"
"Don't you remember? The one that weird girl phoned you about last week, the one who dresses all modern like, that salesgirl ... You really don't remember?" Teresa began to look in the diary she had next to her Canon typewriter. "Yes. Chus. Surely you remember ..."
"Nope. I'm afraid I really don't. Don't remember anything."
"Well, they were pretty cross, I can tell you. I mean, they were already threatening us, you know? Really threatening us, I mean."
"Well, I'm telling you we're not going to do anything right now. Tomorrow's a holiday, Teresa. Everything'll be shut. What else do you want me to say?"
"Yeah. OK. All right. Just remember it's there. You know best, of course. You've got some others though. Elisandro, papers and stuff. The funding bodies, all the usual. He said you'd know. I don't know. Well. You'll know, I'm sure."
"All the usual, yes. I do know about all the usual. I do know that." He put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the counter.
"Oh," she then added, "Paco's called, he says the papers for the tax return, everything and all, well, it's time to get it up and running. He doesn't want what happened last year to happen again - if you remember what happened. So if you can ... if you can go over later and talk to him ..."
"Today?"
"I don't know. He told me he was going to be there until about ten. I mean, what he said is he didn't want what happened last year to happen again. But it's your shout, isn't it? I mean, if you want to leave it till Monday, well, next week is what I'm saying ..."
Salvador left the call book on top of the Canon and lit another Winston. He saw the diary that was next to it.
"Lovely diary."
"A gift."
"Who?"
"The translators."
"Nice."
"Well. Actually, if truth be told, it's actually for you, but since you've already got one for next year ... you do have one, don't you?"
"So you thought you'd take advantage of the opportunity, eh?"
"Well, I mean you ..."
"Oh it doesn't matter, Teresa, it doesn't matter. You can make use of it, right?"
"Well ..."
"Right." For a moment, he looked at one of the books on the bookshelf next to the desk - and then at none of the books. He took out another cigarette and lit it. "OK, Teresa. That all then?"
"If you can sign these cheques here ..."
"Give me the list and I'll see what I can do. If you don't need me any more, I'm going to my office." He opened the door to the passage.
"Hey, Salvador, I completely forgot," whispered Teresa, with a sudden movement as she closed the door and, finding herself too close to her boss, suddenly aware of his alcohol, his tobacco and his day's work, as well as the work he hadn't done; and then perhaps also something different, something impossible to define, something - perhaps - yet to define.
"What did you completely forget?" said Salvador.
"Julian's here."
"Julian?"
"Julian."
"Today?"
"He's been here for almost an hour."
"Almost an hour?"
"I told him you were coming. I mean, because of the cheques. I mean, I didn't say anything specific, of course. But he imagined, I'm sure."
"You told him I was coming but in fact he imagined it? Right. OK. Brilliant. And why the fuck did you tell him that? I mean, exactly today. I can see it now. I've got this to deal with now till it's time for bedtime stories - and pretty damn late ones at that."
"I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"Honestly, no."
"And how come you suddenly know so much about Julian?"
"He's here with his wife.·
"Fuckity fuck. What I really needed. Cheers, Teresa. Thanks a bunch. You've certainly outdone yourself this evening. But mightily. Oh fuck."
And all of a sudden they could hear footsteps on the other side of the door. And he knew he had no alternative but to stay and speak, and even sign - sign, that is, if yet another moment of no alternative should yet again present itself.
*
Four hours later, he stepped out onto the street and breathed the air with gratitude, and looked across the small square, and saw that the B_____ (a bar of allegedly German extraction) was still open. It was a long and narrow bar, with a big and revealing window looking onto the square. He could see a young woman sitting inside. She had long straight hair, blonde highlights in fact. She was sitting next to the window, the glass a little steamed up, the owner of the bar already clearing away as he looked up at the television on the wall and at his watch; she wasn't though, she looked elsewhere: she was looking at some personal place, some place her own, interior, private, just a Coca-Cola in front of her - and now he could see some pistachios or peanuts on a small white plate, almost translucent it was, she'd clearly been waiting for a while.
He reached the other side of the square and entered the bar with decision.
"Hello Salvador."
"Ana! Anita! But what are you doing here? Waiting for me, I bet. Really so? Are you really still waiting for me?"
"I ask myself the same question, Salvador. I ask myself the same question."
"Hey, Freddy. Time for a cubata?"
"I figure we do, Salva. I figure we do. I've got my wife with the mother-in-law until Sunday. Guess I really don't know have anything else to do."
"Thanks muchly, Freddy. Thanks very muchly!"
He took out his Winstons and offered her one. Whilst she took it by one end, she looked at him fixedly, pressing her lips together and shaking her head.
"You've certainly taken your time this evening."
"Yeah. I know. I know. Oh fuck. What do you want me to say? All this holiday stuff, I get so damn anxious. People behave like idiots. Damn fool idiots. I really can't deal with it. One day, it's going to do me in." He looked up at the ceiling for half a pregnant minute, then looked back down. Then he continued his little speech, now with a certain tone of complicity. "I've been so damn busy. With that damn fool José Luis all afternoon. His machines couldn't read my diskettes properly. He had to call Barcelona to ask some idiot of an IT guy - what's more, using my mobile phone to do so! The sons-of-a-bitch have billed me three times, you know? Three times for these shitty invoices. Thanks Freddy."
"Don't mention it, mate. Don't mention it."
"What do you want?" Salvador asked Ana.
"I'll have another Coca-Cola, I think," she answered, "I think ..."
"Well, that's another Coca-Cola, Freddy - do you hear me? With the usual. You know what I mean."
"Okey dokey, Salva. Let me clear all this away." He came out from behind the counter and looked at Ana for a moment whilst he cleaned the table. "I'll bring it right over."
"Thanks, Freddy," Ana answered, now much calmer. "Although I'm not absolutely sure if it's a good idea. She looked back at Salvador. "Got to get up early tomorrow. You remember?"
"Right. Right. Yep. I remember. Fuck. Jesus." He stretched out his cigarette lighter. Then all of a sudden, they both realised he was unable to maintain his hand steady - it trembled as if he was in the grip of a terrible, perhaps supernatural, cold. It was a short moment, like so many others which people are so often ignorant of on a daily and generally insignificant basis - and yet, for them both, it proved a revelatory understanding fully shared like perhaps no other in their short acquaintance.
And if, at the time, an observer had been able to ask either of them to evaluate its proper meaning, neither of them would have known how to express themselves with a relevant or useful accuracy.
"Three damn times. Once, for the computer program which they say we need to get the invoices onto their systems, and even then they give it us in Catalan. Twice, because in the end they had to type it in manually, since their fucking computers don't work with the fucking program his Catalan-speaking IT friends choose to distribute. And three times, for the telephone call. So you can just imagine the scene. Me and him, 'clickety click' on the computer. Typing in the data with two fingers. Me doing half the job. And him billing me for the honour." He exhaled slowly. "So you can see, can't you? You can see why I'm so damn anxious. And a holiday tomorrow ..." he raised his hand "... and this is where I've finally ended up. And my people won't get a peseta until Monday or Tuesday and they're going to rip into me - really rip into me. All when, really, it's got nothing to do with me. All I do is pay, you know? All I do is pay ..."
He took a sip of his cubata and exhaled once more.
"Oh dear," responded Ana finally. "I didn't realise. Looks like things are getting a little complicated for you."
"Well," he half-smiled, "I'll think of something. What do you want me to say? The more you work for these people, the more they want to fuck you." He looked at her with an air of confidence, he gently tipped his head to one side, he moved towards her, and he started, once more, to gain her complicity, to win over the opposition ... in this case, a young woman, earlier that evening a man old beyond his years, looking for retirement, looking for release. It didn't matter who or when or why he had to do it; all that mattered was that he still could, that he still might convince with his words and the whispering sound of his certainties, the wily hints dropped cleverly, the rumours, the gossip, and the silence also - also the silence, that moment so empty and useless for some which, nevertheless, in his hands, in the right hands, could prove so powerful and devastating.
*
Freddy closed up shop at around half past one in the morning. Salvador offered to take Ana home. It was a dark night and there were few people out on the street. It was sensible to offer and it was sensible to accept.
She accepted.
CREEPY-CRAWLY STUFF ... when I start looking over my shoulder
Re: Adiós a la alianza... y Tormenta en un vaso...
Al final voy a tener que subscribirme a elpais.es sólo por el efecto psicologicamente terapéutico de los últimos artículos de opinión que estoy leyendo los días que compro la versión impresa. Primero, el artículo de Hermann Tertsch -"Adiós a la alianza que fue"- que termina con la siguiente observación:
"[...] es difícil ser optimista [sobre la relación actual entre EE.UU y sus aliados]. Porque, por desgracia, estos caracteres sencillos que ayer acusaban en el Congreso de los Diputados a Bush de actuar 'sólo por petroleo' se equivocan. Es petróleo, pero mucho más ideología y grandes dosis de presbiterianismo militante y militar. En ocasiones letales."
Añadiría que, a veces, cotidianamente letal, de manera sencillamente cutre y mediocre, como matones baratos en un colegio pobre de barrio.
Y segundo, el artículo de Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra -"Tormenta en un vaso de agua"- sobre España y la identidad de los españoles. Dice: "[...] Mi idea de España pasa por admitir de buen grado que cada uno, individual o regionalmente, se sienta español como mejor lo considere. [...] Mi comprensión en ese asunto me lleva hasta la aceptación de quienes se definen como no españoles. [...] Defínase como quiera, incluido el definirse como no español, con la siguiente condición: defienda la libertad de los demás para que también su definición sea respetada y respetable, y participe en un proyecto colectivo donde la cohesión y la solidaridad entre todos esté garantizada."
Aplicamos esta última tésis a la circunstancia primera. En gran parte, los problemas de la alianza entre EE.UU y la Europa democrática, constitucional y libre pasa por permitir que los europeos encuentren los medios, la convicción y el espacio propio -además de ese añorado proyecto colectivo, a la vez contenedor y promotor de la diversidad-, a su ritmo y con el apoyo solidario e inteligente de lo que -para los antiguos paises del Este- siempre fue un símbolo de las oportunidades y las libertades, las aperturas y los derechos de los individuos por encima de los derechos de las instituciones y las empresas estratégicas y estatales.
Y si la alianza termina por romperse será porque esencialmente se habrá predicado la diversidad a lo Henry Ford: "Puedes vivir la cultura que quieras, con que la cultura que quieres sea la mía."
Más sobre "La Nueva Europa" aquí:
http://elpais.es/foros/foro.html?cod_orden=000100010003&grupo=foro_ELPAIS
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
Al final voy a tener que subscribirme a elpais.es sólo por el efecto psicologicamente terapéutico de los últimos artículos de opinión que estoy leyendo los días que compro la versión impresa. Primero, el artículo de Hermann Tertsch -"Adiós a la alianza que fue"- que termina con la siguiente observación:
"[...] es difícil ser optimista [sobre la relación actual entre EE.UU y sus aliados]. Porque, por desgracia, estos caracteres sencillos que ayer acusaban en el Congreso de los Diputados a Bush de actuar 'sólo por petroleo' se equivocan. Es petróleo, pero mucho más ideología y grandes dosis de presbiterianismo militante y militar. En ocasiones letales."
Añadiría que, a veces, cotidianamente letal, de manera sencillamente cutre y mediocre, como matones baratos en un colegio pobre de barrio.
Y segundo, el artículo de Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra -"Tormenta en un vaso de agua"- sobre España y la identidad de los españoles. Dice: "[...] Mi idea de España pasa por admitir de buen grado que cada uno, individual o regionalmente, se sienta español como mejor lo considere. [...] Mi comprensión en ese asunto me lleva hasta la aceptación de quienes se definen como no españoles. [...] Defínase como quiera, incluido el definirse como no español, con la siguiente condición: defienda la libertad de los demás para que también su definición sea respetada y respetable, y participe en un proyecto colectivo donde la cohesión y la solidaridad entre todos esté garantizada."
Aplicamos esta última tésis a la circunstancia primera. En gran parte, los problemas de la alianza entre EE.UU y la Europa democrática, constitucional y libre pasa por permitir que los europeos encuentren los medios, la convicción y el espacio propio -además de ese añorado proyecto colectivo, a la vez contenedor y promotor de la diversidad-, a su ritmo y con el apoyo solidario e inteligente de lo que -para los antiguos paises del Este- siempre fue un símbolo de las oportunidades y las libertades, las aperturas y los derechos de los individuos por encima de los derechos de las instituciones y las empresas estratégicas y estatales.
Y si la alianza termina por romperse será porque esencialmente se habrá predicado la diversidad a lo Henry Ford: "Puedes vivir la cultura que quieras, con que la cultura que quieres sea la mía."
Más sobre "La Nueva Europa" aquí:
http://elpais.es/foros/foro.html?cod_orden=000100010003&grupo=foro_ELPAIS
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
CREEPY-CRAWLY STUFF ... when I start looking over my shoulder
Michael Ignatieff's article "The Burden" here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05EMPIRE.html
Readers' responses here:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?230@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474823@.f35ae71
My responses here (but on reflection should really go in "Finger-down-throat ..." section - I do get unbearably sanctimonious sometimes):
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/0
and:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/89 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/91
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05EMPIRE.html
Readers' responses here:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?230@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474823@.f35ae71
My responses here (but on reflection should really go in "Finger-down-throat ..." section - I do get unbearably sanctimonious sometimes):
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/0
and:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/89 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@119.1DBSaop11Ci.474925@.f35ae71/91
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
FINGER-DOWN-THROAT STUFF ... when I start getting sentimental
"English is toughest European language to read"
Turn up for the books, I think (whilst the article doesn't enter restricted access archive - so read now!!!):
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991233
Been looking for link to another article, titled "You are what you speak", but guess is restricted access by now (dated 30th November 2002 in same magazine). Anyhow, this was my response on reading it (thanks Little Sis for drawing my attention to it when you did - nice bit of remote-control therapy):
"Just got the New Scientist article today, and I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis.
"One day the American came into the cafeteria at the faculty whilst I was having lunch and had lunch too. That was the day he said there were plenty of opportunities for working in Croatia if you wanted to work for American companies. He argued that top-down development (ie importing knowhow and people and procedures, creating a corporate monopoly stranglehold - my words, his ideas - in Croatia in the IT sector, especially in relation to government suppliers) would eventually benefit even the poorest, because the bigger the cake got, the more crumbs (again, my words but his idea) would filter down to even the lowest levels of society.
"He also said that as far as he could see there were plenty of business opportunities in Croatia and he could only explain Croatians' reluctance to get up and go in a standard American-type entrepreneurial mode by the fact that the Croatians were obviously lazy.
"I didn't agree with this (he probably didn't either - he wasn't stupid, just extremely focussed on the objective he'd set himself/had been set). Firstly, if jobs are hard to come by, their quality is unlikely to be high, they are unlikely to engage the intellect, the procedures if they exist in even a slightly structured way have to be acquired with little training or support, and will probably be far less efficient than they could be (and what's more quite obviously so to even new workers, a soul-destroying experience for any one who's enthusiastically new to a place and would like to go that little bit further to make things better), management will be top-down, hierarchies will be rigid, decisions immutable etc. So under those circumstances you're hardly going to be keen about striking out on your own.
"Secondly, two experiences I had in Spain which have shown me the importance of not assuming that what's done in one country and works is easily applicable in another, or that if something works for you then that gives you the right to force others to accept it should work for them (again, all good teachers learn this pretty quickly).
"1) I had to act as interpreter once in a bottling factory in Burgos. An American technician had been sent over to explain how a new label-sticking machine worked. Its controls had to be learned in a rather intuitive way (it was designed to stick transparent plastic labels on beer bottles so as to give them a cheap Coronita painted glass look, and the labels got easily wrinkled, and the adjustments needed to stop the wrinkles were not 'this size wrinkle, three mm to the left' but rather 'this size wrinkle across that corner, push it in a little here not there'), and so the technician had to give a course. He proposed a hierarchical solution: two of the 'best' (definition of best is...?) workers with him for a day, he'd transmit his knowledge to them, they'd transmit the acquired knowledge to their colleagues at some other moment. But the management of the factory said no. Instead, the system was going to be the following:
a) half an hour of theory with the blackboard, all ten workers up in the classroom, interpreter doing best to understand concepts (but no miracles expected vocabulary-wise - 'course, this does beg the question why the Americans couldn't have sent over a Spanish-speaking technician: the factory was after all the client, the machine rather pricey), and then,
b) everyone down to the shop floor, and all ten would be allowed to crawl all over the machine until they had learned how to use it (applying the recently-transmitted theory immediately in situ)
"I was probably as horrified as the technician, but nevertheless the client *is* king (even when you think he/she's an emperor wearing skimpy clothes), and as things turned out the client was right. That morning, all ten workers learned the basics of buttons, adjustments, wrinkles produced by such and such an adjustment, wrinkles removed by such and such an adjustment. By the following day the first trial run of labelled bottles churned out successfully. They had learned their way, using their rules, using their procedures, and probably more quickly than the hierarchical model beloved of the Anglo-Saxons (even when used by people in favour of and comfortable with such a model).
"2) I used to give English classes in a Spanish family-run Total Quality Management-impregnated company in Burgos. I learned a lot from them through observation over the years I gave classes there. On one occasion, one student explained the competitive advantage that the Spanish version of TQM had given them over suppliers from other countries (ie acquired initially from outside Spain, but vigorously reworked and modulated over the 90s by those companies forward-looking enough to understand the importance of worker involvement not only at the 'what we do' level, but also at the 'how we do it' [ie workteam-specific procedural and internal functioning] level).
"The Spanish, as the Croatians (at least for the American in question), have traditionally been considered lazy, more interested in living than working (in a previous e-mail I got the phrase the wrong way round when I said I had learnt the importance of living to work from the Spanish: I should've said I had learnt the importance of working to live!!!). Nevertheless, they are excellent at improvising (they have to be, otherwise they'd never get anywhere: someone once said if the Spanish were able to merge the planning of a German work environment and the improvisation of a Spanish work environment in one cogent whole, they would be world leaders in anything they put their hands to), and one could argue that any procedures developed for use within a Spanish company context should take into account this widely-shared skill. Certainly, the Spanish company soon understood (consciously or sub-consciously) the value their workers could add in an improvisational context.
"And so it was that my student explained to me the difference between a Japanese supplier and a Spanish supplier. A Japanese supplier planned the development process of a new part of a car (roof section, electric motor for winding up windows, whatever) and made 80% of changes within the first 20% of the development cycle. This required the client (Peugeot, Mercedes, Nissan, whoever) to be equally clear right up front about what they wanted. The Spanish however tended to plan less strictly, the beginning of a new project would often be used to frantically finish the end of a late-running previous project. However, it soon became clear to the clients that although they knew the Spanish were not so careful with the first half of a project, the fact that they increased workrates exponentially right up to the final deadline meant that any late bright ideas the client suddenly had were easily added to the project if you were working with such a Spanish supplier, as they always ended up making 80% of the changes in the *last* 30% of the development cycle, because they were always running late, whereas the Japanese refused to work more in the last half of the cycle, quite the contrary, they planned to work less, as they needed to start dedicating some of the resources originally used for the first half of the current project to the highly-planned beginning of the next project.
"If the Spanish had been forced to use American procedures (TQM and Quality Circles although widely employed first by the Japanese were in fact originally an American invention) and had never been given room to develop not only 'what we do' but also 'how we do it' (ie the procedures, the glue, when etc.) (first, at individual company level, second, at workgroup level in relation to other workgroups, third, at specific individual level in relation to other individuals within a workgroup), then the comapny in question and other companies would not have added value in a uniquely Spanish way uniquely appropriate to the Spanish way of doing things, would therefore have been obliged to use work systems and procedures appropriate for the Japanese or the Americans, and would therefore have *always* been working at a competitive disadvantage without ever really being able to understand why the Japanese and Americans were always able to maintain a strangely elusive competitive edge. That is, the Spanish would have been hobbled, trying to work with one hand tied behind their collective back, in a terribly undefinable way which would have allowed the Japanese and Americans to carry on ruling the roost.
"There was another case: another automotive components company in Burgos too (German-owned) was told to work out how to make use of a 20-year-old machine judged no longer of use to the German parent factory. So they sat down, in standard TQM mode, but a la Spanish, and brainstormed improvements on a machine that any self-respecting group of workers would have felt embarrassed to be working on. They were so successful in the improvements they made to the machine, improvements the Germans had probably felt beneath them (subconsciously, no doubt), that - unfortunately for them - they were soon obliged to do the same for a steady stream of cast-offs from their German parents!
"All of this now seen in a Croatian context and with the New Scientist article in mind.
"When the American said he felt Croatians were lazy because they didn't seem to be responding to the advantages the free market promised (ie this version of the free market: American corporate monopoly in key sectors like the IT sector, the crumbs to be then freely-fought over by homegrown businesses), I argued that:
a) the Croatians had spent the past fifty years (if not more) training themselves not to hope, because there was no point; you need to be able to throw at least some caution to the winds if you are to properly embrace free market economics, and you have to believe that entry barriers are sufficiently low (because they really are, not because the Constitution says they are) to make such throwing-of-caution-to-the-wind worth considering (if my experiences in relation to OSS are anything to go by, it's absolutely clear that the market is not free, and entry barriers will always be raised artificially even - especially? - by dyed-in-the-wool proponents of free market economics; that is to say, if I had upped the stakes, something else would have been done to prevent me from progressing, I am sure, and although you argue that the threat was small and I was magnifying it, I am under no illusions that it would not have been increased if I had been more focussed)
b) the fact that all Croatian children spend two years from seven to nine learning about the grammatical infrastructure that underpins the language, that here are rules you cannot argue with or jump or get away from or circumvent, the fact that any Croatian speaker of a minimum level of competence must modulate perhaps five discreet items, mutually dependent, in order to get to the end of just one single sentence, learn how to process all of this (the 'how') at the same time as decide on the content to be communicated (the 'what'), all this means they will inevitably be more prone to checking out all the angles first, they will be doing it in almost any linguistic transaction of any nature (even just buying the bread) every day of their lives, and even if their recent history had not been oppressive, they would naturally tend to a greater degree of caution, perhaps even suspicion, and certainly be prone to question and wonder about the 'hows' of things than their Anglo-Saxon free-loading (user-oriented and linguistically individualisable) counterparts
"I thus found reading the New Scientist article quite painful, because I spent most of it nodding and thus had quite a significant (literal) pain in the neck at the end of it. The thesis propounded was exactly what I said to the American who couldn't understand (chose to give the impression he couldn't understand) why Croatians didn't leap into the free market as one would into the sea the first day of the summer holidays.
"I would argue that if you are sincere about free market economics as a way of gluing a country together and developing a productive and expansive future, you have to allow - empower, train permanently, teach them to define their own training needs, teach them to teach you - mother-tongue Croatians from the very beginning to participate in everything, so they can develop not only the 'whats' but also the 'hows'. The Extremadura project (http://www.linex.org/) in relation to the knowledge society and the Catalan flavour of nationalism - inclusive and business-friendly - seem to me exactly what Croatia needs in order to create its own unique, homegrown, and therefore perfectly-fitting brand of free market economics, procedures and business environments, allowing Croatians to one day be able to take advantage of their own ways of doing things, their own instinctive multiple double-checking, in the same way that the Spanish added improvisation to TQM. (I was reminded of how different the Spanish and the Croatians are when I heard my uncle - an ex-forest warden, not a university-trained man at all - spending 15 minutes arguing about the grammatical niceties of a particular phrase he'd heard on the news; one of the Spanish teachers from the Spanish government-sponsored Aula Cervantes in the Filozofski Fakultet agreed, saying her Croatian students would regularly get excited, quite heated, about grammatical questions related not to Spanish but Croatian, something quite unheard of in a Spanish university context amongst normal Spanish undergraduates, or indeed the wider Spanish population).
"Neither of these elements (Extremadura-type knowledge society/Catalan-type nationalism) needs to be incompatible with American corporate monopoly in certain strategic sectors such as the IT sector, if these companies and American government policy understand the importance of training everyone in a country up on a permanent basis with the objective of general empowerment at some reasonable moment in the future (reasonable in the sense of allowing these corporations to recover their investments and make their profits, without generating competitive disadvantages for Croatian businesses in such key sectors as IT in relation to alternative OSS solutions being developed in Germany, Slovenia, France, Spain, Italy etc.), at the same time as allowing the citizens and workers of the country to participate on a progressive and exponential basis in *how* things begin to be done (requires clear permanent training policies for all sectors of society, widespread access to Internet, access to clear administrative procedures for setting up companies, business-culture training, access to local distribution networks in a secure and just environment of equal opportunities, access to government-supported seed funds etc.).
"These are the things I believe in at macro level, because I have had the opportunity to see how and why things worked well at macro level in Spain over the past 15 years and at micro level in classroom environments and in business environments all those years I was trying to convince the Spanish that learning languages is easy, not difficult, and it's only difficult when you're not happy with the 'how', or you like a particular 'how' (conversation classes for example: easy solution 'cos they mean no commitment, no objectives, no responsibilities, no downside) for the wrong reasons."
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
Turn up for the books, I think (whilst the article doesn't enter restricted access archive - so read now!!!):
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991233
Been looking for link to another article, titled "You are what you speak", but guess is restricted access by now (dated 30th November 2002 in same magazine). Anyhow, this was my response on reading it (thanks Little Sis for drawing my attention to it when you did - nice bit of remote-control therapy):
"Just got the New Scientist article today, and I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis.
"One day the American came into the cafeteria at the faculty whilst I was having lunch and had lunch too. That was the day he said there were plenty of opportunities for working in Croatia if you wanted to work for American companies. He argued that top-down development (ie importing knowhow and people and procedures, creating a corporate monopoly stranglehold - my words, his ideas - in Croatia in the IT sector, especially in relation to government suppliers) would eventually benefit even the poorest, because the bigger the cake got, the more crumbs (again, my words but his idea) would filter down to even the lowest levels of society.
"He also said that as far as he could see there were plenty of business opportunities in Croatia and he could only explain Croatians' reluctance to get up and go in a standard American-type entrepreneurial mode by the fact that the Croatians were obviously lazy.
"I didn't agree with this (he probably didn't either - he wasn't stupid, just extremely focussed on the objective he'd set himself/had been set). Firstly, if jobs are hard to come by, their quality is unlikely to be high, they are unlikely to engage the intellect, the procedures if they exist in even a slightly structured way have to be acquired with little training or support, and will probably be far less efficient than they could be (and what's more quite obviously so to even new workers, a soul-destroying experience for any one who's enthusiastically new to a place and would like to go that little bit further to make things better), management will be top-down, hierarchies will be rigid, decisions immutable etc. So under those circumstances you're hardly going to be keen about striking out on your own.
"Secondly, two experiences I had in Spain which have shown me the importance of not assuming that what's done in one country and works is easily applicable in another, or that if something works for you then that gives you the right to force others to accept it should work for them (again, all good teachers learn this pretty quickly).
"1) I had to act as interpreter once in a bottling factory in Burgos. An American technician had been sent over to explain how a new label-sticking machine worked. Its controls had to be learned in a rather intuitive way (it was designed to stick transparent plastic labels on beer bottles so as to give them a cheap Coronita painted glass look, and the labels got easily wrinkled, and the adjustments needed to stop the wrinkles were not 'this size wrinkle, three mm to the left' but rather 'this size wrinkle across that corner, push it in a little here not there'), and so the technician had to give a course. He proposed a hierarchical solution: two of the 'best' (definition of best is...?) workers with him for a day, he'd transmit his knowledge to them, they'd transmit the acquired knowledge to their colleagues at some other moment. But the management of the factory said no. Instead, the system was going to be the following:
a) half an hour of theory with the blackboard, all ten workers up in the classroom, interpreter doing best to understand concepts (but no miracles expected vocabulary-wise - 'course, this does beg the question why the Americans couldn't have sent over a Spanish-speaking technician: the factory was after all the client, the machine rather pricey), and then,
b) everyone down to the shop floor, and all ten would be allowed to crawl all over the machine until they had learned how to use it (applying the recently-transmitted theory immediately in situ)
"I was probably as horrified as the technician, but nevertheless the client *is* king (even when you think he/she's an emperor wearing skimpy clothes), and as things turned out the client was right. That morning, all ten workers learned the basics of buttons, adjustments, wrinkles produced by such and such an adjustment, wrinkles removed by such and such an adjustment. By the following day the first trial run of labelled bottles churned out successfully. They had learned their way, using their rules, using their procedures, and probably more quickly than the hierarchical model beloved of the Anglo-Saxons (even when used by people in favour of and comfortable with such a model).
"2) I used to give English classes in a Spanish family-run Total Quality Management-impregnated company in Burgos. I learned a lot from them through observation over the years I gave classes there. On one occasion, one student explained the competitive advantage that the Spanish version of TQM had given them over suppliers from other countries (ie acquired initially from outside Spain, but vigorously reworked and modulated over the 90s by those companies forward-looking enough to understand the importance of worker involvement not only at the 'what we do' level, but also at the 'how we do it' [ie workteam-specific procedural and internal functioning] level).
"The Spanish, as the Croatians (at least for the American in question), have traditionally been considered lazy, more interested in living than working (in a previous e-mail I got the phrase the wrong way round when I said I had learnt the importance of living to work from the Spanish: I should've said I had learnt the importance of working to live!!!). Nevertheless, they are excellent at improvising (they have to be, otherwise they'd never get anywhere: someone once said if the Spanish were able to merge the planning of a German work environment and the improvisation of a Spanish work environment in one cogent whole, they would be world leaders in anything they put their hands to), and one could argue that any procedures developed for use within a Spanish company context should take into account this widely-shared skill. Certainly, the Spanish company soon understood (consciously or sub-consciously) the value their workers could add in an improvisational context.
"And so it was that my student explained to me the difference between a Japanese supplier and a Spanish supplier. A Japanese supplier planned the development process of a new part of a car (roof section, electric motor for winding up windows, whatever) and made 80% of changes within the first 20% of the development cycle. This required the client (Peugeot, Mercedes, Nissan, whoever) to be equally clear right up front about what they wanted. The Spanish however tended to plan less strictly, the beginning of a new project would often be used to frantically finish the end of a late-running previous project. However, it soon became clear to the clients that although they knew the Spanish were not so careful with the first half of a project, the fact that they increased workrates exponentially right up to the final deadline meant that any late bright ideas the client suddenly had were easily added to the project if you were working with such a Spanish supplier, as they always ended up making 80% of the changes in the *last* 30% of the development cycle, because they were always running late, whereas the Japanese refused to work more in the last half of the cycle, quite the contrary, they planned to work less, as they needed to start dedicating some of the resources originally used for the first half of the current project to the highly-planned beginning of the next project.
"If the Spanish had been forced to use American procedures (TQM and Quality Circles although widely employed first by the Japanese were in fact originally an American invention) and had never been given room to develop not only 'what we do' but also 'how we do it' (ie the procedures, the glue, when etc.) (first, at individual company level, second, at workgroup level in relation to other workgroups, third, at specific individual level in relation to other individuals within a workgroup), then the comapny in question and other companies would not have added value in a uniquely Spanish way uniquely appropriate to the Spanish way of doing things, would therefore have been obliged to use work systems and procedures appropriate for the Japanese or the Americans, and would therefore have *always* been working at a competitive disadvantage without ever really being able to understand why the Japanese and Americans were always able to maintain a strangely elusive competitive edge. That is, the Spanish would have been hobbled, trying to work with one hand tied behind their collective back, in a terribly undefinable way which would have allowed the Japanese and Americans to carry on ruling the roost.
"There was another case: another automotive components company in Burgos too (German-owned) was told to work out how to make use of a 20-year-old machine judged no longer of use to the German parent factory. So they sat down, in standard TQM mode, but a la Spanish, and brainstormed improvements on a machine that any self-respecting group of workers would have felt embarrassed to be working on. They were so successful in the improvements they made to the machine, improvements the Germans had probably felt beneath them (subconsciously, no doubt), that - unfortunately for them - they were soon obliged to do the same for a steady stream of cast-offs from their German parents!
"All of this now seen in a Croatian context and with the New Scientist article in mind.
"When the American said he felt Croatians were lazy because they didn't seem to be responding to the advantages the free market promised (ie this version of the free market: American corporate monopoly in key sectors like the IT sector, the crumbs to be then freely-fought over by homegrown businesses), I argued that:
a) the Croatians had spent the past fifty years (if not more) training themselves not to hope, because there was no point; you need to be able to throw at least some caution to the winds if you are to properly embrace free market economics, and you have to believe that entry barriers are sufficiently low (because they really are, not because the Constitution says they are) to make such throwing-of-caution-to-the-wind worth considering (if my experiences in relation to OSS are anything to go by, it's absolutely clear that the market is not free, and entry barriers will always be raised artificially even - especially? - by dyed-in-the-wool proponents of free market economics; that is to say, if I had upped the stakes, something else would have been done to prevent me from progressing, I am sure, and although you argue that the threat was small and I was magnifying it, I am under no illusions that it would not have been increased if I had been more focussed)
b) the fact that all Croatian children spend two years from seven to nine learning about the grammatical infrastructure that underpins the language, that here are rules you cannot argue with or jump or get away from or circumvent, the fact that any Croatian speaker of a minimum level of competence must modulate perhaps five discreet items, mutually dependent, in order to get to the end of just one single sentence, learn how to process all of this (the 'how') at the same time as decide on the content to be communicated (the 'what'), all this means they will inevitably be more prone to checking out all the angles first, they will be doing it in almost any linguistic transaction of any nature (even just buying the bread) every day of their lives, and even if their recent history had not been oppressive, they would naturally tend to a greater degree of caution, perhaps even suspicion, and certainly be prone to question and wonder about the 'hows' of things than their Anglo-Saxon free-loading (user-oriented and linguistically individualisable) counterparts
"I thus found reading the New Scientist article quite painful, because I spent most of it nodding and thus had quite a significant (literal) pain in the neck at the end of it. The thesis propounded was exactly what I said to the American who couldn't understand (chose to give the impression he couldn't understand) why Croatians didn't leap into the free market as one would into the sea the first day of the summer holidays.
"I would argue that if you are sincere about free market economics as a way of gluing a country together and developing a productive and expansive future, you have to allow - empower, train permanently, teach them to define their own training needs, teach them to teach you - mother-tongue Croatians from the very beginning to participate in everything, so they can develop not only the 'whats' but also the 'hows'. The Extremadura project (http://www.linex.org/) in relation to the knowledge society and the Catalan flavour of nationalism - inclusive and business-friendly - seem to me exactly what Croatia needs in order to create its own unique, homegrown, and therefore perfectly-fitting brand of free market economics, procedures and business environments, allowing Croatians to one day be able to take advantage of their own ways of doing things, their own instinctive multiple double-checking, in the same way that the Spanish added improvisation to TQM. (I was reminded of how different the Spanish and the Croatians are when I heard my uncle - an ex-forest warden, not a university-trained man at all - spending 15 minutes arguing about the grammatical niceties of a particular phrase he'd heard on the news; one of the Spanish teachers from the Spanish government-sponsored Aula Cervantes in the Filozofski Fakultet agreed, saying her Croatian students would regularly get excited, quite heated, about grammatical questions related not to Spanish but Croatian, something quite unheard of in a Spanish university context amongst normal Spanish undergraduates, or indeed the wider Spanish population).
"Neither of these elements (Extremadura-type knowledge society/Catalan-type nationalism) needs to be incompatible with American corporate monopoly in certain strategic sectors such as the IT sector, if these companies and American government policy understand the importance of training everyone in a country up on a permanent basis with the objective of general empowerment at some reasonable moment in the future (reasonable in the sense of allowing these corporations to recover their investments and make their profits, without generating competitive disadvantages for Croatian businesses in such key sectors as IT in relation to alternative OSS solutions being developed in Germany, Slovenia, France, Spain, Italy etc.), at the same time as allowing the citizens and workers of the country to participate on a progressive and exponential basis in *how* things begin to be done (requires clear permanent training policies for all sectors of society, widespread access to Internet, access to clear administrative procedures for setting up companies, business-culture training, access to local distribution networks in a secure and just environment of equal opportunities, access to government-supported seed funds etc.).
"These are the things I believe in at macro level, because I have had the opportunity to see how and why things worked well at macro level in Spain over the past 15 years and at micro level in classroom environments and in business environments all those years I was trying to convince the Spanish that learning languages is easy, not difficult, and it's only difficult when you're not happy with the 'how', or you like a particular 'how' (conversation classes for example: easy solution 'cos they mean no commitment, no objectives, no responsibilities, no downside) for the wrong reasons."
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003. Some of these links are now broken.]
HOW TO MAKE MONEY ... AND add to the sum of human happiness
First part of this story here:
http://www.abookandablog.com/2011/01/how-to-make-money-and-add-to-sum-of.html
Lesson 3: "In hot water again!!!"
Phoned up shop owned by local man, no logos, no secretary (wife helps out rather gently in mornings), just a business to allow him to get to end of month. Guy said if nothing to be done, he'd charge us 11 euros 40, but thought be able to get hold of spare parts from third-party suppliers. Was shocked by 30 euro callout charge from official repair people, said they don't have spare parts because Spanish law only obliges them to be held for seven years, and not in manufacturer's interest to use third-party parts supplied thereafter, as looking to install new hot-water heater instead of save planet from wreckage of old (last idea mine, actually).
Cutting long story short: local guy charges us 80 euros for two 30 km round trips to where we live, new element, bucket-full of lime cleared out of inside of heater, tap to turn off water if problem next time round, and quietly efficient and pro-active service.
My question really is:
Why can't big companies use their own employees' intelligence to assess all the needs of the clients, instead of go down the route of deciding where maximum profit/minimum effort ratio lies, proceduralising this area into a total solution script and eliminating anything else which although may serve to ADD to the sum of human happiness (employee happy for sorting out problem using own initiative, client happy 'cos problem sorted out) probably means you need better managers? (You can see question is rhetorical, can't you? Answer bloody obvious.)
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003.]
http://www.abookandablog.com/2011/01/how-to-make-money-and-add-to-sum-of.html
Lesson 3: "In hot water again!!!"
Phoned up shop owned by local man, no logos, no secretary (wife helps out rather gently in mornings), just a business to allow him to get to end of month. Guy said if nothing to be done, he'd charge us 11 euros 40, but thought be able to get hold of spare parts from third-party suppliers. Was shocked by 30 euro callout charge from official repair people, said they don't have spare parts because Spanish law only obliges them to be held for seven years, and not in manufacturer's interest to use third-party parts supplied thereafter, as looking to install new hot-water heater instead of save planet from wreckage of old (last idea mine, actually).
Cutting long story short: local guy charges us 80 euros for two 30 km round trips to where we live, new element, bucket-full of lime cleared out of inside of heater, tap to turn off water if problem next time round, and quietly efficient and pro-active service.
My question really is:
Why can't big companies use their own employees' intelligence to assess all the needs of the clients, instead of go down the route of deciding where maximum profit/minimum effort ratio lies, proceduralising this area into a total solution script and eliminating anything else which although may serve to ADD to the sum of human happiness (employee happy for sorting out problem using own initiative, client happy 'cos problem sorted out) probably means you need better managers? (You can see question is rhetorical, can't you? Answer bloody obvious.)
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th of January 2003.]
CREEPY-CRAWLY STUFF ... when I start looking over my shoulder
A friend who is younger than me informs me that:
"Hierarchy is better than Anarchy (which becomes hierarchy without any rights very quickly)."
My response (should this then be in "Finger-down-throat" again? Why do I *always* have to go for the ideals instead of the reality? Maybe I just need therapy of some sort):
"Hierarchy which becomes self-serving is skating close to fascism. And that's why all politicians and governments in democratic countries must respond to sensibilities and discourse as well as data and threat, and, of course, legal procedures and constitutional rights. Without then giving the impression that when complied with, this is in some way something to be praised as a virtue. The law is the law. Compliance is a prerequisite, not a cherry on the cake. That's what living in democracy means. If not, it's no longer democracy."
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th January 2003.]
"Hierarchy is better than Anarchy (which becomes hierarchy without any rights very quickly)."
My response (should this then be in "Finger-down-throat" again? Why do I *always* have to go for the ideals instead of the reality? Maybe I just need therapy of some sort):
"Hierarchy which becomes self-serving is skating close to fascism. And that's why all politicians and governments in democratic countries must respond to sensibilities and discourse as well as data and threat, and, of course, legal procedures and constitutional rights. Without then giving the impression that when complied with, this is in some way something to be praised as a virtue. The law is the law. Compliance is a prerequisite, not a cherry on the cake. That's what living in democracy means. If not, it's no longer democracy."
[Editor's note: first published on the 25th January 2003.]
Saturday, 22 January 2011
2. The Second Lunch
On this Tuesday, the 5th of December 1995
"I've heard a couple of things on the grapevine."
"I hear quite a few things on the grapevine most days. You can't believe everything you hear." He lit a Winston and offered the packet to the man sitting across the table from him.
"A rather disagreeable scene in a restaurant with too many people around." The bank manager looked at his client to analyse better his reaction.
"Yeah. Right. As I say."
"OK. Not everything you hear fairly reflects what happens."
"I sure am grateful. Wonderful, isn't it?" With a barely contained fury, he put out the cigarette. "We're always having to get up in the morning to face this or that stupidity ..."
"Stupidities. Well, yes. Idiotic detail, let's say. Never been your forte, this is something we already know. But as time goes by, well, one may find a certain satisfaction in carrying out routine tasks, daily tasks; tying up loose ends every so often, at the right time, correctly, with the appropriate elegance of social man let's say - of the sort of man who does care what the rest think, what the rest do ..." and so it was that the bank manager took the cigarette packet from the other which - as he did so - was serving to define a meridian between the two of them "...although, of course, not everything you hear, not everything you see, accurately reflects what takes place ..." And the bank manager looked at his client once more.
"Look, José Luis - you know what? It's up to you, mate. Entirely up to you. I'm not going to try and convince you of anything any more. You listen, watch and draw the conclusions you have to draw. I simply cannot deal with any more of this shit. You know? So you do what you have to do. If, that is, the vultures have to soar over us and you want to be one of them."
"Dear Salvador, I'm afraid you misinterpret me."
"Well, that must be it then, mustn't it? I must be misinterpreting everyone, right? I mean, what's happening here is that I trust people and this isn't something the rest of you think I should do, so now it's time to fuck the fool, is it?"
He tried for another cigarette but there were none left in the packet. He fingered its emptiness for a strange moment, as if he expected to stumble across some kind of sensibility in all his suffering - a sensibility which he'd been trying to find for a while.
"It's not a question of fucking the fool. Really, Salvador, I do not consider you to be a fool. And I can say this with all my heart. The problem is that the numbers lend themselves to various interpretations. I'm still looking to favour the positive ones. But I do need something which allows me to continue supporting this thesis. That is to say, your thesis." He inhaled the sharp smoke calmly, accompanying the action with a familial air, avuncular that is, almost affectionate - most certainly not threatening. "That is to say, for the benefit of my people, of course."
He then picked up his mobile phone and switched it off.
"A bit of peace and quiet, eh? That's what we need. There's a couple of things we've got to discuss and I'm really not sure it's the right time to take phonecalls."
"Right you are," answered his client. Right you are, he then said to himself. He called over the waitress who was serving them that afternoon. "A packet of Winston, María, if you can."
"Okey dokey, Salva. Okey dokey," answered María, with a smile in her voice.
"They all know you, Salvador, they all know you," said the manager, with a degree of admiration.
"I don't know, I really don't know. You're not to be telling my wife, anyhow. Mad enough she got when they told her they'd seen me in a disco with a blonde till the early hours of the morning, and, believe it or not, the damn blonde was actually my daughter." He savoured the tinto as if it were mouthwash - there was something about it really not working for him - and then he looked up at the ceiling with a gesture of resignation and complicity.
"Oh, yes, of course. Women again," said the manager. "I've got mine at home and get to see her very rarely. I hardly recognise the kids."
"Well you can imagine what it's like for me then."
"Which reminds me, I must call the little one - it's her birthday today. Mind if I have your phone for a second so I can phone her?"
It was a most curious moment. Alongside the half-consumed food, the plates, the napkins, the four glasses, the bottle of mineral water, the bottle of mouthwash, the plate of olives, the toothpicks and the ashtray with its water dish - as well as the already mentioned empty packet of Winston cigarettes - there were two mobile phones on the table: one which belonged to the bank manager and the other which belonged to his client - both of which, in that moment, were to be found switched off. The manager's request, strange and difficult to justify, stood out uneasily amongst all the other objects much like a homeless person might at a meeting of shareholders. It was entirely unnecessary for the client to direct his attention towards the other's phone in order for the director to take the hint and calmly provide an explanation.
"Yes, yes. I know you all believe," he said, with a broad gesture of almost biblical proportions around the room, "that we banks have deep pockets and that we do little else but enrich ourselves at your expense," and he continued, " but let me say, this telephone isn't mine, it belongs to my employer, Salvador, my employer, and what we do in our business is control our costs, to the very last peseta, Salvador, to the very last peseta. In fact, not even the car I drive is mine - in this, at least, you have one over me."
"That'd be all I needed, José Luis. All I needed."
"Your Winstons, Salva," smiled María, and with a "click clack" of her black shoes she was already serving the table next to them.
"They programme in four Barcelona numbers and two from B_____ and that's it! They have me super-controlled, you know? Super-controlled. I mean, really, I have to phone from telephone boxes."
And in that moment, that curious moment, the client realised once again that - as on many prior occasions in his varied and changing business existences (moments which he unfortunately found far too easy to remember) - it is a weary truism to say that, in the relationship between client and bank manager, the client is always the manager.
"From telephone boxes, José Luis? Oh please! I mean, really." Salvador switched on his phone and then, after handing it over, lit himself another cigarette.
Then he called to the waitress and asked her for the bill and the chupitos.
José Luis returned from his phonecall, his face as radiant as could be.
"Family life, Salvador. Family life. This weekend, I'm off to Barcelona. It's been three weeks since I last saw them. How I love them, truly. I'm so looking forward to seeing them again. So looking forward to seeing them."
The meal quickly moved on to a different plane. It appeared that José Luis had forgotten, for the moment, the issues he needed to discuss with his client. The chupitos led on to other much easier, apparently disinterested, conversations - and, little by little, the room emptied as the goodbyes ended up resting their heads in the remembrance of the afternoon, very much like the odour of the Cuban cigars, long since lit and smoked and now disappeared.
Whilst the sun set behind the buildings on the other side of the centrally located car park.
One thing we should not forget, however, about the relationship between a bank manager and their client is that the manager never forgets and the client is never allowed to forget. What's left unsaid and what needs no saying sometimes weighs more heavily in the relationship than three hours of verbal exchanges and agreements.
The reaction of his client, right at the very beginning of the lunch, didn't in any way make the manager feel more relaxed about the situation - in fact, the effect was quite the contrary. He didn't say anything at the time and neither did he think it necessary to do so. He hadn't lost faith in his client - not yet. That time hadn't quite arrived. But he did begin to see the need to calculate - even if only as a guesstimate (though certainly not for the moment on auditable paper) - the possible negativities for him in a worst case scenario; the potential for financial loss; how to cut any potential as much as possible if it occurred; and how all of this could affect not only his branch's balance sheet but also the date of his return to the Ciudad Condal, to his family, to his wife and to his expensive en suite jacuzzi.
It was quarter past six when they finally left the restaurant. It was already dark. On the other side of the river, they could see the window displays of a national chain of fashion clothes - points of white halogen lamps, red and green Christmas motifs, slim clothes for precautionary folk. In front of the displays, waiting seemingly forever for their transport, long coats with scarves stood most patiently as the city buses which arrived every so often transported the inhabitants from the centre to the distant workers' suburbs.
Outward and return journeys which existed in a circle of grand business that reverted back on itself on a daily basis: a payment one made through necessity, a business which existed to satisfy such a necessity, a necessity which not everyone had - only, in fact, those who didn't really have.
"We'll be in touch," said José Luis to Salvador.
"I'll call you," said Salvador to José Luis.
And so it was that each went to his own car - neither absolutely sure of the meaning of the afternoon even as both found themselves convinced that, in some way, something was on the point of resolving itself in a not-too-distant future.
Salvador watched his bank manager get into his car, start it, drive it to the small construction of brick and aluminium where payment had to be made, park it - meanwhile turning off the engine (oh my goodness, how he had to control his costs - absolutely incapable of leaving his engine on for even five seconds!) - get out, climb the five steps, pay, return to his car, get in, start the engine once more and finally leave the car park in the direction of his beloved branch.
And so Salvador stood there watching. Not exactly at anything at all. Thinking perhaps, more than watching; thinking as well as conscious of the moment - conscious of the cold and the smell of chestnuts from a street stall opposite the school, and the smoky diesel fumes from a fruit and vegetable lorry to his right, and the cries of the children still playing in the school playground, and their parents as they wearied of repeating themselves over and over, and the mongrel which sniffed amongst the bags of rubbish which piled up on the pavements, and the cat which was waiting for the mongrel to leave - and perhaps a thousand other things of very little rational importance which he shouldn't have been thinking about right then but which nevertheless did spring to his fevering mind ... and thus he was suddenly so awfully conscious of that moment, that stopping of time which reminded him of those other quite different occasions when his heart - in abject love - had jumped so unwisely, and yet so sincerely.
But the moment passed, and so he went over to his car (a long, red and far too ostentatious car), got in, started it up, drove it to the hut, got out to pay, got back in, drove towards the exit and - in the circumstances, perhaps overly contented - left the scene, the occasion, the evening and the encounter, as he began to believe that at very long last events would finally turn out as he had been planning these four long years.
"I've heard a couple of things on the grapevine."
"I hear quite a few things on the grapevine most days. You can't believe everything you hear." He lit a Winston and offered the packet to the man sitting across the table from him.
"A rather disagreeable scene in a restaurant with too many people around." The bank manager looked at his client to analyse better his reaction.
"Yeah. Right. As I say."
"OK. Not everything you hear fairly reflects what happens."
"I sure am grateful. Wonderful, isn't it?" With a barely contained fury, he put out the cigarette. "We're always having to get up in the morning to face this or that stupidity ..."
"Stupidities. Well, yes. Idiotic detail, let's say. Never been your forte, this is something we already know. But as time goes by, well, one may find a certain satisfaction in carrying out routine tasks, daily tasks; tying up loose ends every so often, at the right time, correctly, with the appropriate elegance of social man let's say - of the sort of man who does care what the rest think, what the rest do ..." and so it was that the bank manager took the cigarette packet from the other which - as he did so - was serving to define a meridian between the two of them "...although, of course, not everything you hear, not everything you see, accurately reflects what takes place ..." And the bank manager looked at his client once more.
"Look, José Luis - you know what? It's up to you, mate. Entirely up to you. I'm not going to try and convince you of anything any more. You listen, watch and draw the conclusions you have to draw. I simply cannot deal with any more of this shit. You know? So you do what you have to do. If, that is, the vultures have to soar over us and you want to be one of them."
"Dear Salvador, I'm afraid you misinterpret me."
"Well, that must be it then, mustn't it? I must be misinterpreting everyone, right? I mean, what's happening here is that I trust people and this isn't something the rest of you think I should do, so now it's time to fuck the fool, is it?"
He tried for another cigarette but there were none left in the packet. He fingered its emptiness for a strange moment, as if he expected to stumble across some kind of sensibility in all his suffering - a sensibility which he'd been trying to find for a while.
"It's not a question of fucking the fool. Really, Salvador, I do not consider you to be a fool. And I can say this with all my heart. The problem is that the numbers lend themselves to various interpretations. I'm still looking to favour the positive ones. But I do need something which allows me to continue supporting this thesis. That is to say, your thesis." He inhaled the sharp smoke calmly, accompanying the action with a familial air, avuncular that is, almost affectionate - most certainly not threatening. "That is to say, for the benefit of my people, of course."
He then picked up his mobile phone and switched it off.
"A bit of peace and quiet, eh? That's what we need. There's a couple of things we've got to discuss and I'm really not sure it's the right time to take phonecalls."
"Right you are," answered his client. Right you are, he then said to himself. He called over the waitress who was serving them that afternoon. "A packet of Winston, María, if you can."
"Okey dokey, Salva. Okey dokey," answered María, with a smile in her voice.
"They all know you, Salvador, they all know you," said the manager, with a degree of admiration.
"I don't know, I really don't know. You're not to be telling my wife, anyhow. Mad enough she got when they told her they'd seen me in a disco with a blonde till the early hours of the morning, and, believe it or not, the damn blonde was actually my daughter." He savoured the tinto as if it were mouthwash - there was something about it really not working for him - and then he looked up at the ceiling with a gesture of resignation and complicity.
"Oh, yes, of course. Women again," said the manager. "I've got mine at home and get to see her very rarely. I hardly recognise the kids."
"Well you can imagine what it's like for me then."
"Which reminds me, I must call the little one - it's her birthday today. Mind if I have your phone for a second so I can phone her?"
It was a most curious moment. Alongside the half-consumed food, the plates, the napkins, the four glasses, the bottle of mineral water, the bottle of mouthwash, the plate of olives, the toothpicks and the ashtray with its water dish - as well as the already mentioned empty packet of Winston cigarettes - there were two mobile phones on the table: one which belonged to the bank manager and the other which belonged to his client - both of which, in that moment, were to be found switched off. The manager's request, strange and difficult to justify, stood out uneasily amongst all the other objects much like a homeless person might at a meeting of shareholders. It was entirely unnecessary for the client to direct his attention towards the other's phone in order for the director to take the hint and calmly provide an explanation.
"Yes, yes. I know you all believe," he said, with a broad gesture of almost biblical proportions around the room, "that we banks have deep pockets and that we do little else but enrich ourselves at your expense," and he continued, " but let me say, this telephone isn't mine, it belongs to my employer, Salvador, my employer, and what we do in our business is control our costs, to the very last peseta, Salvador, to the very last peseta. In fact, not even the car I drive is mine - in this, at least, you have one over me."
"That'd be all I needed, José Luis. All I needed."
"Your Winstons, Salva," smiled María, and with a "click clack" of her black shoes she was already serving the table next to them.
"They programme in four Barcelona numbers and two from B_____ and that's it! They have me super-controlled, you know? Super-controlled. I mean, really, I have to phone from telephone boxes."
And in that moment, that curious moment, the client realised once again that - as on many prior occasions in his varied and changing business existences (moments which he unfortunately found far too easy to remember) - it is a weary truism to say that, in the relationship between client and bank manager, the client is always the manager.
"From telephone boxes, José Luis? Oh please! I mean, really." Salvador switched on his phone and then, after handing it over, lit himself another cigarette.
Then he called to the waitress and asked her for the bill and the chupitos.
José Luis returned from his phonecall, his face as radiant as could be.
"Family life, Salvador. Family life. This weekend, I'm off to Barcelona. It's been three weeks since I last saw them. How I love them, truly. I'm so looking forward to seeing them again. So looking forward to seeing them."
The meal quickly moved on to a different plane. It appeared that José Luis had forgotten, for the moment, the issues he needed to discuss with his client. The chupitos led on to other much easier, apparently disinterested, conversations - and, little by little, the room emptied as the goodbyes ended up resting their heads in the remembrance of the afternoon, very much like the odour of the Cuban cigars, long since lit and smoked and now disappeared.
Whilst the sun set behind the buildings on the other side of the centrally located car park.
One thing we should not forget, however, about the relationship between a bank manager and their client is that the manager never forgets and the client is never allowed to forget. What's left unsaid and what needs no saying sometimes weighs more heavily in the relationship than three hours of verbal exchanges and agreements.
The reaction of his client, right at the very beginning of the lunch, didn't in any way make the manager feel more relaxed about the situation - in fact, the effect was quite the contrary. He didn't say anything at the time and neither did he think it necessary to do so. He hadn't lost faith in his client - not yet. That time hadn't quite arrived. But he did begin to see the need to calculate - even if only as a guesstimate (though certainly not for the moment on auditable paper) - the possible negativities for him in a worst case scenario; the potential for financial loss; how to cut any potential as much as possible if it occurred; and how all of this could affect not only his branch's balance sheet but also the date of his return to the Ciudad Condal, to his family, to his wife and to his expensive en suite jacuzzi.
*
It was quarter past six when they finally left the restaurant. It was already dark. On the other side of the river, they could see the window displays of a national chain of fashion clothes - points of white halogen lamps, red and green Christmas motifs, slim clothes for precautionary folk. In front of the displays, waiting seemingly forever for their transport, long coats with scarves stood most patiently as the city buses which arrived every so often transported the inhabitants from the centre to the distant workers' suburbs.
Outward and return journeys which existed in a circle of grand business that reverted back on itself on a daily basis: a payment one made through necessity, a business which existed to satisfy such a necessity, a necessity which not everyone had - only, in fact, those who didn't really have.
"We'll be in touch," said José Luis to Salvador.
"I'll call you," said Salvador to José Luis.
And so it was that each went to his own car - neither absolutely sure of the meaning of the afternoon even as both found themselves convinced that, in some way, something was on the point of resolving itself in a not-too-distant future.
Salvador watched his bank manager get into his car, start it, drive it to the small construction of brick and aluminium where payment had to be made, park it - meanwhile turning off the engine (oh my goodness, how he had to control his costs - absolutely incapable of leaving his engine on for even five seconds!) - get out, climb the five steps, pay, return to his car, get in, start the engine once more and finally leave the car park in the direction of his beloved branch.
And so Salvador stood there watching. Not exactly at anything at all. Thinking perhaps, more than watching; thinking as well as conscious of the moment - conscious of the cold and the smell of chestnuts from a street stall opposite the school, and the smoky diesel fumes from a fruit and vegetable lorry to his right, and the cries of the children still playing in the school playground, and their parents as they wearied of repeating themselves over and over, and the mongrel which sniffed amongst the bags of rubbish which piled up on the pavements, and the cat which was waiting for the mongrel to leave - and perhaps a thousand other things of very little rational importance which he shouldn't have been thinking about right then but which nevertheless did spring to his fevering mind ... and thus he was suddenly so awfully conscious of that moment, that stopping of time which reminded him of those other quite different occasions when his heart - in abject love - had jumped so unwisely, and yet so sincerely.
But the moment passed, and so he went over to his car (a long, red and far too ostentatious car), got in, started it up, drove it to the hut, got out to pay, got back in, drove towards the exit and - in the circumstances, perhaps overly contented - left the scene, the occasion, the evening and the encounter, as he began to believe that at very long last events would finally turn out as he had been planning these four long years.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
FINGER-DOWN-THROAT STUFF ... when I start getting sentimental
This link is like finding an old friend (thanks Bruv for link):
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2003/0120/cover/story.html
Used to read Time and Newsweek on summer holidays in Croatia in the 70s and 80s. Which then seemed like this:
"Dear Diary:
"Been an eventful two months. I notice someone was in Prague recently. I remember being there when I was very young, can only now remember what it was like through the jerky, flicky, scratched 8mm film images that clatter through my mind's eye, and now sit staidly on a compilation VHS video my father made some years ago, waiting to be dusted down and sentimentally observed once more I'm sure, now I remember they're there again; I'm sure Prague is now quite different though, quite something else, not sentimental, quite forward-looking.
"I was in Zagreb in the month of November. There are images of Croatia on that compilation too, images of other places, Rogaska Slatina up on a steep hill down which a moped would putter every morning, dew on the grass, the smell of the forest and mushrooms drifting in through the open windows, the house forever unfinished, a family Sunday lunch, Baka shaking her fist, half-cross with the cameraman for catching her unawares as she shares out the semi-fried potatoes, the finely-sliced cabbage salad, the clear chicken soup with noodles and sliced carrot, or maybe the sarma, then for dessert the small ball-shaped doughnuts, even in summer, even in the sweltering heat of summer she would be there in the kitchen frying and boiling; or maybe strudel, tossed up high and stretched and then rolled and turned into heaven on earth; and then down below between the trees, swinging round into the village at the foot of the hill, the grey smoking steam-engine, the black line of carriages, always swinging round the same bend, just after Baka shakes her fist, or just before, I can't remember now.
"A few images of Krapina too, maize growing high like thin sentries swaying in the breeze, sheet lightning over the high hills across the valley, us shuddering with fear in a darkened kitchen as we looked out from the third floor old-aged pensioners' flat my grandparents lived in; then the following morning, up over the railway track and into the trees, the smell of forest and fresh mushrooms again, and damp pine needles giving way softly underfoot; one day, the high-walled yellow-painted graveyard up on top of the hill, draped around it in a loving sort of way like a cream-coloured antimacassar perched on top of a narrow threadbare armchair; many days, the friends of family who smoked so much and drank small concentrated cups of thick black sickly-sweet Turkish coffee, the home-made cherry wine, the lovingly-fingered and carefully re-read copies of Time and Life piled up on a dark wooden sideboard in the English teacher's house, the one she shared with her brother, who slowly fell ill along with the memories of local and national injustice that young and old hugged close for too long, unspoken, invisible for outsiders who only ever saw the beauty, never ever that routine mediocre hell of quiet desperation which underpinned the beauty, perhaps even helped sustain it."
I did say it was the finger-down-throat stuff. I did make it plain.
Only - something's changed, hasn't it? And not, altogether, for the better. Or maybe it's just me here. Same circles I go round in as always.
Things I've found worth reading recently are a Michael Ignatieff article in the New York Times on the subject of the American empire, a Javier Solana article in El País on the seeds of a possible rupture between America and Europe, a Hermann Tertsch commentary today on saying goodbye to an alliance which once was in same paper, and a nice article on Spain and Spanish identity by Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, which is perfectly applicable to Europe, Europe and America, America and the Rest of the World (also El País). But all four pieces are hidden/will be hidden behind online registration or restricted access procedures, so there's not really much point in linking, is there?
Just that it all makes me feel so sad. I liked America better when Communism was around. There seemed some point to it all, some focus, some truth, some reason, something apart from business interests. Some ideal.
[Editor's note: first published on the 24th of January 2003.]
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2003/0120/cover/story.html
Used to read Time and Newsweek on summer holidays in Croatia in the 70s and 80s. Which then seemed like this:
"Dear Diary:
"Been an eventful two months. I notice someone was in Prague recently. I remember being there when I was very young, can only now remember what it was like through the jerky, flicky, scratched 8mm film images that clatter through my mind's eye, and now sit staidly on a compilation VHS video my father made some years ago, waiting to be dusted down and sentimentally observed once more I'm sure, now I remember they're there again; I'm sure Prague is now quite different though, quite something else, not sentimental, quite forward-looking.
"I was in Zagreb in the month of November. There are images of Croatia on that compilation too, images of other places, Rogaska Slatina up on a steep hill down which a moped would putter every morning, dew on the grass, the smell of the forest and mushrooms drifting in through the open windows, the house forever unfinished, a family Sunday lunch, Baka shaking her fist, half-cross with the cameraman for catching her unawares as she shares out the semi-fried potatoes, the finely-sliced cabbage salad, the clear chicken soup with noodles and sliced carrot, or maybe the sarma, then for dessert the small ball-shaped doughnuts, even in summer, even in the sweltering heat of summer she would be there in the kitchen frying and boiling; or maybe strudel, tossed up high and stretched and then rolled and turned into heaven on earth; and then down below between the trees, swinging round into the village at the foot of the hill, the grey smoking steam-engine, the black line of carriages, always swinging round the same bend, just after Baka shakes her fist, or just before, I can't remember now.
"A few images of Krapina too, maize growing high like thin sentries swaying in the breeze, sheet lightning over the high hills across the valley, us shuddering with fear in a darkened kitchen as we looked out from the third floor old-aged pensioners' flat my grandparents lived in; then the following morning, up over the railway track and into the trees, the smell of forest and fresh mushrooms again, and damp pine needles giving way softly underfoot; one day, the high-walled yellow-painted graveyard up on top of the hill, draped around it in a loving sort of way like a cream-coloured antimacassar perched on top of a narrow threadbare armchair; many days, the friends of family who smoked so much and drank small concentrated cups of thick black sickly-sweet Turkish coffee, the home-made cherry wine, the lovingly-fingered and carefully re-read copies of Time and Life piled up on a dark wooden sideboard in the English teacher's house, the one she shared with her brother, who slowly fell ill along with the memories of local and national injustice that young and old hugged close for too long, unspoken, invisible for outsiders who only ever saw the beauty, never ever that routine mediocre hell of quiet desperation which underpinned the beauty, perhaps even helped sustain it."
I did say it was the finger-down-throat stuff. I did make it plain.
Only - something's changed, hasn't it? And not, altogether, for the better. Or maybe it's just me here. Same circles I go round in as always.
Things I've found worth reading recently are a Michael Ignatieff article in the New York Times on the subject of the American empire, a Javier Solana article in El País on the seeds of a possible rupture between America and Europe, a Hermann Tertsch commentary today on saying goodbye to an alliance which once was in same paper, and a nice article on Spain and Spanish identity by Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, which is perfectly applicable to Europe, Europe and America, America and the Rest of the World (also El País). But all four pieces are hidden/will be hidden behind online registration or restricted access procedures, so there's not really much point in linking, is there?
Just that it all makes me feel so sad. I liked America better when Communism was around. There seemed some point to it all, some focus, some truth, some reason, something apart from business interests. Some ideal.
[Editor's note: first published on the 24th of January 2003.]
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
HOW TO MAKE MONEY ... AND add to the sum of human happiness
Lesson 1:
OK. Now been two weeks without a working hot-water heater (more importantly without hot water). Went round to the shop last Friday, after debating for about a week (humming - and smelling - in typical male procrastination mode) whether to buy new heater or ask about poss. of spare part. Quick whiz round UK webpages revealed that instant hot-water heaters no longer existed. Spanish solution required, plus Dutch courage to boot.
Shop informs me I need the model number, man'll come round on Monday, shower Monday midday. Great stuff!!! (Haven't heard anyone say "Great stuff!!!" since university, when tended to be said by yobbish accounting undergraduates between words like "Fuck!" and "Cunt!", and a frying pan full of deep frozen Sainsbury's sausages, spitting as fiercely as evil London bus passenger.)
Monday comes round, man comes round (good start), man has nice new van with lots of spanking logos on side, plus photographer-type metal case and PDA for ogres (shoe-box sized). Man arse-hole, takes out meter, measures current, tells me what I already know (element buggered), also tells me no spare parts, old water-heater (already informed girl at shop of this piece of information, wasn't a problem on Friday) and that'll be 30 euros, please.
Think quickly (due to many days without shower - BO would appear to sharpen mind), sign receipt with unrecognisable scribble and say wife in town will pay. Man goes, not his problem, shop not his, shop just coordinates (or not) callouts to freelances with shiny new vans and spanking logos. But of course they can afford such things, because they earn 30 euros from *someone* (not me this time - hee hee hee) every time an idiot like me opens a front door to them.
End of Lesson 1. Conclusion: this is one example of how to make money and NOT add to the sum of human happiness.
Lesson 2:
Oldest son growing up now. Thinks time to try coffee for breakfast instead of drinking chocolate. OK. No prob. I say (unwisely) - you can have a slurp of mine in the morning. Turns out son has seen advert for product which consists of a mixture of coffee and chocolate in a plastic box made to look like some kind of sub-Rambo jungle accessory (sub-Rambo is contradiction in terms, physically unimagineable, radically bizarre).
Like to encourage growth of children's sense of self. Think good chance to allow such growth to flower (flourish? Manifest itself? Be?). Say yes, where wife apparently had already said no (important info of this nature never discovered in time).
Go to shop, laden with heartfelt promises to buy aforesaid liquid enrichment. 2 bloody euros 15 for 200 grams? But story doesn't end here. When back home, see only 9 per cent of product is coffee, 11 per cent chocolate, other 80 per cent SUGAR!!!
Can imagine scene where product was invented. Think of a way of selling more sugar at ten times the price. Make drinking chocolate for sub-Rambo adolescents wanting to grow up fast without starting to smoke or sniff. Doesn't matter that product makes father sniff and then smoke. Make a note of this: add marketing arse-holes to the members-of-society-against-the-wall list which has already got deep-frozen-Sainsbury-sausage-eating accountant arse-holes on it.
End of Lesson 2. Conclusion: this is another example of how to make money and NOT add to the sum of human happiness.
[Editor's note: first published on the 23rd of January, 2003.]
OK. Now been two weeks without a working hot-water heater (more importantly without hot water). Went round to the shop last Friday, after debating for about a week (humming - and smelling - in typical male procrastination mode) whether to buy new heater or ask about poss. of spare part. Quick whiz round UK webpages revealed that instant hot-water heaters no longer existed. Spanish solution required, plus Dutch courage to boot.
Shop informs me I need the model number, man'll come round on Monday, shower Monday midday. Great stuff!!! (Haven't heard anyone say "Great stuff!!!" since university, when tended to be said by yobbish accounting undergraduates between words like "Fuck!" and "Cunt!", and a frying pan full of deep frozen Sainsbury's sausages, spitting as fiercely as evil London bus passenger.)
Monday comes round, man comes round (good start), man has nice new van with lots of spanking logos on side, plus photographer-type metal case and PDA for ogres (shoe-box sized). Man arse-hole, takes out meter, measures current, tells me what I already know (element buggered), also tells me no spare parts, old water-heater (already informed girl at shop of this piece of information, wasn't a problem on Friday) and that'll be 30 euros, please.
Think quickly (due to many days without shower - BO would appear to sharpen mind), sign receipt with unrecognisable scribble and say wife in town will pay. Man goes, not his problem, shop not his, shop just coordinates (or not) callouts to freelances with shiny new vans and spanking logos. But of course they can afford such things, because they earn 30 euros from *someone* (not me this time - hee hee hee) every time an idiot like me opens a front door to them.
End of Lesson 1. Conclusion: this is one example of how to make money and NOT add to the sum of human happiness.
Lesson 2:
Oldest son growing up now. Thinks time to try coffee for breakfast instead of drinking chocolate. OK. No prob. I say (unwisely) - you can have a slurp of mine in the morning. Turns out son has seen advert for product which consists of a mixture of coffee and chocolate in a plastic box made to look like some kind of sub-Rambo jungle accessory (sub-Rambo is contradiction in terms, physically unimagineable, radically bizarre).
Like to encourage growth of children's sense of self. Think good chance to allow such growth to flower (flourish? Manifest itself? Be?). Say yes, where wife apparently had already said no (important info of this nature never discovered in time).
Go to shop, laden with heartfelt promises to buy aforesaid liquid enrichment. 2 bloody euros 15 for 200 grams? But story doesn't end here. When back home, see only 9 per cent of product is coffee, 11 per cent chocolate, other 80 per cent SUGAR!!!
Can imagine scene where product was invented. Think of a way of selling more sugar at ten times the price. Make drinking chocolate for sub-Rambo adolescents wanting to grow up fast without starting to smoke or sniff. Doesn't matter that product makes father sniff and then smoke. Make a note of this: add marketing arse-holes to the members-of-society-against-the-wall list which has already got deep-frozen-Sainsbury-sausage-eating accountant arse-holes on it.
End of Lesson 2. Conclusion: this is another example of how to make money and NOT add to the sum of human happiness.
[Editor's note: first published on the 23rd of January, 2003.]
Monday, 17 January 2011
1. The First Lunch
On this Friday, the 1st of December 1995
It was quarter past two in the afternoon. He'd left P_____ late and had arrived late in B_____. Everyone had already gone home and in the office all that could be heard was the "tick tock" of the quartz wall clock. He could see a pile of unopened letters on the tray and another one of phonecalls still to be made. He went to the small office at the end of the passage, where he normally went on such occasions, and sat down behind the table with the letters and pink message slips.
By three fifteen he'd only made two calls. As he was always in one place or another but never in his office (people often said his office was his car), when others did manage to speak to him (which essentially was when he phoned them) he would take full advantage of the situation to tell them absolutely everything. This fact presupposed a distortion of and excessively emotional approach to reality, as well as his own perception of it - and even though it was clear to everyone who knew him that he was a highly observant person, he never actually understood such situations for what they were. He was unable to take them seriously and instead of understand, he simply chose to put up with them. He assumed they were the result of an evermore crazy and busy world, never stopping to think whether everyone experienced it in the same way.
He opened the letters as he spoke - and thus, whilst on the one hand, through unpaid bill after unpaid bill, the slow and yet certain bankruptcy of his company began to puncture his wavering vision, on the other hand, through what he could begin to hear over the telephone line, there appeared a quite different kind of bankruptcy which began to unsettle his soul: the bankruptcy of that overwhelming faith which his people - in previous times - had expressed in him.
"Look mate, don't you realise?" murmured the voice on the phone. "I mean, of course, I can run with what you say - problems, well, we've all got them sometimes. But Salvador - hey, it's been four months."
"I know. I know. But we've always done it like that and it's always turned out OK," he said, without too much conviction. And then, suddenly, he was tired and thought to himself that instead of speaking on the phone with a man who considered himself his friend, he should be having lunch with another man who also considered himself his friend, and with whom he had agreed this morning to visit the restaurant La G_____. "Look, Ángel, what are you going to do now? Have you had lunch?"
"Actually, I was on the point of leaving the office," answered Ángel. "No, had lunch, I've not had lunch. Why? You paying?"
"If we play our cards right, someone else will pay!"
"OK, you're on. Where?"
"La G_____, in fifteen minutes. I'm off right now - just got to make another call, and I'll be off."
"OK. But don't be late. Please don't be late. I'll be ordering, right?"
"Sure. You go order. I won't be long. See you later, Ángel."
"See you later, Salvador."
In his mind's eye, Salvador could see Ángel's face: the face of a decent man who was also impatient - as well as, in some way or other, mediocre; a man who believed he was of value, a man who would always end up dragging you down, a man - as they might argue - of little importance.
He made the last phonecall he had to make that morning.
"Is Chus there? Yep. It's Salvador Domingo, calling from I_____. Sure. I'll wait." He took a Winston and lit it. "Chus? Hey, gal! We'd agreed to meet today, right? Great. La G_____ in fifteen minutes. Of course, gal. Of course we'll talk business. No. Of course I'm not selling porkies. Come on! See you there ..."
He got up, still a little tired - a little tired, in fact, of a little of everything; but the prospect of lunch was already helping him - as it almost always did - to put up, once more, with whatever life would choose to throw his way.
La G_____
When he arrived at La G_____ half an hour later, it was already twenty to four. He was the last to get there and so it was that everyone believed it would be a day like any other, without surprises, without unhappy shocks, of any kind whatsoever. It is, in fact, a truism of our laborious day-to-day existences that events of a most disagreeable nature - when they choose to take place - are never perceived in their entirety.
And so it was, at twenty to four in the afternoon, on a day like any other, in a family-run restaurant with a most appropriate fame, large round tables, generous white tablecloths, stylish coats hung temporarily like weapons put to one side in a moment of festive confidence; and below the ever-present smell of roasting B_____ lamb, the smoke of a Cuban cigar in the all-knowing hands of the president of some important football club or another, the confidential glances of the waitresses directed at their most beloved clients, the punctuating "ring ring" of mobile phones (tastelessly, not yet switched off), the energetic laughter of those men who in that moment could see everything to play for in the future ... so it was, exactly in this way, that everything began to happen on that 1st of December, 1995 - a day which started out like absolutely any other but in the end truly refused to confirm everyone's expectations.
"Hey," said José Mari, half getting up and reaching out with a firm handshake which nevertheless, curiously, managed to exude a certain spongy aspect to its grip.
"Worker!" added Ángel, seated to his right.
"Punctuality really not your forte, mate," spat Chus, seated to his left.
"Yeah, OK," answered Salvador, eyes half closed, another Winston already lit, "but what else can we do, eh? What else can we do?"
"I dunno. Get here when you say you will at least one fucking time in your life."
"Chus," said Ángel, "you know very well ..."
"Only too well, dear!"
"... that Salva is only punctual when he meets with bank managers."
"Well, yes. And according to my latest info, lately not even then ..."
Salvador sat down opposite José Mari, looked at him, put out his Winston and picked up the napkin next to his plate.
"I figure you've all ordered."
"Well, yes, mate. Surely we have," answered Ángel. "Surely we have."
"And I figure you've ordered for me too, right?"
"Sure thing. For you too."
"I dunno, Ángel," said Chus, rather pointedly. "We're a mite nervous today, seems to me."
"She's a little silly is dear Chus this afternoon. A little silly," said Salvador, looking straight at José Mari.
"Me?"
"Yup. You." Salvador continued looking at José Mari. "Right?"
"I don't think silly, exactly. No, I don't think silly," explained José Mari, just a little too quickly. "What it is, I think, is her brand new boots. And you ain't said nothing. And, you know, dear Chus and her boots. Come on, man. Tell her she's stunning. And then, all sorted all round. You'll see. All totally sorted."
"I dunno, José Mari. What a charmer you are. And there's me almost believing you," said Chus, in sardonic admiration.
"Well, there you go. But when I have lunch with someone, I don't start by insulting them, you see?" started Salvador, calmly, without blinking. "And as far as the banks are concerned - well, everything's totally under control, you know? So, if that's what you're up to," he lit another Winston, "and if that's what you're looking for ... well, you're not going to find any shit for that shitty newspaper of yours - and if it is shit you're after, why don't you check out those brand new boots which your shit of a boyfriend has bought you?" He offered the cigarette packet around. No one moved a muscle. "'Cos I really do have the sensation that maybe you've stepped where you really shouldn't have. And if it ain't the case, something stinks for sure, but you can bet your bottom dollar it ain't going to be me. Or is it your clown of a boss? Is that what this is all about?" He turned back to Ángel and José Mari. "Thing is, you see, this guy is going round saying I haven't paid a shitty invoice for some damn fool advertising campaign he reckons I ran on his shitty local TV station, and if that's the issue," he turned back again to Chus, "well, I'm telling you we'll be seeing each other in court, 'cos my dear Chus ..." and, for such a short moment, he looked once more at José Mari and Ángel, "... and I wasn't going to say anything in front of such an august public, but since you've decided to spill the beans, I can prove that the bitch that you are, you signed that famous contract, that famous contract your boss goes around saying I signed in some damn fool moment, and that, my dear, my dearest Chus, that is fraud, absolutely and undeniably. And if I want to pursue this, as perhaps I really should, you'll be finished, totally and utterly - and it won't make any difference however much new boot and tit you flash around, and you won't even be worth the shit you leave behind you. And what's more, it's not even shit - just plain and simple lies is all you're spreading here. Which is a helluva thing to do, right? Helluva thing to do ..."
No one said anything - and suddenly everyone realised something truly curious had taken place because even the mobile telephones, for some strange reason, stopped their ringing. And, deep down, Salvador knew in that moment that something life-changing had just gone and happened - even as in that very same moment he refused to properly recognise it.
Even though his own pride didn't allow him to contemplate its true extent.
The truth of the matter is that there's a first time for everything - and when this first time happens, by definition we can never compare anything with anything. In such a way, any first time remains something entirely visceral, impossible to analyse, impossible to repeat - and, essentially, something fixed and immovable in the changing and unpredictable lives we live.
In reality, Salvador's speech as described above was the first time in his thirty years of adulthood when he had allowed himself to be swept away by an impulse (an impulse, that is to say, not of a sexual origin). And although in itself and in the life of any other man this would have been of very little significance, in that carefully laid-out and structured existence which was the life he so widely led, the impulse in question produced such an astonishing and confusing echo that even he was unable to listen to it correctly - or appropriately understand its implications.
It was quarter past two in the afternoon. He'd left P_____ late and had arrived late in B_____. Everyone had already gone home and in the office all that could be heard was the "tick tock" of the quartz wall clock. He could see a pile of unopened letters on the tray and another one of phonecalls still to be made. He went to the small office at the end of the passage, where he normally went on such occasions, and sat down behind the table with the letters and pink message slips.
By three fifteen he'd only made two calls. As he was always in one place or another but never in his office (people often said his office was his car), when others did manage to speak to him (which essentially was when he phoned them) he would take full advantage of the situation to tell them absolutely everything. This fact presupposed a distortion of and excessively emotional approach to reality, as well as his own perception of it - and even though it was clear to everyone who knew him that he was a highly observant person, he never actually understood such situations for what they were. He was unable to take them seriously and instead of understand, he simply chose to put up with them. He assumed they were the result of an evermore crazy and busy world, never stopping to think whether everyone experienced it in the same way.
He opened the letters as he spoke - and thus, whilst on the one hand, through unpaid bill after unpaid bill, the slow and yet certain bankruptcy of his company began to puncture his wavering vision, on the other hand, through what he could begin to hear over the telephone line, there appeared a quite different kind of bankruptcy which began to unsettle his soul: the bankruptcy of that overwhelming faith which his people - in previous times - had expressed in him.
"Look mate, don't you realise?" murmured the voice on the phone. "I mean, of course, I can run with what you say - problems, well, we've all got them sometimes. But Salvador - hey, it's been four months."
"I know. I know. But we've always done it like that and it's always turned out OK," he said, without too much conviction. And then, suddenly, he was tired and thought to himself that instead of speaking on the phone with a man who considered himself his friend, he should be having lunch with another man who also considered himself his friend, and with whom he had agreed this morning to visit the restaurant La G_____. "Look, Ángel, what are you going to do now? Have you had lunch?"
"Actually, I was on the point of leaving the office," answered Ángel. "No, had lunch, I've not had lunch. Why? You paying?"
"If we play our cards right, someone else will pay!"
"OK, you're on. Where?"
"La G_____, in fifteen minutes. I'm off right now - just got to make another call, and I'll be off."
"OK. But don't be late. Please don't be late. I'll be ordering, right?"
"Sure. You go order. I won't be long. See you later, Ángel."
"See you later, Salvador."
In his mind's eye, Salvador could see Ángel's face: the face of a decent man who was also impatient - as well as, in some way or other, mediocre; a man who believed he was of value, a man who would always end up dragging you down, a man - as they might argue - of little importance.
He made the last phonecall he had to make that morning.
"Is Chus there? Yep. It's Salvador Domingo, calling from I_____. Sure. I'll wait." He took a Winston and lit it. "Chus? Hey, gal! We'd agreed to meet today, right? Great. La G_____ in fifteen minutes. Of course, gal. Of course we'll talk business. No. Of course I'm not selling porkies. Come on! See you there ..."
He got up, still a little tired - a little tired, in fact, of a little of everything; but the prospect of lunch was already helping him - as it almost always did - to put up, once more, with whatever life would choose to throw his way.
La G_____
When he arrived at La G_____ half an hour later, it was already twenty to four. He was the last to get there and so it was that everyone believed it would be a day like any other, without surprises, without unhappy shocks, of any kind whatsoever. It is, in fact, a truism of our laborious day-to-day existences that events of a most disagreeable nature - when they choose to take place - are never perceived in their entirety.
And so it was, at twenty to four in the afternoon, on a day like any other, in a family-run restaurant with a most appropriate fame, large round tables, generous white tablecloths, stylish coats hung temporarily like weapons put to one side in a moment of festive confidence; and below the ever-present smell of roasting B_____ lamb, the smoke of a Cuban cigar in the all-knowing hands of the president of some important football club or another, the confidential glances of the waitresses directed at their most beloved clients, the punctuating "ring ring" of mobile phones (tastelessly, not yet switched off), the energetic laughter of those men who in that moment could see everything to play for in the future ... so it was, exactly in this way, that everything began to happen on that 1st of December, 1995 - a day which started out like absolutely any other but in the end truly refused to confirm everyone's expectations.
"Hey," said José Mari, half getting up and reaching out with a firm handshake which nevertheless, curiously, managed to exude a certain spongy aspect to its grip.
"Worker!" added Ángel, seated to his right.
"Punctuality really not your forte, mate," spat Chus, seated to his left.
"Yeah, OK," answered Salvador, eyes half closed, another Winston already lit, "but what else can we do, eh? What else can we do?"
"I dunno. Get here when you say you will at least one fucking time in your life."
"Chus," said Ángel, "you know very well ..."
"Only too well, dear!"
"... that Salva is only punctual when he meets with bank managers."
"Well, yes. And according to my latest info, lately not even then ..."
Salvador sat down opposite José Mari, looked at him, put out his Winston and picked up the napkin next to his plate.
"I figure you've all ordered."
"Well, yes, mate. Surely we have," answered Ángel. "Surely we have."
"And I figure you've ordered for me too, right?"
"Sure thing. For you too."
"I dunno, Ángel," said Chus, rather pointedly. "We're a mite nervous today, seems to me."
"She's a little silly is dear Chus this afternoon. A little silly," said Salvador, looking straight at José Mari.
"Me?"
"Yup. You." Salvador continued looking at José Mari. "Right?"
"I don't think silly, exactly. No, I don't think silly," explained José Mari, just a little too quickly. "What it is, I think, is her brand new boots. And you ain't said nothing. And, you know, dear Chus and her boots. Come on, man. Tell her she's stunning. And then, all sorted all round. You'll see. All totally sorted."
"I dunno, José Mari. What a charmer you are. And there's me almost believing you," said Chus, in sardonic admiration.
"Well, there you go. But when I have lunch with someone, I don't start by insulting them, you see?" started Salvador, calmly, without blinking. "And as far as the banks are concerned - well, everything's totally under control, you know? So, if that's what you're up to," he lit another Winston, "and if that's what you're looking for ... well, you're not going to find any shit for that shitty newspaper of yours - and if it is shit you're after, why don't you check out those brand new boots which your shit of a boyfriend has bought you?" He offered the cigarette packet around. No one moved a muscle. "'Cos I really do have the sensation that maybe you've stepped where you really shouldn't have. And if it ain't the case, something stinks for sure, but you can bet your bottom dollar it ain't going to be me. Or is it your clown of a boss? Is that what this is all about?" He turned back to Ángel and José Mari. "Thing is, you see, this guy is going round saying I haven't paid a shitty invoice for some damn fool advertising campaign he reckons I ran on his shitty local TV station, and if that's the issue," he turned back again to Chus, "well, I'm telling you we'll be seeing each other in court, 'cos my dear Chus ..." and, for such a short moment, he looked once more at José Mari and Ángel, "... and I wasn't going to say anything in front of such an august public, but since you've decided to spill the beans, I can prove that the bitch that you are, you signed that famous contract, that famous contract your boss goes around saying I signed in some damn fool moment, and that, my dear, my dearest Chus, that is fraud, absolutely and undeniably. And if I want to pursue this, as perhaps I really should, you'll be finished, totally and utterly - and it won't make any difference however much new boot and tit you flash around, and you won't even be worth the shit you leave behind you. And what's more, it's not even shit - just plain and simple lies is all you're spreading here. Which is a helluva thing to do, right? Helluva thing to do ..."
No one said anything - and suddenly everyone realised something truly curious had taken place because even the mobile telephones, for some strange reason, stopped their ringing. And, deep down, Salvador knew in that moment that something life-changing had just gone and happened - even as in that very same moment he refused to properly recognise it.
Even though his own pride didn't allow him to contemplate its true extent.
The truth of the matter is that there's a first time for everything - and when this first time happens, by definition we can never compare anything with anything. In such a way, any first time remains something entirely visceral, impossible to analyse, impossible to repeat - and, essentially, something fixed and immovable in the changing and unpredictable lives we live.
In reality, Salvador's speech as described above was the first time in his thirty years of adulthood when he had allowed himself to be swept away by an impulse (an impulse, that is to say, not of a sexual origin). And although in itself and in the life of any other man this would have been of very little significance, in that carefully laid-out and structured existence which was the life he so widely led, the impulse in question produced such an astonishing and confusing echo that even he was unable to listen to it correctly - or appropriately understand its implications.
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