During my first evening here in the summer of 2000, Leslie –- sister of my best friend's wife, married to a Spanish attorney, now living in this part of the world for something like 19 years -– took me out for tapas. Not a carousing binge. She didn't have that kind of time, I was jet-lagged. More of a brief intro to Madrid's nightlife.
Going out like that in Madrid is a joy. The city is positively heaving with eating and drinking establishments, and the people go out and enjoy them. It's part of the way of life, and it's a pretty good way of life.
So we're in Leslie's car, flying down wide boulevards at genuinely high velocity (another part of the way of life here: driving fast and wild). We insinuate our way into a happening section of the city center through a maze of narrow one-way streets, Leslie even manages to scare up a parking spot –- the fact that it was July 31st, half the population away on vacation, probably helped. We walk a couple of blocks, she leads me to a little joint, an old, well-established place, small but loaded with atmosphere, the display cases on the bar packed with tapas of all kinds. We're ordering, I'm checking everything out. I notice garbage all over the floor. And I mean garbage. All over the floor. Wadded-up napkins, food remnants, cigarette butts. Leslie returns from the bar with a couple of plates of stuff, I ask about the refuse display. Her eyes widen, she laughs, realizing I'm new to all this, explains that it's the custom here. In bars, taverns, tapas joints, people toss their trash on the floor. It tends to accumulate in mounds near the foot of the bar and off to the sides, periodically it gets swept up or at least arranged into more compact mounds. It's just what they do. It's not only what they do, people apparently often judge the desirability of a tapas joint by the amount of refuse strewn around the floor, the theory being that more trash indicates a busier place (the implication: busy = good). Or so I've been told.
I adjusted to this surprisingly quickly, same way I adjusted to cigarette smoke in bars and restaurants. But things are changing. Since the turn of this year, many places have installed small trash containers (cubos de basura), either on the floor inside the foot rail at the bottom of the bar or screwed to the surface of the bar itself. Enough people have been using them that I see far less trash strewn around than I used to. Maybe it's an organized attempt to project a more sophisticated image to the international community. A more urbane picture, something more befitting a global power.
I've become accustomed enough to the cleaner state of these joints that flagrant examples of old-style trash-dropping conduct now stand out. Example: me, in a neighborhood joint a few weeks back. La Cafetería Vic-Mar, a local version of what would be called a greasy-spoon in the States. Not refined or genteel. But fun, clientele a bit wilder, more colorful than your normal joint. And the place does good, thick soups.
I'm sitting there one afternoon wading through lunch, a rumpled, loud 60-something couple is seated at a table about eight feet away from me, finishing up their meal. He's working on a cigarette, his wife is finishing up her food -- when the butt gets down to the last puff, the guy doesn't just drop it to the floor, he flicks it several feet away in a lazy arc that lands near the cafetería's entrance, tossing off a couple of sparks when it touches down and bounces to a stop. It had been a while since I'd seen something like that in a public eating place here, so it caught my attention. No one else seemed to notice. A few minutes later, that couple finished up and bolted, their table remained vacant. Within minutes, a younger type sitting at the bar finished up a cigarette, flicking it off in a grand arc like the older guy had done. Or trying to flick it off in a grand arc, not quite making it. Instead of winging its way to open floor, the butt jerked two or three feet through air to land on the chair the previous butt-flicker had occupied, bouncing, tossing off sparks then coming to rest. The chairs in this place are decent hand-caned jobs, smoke began rising from the chair almost immediately as the cane started to smolder. The butt-flicker's eyes widened, he threw himself at the unintended combustion as discretely as he could manage, wiping the butt off the seat to the floor where it slowly went out.
No one seemed to notice, no one said anything.
The Spaniards aren't always as easygoing as this. Observe a busy intersection at rush hour, you'll see what I mean. But when it comes to tapas bars and the like, it's much more tranquil. The food, the drinks, the conversation are too important to sweat the small stuff.