The essence of Spain

Spain doesn’t smell the same any more. At the airport, the very first impression used to be of bitter black tobacco smoke, more acrid than Balkan Sobranie, a harbinger of stronger smells beyond Customs.

That smoke would follow you wherever human activity was to be found. It was the cantus firmus in the polyphony of smells flying up from a culture being itself. On the station platform a drift of smoke would bind together the passengers waiting far too early, as is their habit, for a train: the conscript going back to his village on weekend leave or the countryman and his wife, a cardboard box knotted with string at their feet. The cigarette ends would roll into the grooves of the tiled platform for a few minutes until an overalled woman swept them into her plastic dustpan on a long stick.

The law of 26 December 2005, a fateful feast of Stephen, the first martyr, broke this unifying constant. Bars now have to declare whether they are smoking or non-smoking. There’s no smoking on trains (except by the drivers, as passengers in the front compartment can jealously detect near the door into the cab), or in your office, or kiosk, or barber’s shop, or at your lathe, in a brothel or on your balcony. Certainly not at the airport.

The same black smoke that once welcomed the traveller also underlay the boisterous smells of a busy bar at noon. The smoke curled up around the hanging hams dropping their year-slow fat into little paper umbrellas stuck in their lowest points to catch it. Cigarette ends nestled among the discarded sugar sachets from dozens of morning cups of coffee (for it is not impolite, but quite the done thing, to throw bits of rubbish on the bar floor), soon to be joined by the legs and heads of tapas prawns, wooden toothpicks, the skins from slices of morcilla (that earthy black pudding), olive stones, oil-spotted paper serviettes fresh from fingers and lips busy with squares of tuna, bits of artichoke, meatballs, battered whitebait, potato tortilla, little pastry purses of minced meat.