By Bryan Hemming
Published: May 1, 2009
Updated: May 1, 2009 PrintEmail
Holy days and fiestas never go by without Santa Catalina’s little band taking to the streets. Though I like to listen, there’s something about the trembling trumpet effect has me expecting to see a group of stumbling, blindfolded cowboys, hands bound behind their backs, being led to the plaza in the centre of the pueblo. It comes from watching too many Westerns in boyhood.
Whenever filmmakers wanted to show the Rio Grande had been crossed, a brass brand took up the score with that particular quivering sound. Just in case the wide-brimmed sombreros, ponchos, unshaven chins, drooping moustaches and bandoleers weren’t enough of a hint. When accompanied by drums we knew there was about to be a firing squad.
But whenever I see brass bands I think of spit. How much of it must be in all those tubes. Gallons of it, I shouldn’t wonder. That stems from spying a tuba player flicking a great gobbet of the stuff from his mouthpiece, at the impressionable age of four. I thought he was sucking it out and promptly vomited on my plimsolls. The connection has remained with me. Nowadays, such huge lakes of it come to mind when listening to the opening bars of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ I can’t help gagging at the memory.
My thoughts turned to spit last year while passing through the urban sprawl stretching south of Malaga. Not such an uncommon occurrence, I suspect. From Marbella to the Gibraltar Straits, the entire coastline has been transformed into one long shopping mall. Separated by a busy four-lane highway searing down the middle, it’s an unbroken, ribbon of asphalt, glass, and concrete against a backdrop of mountains on one side, and sea on the other. Names change on passing signs to convince you you’re leaving one town and entering the next. You’re not. It’s one long city. You’re stuck in the same place. Like an old film set where the background moves, and not the car, everything keeps repeating. Everywhere is the same. Endless rows of apartment blocks and holiday lets dotted with McDonald’s, empty stores offering home décor, reproduction antiques, electronic gadgets, and digital lives. The mediocrity of design relieved – if relieved is the right word – by a suggestion of Disneyland here, a trace of plastic gothic there, and occasionally punctuated by sprawling golf courses. Retired bank managers rub shoulders with retired bank robbers, old ladies overdose on bridge and, judging by the ample evidence, the Mediterranean tastes of all the gin and tonic being filtered daily through thousands of tanned and wrinkly kidneys.
Most curious of all is how deserted everywhere is. Where are all the customers? There’s a sense a Tsunami is imminent and nobody’s bothered to tell you. The stores and cafés empty as a tinker’s fridge, electric doors slide open, as you pass, bidding you enter. With nobody else in sight you feel compelled to penetrate a widescreen world of muzac, after-shave, and commission-starved salespersons stalking aisles. If nothing else, to make up for the mechanical effort and potential waste of energy involved.
My thoughts turn back to spit. Doesn’t it make you want to? In a world stretching any sense of reality, the most bizarre of all was a sign stuck under a forest of signs advertising tri-lingual estate agents, Porsche dealers and satellite TV installation firms. ‘Drive-In Hand Wash’ it read. It set me pondering. Simple, yet, at the same time, weighed down with unanswered questions.
I know what a drive-in Burger King is, and a drive-in cinema, but a drive-in hand wash? What type of person needs a hand washed by someone else? Why not get both washed and be done with it? Admittedly, there are occasions when just one hand gets a bit grubby, and it seems a pity to go to all the effort of washing both. Yet, as anyone who has tried can tell you, it’s nigh impossible to wash one hand without washing the other in the process. I suppose that very difficulty could create a bit of a market. But would demand be sufficient to sustain regular paid employment?
Thinking more, someone with one arm might need such attendance. On the other hand – or the only hand – not only could it prove prohibitively expensive, but time-consuming too. Having to pop down to the drive-in hand wash after each and every widdle could use up a good part of the day. There are probably more cost-effective and efficient ways to deal with the dilemma.
Perhaps, the service is intended for busy executives who don’t have time to wash both hands if solely one is slightly soiled, leaving the other free to make important mobile calls to Shanghai, or jot down large numbers in the margins of the Financial Times. I must ask someone who knows about these things.
We were talking of spit. And talking of spit, in the way one thing always leads to another, visions of my grandmother spring to mind. Like any other Swedish grandmother, she was obsessed by hygiene to the point of psychosis. Nevertheless, she possessed one great failing in the health department.
In a lifelong battle against harmful bacteria, she was often overcome by a need to clean exposed parts of my body at inappropriate moments. Usually while we were out, and in full public gaze. The unclothed bits between knee and sock, at the ends of sleeves, poking out of collars, and concealed behind ears. The bits attracting grime so readily in small lads. Unfortunately, the urge was rarely accompanied by convenient proximity to basins of steaming soapy water and freshly laundered towels. Needs must.
Despite instructing me to avoid salivial contact with all humans, and other animals, transmitted through shared bottles of pop, secondhand chewing gum, licking and being licked, she seemed to believe her own spit was completely germ-free and might even have disinfectant qualities, as well as magical healing powers. The smallest smudge on my cheek, a smidgen of biscuit, a tiny smear of ice cream round my lips, or a slightly grazed knee, and out would pop a little lace hanky reeking of cologne. The enigmatically named, 4711. This she would invest with a generous gobbit of her fresh, and sometimes steaming, spit. Once spitted up, she would scour the contaminated zone till the affected skin glowed scarlet, and I was howling as though being flailed by a bunch of stinging nettles. I managed to put a stop to the practice by attending a distant university.
I have to admit it worked, if the intention was to give me a lifelong aversion to other people’s spit. On the downside, I will never be able to hear a brass band without thinking of my Swedish grandmother and buckets of spit.
