Let sound be unbound

I don't know if you've noticed but Spain can get quite noisy. 

There is a sort of noise that is common in social situations. There are a lot of people, everyone is talking, so to be heard above the general din, one needs to talk more loudly. By degrees the noise level increases so that shouting becomes necessary. It happens in places like restaurants all the time. It is often made worse because, especially around here, the buildings are made of materials that have no sound deadening effect whatsoever and buildings tend to be very echoey.

Then there is the sort of noise where people are not competing with the general hubbub, they are competing with each other. Even in a general conversation, Spaniards do not follow the British custom of waiting until one person has finished before they wade in with their point of view, anecdote, or counter-argument. Britons do push a little, conversationally speaking, especially when the debate warms up but, basically, we do our best to take it in turn. Spaniards don't work like that. Before the speaker has finished, the listener has anticipated the end of the phrase and responded. I was listening to an interview on the radio and the interviewee never drew breath while the interviewer moved from one question to the next. It wasn't that the interviewee didn't respond to each and every question it was simply that it was an unending conversational stream. I reckon it must be taught from birth, like the ¡Viva! response or how to use a fan.

There has been a bit of disquiet in the village about certain events and particularly the organisation of the annual fiesta. When a new village "mayoress" was appointed, she organised a meeting to discuss the fiesta. Lots of people, us included, went to the meeting. Nearly everyone there had a view about something fiesta-related and wished to share it with everyone else. Often, two or three people would start their interjection at the same time - extra volume was the chief tool in making sure that their views got the first look in. Meanwhile, little knots of people were having off piste conversation arising from what had already been said in the general forum. The result? At any one time, there might be three or four, high volume statements being addressed to the room and maybe four or five private conversations going on at the same time. 

Given a following wind, a room with good acoustics, and generally favourable conditions, I can, just about, hang on to a full-tilt conversation in Castilian Spanish. When there is a lot of extraneous noise, and especially if, in the heat of the moment, someone resorts to their Valencian mother tongue then the street version of sodomized comes to mind as the appropriate adjective to describe my chances of comprehension.

Spaniards also talk to each other when they are bored with what's going on around them. We go on quite a lot of guided visits and I find that oftentimes the guides are less than inspiring. In a castle – instead of interesting stuff like the link between the architecture and defence and attack tactics, or about the comforts and discomforts of castle life, it's dates, facts, and figures. At the Bronze Age site there is nothing about the sort of food people might have prepared in the ceramic pots you're seeing or how the village social hierarchy was possibly organised. Instead it's the chemical composition of the clay that made the pots and a series of dates related to the burial plots. The sort of guide who repeats facts, who is repeating a well worn script, is on autopilot. They are the sort of guide who doesn't have time for those who dawdle over an information board or want to take a picture. Very soon, the guide stops waiting for the people who don't move briskly enough and will begin their next list of facts before the tardy visitors catch up. The knock on effect is that the audience members who arrive half way through an explanation lose interest and start their own conversation. It's my theory that the higher the volume of the crowd on any guided visit, the more boring the guide. 

An interesting afterthought. Someone once told me that Spaniards don't dress up for funerals because, during the dictatorship, they had no choice. Not dressing up nowadays is an almost unnoticed demonstration of basic freedoms. In the book I'm currently reading Almudena Grandes describes how people, in the 1950s, chose tables distant from other tables in cafes and talked in low mumbles in case what they said were overheard. It wasn't that they were plotting but it was always possible that something they said may be overheard and used against them by some potential snitch looking to curry favour. Nowadays no such threat exists so it's possible for the sound to be unbound.