When I first moved to Spain last summer, I felt strangely disoriented. I could hardly blame the culture shock – I had been touring the country for years before moving to Madrid. I speak Spanish. I have a Spanish family. But I had never lived here and something was wrong. Then a casual comment from a friend crystallized the problem. “The fact is that in Spain you don’t have a word for the afternoon,” he said. And he was right.
I know online dictionaries will tell you differently: that afternoon translates to “la tarde” in Spanish. But it’s more complicated than that. Tarde is not a clearly defined word covering a discrete segment of the day before evening. Because what is the word for evening in Spain? It is also “la tarde”.
Yes, elusive but hegemonic, tarde reigns over all, an amorphous concept that spans such a large part of the day that other languages need two words to describe it. Tarde resists scrutiny and there is no social consensus as to what that means. The Spaniards themselves disagree when it begins or ends. “In this sense there is chaos in Spanish life,” says Fernando Vilches, a linguist at Rey Juan Carlos University. I think we can give my affliction a name: programming shock.
The Spaniards divide the day according to several parameters. What I will call watchmakers, often young people who have lived abroad, think in terms of hours. But what hours? No one agrees with me that late starts at noon. A government minister told me he greets people with “buenas tardes” if he starts a speech at 12:30. “But if it’s 12:00 and you say people are looking at you funny.” Many watchmakers say late starts at 2pm. But there is also a 4pm faction.
Then there are the foodists, who divide the day not into timetables but into meals, which in Spain are often long, late and wonderfully convivial. For those who say late doesn’t start until you’ve started lunch, that could mean half past two, three or even later. But for many older people it doesn’t start until you’ve finished eating, which takes you past 4 or even 5pm.
A large client lunch can start with beer, work through with wine and finish with a shot of pacharán, followed by a gin and tonic in the bar next door. “Then it’s back to work at 6:00,” says Vilches. “Do this to a poor American and he’s drunk and sleepy and wants to go home. So we have to change things up a bit.” And indeed the change has begun: many companies have ditched the standard two-hour lunch break so that people can get home sooner to their families.
Even the famous Spanish siesta after lunch is not as common as one might think. The only people I know who take regular weekday naps are in kindergarten or retirement. One is my relative Marcelino, 70, who says the delay doesn’t start until he wakes up around 7pm. But more people nap in the summer, as the searing heat makes it difficult to do anything without air conditioning. When most of the day is a write-off, maybe you don’t need words for afternoon and evening.
At 21:00 early risers start dinner. But nine to ten is a gray area where greeting anyone with “buenas noches” rather than “buenas tardes” can elicit one of those funny stares. On the weekends there are still children on the playgrounds at 10.30pm. Reservations can be made at the restaurant at a quarter to midnight.
Daniel Gabaldón, a sociologist at the University of Valencia, says all of this is connected to another curiosity: mainland Spain is in the wrong time zone. If its clocks were set according to the position of the sun, it would be the same time as the UK and Portugal. But instead it is one hour ahead, because in the 1940s the dictatorship of Francisco Franco decided that Spain should be aligned with Nazi Germany. For half the year, Spain sets its clocks to standard time on the German-Polish border. When adjusting for summer time, it corresponds to standard time in the middle of Ukraine.
Having lunch at 14:30 in Spain means that, according to solar time, you’re actually eating around 13:30 (in winter) or around 12:30 (in summer). For official time and natural time being so freaked out is not healthy, says Nuria Chinchilla of Iese Business School. “We have constant jet lag.” No wonder it all ends up confusing.
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