1936 On the Continent

gentry, young or old. If a beggar approaches you you must completely ignore him, as if he did not exist. To speak to him is fatal, even to turn your head and look at him is a mistake. Madrid beggars are verypersistent and a special technique is necessary to shake them off. But you can easily acquire this technique if you start early enough.
    You need not be sorry for any Madrid beggar. Begging is regarded as a profession like any other, and you will see that these pests thrive at it from the fact that there are so many fat beggars in Spain.
    Second, beware of Madrid’s shoeblacks. For some unfathomable reason the Spaniard takes pride in brightly polished footwear, and if you sit or stand anywhere where you can easily be approached a shoeblack—or half a dozen of them—will appear from nowhere and start polishing your shoes without a by-your-leave. Of course, the shoeblacks are
caballeros
as compared with the beggars, and may sometimes even amuse you with their antics, but they are nevertheless a nuisance. See to it that when you go to one of the many open-air cafés you sit somewhere in the interior and not on the edge of the terrace, otherwise you will not have a moment’s rest from the shoeblacks.
    Thirdly, and lastly, there are the cinemas. Although you are not likely to want to visit a cinema in Madrid, particularly in hot weather, it will do no harm to warn you that there are few picture houses in the Spanish capital that you can visit without the risk of carrying away fleas—and worse—in your clothes.
    Madrid is almost in the exact centre of Spain, but although at times it can be grillingly hot, that is not always the case. Madrid lies 2,000 feet above sea-level, and the heat is therefore always bearable.
Hygiene First
    The Spanish capital is one of those cities about which, when you have been there once or twice, you find it difficult to start your story, but once you have started you do not know how to stop. Perhaps the first thing I ought to tell you about Madrid is that it has good W.C. ’s. Up till now you may have cursed the Spanish a great deal for the defective sanitary arrangements almost everywhere, except at the best hotels. Here in Madrid you will have no cause thus to imperil your immortal soul. There are satisfactory W.C .’s not only in every hotel, but also in everyprivate house. It is said that this was enforced in Madrid by a. previous government.
    Let us hope that there will be no revolution when you arrive in Madrid. But even if there is you need not worry. You see, the universally held idea that the Spanish are an excitable race is wholly erroneous. They are calm enough even according to the standards of the traditionally phlegmatic Englishman, and that is precisely why they indulge in a revolution every now and then. It is fun. It wakes them up a bit, even if only for a little while. You, a foreign tourist, may watch a revolution from a café or from a hotel window, without interference from anyone, though the Madrileños do not—as yet—go so far as to organise revolutions for the especial benefit of foreign tourists. At all events, you will find that a little shooting in the streets and a few bomb explosions does not upset anyone, and the idlers at the cafés do not even pause in the act of stirring their drinks at the sound of a nearby explosion.
    So that is one side of the Spanish character you did not know.
    Madrid, next to Berlin, is the youngest of European capitals, and some say that it is the ambition of the Spanish to make it into a replica of Paris. That is not true. Madrid is a far gayer city than Paris, and it is after all the mood of the inhabitants that lends individual character to a city.
    The general street scene suggests that no one is really working, except the beggars and the gentry who peddle shoe-laces, braces, walking-sticks, postcards, and so on and so forth. The rest of the population, with few exceptions, appear to be idling away their time in the open-air cafés, talking politics or “romancing.” In no other city in the world can you hear so many tall stories as in Madrid. Also, you sometimes come up against tall facts, so to speak. For instance, some of the restaurants are closed in summer, just when they could reap a golden harvest.
Restaurants
    Talking about restaurants reminds me to recommend you a few: Lhardy, on Carrera de San Jeronimo, Tournié on Calle Mayor (French cooking), Molinero on Avenida del Conde de Penalver, and the Buffet