FT WEEKEND - LAST WORD: Beyond toil, an ineffable humanity
By Harry Eyres
Published: July 12 2004 16:17 | Last updated: July 12 2004 16:17
I have a Spanish friend who came over to live in London about eight years ago. He doesn't mind the weather (actually very similar to that of his native Oviedo); he puts up with the food; and he greatly enjoys the freedom to move across groups and classes offered by the multi-cultural metropolis. But there is one aspect of London - or English - life which he finds difficult to accept: the lamentably poor quality of what he calls "trato".
Trato is a difficult word to translate. It covers many aspects of the intercourse and dealings people have with each other. In this case, I think Paco is talking about the way people treat each other, the way they greet, interact, pass the time of day with others, especially in commercial contexts. Trato includes, but is much broader than, the concept of service.
In his emphasis on good trato, Paco is revealing a deep part of his Spanish heritage: the ancient belief in the dignity of each and every person regardless of status, the late establishment of the cash nexus as the primary bond between people in Iberian lands.
Looking for trato in England might be like searching for Baroque altarpieces in Norway. Ours was the country that more or less invented capitalism and established the cash nexus before others: at least, Carlyle was the first to write about it in the 1840s. In the second half of the 20th century draconian management techniques set about squeezing the last drops out of trato and denaturing it. I recall a meal at a pseudo-tapas bar in south London in which one poor waitress seemed to be serving the entire dining room. It was just about physically possible, in that she could take down the orders and eventually deliver the food, but it was not humanly possible. She was too harassed to speak or attend to or convey any kind of welcome to guests - and eventually mixed up the orders.
What tends to be emphasised these days is not trato but product. Product is obviously easier to define and to reproduce than trato. Product can be packaged and more or less convincingly wrapped up in a mission statement, whereas with trato a mission statement would be useless: the proof would always lie in unquantifiable human intercourse rather than a set of things, boxes to tick, even promises.
The mission statement for the Pret À Manger chain of coffee and sandwich shops is rather impressive. It is certainly not meaningless that the chain makes all its sandwiches freshly in store each day, uses organic eggs, avoids "nasty" chemicals etc. The product, in my experience, is excellent, whereas the trato is quick and efficient. This is not to say you don't often get a smile from the charming young people who work in Pret À Manger, but that the whole set-up favours speed and convenience, not the extra lingering moment of pleasantry.
It is easy in London to succumb to the notion that humane trato of the kind missed by Paco and still encountered in many contexts in Spain is as extinct as the dodo, a victim of the onward march of industrialisation and modernisation. Engels in the 1840s was already horrified by the bustle of the London streets: "hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks of society . . . rush past one another as if they had nothing in common or were in no way associated with one another. No one even bothers to spare a glance for the others."
You might think the process was intensifying, as supermarkets designed for impersonal efficiency take the place of markets and shops, and there is less and less time to spare a glance for the others around you as you bellow instructions into your mobile phone.
Strangely, though, I am beginning to notice a counter-movement to all this. In my local supermarket, on a jostling, working thoroughfare, I am amazed by the way the women at the check-outs manage to spare not just a glance but a kind word for customers, especially older ones for whom passing the time of day with someone is more important than rushing from A to B.
My local pub has put a conscious effort into improving the trato it offers - and I mean trato and not just service. The staff who work there seem genuinely interested in the customers; though they are busy, they are never too busy to exchange a pleasantry; in a delightful breach of conventional pub etiquette, they serve drinks at the tables and not just at the bar. They enjoy working there, they tell me, because they are encouraged to do so.
The secret is that trato is a two-way street. However unpromising the context, you yourself can instigate good trato with the smile or remark that may not be answered, but surprisingly often is. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his sonnet "God's Grandeur", described a world "all seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil". And yet, beyond that, he saw how "nature", including human nature, "is never spent: . . there lives the dearest freshness deep down things".[email protected]
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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