05 | April | 2025 | The Book of Barnabas

“Con el arroz con leche… Seventeen pounds. Cash or card?”

“Bueno, con tarjeta, si se puede.”

“Uy, perdón. No sabía. Vi tu cara y…”

“Bueno si, es verdad que tengo la cara guiri, y que soy inglis, pero hay que esforzarse un poco al viajar, no?”

“Bien dicho. Pues, la tarjeta aquí… gracias.”

“A usted.”

“Otra vez, perdón. Y por favor, no me vuelvas a llamar ese usted.”

Exchange at the Air Food One, Santiago Airport

When I teach the verb forms in class, I sometimes get asked by my students about usted. Etymologically, I’ve always found it something of a doozy. While I’ve always been rather fond the Arabic origin theory via the phonetically similar “ustaadh” (meaning doctor or teacher), the general consensus (backed up by the RAE) is that it comes from an abbreviation of ‘vuestra merced’, an old honorific meaning “your mercy” or “your worship”. The old way of writing the letter U as V, paired with the increasingly shorter abbreviation to “Vd”, gradually distilled the honorific into a single world, usted, which is now used around the Spanish-speaking world as a polite term of address.

Except in Spain, in my experience, where it’s usually regarded as an affront.

Until this week, I’ve used usted just once in my life, and it was wrong. I’ll admit, I avoided it for years purely out of laziness. Like the French vous, usted requires a different person when addressing somebody: where vous takes the second person plural, usted takes the third person singular. Think of it like a waiter in a very fancy restaurant (“would sir like a bottle of the house wine?”). When you’re learning a language, it’s hard enough to get the tenses right, never mind the societal conditions dictating whether one should use formal or informal speech.

The one time I did experiment with usted, I got laughed out of court. After spending years trying to locate my Spanish family and finally tracking them down to a pueblo de La Mancha (you can read that saga here), I spent a long evening being introduced to my kin. One of my uncles, the venerable Don Augusto, worked in the local bank and seemed to command some sway as one of the family patriarchs. Here, I thought, was a textbook case for usted: a term reserved “for older people and those to whom you want to show more respect”, to quote the oft-used student resource, BBC Bitesize.

Augusto’s response? “Usted? Pero, ¿por qué usted? Somos familia.” Augusto isn’t a blood relation, but that means little in Spain where family is still everything. We had a little laugh about it and I never used usted again.

Until this week, where for whatever reason I’ve been using it daily in my interactions in shops, restaurants and pensiones. I can only assume it’s the subtle influence of my increased use of French, where the polite form is not only more common, but mandatory in certain contexts. The French even have two verbs to distinguish the point when you must use formal speech (vouvoyer) and relax into informal speech (tutoyer).

Latin Americans love their formality. They held onto the deferential vos (a close relation of the French vous) in lieu of tú long after the Spanish gave it up as a lower class symbol, and usted is used all over. Using tú outside of close-knit circles of family and friends is actually considered overly familiar to the point of being vulgar.

But in speech, as in other ways, Latin Americans and Spaniards must not be conflated. The Spaniard’s innate love of familiarity and hostility toward authority make for infertile soil for formal speech. It may have been more common in the last century under the dictatorship, but like much that was once sacred, it is sliding steadily into the void. And is that such a bad thing? Why hold someone at arm’s length when there is a potential friend to be made? Warmer climes make for warmer people, and the Spanish are no exception to that rule whatsoever.

My brief exchange with the tiller at the airport café is a classic example: Spaniards may consider the uninvited use of usted to be an affront, a way of saying “you and I are doing business only, nothing more”. A short soujourn in Morocco, Spain’s southern neighbour and the ancestral home of many of its people, will show you the paramount importance attached to friendly, familiar interactions in even the briefest of dealings: no item can be bought or sold without engaging in witty banter over family and friends over a glass of mint tea. It’s a habit the Spanish have never quite been able to shake, and one that would have been a worthy addition to my EPQ on Spain’s Islamic heritage, had I known about it at the time.

Well, I’ve had my slice of humble pie (or tortilla). It’s back to the books for now. I’ll bow out gracefully, and informally. They seem to prefer things that way here! BB x

As Escaselas. 12.01pm.

Rain. It started early this morning, while I was still fast asleep, but it’s coming down quite hard now. The bus has just climbed the hill north of As Escaselas and is rolling towards Sardiñeiro, its windscreen wipers working overtime. Lichen-coated hórreos, a symbol of the Galician countryside, stand shoulder to shoulder with new-build white houses with wide garages. That strange mix of ancient and modern is ubiquitous along the pilgrim road: here is a wizened fisherman in blue overalls mending his lobster creels in the shelter of an awning, above which a sign advertises (in English only) “hippie/chill-out/goa fashion”. The lady on the bus behind me talks down the phone in a Galician accent so thick it could be Portuguese, while a couple of free-spirited Germans discuss their next steps. My German is rudimentary at best, but I catch the words “Mallorca”, “Sontag” and “yogi”.

Now and then I recognise a patch of road from that summer two years ago, when Simas and I pushed on together for the Cape, in warmer days when the wind blew west and America still seemed like a land full of hope. Now, the news is full of fury as Trump’s tariffs threaten a global trade war, and the US government tells its citizens to “trust in Trump”. Americans, it should be noted, have been notably absent from the pilgrim trail over the last few days.

Three pilgrims return home on foot in coats that cover their backpacks, and one pilgrim comes back the other way, striking out for the last stage of her journey. The Camino is eternal.

Spooky by Dusty Springfield plays over my earphones as the bus pulls into the former whaling town of Cee. A crude iron sculpture on the seafront is all that remains of that heritage, besides its name, though there are honorary clues all over the place: Restaurante As Balenas, a number of whale-themed hotels, a couple of whale-shaped hobby horses in the play park and even a friendly mural on a wall near the bus station, offering a whimsical nod to that monstrous practice.

Whaling has been outlawed here since 1986. Spain was slow to adopt the ban and Galicia was one of the regions hit hardest, though by that point most of the whales had long since been driven to local extinction. Lately, however, these majestic creatures have been sighted off the coast again, after an absence of nearly forty years, including the greatest of them all, the blue whale – the largest creature ever to grace this planet.

Perhaps they’ve been driven here by the depleting of their feeding grounds further south. Or perhaps – and this is what some scientists believe – it is an ancestral memory that has brought them home, in spite of the knowledge they must have of their kind’s slaughter at the hands of man. Something stronger than fear has called them back, the same compulsion that makes the tiny swallow travel around the half world twice a year. The same compulsion, perhaps, that leads pilgrims of all stripes to seek the end of the world here, as they had done long before the legend of Santiago washed up on these shores over a thousand years ago.

There’s a small bust-up in Muros, where the bus stops for a change of drivers. The two German pilgrims get off for a smoke and return with their rucksacks. The driver tells them they’ll have to leave their bags underneath if they’re headed for Santiago, as the bus will fill up when we reach Noia. One of the two – the one who speaks Spanish – argues the toss, asking if they can keep them at their feet. This annoys the driver, who points out that other passengers will need the seats more than their bags. Keeping my rucksack on me nearly got me out of a nasty scrape when I was backpacking around Morocco, but here in Spain, there’s no need to be quite so defensive. ALSA, Spain’s largest bus company, actually gives you the option to buy up the seat next to you, which seems a bit selfish. Monbus – a smaller corporate creature by far – is a lot more democratic.

There’s an enormous queue for the bus when it reaches Santiago, almost all of them under the age of thirty. It only dawns on me then that the only young people I saw out and about in Fisterra were pilgrims, and few of them under thirty at that. Spain is much like the rest of the world in that regard: its youth abandon the towns and villages for the bright lights of the city in pursuit of opportunities in work or love, returning home only to see friends and family, or once they have a family of their own.

My digs for the night are within a stone’s throw of the cathedral – quite literally. I can hear the bells chime every half hour from my room. I made a flying visit to some of the local bookstores, but wound up returning to my old haunt in Casa del libro in search of a couple of histories on Tartessos, a current fixation of mine. So far, my specialist areas include: