Spain’s Guardia Civil serves as that country’s federal police, paramilitary force, bomb squad, counter-narcotics agency, arbiter of PTA disputes, counter-terrorism unit and traffic patrol. It was in this last capacity that my wife and I, back in earlier part of the decade, had our first and only run-in with Spain’s elite-ish unit of all trades. All we knew at the time was that the Guardia Civil wore green uniforms, were not to be trifled with and drove small, boxy green cars. Prior to the fungal growth of the “green” movement in the west, these boxy euro cars called to mind, the American mind, a more primitive, Flintstones-inspired vehicle, rather than an enviro-status symbol. Cartoonish either way.
It was late at night and we were returning home from Granada via largely unlit pastoral highways. We exited the highway a bit early and accidentally ran a stop sign that was located, regarding space and time respectively, off in some bushes skirting the exit ramp in the center unfathomable darkness at the event horizon. Once back on the highway, we were greeted by the kind of light show that is rarely associated with entertainment. The guardian of Iberian civility approached our driver’s side window with a speed unequal to his shape. His paunch was a doomsday pendulum keeping an ominous if sort of polyrhythmic time and meting out the seconds as he drew closer in the darkness.
As I sat in the passenger seat, I gisted his surprisingly animated diatribe as best I could and managed about every eighth or ninth word, none of my random sample including ‘¿Cómo estás?‘ or ‘¿quieres queso?‘. So in lieu of comprehension, I settled for imagination as my wife nodded and looked up into the maglite, suitably stricken. Given his apparent agitation, I imagined we were suspected of something worthy of the prison in Papillion or the Château d’If fortress from the Count of Monte Cristo (I don’t know of any famous Spanish hoosegows). As the night wore on I began to wonder if our officer had that not unfamiliar soft-but-flinty socialist chip on his shoulder and was now lecturing us on U.S. imperialism and hegemony and such. At some point, I switched gears and began plotting our future prison break as my wife continued to struggle though the lingual obstacle course of Castillian Spanish. She speaks “colonial” Spanish with near-native fluency but was having trouble keeping up with the speed, the spite and the spittle of our Spanish inquisitor’s delivery.
As it turns out, the bulk of his speech was concerned not with the stop sign but with finding out why we would flaunt the traffic laws and civil codes of a sovereign nation by using our fog lights sans fog, in the clear of a starry starry night. Running designated stop signs is a fairly universal faux pas. Speeding similarly has an applicability that transcends most borders. But this fog light prohibition seemed a bit random and at the time I considered that it was maybe endemic to the Iberian peninsula. Turned out this wasn’t the case; we have the same deal in the U.S. You just won’t find the Federal B.I pulling you over and lecturing you with near-parental disappointment for inappropriate fog light usage. That said, you can’t pay the fine for an out-of-town municipal ticket at your local bank in the U.S.
Mystereedissolved 