Shocking Changes

"Why is it," asked Madrid's influential royalist newspaper A.B.C., "that all over the world people get up early, work straight through the day. knock off work late in the afternoon and are in bed by midnight -except in Spain?"

The answer, as any good Spaniard knows, is that the rest of the world is mad. The leisurely Spanish have evolved a daily schedule that amounts to a happy truce with the business of earning a living. Spanish morning begins at 10 a.m., noon comes at 2 p.m. and early afternoon at 4:30 p.m. No Spaniard who is anyone goes to work before noon. Lunch is a two-or three-hour affair beginning at 2 p.m., and dinner stretches from 11 p.m. into the small hours of the morning. Among upper-class Spaniards and those who aspire to that state, too much interest in work is considered bad form; if business must be done, let it be concluded in a cafe.

A.B.C., flushed with victory from a recent campaign against hornblowing, unsettled a lot of cafe conversations by proclaiming: "This business of not working, of having lunch at teatime and dinner when one should be in bed, constitutes a sorry picture and is neither healthy nor ethical." Day after day. A.B.C. took up logical, historical, medical, ethical and demographic arguments for a change.

Stirred from their lethargy, thousands of Spaniards wrote letters to the editor. Madrid's vociferous Castizos (true Castilians) almost to a man opposed reform, arguing that to impose "foreign innovations" was to overlook "the realities of Spain" and to threaten one of the most cherished of Spanish institutions, the so-bremesa -"chatting without attaching any importance to the passing of time" at the table after lunch.

Last week the Spanish Ministry of Labor gave the cafe habitues something real to chew on. It approved a new 42-hour week for insurance employees -but provided that they work from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. without a luncheon break. Once the shock passed, the workers welcomed the change: abolishing the two-hour lunch would mean for thousands of them only two subway or bus trips a day instead of four. And hard-up Spanish workers, most of whom must hold two jobs in order to make ends meet, now had their "afternoons" free for side jobs. At week's end Spain's major banks announced that they would probably change over to 8 to 3 too. Not satisfied with these changes. A.B.C. called for time clocks in offices. When the full meaning of a time clock was at last explained to one Castilian, he recoiled in horror. "The Spanish way of life," he said, "is finished."

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