A bit cheeky

For this month’s col­umn I’m going to set aside my hith­erto shun­ning of all things coro­n­avirus and ad­dress an issue taken from a re­cent news­pa­per ar­ti­cle, which was en­ti­tled: “Chil­dren and rogu­ish adults take to the streets” (my un­sat­is­fac­tory at­tempt at a trans­la­tion from the Span­ish “Los niños y la pi­caresca de los adul­tos toman la calle”). Ad­jec­tives: rogu­ish, ras­cally. Nouns: guile, chi­canery, (lit) sub­terfuge. That’s what you find if you look up pi­caresca in the Collins Span­ish-Eng­lish dic­tio­nary. In other dic­tio­nar­ies it even ap­pears trans­lated as “cheeky”. It’s a word that is very much con­nected with Spain – as op­posed to Cat­alo­nia, where the go-to word is seny, also dif­fi­cult to trans­late but gen­er­ally ac­cepted as com­mon-sense or, ac­cord­ing to Wikipedia, “a form of an­ces­tral Cata­lan wis­dom or sen­si­ble­ness”.

I have an issue with the Collins trans­la­tion of pi­caresca, be­cause the afore­men­tioned Eng­lish words used to trans­late it don’t do enough to cap­ture the gen­er­ally self­ish and ir­re­spon­si­ble side of such be­hav­iour in my book. And what could be more re­veal­ing of that side than the sight of whole fam­i­lies flout­ing pro­to­col on the first day of the re­lax­ing of lock­down rules for the coro­n­avirus? That was such a dis­ap­point­ing turn of events after the heroic wide­spread ef­fort to ob­serve con­fine­ment. Fi­nally, kids are al­lowed out after a seem­ingly end­less pe­riod stuck at home, which must have been par­tic­u­larly frus­trat­ing for those fam­i­lies with no or lit­tle out­door space, and many ig­nore the pre­cau­tions de­vised to save oth­ers’ lives, a be­hav­iour the media de­scribe as rogu­ish, ras­cally, well, you’ve seen the list.

I was dumb­founded to see the pho­tos of chil­dren and adults milling about by the beach in Barceloneta on Sun­day April 26 as if greet­ing the ar­rival of any other spring, rather than this par­tic­u­lar one. Rule-break­ing took var­i­ous forms: not wear­ing a mask, not re­spect­ing a dis­tance of 1.5 me­tres, more than one par­ent or guardian ac­com­pa­ny­ing the kids, going out with more than the max­i­mum of three mi­nors and stay­ing out for more than an hour. The most fre­quently com­mit­ted of­fence, ac­cord­ing to the po­lice, was that of par­ents with more than one child tak­ing the op­por­tu­nity to both go out, al­though sep­a­rated, to later meet at a spe­cific point.

The first re­ac­tion from the Min­istry for Health was to be ex­pected: a warn­ing that “some cri­te­ria will be ad­justed” if the rec­om­men­da­tions are not fol­lowed in the up­com­ing days. This all smacks of chil­dren being told off by teach­ers, when we are talk­ing about adults being told off by the gov­ern­ment. Clearly, this hap­pens in all cul­tures: the news of po­lice hav­ing to shut down 494 house par­ties in Man­ches­ter a few days after lock­down had started being ample proof of this. But my ob­ser­va­tion here is about the cul­tural causes of such be­hav­iour. De­fi­ance be­fore au­thor­ity is one re­ac­tion, and per­haps more typ­i­cal of coun­tries like the UK and US, where “the right to” do this that and the other, in­clud­ing bear arms (or shoot peo­ple as I see it), is such a com­mon de­fence.

How­ever, the dif­fer­ence, to me, is that de­fi­ance has an el­e­ment of ho­n­our to it. It can be seen as a de­fence of one’s own val­ues when they have come under threat; pi­caresca, on the other hand, has al­ways felt to me more like only look­ing out for your­self and oth­ers be damned.