The straight and narrow

As a Madridian living in Dublin I am often asked to sum up my city by prospective Irish visitors. I have long maintained that Barcelona, prosperous, outward looking, idiosyncratic but cosmopolitan, is the real capital of Spain. It seems to me that tourists don’t feel they need to ask about Barcelona because Barcelona, like all other great cities of the world, already has its own legend. I don’t imagine Parisians get asked what Paris is like, simply because it does not matter what it is like, what matters is what visitors imagine it to be. They will measure their experience against a dream they have had for years.

Madrid is something else, something darker and truly unknown beats at its centre: it may be the heart of everything that is in the shadows of Spain, like Barcelona is at the heart of everything that is bursting with light and sea and colour. Or not. It may not be quite as romantic as that, it could be that it is a geopolitical curiosity, even absurdity: plucked out of the shade to become the capital because of its literal centrality. Madrid is a riverless sealess hamlet that happened to be at the bull’s-eye of a growing empire; a grande dame born out of an undernourished grubby urchin.

Of course I never say these things to those who ask me about my home city. It would not be helpful. I may ask them if they like art, what kind of food they enjoy eating, would they like to take a day trip. What I really would like to say, if anybody asked me to help them understand Madrid is that for some reason, its inhabitants are drawn to narrow watering holes heaving with raucous bodies who standing side by side seem to relish the confusion.

The last time I was in Madrid I was struck by this undeniable fact of life there. Two days short of New Years Eve I am walking towards a night out in my favourite neighbourhood, Lavapiés, home to misfits and martyrs of all colours and creeds. Going up Calle Carretas, skipping up and down the footpath to avoid fellow pedestrians blinded by the urgency of their Christmas shopping, I look left and I see a long and tight pastry shop specialising in croissants with fillings. It is chock-a- block with punters, and the very discomfort it showcases, the narrow proximity of the clientele, seems to act as a centripetal force. Earlier, before I reached Sol, I had a glimpse of the venerable Casa Labra, driving punters in droves to taste its famed buñuelos de bacalao (cod croquettes). The croissant place and Casa Labra could not be more different, one, garishly lit and anodyne, the other, glowing with wooden warmth. Never mind that Casa Labra is a historical treasure and croissantplace will be replaced with another flavour-of-the-day establishment in less than a year. They are both integral to the experience of being in the city I was born in because what matters is that they were created following an individual’s initiative and that that same individual (or their successors as in Casa Labra) furnished it and runs it according to their taste and potential (creative, culinary, musical and, of course, financial).

Living abroad helps you understand your city much better, of course, one day you go over and you see it afresh, as if finally fitted with the lenses that allow you to see beyond your provincial short sightedness. Dubliners have very different drinking habits to Madridians and they often register alarm at the notion that you will only have one drink in a bar before moving on to the next one as we do there. The Irish act as birds of prey when they walk into a busy pub: they crane their necks and, on spotting an opening, mercilessly descend on a free table. They will sit there for the night, marinating their conversation in the same spirits that pickle their livers, and I should know because I am as much of a bar hawk here as the next one. By contrast eating and drinking in Madrid is a restless and nomadic experience. It partly has to do with the weather, which allows for freer rambling without battling against wind or rain, and with the lengthened nature of nights in Spain, which stretches them way beyond the Irish bedtime. But the third vortex of the, ahem, Barmuda triangle I am tracing here is the individuality I offered above.

I don’t suggest that Irish pubs are without character, they can have it in spades, but the differences are subtle and, when it comes to drink or food, with the exception of recently introduced hipster gastro pubs offering speciality beers and fashioned to some tried and tasted business model, they all offer the same range of beers and mediocre wines. As for food, nobody is going to cross the road to get dry roasted peanuts instead of ready salted. The choice is simple for me, when it comes to pubs, old is better than new, mixed clientele a must, good Guinness (for its quality does change from pub to pub) and company I will be happy to spend many hours with. Ah, Madrid, I cannot pin it down so easily. In Dublin I cherish variations of the same evening, a discrete change in volume or tone, a harsher or sweeter finish, make for the differences in my memory. I just never had the same night twice in Madrid. The one I offer now is a vignette, not an emblem.

We rove freely up and down the narrow streets of Lavapiés, dropping a friend and picking two more on the way. Somebody remembers a Gallego tavern from the weekend before but it is full at this time, so we cross the road to get an aperitivo, Vermouth for me, in a good bodega across the road. A couple of tapas will tie us over until the Gallego frees up some space. After dinner, somebody suggests a stiff drink in a hole-in-the-wall run by a crank whose idea of décor are prints of topless beauties painted in the eighties pastel palette of the Athena school (of posters, not classical art). They would not be out of place in the villain’s den in an old episode of Miami Vice. There is an overpowering smell of disinfectant covering up a multitude of sins, and a whiff of what is summed up as some intractable electric malfunction by the owner lingers in the air. Pointing at a stitch above his eyebrow the publican tells us that he had a “friendly encounter” with the floor the previous night and laughs it off. As we leave to get a chaser in another bar two roads down, he is returning a fully charged smartphone to a languid beauty in her early twenties, as out of place in this eighties time capsule as her new iPhone 5.

The next bar is dark and loud and furnished with what look like motley findings in the nearby Sunday flea market of El Rastro. It is squarely below zero outside but for some reason a solitary Brazilian has seen it fit to leave his hotel in a pair of sooty havainana flip flops to nurse a red wine here. The red wine would give him away as a foreigner even if he was appropriately dressed for the dry piercing cold, no native would drink wine without food, especially not in a bar that is clearly a place to down a bottle of beer or a gin and tonic before moving on. We will cross paths with our Brazilian friend later, and draw him to El Calvario, a place that offers live music and ramshackle and blasphemous décor with your drink. There a homeless man in his sixties, will sit silently by the wall across from me and then ask for a cigarette as two of my friends hotly debate the state of the Spanish left, oblivious to this man’s disappointment when I say I don’t smoke and to the ravenous way he eats the bocadillo he produces out of a plastic bag stuffed in his pocket: a sausage drowning in ketchup and mustard rapidly disappears before he does.

I spot him again in Candela, the two tier flamenco bar in Calle del Olivar: the basement is where flamenco musicians are said to jam into the wee hours some nights and access is by invitation only; the main bar, an equal opportunities late bar, welcomes the high and dry that waft in through its doors after all other bars have shut for the night. The homeless man I saw in Calvario is also tolerated, even welcomed, here, and he sits by the cigarette machine, perhaps hoping to catch a punter who will not be able to deny the evidence when he tries to bum a fag. A friend and I begin to dance: a loving parody of the flamenco moves whose vigour and grace we could never approximate. On the stage at the back of the room a man and a woman in their twenties offer a master class in ironic dancing, disco moving to the heartfelt soleá coming out of the speakers. They are both ungroomed, and wear matching lumberjack shirts and tousled hair and, in spite of their seeming androgyny are flirting shamelessly in full view of everybody.

Eventually we are also ejected and as we near sunrise we are forced to look for a bar that will lift its shutters for us. A Moroccan boy, who had cautioned me against drink in Candela as he sipped from a beer, incongruously becomes our leader, promising entry into a nearby bar owned by a Pakistani friend. It strikes me that Madrid is the only place I know where you will rub elbows with Muslims over a bar counter. The experience is certainly unthinkable in Dublin, where social encounters of this kind seem impossible. There is something intolerably grotesque about the secret bar and it is the final push that I need to make my way to the metro in the company of one of my best friends at eight in the morning.

When I am with this friend I always think of the night he tried to take us to a bar called “Luke, I am your father”. We walked up and down the same street vainly trying to find the bar for about thirty minutes, and I eagerly looked forward to finally locating it, because I was unable to imagine what a place with that name, run by a bunch of kids, as he had said, could look like. Eventually somebody stopped at a doorway, and looking and pointing up, said: “It’s here. It’s closed”. We had passed it a few times and missed it because the name was written in marker on a piece of cardboard clumsily fitted above the sign of the previous bar. The kids who ran it were on holidays or out having fun somewhere else themselves, who knows. Disappointed we moved to our second choice: there someone had brought in an antique bathtub inside the bar you could just barely make out in the dark and a couple of drinkers were enjoying their beers inside it. This place could be better than “Luke, I’m your father”, I thought.

I will never know. I never made it to “Luke, I’m your father” and it closed shortly after. Most bars in Madrid come and go. I will never have nights exactly like that again but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I am alive and this is Madrid, fuck it.

Irish tapas

 

A fistful of Guinness

Women are from Mars, Men are from Guinness

Everything you wanted to know about drink and gender but never dared to ask. Okay, only five things: my own shaky, possibly prejudiced, and very personal observations but, let’s face it, more than you had five minutes ago.

1. A pint of Guinness is, without a doubt, the most male coded of drinks. To put this to the test, my esteemed lady-readers, go for a drink to a pub with a male friend, proceed to order a pint of Guinness and any other drink and wait for it to be brought to your table. The pint of Guinness will always be served to the male punter. The combination of drinks won’t alter the experiment; a pint of Guinness is the most masculine of drinks. Order a hand grenade, a boa constrictor, a vasectomy and a pint of Guinness, and the man will get the pint of Guinness. I ought to know: I drink nothing else in a pub and invariably my Guinness goes to my companion if the company is male.

2. Conversely, there is no more female coded drink than a glass of white wine. Yes, I do love an ice-cold glass of albariño. And yes, it must be prejudice, but I cannot abide women who only drink white wine. It reeks of narrow-minded “femininity”, of hollow conversations and self-denial. If I had to define the good life by its stark opposite, I would paint a mane streaked with highlights casting its shade over a glass of white wine.

3. For reasons I cannot fathom, the gin and tonic, even in its domestic variety, is primarily marketed at women. How do I know? It is increasingly hard to find normal tonic as opposed to slim line.

4. Only European men from the mainland or gay men will be seen drinking a solitary cocktail in a pub. One of the most evocative and culturally layered scenes in a bar in recent memory was the sight of a fairly well-known French restaurateur sitting on his own in Korean-owned pub The Hop House in Parnell Street nursing a dry martini. I swear his eyes looked more hooded and come-hither than Marlene Dietrich’s in The Blue Angel. I pity those who fear and avoid the inner city: where else will you see such a delightfully cosmopolitan sight a propos absolutely nothing in particular?

5.  A margarita is the perfect gender-neutral cocktail: equally suitable for a man to brush his moustache against its salted rim than for a woman to seal it with her brightly rouged lips. It is probably the sexiest cocktail of all: no other cocktail says I am up to no good as loudly and clearly as a margarita. It’s all in the uncompromising ingredients: salt, tequila, lemon or lime juice. Sorry-ass squeamish fusspots need not apply.

R&D=G&T (Part I)

“A spectre is haunting Spain –– the spectre of G&T”, Karl Marx, give or take a word or two.

If you live in the British Isles (and I am afraid that for the purposes of expediency my beloved Ireland is included in that archipelago most abhorrent to republican sensibilities), a gin and tonic is a cocktail manqué, a non-drinker’s drink composed of a thumb of any old gin topped with a squalid serving of tepid tonic over hastily- scooped half-melted ice and a segment of lemon if you must insist on being a stick in the mud and delay the barman from serving proper drinks, namely pints of stout or ale, thank you very much.

The first time I ordered a gin and tonic in Dublin, I had to refrain from asking the barman if I needed to fasten my seatbelt before landing when he produced the Lilliputian bottle of tonic that I had hitherto only seen plucked out of an air hostess’s serving trolley in 1950s films where flight attendants where mostly female and impossibly curvaceous and impossibly clad in Technicolor blue with little pillbox hats. In those films the odd debonair sophisticate would puff on a Menthol and briskly stir the gin and tonic that would both provide the necessary Dutch courage to break the ice on the icy blonde on the next seat and a hasty prophylactic for malaria.

If you are going to give me a miniature bottle of tonic, you better look this glamorous

Speaking of the association of gin and tonics and malaria: to my mind there is no better lament for a golden past forever lost than the mourning of the passing of a time when one had to drink a cocktail to fortify oneself against a tropical disease. I would be the picture of health in a safari jacket if we still lived in that glamorous era, daring mosquitoes to bite me for the heck of it.

Ya betcha Hemingway liked to fight malaria with a g’n’t or two

But I digress, shortly after I arrived in Ireland I realised that there was no more point in ordering a gin and tonic in a pub than there was in ordering paella valenciana in a chipper. In fact, there was probably more point in ordering paella valenciana in a chipper, since, at least, they would ignore you, whereas a publican would take out the minute bottle of tepid tonic and be under the illusion that he was serving you a gin and tonic and charge you handsomely for it.

Back then Spain was like the Holy Grail of spirits to my Irish friends. They would come to Madrid for the first time and I would egg them on to order a gin and tonic just to see their mouths go agape as the waiter liberally poured gin in a highball glass. I’d often have to shout “stop” before the gin overflowed the glass since the idea that you could tell a barman when to stop pouring a spirit was both utopian and anathema to them. Many a session ended with Scarlett O’Hara-like oaths “to never touch the stuff again” as someone or another clutched a fistful of empanada to steady themselves before dealing the munchies and my parents’ floor a fatal blow. I, myself, may still be lost in the Madrid night holding a gin and tonic if it had not been for the un-hedonistic detour I had to take to finish my PH.D. on an arcane aspect of James Joyce’s work. I am now certain that Joyce would have taken the cocktails over my thesis any day.

Is it my imagination or is Joyce looking at Pound as if to say, “Where the hell is my gin and tonic, Ezra?”

Back then, I will be the first to admit, Spanish superiority on matters of gin and tonic was largely based on quantity, not quality, and, therefore, no more or less conspicuous or noteworthy than any other cocktail. Things have changed since then, though, and the gin and tonic has become, to my mind, a curious cypher that may hold the key to my country’s current woes, or may be the repository of its current mojo, and therefore an invaluable instrument to unravel where it’s at. In other words, if Unamuno, Baroja, Azorín and Machado were pondering the Spanish question in 2014, they would do so staring into the icy depths of a perfectly calibrated gin and tonic served in a balloon glass, as if it were a medium’s crystal ball reflecting the country’s future.

The Spanish Question circa 2014. Stay tuned…

To be continued…

The revolution will not be televised

There are three things that I enjoy above all else in my spare time: having a meal, going to the movies, and a drink in a pub. The first two I can do by myself, although I would rather in company, the third one is unthinkable on my own. All three require a degree of concentration and ceremony. I’d rather watch a film in the cinema than at home: I like the darkness and quiet of the theatre, and I like the community of voyeurs. I like to plunge into the darkness so that I can enjoy watching films like I enjoy dreaming. I strongly disapprove of chatter of any kind in the cinema and disdain crunching and cracking noises, although not the consumption of food per se if done with a modicum of discretion. Again, I think of film like I think of slumbering: I do not mind the smell of coffee and toast drifting into my dream world, but hate to be rudely awaken by careless clatter in the kitchen. Today I went to the IFI and they dutifully warned patrons not to make noises during the film. A perfect silence reigned throughout the projection of Like Father, Like Son: you could hear the sizzling of Japanese dumplings on-screen above your neighbour’s breathing.

When it comes to eating, Ireland still has enough reverence for the rituals of restaurant dining and I have not come across any public dining ruined by the blare and glare of TV screens.  The most frequent acoustic offender tends to be Muzak and this is quickly gobbled up by the growing din of conversation. Low lighting and convivial chatter are as essential to a good restaurant outing as good bread and wine.  I wish the same could be said about pubs. Why is it so many publicans have decided to ruin their otherwise atmospheric pubs with television sets turned to an infernal blast? Is there a conspiracy out there to turn every bar in this country into the back room of a spin-doctor at the White House? Or perhaps they are aiming to recreate the sitting room of the  hardest of hearing most cantankerous and socially inept grand-uncle in the land?

My latest outing to a pub would suggest this is the case. Last Tuesday I went out for a drink and found my straightforward plan to have a private conversation in a public place thwarted at every turn by televisions blasting the budget debate in the Dáil. Every sip of excellent stout, every line of riveting conversation was punctuated by the offensive banality and obdurate shamelessness of Noonan and company. A good conversation in a pub is the grease of a well-oiled relationship, and the Minister for Finance and his adversaries were hell-bent on making mine screech. The bummest note was struck when Noonan and one of his opponents quoted lines by W.B. Yeats in an effort to give complexity and gravitas to their shopkeepers’ rhetoric. I felt like the beast had quit slouching towards Bethlehem and was sprinting towards me to take a dump on my head. The evening turned into an unplanned pub-crawl as we chased the pipe dream of a TV-less pub. We sat in two and put our heads in four before finding one with a screen-less area. Some evenings the best course of action is to go home and read some Yeats in peace. We need some warnings to stop publicans from switching on their televisions at every turn. Even better, we need a campaign to ban screens from pubs. As with the smoking ban, it will be hard at first, but we will soon grow to appreciate the clean air(waves).

Is Romantic Ireland dead and gone? It  bloody will be if they insist on installing a TV set in every pub