Hospitality

How to define hospitality? Is it an open door? A cup of tea by a roaring fire? A cold beer in the shade? Or a kindly look and a nod as you pass a stranger on a deserted road? It can be all of these and so much more or less. It is defined as much by landscape and climate as it is by the people who inhabit them. Just yesterday morning I was a stranger wading through a silky veil of misty rain along the coast of Inisheer, the smallest of the Aran Islands, and the jagged outlines of the rocky Karst terrain and the riotous wind made me think about the hospitality of the islanders on this tiny patch on the Atlantic.

On the day of our arrival, my friend and I went for a loop walk of the island in rainproof gear and good walking boots, a light bag packed with sandwiches and nuts and water, knowing that a well made bed was awaiting us back in a heated hostel. We are both from Madrid, and the inhospitable there is invariably connected with proximity and friction, rather than solitude and sparseness like in the island. In Madrid, a curt answer in a hopping bar or a sweaty passenger elbowing you out of the way in a crowded metro carriage are examples of the hostility that may sink the spirits of a visitor. Not in Inisheer: there it was the empty beauty of the grassy terrain parcelled out by painstakingly handmade limestone walls and the wild sea keeping us at arm’s length with crashing waves and flying spray.

The unsettled sea had prevented us from sailing the previous day but it opened up to blue skies flecked with clouds blown back and forth by gusts of wind on the afternoon of our arrival. On our long walk we stopped many times along our way to admire the odd solitary horse or companionable cows with their new-born calves. We climbed up to the cemetery by the beach where the Island’s patron, Saint Caomhan is buried and trekking along the coast before reaching the lighthouse we were faced with the rusty spectre of a ship marred on the rocky waves of Innisheer since the 1960s. We talked about the old pictures of the islanders on the walls of the hostel: women in ample red skirts huddled under heavy woollen shawls; barefoot toddlers crowding a mother posing outside their cottage for a stranger’s photograph; fishermen carrying a boat that may have well been their coffin. Their dogged lives were as alien to us as the wind-tormented coast opening up before us. To say that they carved up an existence in the island is to be strict to the letter. When I thought about this the mere fact that I was allowed to stroll down the freshly paved paths crisscrossing the island seemed like a privilege granted generously by the islanders.

We were in an island of less than three hundred inhabitants and no one I met made a fuss about us. We were not feted and nobody made any particular efforts to engage with us other than those dictated by the common politeness that rules commercial exchanges everywhere and yet there was no doubt in my mind that we were welcome and given the freedom of an extraordinary place. Hospitality in Inisheer was the daylong company of a gentle and protective border collie free to roam in our company; the pointless beauty of a field of planted daffodils poking their heads out in neat rows in a patch of limestone guarded grass; the patience of a farmer whose cow was frightened into stasis by two foreigners and their excitable dog; the plaque commemorating the rescue of the complete passage of Plassey, the imposing ship forever marooned on its coast. It was as if a beautiful and sturdy house built over years by a castaway’s bare hands had been left open for strangers to seek refuge.

Walk away, now

I was in Vilnius recently and having just ordered some food in a “traditional Lithuanian tavern” on Pilies Street I realised that, in a city that is not short of nice cafés and restaurants, I had chosen the equivalent of the King of Paellas in the lowest common denominator most anglo-centric part of the Costa del Sol. Of course, in the large scheme of things, it is no big deal to err in your choice of restaurant: soldier on through the bland, unlovingly and thoughtlessly put together fare, wash your disappointment away with coffee and cake somewhere else and avoid throwing the hissy fit that only a Sunday Times restaurant critic can get away with. No point in pretending that it is not a frustrating experience nonetheless, particularly if, like in my case, you only have one day to make up for your mistake.

For that reason, eaters of the world united, to aid you in your choices when navigating alien lands, I have designed a list of tell-tale signs that should make you turn away on your heels and look for food elsewhere even if suffering from hunger pangs. So by all means avoid:

1. Menus with photographs of the dishes. Actually, make that menus with any photographs.

2. Staff dressed in traditional costume.

3. Dishes translated into more than one language. Ideally avoid menus translated into any language.

4. Cart wheels hung from walls or ceilings. What’s the story with the ubiquitous cart wheel? It should replace whatever is on the UN flag.

5. A separate menu for children/vegetarians.

6. Opening times running continuously from morning until night.

7. A piped medley of folk muzak.

8. A flag by the door.

9. Purposely multilingual staff.

10. Purpose built “rustic” furniture.

11. Punters of more than five nationalities and no natives.

12. A variety show with your dinner.

13. A “traditional” dish that no native has heard of.

14. Three variations of the same main: I.e. Pork chops with rice/mash/vegetables differently but arbitrarily priced.

15. A wine list that itemises wine only by the colour. I.e. Red wine: 10 euro, White wine: 12 euro.

Be aware also that for some reason, the above do not apply to Asian restaurants.

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.

Honest tea

You may be able to chart a map of a person’s psyche by the choices they make when they travel. Every individual has his or her own psychogeography comprising the places they have visited, those they won’t visit, and the ones they long to travel to. Join the dots and you will begin to see the shape of their yearning, their love, their prejudices, and their fear. Let me unroll a map of the world in front of your eyes; I close mine and my finger takes me to the places I wish to visit over all others: here’s Mongolia, a place that I skirted when I was in Siberia; there’s Alaska, a challenge to my urban pedigree and sensitivity to the cold; Buenos Aires in Argentina, where Julio Cortázar, a hero of mine, grew up, and above all others, Japan.

When I was a child my parents sold their apartment in Madrid to a Japanese couple with a son. Even then, when the only foreign country I had visited was Portugal, I could tell that these people came from a place very much unlike Spain. They spoke fluent Spanish and were well acquainted with Spanish culture, the husband was a tour guide and played Spanish guitar and the wife worked for a Spanish airline, but their manners made them stand out: they were unfailingly polite and discrete and they held what I thought was a melancholy smile every time we met them. My parents invited them to an asador to have roast lamb: they loved Iberico ham. They reciprocated by taking us to a Chinese restaurant. I expect there were no Japanese restaurants in Madrid in the 1980s or perhaps they thought Japanese food would be too much of a challenge for us. Their son gave me a wooden doll in a lacquered kimono holding a parasol. He said her name was Yuki, meaning “snow” in Japanese. I told him we had the same name in Spanish, Nieves. Now I live in Ireland, a place where a name like Yuki would make you the bull’s-eye for all sorts of bullies, but back then I thought it was wonderful, and I told everybody about my doll and her name. The Nakamoris, for that was their family name, finally moved in before Christmas. We moved to a much bigger apartment with views of the snowy mountains. Amongst my belongings Yuki took pride of place on my new vanity table. She is still there in my parents’ house.

A few months after our move we returned to our old neighbourhood to say hello to some friends and we called in to the Nakamoris. Only the mother and son were there. She wasn’t expecting us, which I suspect is a definite no-no in Japan, but she was gracious and sat us down and offered us some tea and sweets. Hospitality revolves around food in most cultures: tea and cake or biscuits in Ireland; olives, cheese, almonds and a beer in Spain. Ms. Nakamori gave us Turkish tea and Japanese quince paste, a challenge to a Spanish child’s palate. I was far fussier with food as a child than I am now but I knew, instinctively, that refusing the food was not an option. Perhaps it was that melancholy smile suggesting an underlying sadness that I did not wish to awaken; maybe the transformation of the sitting room I knew so well in somebody else’s hands told me that I had to play by different rules, or perhaps my parents had mentioned that the Japanese were fond of ceremony and ritual and being an obliging child I did not want to spoil the occasion. I will never know but as I held the sickly sweet quince paste in my mouth praying it would vanish before I had to swallow it I had my first proper encounter with an alien culture.

The experience left an indelible impression: I think I learnt that being in the world sometimes requires suppression as well as expansion, a lesson that a Spaniard must of necessity learn at some point if she wishes to be a true cosmopolitan. I also realise now that some of the mores I identified as culturally Japanese resonate with my own make up: a love of ceremony and ritual; a recognition of the fragility of the individual ego vis-à-vis society; an appreciation of subtlety and indirection. I would not claim to know much about Japan now: I really enjoy their food ­–on which, incidentally, Spanish Jesuits had a definite impact introducing the Spanish custom of frying in batter, “tempora” or tempura as the Japanese call it; I love Murakami’s fictions and Ozu’s films; I took a foundation course in Japanese a couple of years ago. I am still deeply intrigued by Japan.

Not long ago I met the Japanese tourist liaison officer in Ireland. An attractive and stylish woman in her early thirties, she loved traditional music and played the fiddle, and spoke impeccable English. I don’t remember her name so I will call her Yuki. Yuki’s job is to support Japanese visitors in difficulties. These often involve various kinds of cultural shock. Every year a Japanese student staying with an Irish family will have some sort of break down because he or she finds the family too direct or intrusive. I wonder how many tourist liaison officers they need in Spain if Japanese visitors find Ireland a bit of a handful. Five hundred of them may find themselves with their hands full around the clock.

The night I met Yuki we ended sitting next to each other in a pub and as she did not know most people there I spent an hour or two conversing with her. She told me about her job, and perhaps because of my childhood encounters with Japanese culture, I asked her a question I had long wanted to ask: if I was invited to dinner in Japan, I said, how would I know when they wanted me to leave? She paused to think for a second and then answered: “You don’t. You’ll never know.” I laughed, and then Yuki added: “Except in Osaka: Osakans are very abrupt. They have this special kind of tea that they take out after dinner to signal that they want you to go.” Thinking about this, I could marvel at a culture that considers the serving of a cup of tea as a sign of eviction abrupt but I prefer to think that Osaka tradition confirms something I have known all along: food speaks its own language. Listen and learn.