At home there were a few bottles of Mistela, coffee liqueur, Carmelite liqueur and herbal liqueur, which came out of the cupboard only on very special days, family celebrations and festivals when a general peal of bells rang out in the city and shots rang out, some firecrackers fired in honor of a patron saint. Those cut-glass bottles sat on the dining table in the afternoon, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, accompanied by trays of muffins and jam cakes, along with some small art deco jars that barely fit a thimble on lips. Miguel did not remember that anyone had ever drunk these liquors because time passed and they returned to the showcase intact, without lowering their level year after year. Maybe they just showed up to show that even a semblance of amusement was allowed in this family. This feeling accompanied Miguel throughout his life.
The first doubly forbidden alcohol that Miguel brought to his lips was the communion wine drunk in the sacristy when he was an altar boy. Although there used to be a shipwrecked gnat in the jug, this last ember was disputed with his companions. It was a sweet wine, probably from Malaga, that was about to become the blood of Christ. This secret tasting was usually accompanied by a handful of unconsecrated wafers to serve as a cover. And to end the feast, they rolled a cigarette with the butts that the asthmatic priest threw into the spittoon of sawdust. This priest looked like a Graham Greene character; he was very fond of cognac, and more than once the altar boys had seen him, cap pulled over one ear, saying mass in stumbling Latin.
Miguel has never liked drunk people. There were a few notables in town, and just seeing them stumbling between the tables in the bar made me decide not to drink. But inevitably came the first sangria of the parties, the first beer to show he was a man, the first half combo in that disco where he made the first girl dance. Until at the Montejaque militia camp, a very imaginative captain coined a tenet that Miguel would never forget. “A man must drink what he can piss,” he shouted, thumbs in his belt, before the company formed in the shade of the holm oaks. There he committed the first excess. On the last day of camp, when the final ranking was announced, after tossing his hat in the air, Miguel poured a bottle of wine into one of his semicircular boots and drank several drinks, which he shared with his classmates. A contentious wine with sweaty feet was his baptism as a lieutenant.
To smoke well or badly, to drink well or badly, that was the question. Any harm tobacco could do to you could be considered good if you smoke it with the elegance of Yves Montand. No alcohol would be bad if it made you write like Scott Fitzgerald after your first martini. For a time, imbued with frivolous inconsistency, Miguel’s greatest wish, since these examples were unattainable, was to sit on a stool at the counter of the Chacalay bar and, like the Valencian gentlemen, order a rocafull, iced coffee, brandy and egg whites. Sitting on the bar stools was also an art. Going up and down you had to have momentum. A certain elegant nonchalance with the glass in hand with a measured foreshortening had to go hand in hand with the type of drink one drank.
In Miguel’s biography there were drinks that had become music in his memory. As well as the sound of Paquito D’Rivera’s clarinet, there were drinks sliding down the esophagus with a melancholy of famous bars whose tables or stools had served as stations during his travels. A pint of Guinness at Davy Byrnes on Duke Street, Dublin, where James Joyce began his first morning binge; a Campari on the terrace of the Rosati in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo and watched Alberto Moravia at the next table turn his head as a girl in a flowered skirt passed, following her with his eyes until she got lost on the Corsican street ; a daiquiri at Floridita in Havana, prepared by bartender Constante without thinking for a moment that Hemingway drank it there too; a Jack Daniels at the Sardine Club in Chicago, a venue with just ten tables where Sinatra sang. The Cathai Hotel in Shanghai, the Villa Politi in Syracuse, the Grand Hotel de Cabourg in Normandy, Harry’s in Paris or Venice, each of these energy centers had an appropriate liquor that Miguel attempted to turn into literature.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits