1. The Cava Bar

It was one of those rare places that had no name but seemed to mean everything. We called it The Cava Bar because the product was cava, or Catalán champagne, and because it was the only one we knew. We haunted our nameless dominion through many an afternoon. It was our cherished nexus, a territory for the exposition of a certain cordial, intuitive madness. That of living without place. To call it a haunt does not imply that there was anything looming in the deep, there in the recesses of a champagne bar. It was, simply put, a place frequently visited by a group of expatriates.

Barri Gòtic, Barcelona

Newcomers always found it a bit strange to surround themselves voluntarily with so many ancianos, frail and often raucous survivors of the old regime, deadly Catholic in temperament. The crowding didn’t help to lend charm, at first contact. Over time, one would realize that it was essential to this particular xampanyería that no available floorspace be untrodden at any time. In this place, even the catalanes (known for having a hyper-civilized, cosmopolitan demeanor), with other Spaniards of seemingly all ages were boisterous, pushy, contemptuous.

Overhead, a fleet of tawny shanks of former pigs, arranged in polite arcs, orderly, as if waiting to make a statement, forever patient. They might have been there for years, for a century. It could have been the design of a slightly twisted Belle-epoque architect that placed them. We could recount not one instance in which an actual human hand made contact with the sienna-red pig-shanks. There was an air of myth about them, a freedom from happenstance. Absurd as it may seem, this apparent transcendence gave them purpose, a flavor for the mind, distraction from distraction.

Swimming in locality, we foreigners clung fondly to the pleasures of a routine. It was, after all, our right to attend, to drink, to eat bacon. We believed we were a quiet, respectful bunch, but like the natives, our voices, too, were often carried away in the flood. We took the brunt of the baristas’ wrath for everyone else’s noise. Even this was part of the joy.

Gatherings would range in size from two to a handful, then to groups of a dozen or two. If some of the other meanwhile émigrés would not attend, they were quickly, uniquely missed. Each individual, with his or her preferred range of languages, accent, dress and rhythm of conversation, helped to paint the full sense of our Iberian preserve.

If only one did not attend, the day changed. 'Where's the Dutchman?' a common query. Or, when the Dutchman showed, his incessant: 'Where's that friend of yours with the figure of a lamppost?' Farola, he called her. It was hardly the place to court a love interest, yet hot implacable romantic affairs (affairs of convenience some would say) would arise over nameless pink champagne and talk of gods, variants of divinity.

Whether it was the syruppy resonance, the alcohol, or just the willing effervescence, that inexpensive cava rosada would always mine great conversation from our forastero gullets. Energetic, if not tempestuous dialogues, trialogues, tertulias focusing on the most prevalent and obscure of human concerns, would emerge at almost any stimulus, any change in the light. Tertulias afoot, an artform, an indulgence, a necessity. Everyone standing drunk, with and within the crowd. We sought perspective. Perspective we proffered. The Cava Bar became, by virtue of frequency, a bank of perspective.

I ask myself, does a haunt like ours become what it is from necessity? I don’t know how to learn such a thing. It would be difficult to say if we would have perished without it. It was simply a habit and an environ. We sought the knit-work of a spontaneous trust, a collection of faint but interminable connections based only on our all being 'extranjeros'.

It was our city, too, and we could have proven it, if anyone cared to ask. We could prove it by being falling-down drunk... eating bacon and champagne with straight faces, or with the appropriately resolute grin... lending our voices to the din of the packed house, losing our accents in that little multitude... tambaleando como nativos, never a care, never a worry about orientation or cartography. The falling-down aspect was not advisable, nor would it engender sound scholarship, but we felt like we were getting close to the heart of something.

We made our attempt to master the unknown by embracing, studying, mastering a more humble confusion. In this way, everything became a sort of art of xampanyería, a way of absorbing so much that might otherwise have been overwhelming. A celebration of the foreign from within the warmth of a community fortified by its suddenness, its mongrel temporality.

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