Pastis

The entrance was a small window and a door lit by a string of lights. I walked in and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting; it was darker in the bar than it had been out in the street. A bar eventually resolved around me but it took me a moment to recognize it as such. It was a room not much bigger than the living room of my apartment, which also wasn’t spacious by any standard. There were two tables with three chairs each, and a short row of stools along the bar. I sat down on one of them and waited for the bartender, a fat man wearing a red sweater, to notice me.

The bartender appeared to be as much a part of the décor as anything else. The limited wall space wasn’t dominated by a giant mirror or row after row of bottles with colorful labels and syrupy liquids. Instead the space was packed with signs, notes, and comics written in French, Spanish, German, a few in English. More than a few of them were handmade, written in careless handwriting. There were also portraits- some photos, some hand-drawn based on the photos- of French singers. I recognized Edith Piaf, but none of the others. About a hundred paper cranes of various sizes hung inexplicably from the ceiling. They seemed to be flocking around the bar’s centerpiece, which also hung from the ceiling: a life-size dark figure of a woman done in papier-mache. It could have been a witch on a broomstick, I wasn’t sure. What was certain was that her legs spread out behind her and her dress hung loosely and indecently from them. It was bizarre and reckless. It fit in perfectly.

I ordered glass of wine. When I paid with a twenty euro note he flung it back to me, asking if I had anything smaller. When I told him it was all I had he grumbled, picked up the bill, and shuffled toward the back to make change. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d already failed some kind of test. I’d lived in the city for a year, more than a tourist but less than a local and in a lot of ways I still had no idea where I fit in. This place was small, meant only for specific clientele. Somehow I’d just proven that I wasn’t in the club.

I sipped my wine and paged through a newspaper sitting on the bar. There was a guitarist setting up on a small area that had apparently been designated as a stage. The bar had seating for fewer than a dozen people, yet valuable space had been given up as a stage. I listened to the guitarist tune and practice while I scanned articles in Catalan and Castellano and looked around from time to time. There was another patron in the bar, a man seated at one of the tables. He was silent and didn’t move much. A glance at a time, I took in his ratty gray-black hair and his stained and distressed clothing. I assumed he was one of the city’s many homeless who’d begged enough money for some wine or a beer and was killing time in the bar until it closed. Me, the bartender, the guitarist, and the other silent patron were the only people in the bar for a while.

And then a few people started trickling in. Some were friends of the guitarist and they gathered around him. Some just sat as I did, quietly with their drinks in front of them. The dim light and confined atmosphere had cast a sort of quieting, intimate spell, which was broken when a group of three girls burst in, looked around the tiny bar, and began giggling to themselves. They sat at the other open table and began speaking loudly. I felt a familiar embarrassment as I listened to them squawk in American English. The bartender had reluctantly tottered over to them and was shaking his head, informing them that he didn’t have whatever drink they were ordering. Eventually he brought them a few bottles of beer and went back behind the bar, leaned against the rail and tucked his chin into his chest with his eyes closed.

The guitarist was beginning in earnest now and I listened to him sing in lilting, lyrical Spanish. Spanish poetry is a lot like Spanish food: it’s composed of simple parts and on the surface it seems uncomplicated. But if you sit down and take it in, really pay attention to it, it can be sublime. In the middle of the second song my friends entered. The stood quietly in the back while he finished and only then did we greet each other, exchanging kisses on both cheeks and speaking in Spanish. My friends ordered and sat down quietly. We whispered briefly to one another if a line or a word struck us. The other American girls had long since finished their beers and left, and I could tell the bartender noted the difference between the two kinds of Americans he had seen so far tonight. Perhaps it was my imagination, or the fact that the glasses of wine I’d had so far at Bar Pastis were not the first of the night, but the bartender looked my way for a moment and seemed to give me a nod. I still wasn’t part of the club, but because of my friends I had been forgiven.

We drank and whispered and listened to music. When the guitarist began one of his last songs of the night the quiet man with matted hair and dirty clothes started singing with him. He stood up and joined him on the stage, and the two sung beautifully together. They sung about the flat plains, open sky, and the deep red setting sun of La Mancha, but they could have been singing about the plains of my own home. Afterward the guitarist thanked him and the man sat back down.

At the end of the night I was drunk and happy, and the end of the Rambla didn’t seem quite as sad as it had when I’d arrived. It didn’t even seem as ugly. I suddenly noticed the stretch of water extending from the port. I looked up at Christopher Columbus atop his ornate totem as he pointed far out into the sea, toward the horizon. The Rambla itself stretched upward into the city, devoid of tourists and human statues. It almost seemed like the wide, tree-lined avenue it might have been many years ago.