By the time we reached the end of the street in another town where we’d find the bar I had been looking for, we had walked through several back alleys behind the opera house. Pakistanis ran little shops and cafés alongside the alleys, and one of them curiously called his shop a Tandoori House which oddly served pizzas.
After another left turn at the end of that alley, we came to a square that was barricaded because the ground was being surfaced, and as we had been warned, we saw several women wearing dresses that hugged so close to their bodies that it was a miracle they were able to move at all, and as they walked, the men alongside us, single or not, stopped doing whatever they were doing, and stared.
Bar Marsella was right there. And it was closed.
I hadn’t come all the way to Barcelona to see this bar with its shutter down. My friend Melissa had come with me out of a sense of intrigue because she had heard I was looking for a rundown bar, and not Gaudi’s architecture and other spots tourists make it a point to visit. Seeing my disappointment, she tried to cheer me up and told me to stand in front of the shuttered bar while she took my picture. As she asked me to smile, one of the charming ladies walking the streets said: “Mister, it opens at 10 o’clock.”
I relaxed and smiled, and she winked. It felt like a Hemingway moment.
Melissa and I walked along the long avenue, all the way to the spot where there is a tall monument of Christopher Columbus, looking at his hands pointing towards the sea but unable to decide whether to go left or right. We went to the marina and saw the sailboats swaying in the wind, and passed a giant Roy Liechtenstein sculpture and settled down in a bar serving tapas and more wine. Later that night, we headed back to Marsella, hoping to raise a glass of absinthe to Papa.
A week later, from my home in London, I wrote to Jack Turner, asking him about the bar. Turner is writing a book on absinthe, and he wrote back: “The bar is a mandatory stop for all admirers of Hemingway, absinthe, and callow American English majors abroad, impressed by the relevant passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” I wasn’t American, nor an English major. Two out of three ain’t bad.
By the time we reached the bar, the women outside were busy – they had found companions for the evening and they began disappearing into the blocks of flats near the bar.
Marsella had an imposing ceiling but it looked yellowed, like fading newsprint, as if no one had washed it in the nearly two centuries of the bar’s existence. The light was yellow too, looking brighter because of the chandelier that reflected and magnified its reach.
Its yellow glow, and the green tinge of absinthe, gave the bar a muted, contemplative and nostalgic look, as though we had stepped into L’Absinthe, the Edgar Degas painting also known as A Sketch of a French Café, which had a woman and man sitting alongside each other. The man wore a hat and looked away; the woman looked down. A glass of absinthe was in front of her. In their non-communicativeness lay the angst and ennui of urban isolation.
The mirrors behind us were tall and faded, the woodwork looked solid and old. In its seedy air, it looked like the kind of bar where Hemingway would have found home, if only for his own melancholia to find a natural habitat.
One table had three men, saying little to one another; another had two women, sitting close to one other. The bar had a large floor, but it didn’t seem as if any couple had ever danced there. This was where you went to sit, brood, and be alone. As the night lengthened, it became a bit more cheerful, as more people came to the café, and the bartender, who had looked morose, seemed to brighten a little.
I watched the waiter place a glass and a fork on my table. He put a sugar cube on the fork and gave me a bottle of sealed, chilled water, with a tiny hole in its cap, asking me to pour it over the cube until it dissolved. The sweetened water would drop on the spirit below, releasing the powers of the green fairy.
Absinthe was banned for some time in the last century. Made from herbs such as anise and fennel and wormwood, absinthe supposedly had magical powers that played with your mind. The French symbolists – Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme certainly, but to some extent even Baudelaire – credited absinthe with spurring their creativity and they grew to depend on it.
In 1995, on a trip to the Mediterranean, I had discovered pastis, the “parental guidance” equivalent of absinthe, and had often wondered what was so special about a drink that tasted like fennel juice. But I liked it enough to bring back a couple of bottles to my then home, in Singapore.
Turner credits Hemingway for being “almost single- handedly responsible for the American myth of absinthe, namely its supposedly hallucinogenic properties. He was gifted in this respect: what he did for bulls in Pamplona, and daiquiris in Cuba, he did for absinthe in Barcelona. It helped enormously that absinthe was underground, and so the real thing was no longer available. And it didn’t hurt that the drink was so strong. It appealed to both the alcoholic and the sentimentalist in him.”
I sipped absinthe, and it began its work alongside the ambience of desolation. It was more potent than pastis. Melissa took a picture of me with my glass. I promptly uploaded it on my Facebook page. Within moments, my friends began responding and talking to me about absinthe and my being in Barcelona. My friend Susie, a novelist in London, promptly wrote:
Go on, have one more.
I will, for you, I wrote.
Then another one.
You want me back safe and sound, right? I asked.
She drew a smiley. Meanwhile another friend in Seattle, concerned about how much I might drink, reminded me what absinthe did to the French symbolists.
Hemingway would have challenged the entire bar and succeeded in outdrinking everyone – or, at least claimed to have done so in a finely crafted story, even if he might have actually sat there alone, like that old man in A Clean, Well- Lighted Place who had no one to talk with and had attempted suicide only a week earlier.
I had no cause for despair. A little electronic device had connected me with the friends I’d have wanted around my table, and, for a brief moment, we had created a conversation across continents that collapsed so many worlds into one, cheering me. Besides, Melissa smiled cheerfully as she sipped her wine taking my pictures.
We left the clean and pleasant bar. It was well-lighted, even if unpolished. From the outside, I couldn’t be sure, but there were perhaps shadows of the leaves as well, under which an old man liked to sit alone, his loneliness understood by an older waiter.
Café Marsella was clean and bright, as a café should be, and it gave space to the lonely. Melissa and I left that alley and walked to the wider public square which had its taverns and music and youth and laughter, for what was left of the night.
Excerpted with permission from Detours: Songs of the Open Road, Salil Tripathi, Tranquebar Press.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
After another left turn at the end of that alley, we came to a square that was barricaded because the ground was being surfaced, and as we had been warned, we saw several women wearing dresses that hugged so close to their bodies that it was a miracle they were able to move at all, and as they walked, the men alongside us, single or not, stopped doing whatever they were doing, and stared.
Bar Marsella was right there. And it was closed.
I hadn’t come all the way to Barcelona to see this bar with its shutter down. My friend Melissa had come with me out of a sense of intrigue because she had heard I was looking for a rundown bar, and not Gaudi’s architecture and other spots tourists make it a point to visit. Seeing my disappointment, she tried to cheer me up and told me to stand in front of the shuttered bar while she took my picture. As she asked me to smile, one of the charming ladies walking the streets said: “Mister, it opens at 10 o’clock.”
I relaxed and smiled, and she winked. It felt like a Hemingway moment.
Melissa and I walked along the long avenue, all the way to the spot where there is a tall monument of Christopher Columbus, looking at his hands pointing towards the sea but unable to decide whether to go left or right. We went to the marina and saw the sailboats swaying in the wind, and passed a giant Roy Liechtenstein sculpture and settled down in a bar serving tapas and more wine. Later that night, we headed back to Marsella, hoping to raise a glass of absinthe to Papa.
A week later, from my home in London, I wrote to Jack Turner, asking him about the bar. Turner is writing a book on absinthe, and he wrote back: “The bar is a mandatory stop for all admirers of Hemingway, absinthe, and callow American English majors abroad, impressed by the relevant passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” I wasn’t American, nor an English major. Two out of three ain’t bad.
By the time we reached the bar, the women outside were busy – they had found companions for the evening and they began disappearing into the blocks of flats near the bar.
Marsella had an imposing ceiling but it looked yellowed, like fading newsprint, as if no one had washed it in the nearly two centuries of the bar’s existence. The light was yellow too, looking brighter because of the chandelier that reflected and magnified its reach.
Its yellow glow, and the green tinge of absinthe, gave the bar a muted, contemplative and nostalgic look, as though we had stepped into L’Absinthe, the Edgar Degas painting also known as A Sketch of a French Café, which had a woman and man sitting alongside each other. The man wore a hat and looked away; the woman looked down. A glass of absinthe was in front of her. In their non-communicativeness lay the angst and ennui of urban isolation.
The mirrors behind us were tall and faded, the woodwork looked solid and old. In its seedy air, it looked like the kind of bar where Hemingway would have found home, if only for his own melancholia to find a natural habitat.
One table had three men, saying little to one another; another had two women, sitting close to one other. The bar had a large floor, but it didn’t seem as if any couple had ever danced there. This was where you went to sit, brood, and be alone. As the night lengthened, it became a bit more cheerful, as more people came to the café, and the bartender, who had looked morose, seemed to brighten a little.
I watched the waiter place a glass and a fork on my table. He put a sugar cube on the fork and gave me a bottle of sealed, chilled water, with a tiny hole in its cap, asking me to pour it over the cube until it dissolved. The sweetened water would drop on the spirit below, releasing the powers of the green fairy.
Absinthe was banned for some time in the last century. Made from herbs such as anise and fennel and wormwood, absinthe supposedly had magical powers that played with your mind. The French symbolists – Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme certainly, but to some extent even Baudelaire – credited absinthe with spurring their creativity and they grew to depend on it.
In 1995, on a trip to the Mediterranean, I had discovered pastis, the “parental guidance” equivalent of absinthe, and had often wondered what was so special about a drink that tasted like fennel juice. But I liked it enough to bring back a couple of bottles to my then home, in Singapore.
Turner credits Hemingway for being “almost single- handedly responsible for the American myth of absinthe, namely its supposedly hallucinogenic properties. He was gifted in this respect: what he did for bulls in Pamplona, and daiquiris in Cuba, he did for absinthe in Barcelona. It helped enormously that absinthe was underground, and so the real thing was no longer available. And it didn’t hurt that the drink was so strong. It appealed to both the alcoholic and the sentimentalist in him.”
I sipped absinthe, and it began its work alongside the ambience of desolation. It was more potent than pastis. Melissa took a picture of me with my glass. I promptly uploaded it on my Facebook page. Within moments, my friends began responding and talking to me about absinthe and my being in Barcelona. My friend Susie, a novelist in London, promptly wrote:
Go on, have one more.
I will, for you, I wrote.
Then another one.
You want me back safe and sound, right? I asked.
She drew a smiley. Meanwhile another friend in Seattle, concerned about how much I might drink, reminded me what absinthe did to the French symbolists.
Hemingway would have challenged the entire bar and succeeded in outdrinking everyone – or, at least claimed to have done so in a finely crafted story, even if he might have actually sat there alone, like that old man in A Clean, Well- Lighted Place who had no one to talk with and had attempted suicide only a week earlier.
I had no cause for despair. A little electronic device had connected me with the friends I’d have wanted around my table, and, for a brief moment, we had created a conversation across continents that collapsed so many worlds into one, cheering me. Besides, Melissa smiled cheerfully as she sipped her wine taking my pictures.
We left the clean and pleasant bar. It was well-lighted, even if unpolished. From the outside, I couldn’t be sure, but there were perhaps shadows of the leaves as well, under which an old man liked to sit alone, his loneliness understood by an older waiter.
Café Marsella was clean and bright, as a café should be, and it gave space to the lonely. Melissa and I left that alley and walked to the wider public square which had its taverns and music and youth and laughter, for what was left of the night.
Excerpted with permission from Detours: Songs of the Open Road, Salil Tripathi, Tranquebar Press.