Absinthe makes the heart go under
Howard
those postings of a few weeks back) here’s a nifty little piece clipped
from today’s Travel Section of the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Blame all typos on my OmniPage
- Howard.
A DATE WITH THE ‘UNDRINKABLE’
On the Dark streets of Barcelona’s Barrio Chino,
in bars with questionable clientele and peeling paint,
a tourist faces down a drink that has probably
ruined more lives than cocaine.
TARAS GRESCOE
Special to The Globe and Mail
It drove Baudelaire first to Belgium, then to an early grave. It left
poet Paul Verlaine a hollow-eyed wreck, wandering from bar to bar in
Paris' Latin Quarter, accompanied by a misshapen shoeshine boy named
Bibi-la-Puree. The deaths of Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, ind Alfred Musset
were hastened by their inordinate love for this potion, long-since
banned by the thinking men of all civilized nations.
Except, of course, in death-defying, devil-may-care Spain, where
136-proof absinthe is about as common as orange Fanta. I'd come to
Europe determined to uncork the liquid muse of the avant-garde, a
licorice-flavored, high-octane herbal alcohol popularized by a french
doctor in 1792. I was to find that in the nation of his birth,
absinthe's sale had been strictly prohibited since the Great War. In
some countries, however - notably Spain and the Czech Republic -
absinthe is considered just anther aperitif, as familiar as vermouth and
Campari.
Hell, I'd even found litre bottles of what the Spanish call Absenta in
the window of Can Canesa, the great grilled sandwich shop in Barcelona's
Placa Sant Jaume, in liquor stores in Madrid, and in just about every
bar in Catalonia. And now I was in Barcelona's Barrio Chino - the
infamous warren of narrow itreets where Jean Genet set A Thiefs Journal
and the Divine Dali went slumming - finally face-to-face with my own
glass of La fee Verte, the 19th-century hallucinogen that, in its time,
had probably ruined more lives than cocaine.
To tell the truth, I had been been a little worried about my date with
the Green Fairy. Before my trip, the only two people I'd met who had
actually tried absinthe - both mild-mannered Canadians - had gotten into
fist-fights after only a couple of glasses. With that in mind, I'd
chosen my drinking companions carefully: Mary, a Scottish painter who'd
fallen in love with Barcelona in the 1980s, and stayed on through the
booming 90s; and Henri, a gaunt Belgian pastry maker, with the sideburns
of a rockabilly singer. He'd left Ghent only two days before, using a
Renault truck to transport 25-kilograin blocks of chocolate across
France at a top speed of 70 kilometres an hour, to fulfill his longtime
dream of becoming the first truffle-maker for the sugar-loving citizens
of Barcelona.
As drinking partners, Mary and Henri may not have been Sarah Bernhardt
and Rimbaud. But they had forged their, friendship over countless
glasses of absinthe, and knew its rituals. Under their tutelage, I was
pretty sure I wouldn't finish the night in jail.
We had started the evening at midnight (this being Spain, after all) in
the Bar Marsella, which, though recently purchased by two hefty
Anglo-Saxons, has been preserved intact as a kind of monument to the
fast-fading Bohemia of the Barrio Chino. In the Marsella, yellowing
posters for long-forgotten aperitifs curl on the wails, the paint peels
suggestively, and a half-dozen different tile patterns jockey for space
on the undulating floor.
A young waiter brought us small brandy glasses full of clear, oily
looking absinthe along with all the attendant paraphernalia: a bottle of
water, paper-wrapped lumps of sugar, and a three-tined trowel. In the
classic version of absinthe drinking, one sets the trowel on the rim of
the glass, and slowly strains the water through the sugar cube into the
absinthe, where it dissolves. (Water wasn't the only mixer for absinthe,
however: singer Aristide Bruant drank it with red wine; Edgar Allen Poe
took his with brandy - and died, incidentally, at the age of 40, of a
heart attack after a prolonged drinking binge.)
Mary introduces me to a local variation: I allow a sugar cube, squeezed
between forefinger and thumb, to soak up the absinthe, which is 68 per
cent alcohol. Then, placing the cube on the trowel, I light it on fire
until the alcohol bums off. After stirring the dissolving cube into the
absinthe, I fill the glass three-quarters full with water, provoking a
remarkable transformation. The liquid turns milky green - a colour Oscar
Wilde described as opaline - though to my eyes it looks more like a
happy marriage of creme-de-menthe and whipped cream.
I pause. before imbibing. Everything about absinthe, after all, is
sinister. It proved the undoing of so many artists and writers that the
best book on the subject - Bamaby Conrad III's 1995 volume, Absinthe.
History in a Bottle - eventually starts to read like an obituary page.
The drink, he relates,, is distilled from the greyish-green leaves of a
shrub called wormwood - in Russia, the plant is ominously called
chernobyl. In large doses, its active ingredient, thujone, is a
convulsant poison. Even absinthe's Greek name, apsinthion, means
"undrinkable".
However, absinthe was also one of the most popular aperitifs in
fin-de-siecle France, the subject of a painting by Manet, a sculpture by
Picasso, and innumerable anecdotes by Hemingway. A favourite among the
women at Parisian bars like the Nouvelle-Athenes and the Cafe du Rat
Mort, absinthe eventually even made it to the New World, where Mark
Twain and Walt Whitman drank it in New Orleans' Old Absinthe House.
But the dead-eyed regard, of actress Ellen Andree, the barfly in Degas'
1876 painting L’Absinthe, had always haunted me, and the more I look,
the more the small groups huddled conspiratorially around the other
tables at the Marsella begin to resemble the doomed characters of Zola's
L’Assomoir.
Suppressing a sensation of vertigo, I drink. And then I smile. Not at
all bad - reminiscent of pastis, the licorice-flavoured French aperitif,
but with a slightly bitter undertone. Loosening up, I start trading
anecdotes with my drinking companions about our worst debauches. The
Belgian wins hands down with his sad saga of three bottles of red wine,
abrupt eviction from the restaurant where he'd onsumed them, and his
subsequent awakening to a curious sound: the slick hiss of car tires,
whipping past his ear in the gutter he'd chosen for his bed.
Mary looks at the rapidly dwindling level of my drink and says with some
concern: "You might want to slow down. This is brain damage stuff." I,
however, am eager to test Wilde's description of absinthe's effects:
"After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the
second glass, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as
they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."
In fact, as I finish my glass, the Bar Marsella is suddenly looking like
the most wonderful place on God's Earth. When I walked in, I had been
pretty sure that I was surrounded by nothing more than particarly hip
backckpackers. But suddenly the people at the next table began to look
strangely fascinating. They must be artists, I think to myself. And, as
I work on another glass, the second phase of Wilde's dictum begins to
kick in: I start to see things as they aren't. Isn't that woman - the
one with her arm around the red-headed guy with the goatee - staring at
me through her half-lifted eyes?
My eyes, too, are playing tricks on me: when I focus on an ashtray or a
beer spigot, the centre of my field of vision becomes unusually clear,
but the periphery looks watery, indistinct. Objects seem to be
surrounded by yellowish haloes, as in a Van Gogh painting (the Dutch
artist was on an absinthe bender for much of his career, including the
binge in which he ran at Gauguin with a razor, and then cut off the tip
of his own ear). The overall effect is of wearing a pair of ill-fitting
goggles in the bottom of a filthy - but surprisingly comfortable -
aquarium.
Just as I'm beginning to think this bar would be a great place to live.
like for the next few decades - the owner starts to lower the metal
curtains. Noticing that the woman at the next table has somehow
vaporized, I suggest to my drinking mates that we take our custom
elsewhere.
Henri begs off. The combined effects of hard liquor and two days of
driving with the French having taken their toll. But Mary and I continue
our crawl through the Barrio Chino. Most of the rest of the madrugada
(not surprisingly, the Spanish have a single word for the early hours of
the morning) is a blur. We wander past the Franco-era prostitutes of
Carrer d’en Robador, anarchist cafes and the inevitable piles of
street-comer refuse giving off fascinating, unidentifiable odours.
We stop at a nightclub called El Cangrejo, where a transvestite of the
stature of the late Divine is per-forming beneath a sheepdog-sized wig.
We poke our heads into the Bar Pastis, a temple of francophilia where
the jukebox has been playing Edith Piaf since the forties; the London
Bar, where people came to worship swinging England; and finally the Bar
Kentucky, which is what an A,merican tavern might look like if Antonio
Gaudi was hired as the decorator. A barman who calls himself Pinocchio -
he explains his sobriquet with a gesture to his bent nose - serves us
our last absinthes of the night, and Mary and I ferry our drinks to the
end of the mobile hlme length bar.
As taxi drivers and prostitutes squeeze past us, we clink glasses,
toasting what's left of Barcelona's rapidly gentrifying Barrio Chino. On
this night, I won't make it to Wilde's ultimate phase of absinthism (it
would take at least five more glasses), the one in which one's
surroundings reveal themselves in all their horror. In the Kentucky, on
the contrary, the seediness continues to look glamorous.
With the opaline, nerve-damaging muse in hand, I drink to squandered
talent and beautiful corpses. But I'm really drinking to danger - and to
the grateful realization that, in this world in which people are
increasingly protected from themselves, there are still places left
where we are free to choose our own poison.
Taras Grescoe is based in Montreal.
LITTLEPJoo
like.
PJ
PRNancy
(a great piece about absinethe in the Barrio Chino section of Barcelona)
GRRRR!!! Double GRRRR!
I went there to find this stuff last summer! And...nada.
Maybe I'll have better luck next summer, especially if I leave my gorgeous
daughter behind. That's the ticket! An independent middle-aged Amazon
cruising the Barrio for just the right facade of peeling paint.
I'll go in and ask, "Excuse me. May I please have some of the drink that has
probably ruined more lives than cocaine?"
Last summer, I had to spell it out on a napkin.
Nancy, happy with butter pecan ice cream ;)
LITTLEPJoo
Oh No. You had to mention ice cream. I'm having a serious chocolate ice cream
jones tonight!
PJ