Shortly before the pandemic, my daughter Silvia and I were eating on a terrace facing the sea when I saw Manolo Palencia approaching in a swimsuit, who joined us, asked for water, we chatted for a while and left. But he did not walk away but swam until he reached his sailboat anchored in Calabardina, a beach where I spend the summer since I can remember (and he did some summers), and he continued his journey through Mediterranean waters.
A few meters behind, behind the mountain, a small cove today destroyed by speculation, was the landscape for several decades of one of the bars or gambling dens that Manuel Palencia includes in the book ‘Bares para el memoria. Days of wine and roses’, edited by Alfonso González-Calero, collaborator of ABC and its publisher Almud.
That bar was called El Cotopaxi, with gazebos going down to the sea, which we both knew although we never met there, and which was run by Sarita, a German with a Nazi past and good contacts with the Franco government.
Manolo tells that in the summer of 1980, when she was around 50, she had a 17-year-old lover. Her name was Virgilio and he was a real ‘adonis’ who disappeared one day and was never heard from again. I remember the extravagant Sarita, a few years after that, already almost old, walking the beach with a little donkey and surrounded by dogs. Manolo met the aquiline actor Paco Rabal there, who was my parents’ summer neighbor. You must read that chapter of this bar in Águilas (Murcia), almost forgotten in the mists of time and legend.
But most of the bars that Palencia includes in this book are from Toledo, all of which have now disappeared, such as El Cotopaxi, in addition to others, up to a total of 28, from places such as Benidorm, Mojácar, and another one in Águilas.
It is a book that invites you to read as soon as you open it because it is very well written and talks about something that interests the people of Toledo, at least those of us who are over 50 years old, whom we met in that decade of the 80s of the last century these meeting places where life made us as drunk as alcohol. It is a book of that Manriqueño ‘any past time was better’, a happy book but touched by nostalgia and melancholy. Much of the real history is written in bars. For this reason, I would classify this book as historical, since, although the author does not enter the political sphere of that decade, what is more historical than human relations, the contacts of ordinary people who, one on top of the other, forge the historical and social pyramid of a country; the culture on foot, the shared reading of books, the music listened to, many of them on the literary frontier, or countercultural movements such as La Movida Madrileña that also arrived, albeit timidly, in Toledo.
This bar lover who is Manolo Palencia, -he has just opened one in the Toledo Jewish quarter-, was caught by that move, due to his age in Toledo. For me, after that 23-F that Javier Cercas dissects so well in ‘Anatomy of an instant’, he already caught me in Madrid studying Journalism. I remember going at night to the bar that the brothers Enrique and Álvaro Urquijo, Los secretos, frequented on Calle Hilarión Eslava, ‘La Eslava’, very close to Moncloa. And in my family we always remember with much laughter when a few years later my little sister came to study in Madrid and she tirelessly asked us to take her to the scene.
That phenomenon coincided in Spain with the decriminalization of homosexuality, the sale of contraceptives, the resurgence of feminism and secularism in society, a time when, sadly, drugs ended the lives of many young people, including Enrique Urquillo, as happened with many Toledans too, as Manolo Palencia suggests in the stories of bars in a book that is dedicated to two friends who are no longer there, Jechi and Chirla, and two who are, their beloved children Paola and Andrés , belonging to a generation, that of our children, who no longer go out to the streets in search of adventures but who already have all their leisure time scheduled in concerts or ‘meetings’ with that ‘coldness’ that characterizes contacts on social networks, so far removed from the human factor of the hug, the kiss, the spontaneous jump when they played your song on the music machine at the bar on the corner and Mahou bottles are piled up on the table. In their places of leisure there are no books.
So, we’ve all been to Tierra at some point, where for the first time we heard of a certain Pedro Almodóvar and the handsome waiter Manel, from the group ‘El pez de Andy’, showed Manolo the Nacha Pop album, with Antonio Vega and that ‘girl from yesterday’, “the x-ray of our soul”, says the author; and Mick Jagger played; or there was a Ceesepe poster on the wall while an Edgar Alan Poe book rested on a table.
He talked about history with friends in the Hogar Obrero, among old wood stoves; and the lysergic acid ran through the two floors of the boiteGarcilaso, “the dance hall of the thousand and one dawns,” says Palencia, with the memory of that girl in his head.
At the age of 15, with Sandra and Amaranta, he danced Gardel’s tangos in the Ambos mundos, rancid wine and black tobacco on the old steel and zinc bar next to a Lovecraft book and the parishioners mixed with the young people who paid for what they drank leaving the bottle caps. “They never mistrusted us,” says the author.
In the bars, the privileges and social hierarchies disappeared, and in those Toledan bars that have already closed forever, several generations and people of all stripes joined in fellowship: drunkards, workers, students, civil servants, artists… and even you could find your own mother talking to a neighbor recently arrived from the market if you lived in Casco.
Centuries ago, surrounded by poorly lit alleys, between inns, brothels and Toledo gambling dens, we would surely have found Lope de Vega and Cervantes himself, those inns and taverns that crossed the pond with the conquerors to the New World. From there, from the neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York, the Toledo poet Hilario Barrero has already read Manolo Palencia’s book. And this seemed to him:
«There are moments when the prose rears up and drowns your feeling. The book has that melancholy of what is lost, that arrogance of what is gained night after night, the noise of loneliness, the deceptive reality that what seems like it will never end, it ends. It is a guide for you to get lost and a book for you to find what you long for. Stark, at times, the book presents us with a hive of characters who passed without pain or glory like a summer storm. It is, above all, a social chronicle, a gap in the ‘usual’ values, a slight religious criticism and, above all, an emotional punch in the soul of men and women who are beginning to learn to be older. Thanks to the ‘alcoholic’, nostalgic and nervous prose of Manuel Palencia we can see that in the fragility of the shadow of a bar or a tavern heartbreak shines, the sexual beast boils and we feel, inevitably, the passage of time.
And who does not remember El Tropezón, which was filled with young people for decades, the music machine, the damascener in slippers or the tap dancer; or El Calimocho, frequented by princesses and scoundrels, where the author read comics with his two childhood friends over glasses of red wine with Coca-Cola, while Richard Corben, the American cartoonist “showed us the intimate beauty of defeat ».
And El Garaje, that garage on Calle Cervantes opened as a bar by Tío Dimas, an old truck parking lot where hippies and homosexuals of the time lived together. And Palencia was happy corresponding with her summer love.
You could find the Rocket, the Legionnaire or the Nombela in that family dinner house that was El Nido, whose bar was made up of the hoods of the cars parked in the Plaza de la Magdalena, among which ‘Santi the boat’ wandered; and my colleague Valle Sánchez to see her in El Manhattan with her beer, in the El Miradero shopping arcade, where she first listened to the Low Blows and Manolo Palencia to the Police. The journalist Alfonso Castro also passed by there and the boys had their eye lines painted and their overcoats reached down to their feet.
Many people from Toledo played mus between old Mahou bottles in El Patio, which everyone knew as La Cana. With the air of a seedy Madrid tavern, like the ones that come out in ‘La Colmena’ or ‘Luces de Bohemia’, some herbs and vegetable resins, and some were stunned when touching the marble of the tables below, the engraved letters revealed to be cemetery tombstones. I saw the first ‘drag queen’ pass through those streets -or what seemed to me like one of them- that I’ve ever seen: Lola, ‘la Buscapisos’. Full of jewels like the Monstrance of Arfe, painted ad nauseam, blond hair teased from a boat that made it grow towards the heights, that woman’s eyelashes rose twisted touching her forehead.
I don’t want to expand further because you have to read it. But imagine that there are still bars like Los candiles, el Bartolo, el Macondo, el Palacio Shankara, San Justo Precio, el Ti-fall, el Centro bar, La Chapinería (which appears on the cover of the book with the people gathered on the hill that goes down to the door of the Clock of the cathedral), El enebro, El Marlene….and three more from Cuenca, Ciudad Real and Guadalajara. (The book includes a QR code with five hours of music from those years).
And in addition, the Pacha de Benidorm, the Ninfas y Faunos de Mojácar and another bar in Águilas, El garabato, from where the party was followed on the Hornillo beach, in front of Isla del Fraile. Surely Manolo, that day he sailed from Calabardina, remembered his friends when passing through that idyllic spot and seeing the Yellow cove and the iron bridge of the English inaugurated in 1903, from where the ore was loaded onto ships.
One day the author of this book will arrive at his destination aboard his sailboat and go ashore. Because, as Manuel Vicent wrote, «it is about fleeing behind a dream to find a white rocking chair and swinging in it under a vine, by the sea… letting the hours pass, discarding any ambition, living the sun in the middle of of graceful austerity, to drink olive oil, to walk barefoot on salt, to sail on sweet waters, and to desire nothing but friends and celery salad.”
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