5PM There is a correct way to drink absinthe,
and it has a certain sense of theatre. On a quiet
afternoon at Barcelona’s Bar Marsella,
the landlord José Lamiel Vallvé is demonstrating
the time-honoured tradition. For this,
he requires: one glass of neat absinthe, a short
silver fork, a pair of sugar cubes and a plastic
bottle of water with - and this is the important
part - a pin prick in the lid of the bottle. First,
José balances the fork on the top of the glass
of absinthe and places the sugar cubes into the
cradle. Then, taking the water bottle, he squeezes
a narrow jet very slowly over the sugar cubes.
Keeping my eyes on the yellowy-green liquid,
I see the magic start to happen. Ghostly tendrils
appear, filling the glass until the liquid has
become a misty emulsion. This is known,
appropriately, as the ‘louche effect’.
Absinthe has been drunk this way for at least
a century. In 1922, while working as a European
correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest
Hemingway wrote of watching absinthe turn
“milky when water was added” and noted how
the resulting drink had “the slow, culminating
wallop that made the boulevardier want to get
up and jump on his new straw hat in ecstasy.”
Although, there are few boulevardiers in
crumpled straw hats around today, some things
never change and Bar Marsella is one of them.
According to legend and the evidence of my
own eyes, the bar has never once been properly
cleaned in the two centuries since it opened
in 1820. The roof is stained caramel from
decades of accumulated cigarette smoke,
and thick cobwebs hang from the wooden
shelves, draped spookily over full bottles
of wine made by long-defunct vineyards.
It’s no surprise that Hemingway himself
was a regular at Bar Marsella, as were Salvador
Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Antoni Gaudí. Back in
the 1920s, José’s grandfather was the landlord
and the bar was a hotbed of revolutionary ideas.
“That was when the workers started organising
and forming unions,” explains José. “They hadpolitical meetings here that attracted
people with big ideas: painters and writers.
The connection was the absinthe.”“They came to dance
with the green fairy, and
to put off going to bed.”^
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway
described the Spanish disdain for anyone who
chose to sleep during the hours of darkness:
“For a long time your friends will be a little
uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed
in Madrid until they have killed the night.”
These days the same is true of Barcelona,
the Spanish capital’s defiant sibling. A night
out here is to be enjoyed at leisure and at
length. The streets begin to grow busy
sometime before 8pm, particularly on the
crowded main strip of La Rambla. Human
statues line the path near the seafront, gathered