At home there were some bottles of Mistela, coffee liqueur, Carmelite liqueur, and herbal liqueur, which only came out of the cupboard on very special days, family feast days and festivals in which a general ringing of bells sounded in the town and shots were fired. some firecrackers in honor of some patron saint.
Those cut-glass bottles were present in the afternoon on the dining room table, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, accompanied by trays of muffins and jam cakes, along with some small,
art deco -style glasses.
, in which barely fit a thimble, enough to wet the lips.
Miguel did not remember that anyone had ever taken those liqueurs because time passed and they returned to the cabinet intact without lowering their level year after year.
Perhaps they were only showing up to show that some semblance of pleasure was also allowed in this family.
That feeling accompanied Miguel throughout his life.
The first doubly prohibited alcohol that Miguel put to his lips was the mass wine that was drunk in the sacristy when he was an altar boy.
Although inside the cruet there used to be a shipwrecked mosquito, that last ember was disputed with his companions.
It was a sweet wine, probably from Málaga, which had been about to become the blood of Christ.
This secret tasting was usually accompanied by a handful of unconsecrated wafers that served as a cover.
And to end the party they rolled a cigarette with the butts that the asthmatic priest threw into the sawdust spittoon.
This priest looked like a Graham Greene character;
he liked cognac very much and more than once the altar boys had seen him, with his bonnet cocked over one ear, say mass in stumbled Latin.
Miguel has never been able to stand drunks.
In the town there were some notables and just seeing them tumbling between the tables in the bar made up the resolution not to drink.
But inevitably came the first sangria of the parties, the first beer to show that he was a man, the first half combination in that disco where he took the first girl to dance.
Until, in the militia camp in Montejaque, a very fanciful captain coined a principle that Miguel would never forget.
"A man has to drink what he is capable of pissing," he shouted with his thumbs in the belt before the company formed in the shadow of the holm oaks.
There he committed the first excess.
The last day of camp, when he sounded the final break ranks, after throwing his hat into the air,
Miguel poured a bottle of wine into one of his knee boots and downed several gulps that he shared with his shopmates.
A strong wine with foot sweat was his baptism as ensign.
To smoke well or to smoke badly, to drink well or to drink badly, that was the question.
Any harm that tobacco could cause you could be considered good if you smoked it with the elegance of Yves Montand.
No alcohol would be bad if it forced you to write like Scott Fitzgerald after your first Martini.
Since these examples were unattainable, there was a time when, imbued with frivolous inconsistency, Miguel's highest aspiration consisted of getting to sit on a stool at the bar of the Chacalay bar and order a Rocafull as the Valencian gentlemen did, iced coffee, brandy and egg white.
Knowing how to sit on the bar stools was also an art.
You had to have
swing
when going up and down.
A certain elegant slackness with the glass in hand with a measured foreshortening had to go hand in hand with the kind of drink you drank.
In Miguel's biography there were drinks that in his memory had become music.
Just like the sound of Paquito D'Rivera's clarinet, there were drinks that slid down the esophagus with a melancholy of famous bars whose tables or stools had served as stops during his trips.
A pint of Guinness at Davy Byrnes, on Dublin's Duke Street, where James Joyce began his first morning binge;
a campari on the terrace of the Rosati in Piazza del Popolo in Rome watching how, at the next table, Alberto Moravia turned his head when a girl in a flowered skirt passed by and followed her with his eyes until she was lost on the street of the Corso;
a daiquiri at Floridita in Havana prepared by the bartender Constante without thinking for a moment that Hemingway also drank it there;
a Jack Daniels at Chicago's Sardine Club, a venue with only ten tables where Sinatra sang.
The Cathai Hotel in Shanghai, the Villa Politi in Syracuse, the Grand Hotel de Cabourg in Normandy, Harry's in Paris or Venice, each of these energy centers had an appropriate liquor that Miguel tried to turn into literature.
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