During a hospital stay, at a very bad time in my life, I had a dream that for some reason I have not forgotten. Suddenly I found myself in front of a kind of vanilla-colored mansion. I don’t know how -in dreams there are no transitions-, I began to go down a great spiral staircase. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. Behind the door was a place that could only be seen from the outside, but it had a very long bar and a shelf full of bottles. The dream ended abruptly, as dreams end, but the sensation of placidity transmitted by that barely glimpsed place was impossible to forget. For someone who was hospitalized and who did not know very well what was going to happen to his life, that dream conveyed the idea that things could go well. Better said: they would be fine. Come what may, one was going to walk down those silent steps to a place filled with benevolent vanilla-colored light. No matter how close one was to death, life always won in the end.
The ancients believed that dreams warned us of danger or guided us through the unknown or provided comfort in times of distress and pain. Freud changed our minds when he explained that dreams were nothing more than the vile stuff of unsatisfied desires. But I know that hospital dream was one of those dreams that brought comfort. And I know because that dream was made up of fragments of a very deep experience that my mind associated with a place in Palma where life always seemed to flow calmly and safely.
That bar was a place in Plaza Gomila that everyone knew in Palma: Joe’s bar. When you entered Joe’s, the first thing you heard was the sound of Don Pep’s cocktail shaker -the great José de los Ríos, Mr. Pep from Joe’s- as he prepared a very dry dry martini or a strong bullshot loaded with angostura, just the way Errol Flynn liked it. Don Pep started working at Joe’s at a very young age and only retired when the premises closed in the late 1980s. Don Pep was always silent, discreet, unmoved. He heard lovers’ fights, witnessed betrayals and scams and witnessed beautiful love stories that lasted two days (or a lifetime), but he never stopped smiling with the half smile of someone who only makes sure that the measure of vermouth is adequate to keep the world rolling in its place. Don Pep died in 2010. With him disappeared a way of living that will probably no longer be possible.
Now I read that Joe’s has reopened -turned into a kind of bistro- and that there is an ambitious project to revive that Gomila from the late 60’s. I don’t know, I don’t know. We can recover the places, we can recover the architecture, we can resurrect a city, but who can recover the half smile of Don Pep while he moved the cocktail shaker? And who can bring back those places that seem invaded by a warm vanilla light because one, in there, always believed that one was safe from everything bad that life was going to bring?
Leave A Comment