"I was left wanting to see you and talk, and I shot straight to the bar, to the bar of the unloved. I arrived, many friends were already waiting for me, and since the last one always pays, I invited them. I toasted, for the passion that broke my soul,
with your memory you almost killed me, and I got drunk."
The Canarian singer José Manuel Ramos perfectly describes in his song "El Bar de los mal amados" what happens in many places in our Archipelago and also, why not say it, outside of it: people who need the meeting point of a bar, tavern, cafeteria or whatever where to arrive without needing to leave accompanied by anyone and find there the love or company that replaces their emotional, affective, work or social deficiencies.
It is known to all that this type of establishment is, from ancient times, an anteroom or extension of houses, casinos for the poor, social meeting points, caves of all kinds, a hiding place for all kinds of people, or an echo of news. They are, after all, places where people sing, laugh, argue, blaspheme and spend what they don't have, making crazy and childish boasts. In these places, various matters are settled and forces are gathered to face real life with the artificial energies that wine and beer give, accompanied by the hubbub and music.
San Cristóbal de La Laguna is the clearest example of the proliferation of these establishments: peculiar places with more than unique clientele in which tapas and a not very extensive gastronomic offer play a secondary role to wine - mostly foreign (sic) - glasses of beer or garimbas and a more than assorted variety of liquors and spirits that fight with their ethyl vapors to capture a partying clientele with not very generous pockets.
Another characteristic and differential habit of these places are the gatherings, intellectual, sports, political or of the most unlikely themes, which since ancient times have taken these bars as the center of political conspiracy well understood, a forge of ideas, a stimulus for social renewal and an incentive for Canarian society and in which, the affinity between its participants, creates a fidelity to the establishment that increases or decreases according to the intellectual level and the achievements achieved in the healthy, or not, discussion of bar gatherings.
Finally, we cannot ignore the unemployed and the musicians or revelers. The former make these places their work office and their apparent work motive, exercising without blushing what they do not even aspire to be. The musicians and revelers, on the other hand, come to these establishments not so much for their culinary offer but to make them a place where they can express their musical skills and feel, if not the applause, then the admiration of the audience that their chords awaken.
In these bars of the unloved, therefore, one forgets about oneself and those around us for the brief or extensive time that the visit lasts while enjoying without hesitation these unreal moments that make one forget human miseries, which after all are all the same whether we are handsome, ugly, with hair or without it, tall, short, poor or rich.
Alfonso J. López Torres
Saboreado Canarias
@AlfonsoJLT
