On the corner of Calle de Jaime el Conquistador in the La Chopera neighbourhood of Madrid, there sits a little tavern with white-washed walls called Bodega Salvaje. It is owned and run by Manchegos, not cheeses, but locals from the region of La Mancha, who had moved to the Spanish capital to live their dreams and dream of home. The menu is an homage to La Mancha and from pigs’ ears they have fashioned the culinary equivalent of silk purses in the form of a sweet gelatinous stew served in small terracotta pots.
It was clear I was in the presence of a band of people that thought of food in the same way as I did. I asked the waitress for suggestions of places where I could eat well in Madrid. My enquiry set off a staccato of hurled questions between the bar and the kitchen and before long cooks and waiters were emerging from behind their pots and pans, drying hands on aprons and towels, all the better for waving them around to dismiss one restaurant recommendation and put forward another.
An intense debate ensued, voices were raised, and I saw that my question had placed upon the staff of Bodega Salvaje a serious obligation. An off the cuff, second-thought recommendation would not do, it would reflect badly on them. The group began to go through a list of places, debating and rejecting, winnowing the options until finally they came to a conclusion that they could all agree on. They broke from their huddle and informed me that I had to go to Bar Santurce. I asked what I could expect at Santurce. Sardines they told me. Just sardines. A mud map was drawn and slid across the bar, like a secret code into a world known only to those who understand that eating is a question of life and death.
Many years ago, I visited a doctor in Brisbane for some blood tests. He was an elderly gentleman and a bit of a wit. When I returned a week later to receive the results he held the printout at arm’s length, and scratched at his chin. I was worried. “You said you lived for a couple of years in South America?” This did nothing to appease my worrying. “Yes,” I confirmed. “And yet, you didn’t pick up a single disease.” He lowered the paper and looked disapprovingly at me over the top of his glasses. “How boring.” Relieved, I responded, “Boring yes, but happy.” “Happy?” he shot back. “Oh, you really are boring.”
Despite my response to the doctor, I cannot claim any sustained period of happiness in my life, nor would I wish it. I do clearly recall moments of happiness; a cold morning in a nondescript hotel drinking a bottomless pot of ordinary coffee with a lifelong friend or a morning on an out of the way trout stream with no sound but the soft shuffling of the rapids. I remember a grilled octopus tentacle and a three-euro carafe of white wine. I remember one morning laying flat on a concrete bench at a train station, a warm mid-winter sun on my face.
Author Charmian Clift once wrote that “a great many people are only really happy retrospectively.” Though I am sure this is true, in my case, it is not hindsight at work. I felt happy there and then. And if I catalogue those moments, there are a few constants: friends, food, rivers, oceans, nature. Moments defined by their simplicity. And the lesson I draw from these memories is that happiness is eternal while it lasts.
Bar Santurce exists on the fringe of the El Rastro market in the Lavapies barrio of Madrid. Where the crowds of the market end and the lines for Bar Santurce begin, is hard to define. There are no tables inside Bar Santurce, just people, all standing, packed in shoulder to shoulder. Some hold plates of baby calamari or pimientos de padron, deep fried sweet green chilis. Nearly everyone clasps an ice-cold beer. But it is the sardines that the people come for.
The website for Santurce will tell you that it opened in 1977 and has retained the same passion and friendliness ever since. When my wife finally made it to the bar, she took a moment to look around the room and soak it all in but was soon interrupted by all of the passion and none of the friendliness. The man behind the bar took offence at my wife’s insouciance, her disregard for protocol. The bar was the place to be ordering food not sightseeing. He screamed at her to order or move on, sweat beading on his reddened forehead as his face contorted in rage. Flustered, my wife turned to look at me. “Sardines!” I yelled back at her over the noise of the crowd and the kitchen and the cooking and the chaos. “Just order the bloody sardines!” But it was too late, the crowd had sensed her weakness and knowing she had missed her chance had closed around her, a wave of humanity moving her further from the bar.
We retreated to regroup and hovered behind a young couple, waiting until they had finished their plate of sardines before deploying elbows to occupy their place where the bar met the wall. It was a small pocket of calm. We were like two trout in a pool, hiding behind a rock protected from the flow of the stream, shooting out only occasionally to order a fresh plate of sardines and beer.
On the other side of the bar, an elderly lady, grey hair tied in a tight bun, sweat dripping down her neck, her back to the beautiful chaos going on in the main room, tended to a large flat grill plate. Armed with nothing more than a metal slice, she flipped row after row of sardines until they were done, slipped them onto a plate, 12 or 14 at a time, threw a handful of sea salt in their general direction then handed them off to the bar staff who made sure they arrived where they were needed. And as I watched her do her work, I marvelled at how much happiness is contained in a simple silver fish.
Happiness has always been a welcome by-product of life, never a goal. I am sceptical of the perpetually happy in the same way I am sceptical of two-for-one deals. It’s never quite believable. Show me someone who proudly claims happiness as a state of being, or even something worth pursuing, and I will show you a deluded human. I think that was what the Brisbane doctor was getting at. Happiness as a state is unobtainable and those who think they have attained it are revealing themselves, as I did, for the bore they are.
It is a view that Charmian Clift agreed with. “Happiness is not a permanent human condition, nor is the single-minded pursuit of it ultimately rewarding. It occurs but occasionally, and often quite incidentally to some other purpose or endeavour,” she wrote. The trick therefore is to fill our lives with purpose and endeavour, the very opposite of boring.
We stayed about an hour in Bar Santurce. It was stifling hot inside but that didn’t stop the crowd flowing in and out, the individuals ever changing, like the planks of Theseus’ ship, but always the large crowd, fed and watered and content. As I walked out into the heat of that Madrid afternoon, in search of a bed or at least a seat in the shade, I thought how easy it is to find happiness once we resist the temptation to search for it.
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Happiness is Eternal While it Lasts