I came to Madrid expecting to spend my days in archives, bent over old documents, chasing ghosts through brittle pages. And while that has certainly been my primary activity—along with developing arthritis and picking fights with 18th-century handwriting—I did not anticipate becoming a regular at a neighborhood bar. Yet, here we are.
It started, as most things in my life do, with an inconvenience. I had spent the entire day trying to track down burial records from 1832, which, as it turns out, were supposedly stored in an office that no longer exists. Classic. After several hours of running in circles and discovering that a government building had been turned into a sandwich shop (which, honestly, was probably an improvement), I gave up.
I was tired. I was irritated. My knees hurt. So I did the only reasonable thing: I wandered into the nearest bar, fully prepared to sit alone and sulk.
The place was old. Not in a trendy, ‘let’s make this look vintage’ kind of way, but in a this bar has been here longer than your country has existed kind of way. The kind of place where the wooden counter has been worn smooth by decades of elbows, the shelves behind the bar are stacked with dusty bottles, and the only decoration is a faded bullfighting poster from 1967.
I sat down, ordered a drink, and pulled out my notebook, because I have never been able to sit in a place quietly like a normal person. I always have to be doing something. Maybe it’s the historian in me. Maybe I just have the attention span of a nervous bird. Either way, I was halfway through writing a note about cemetery record inconsistencies when I heard a voice beside me say, in Spanish:
“Are you writing a book, or are you just insane?”
That’s how I met Paco.
Paco is somewhere between 60 and 100 years old, wears the same tweed cap every single day, and has what I can only describe as the energy of a man who has personally seen some things. He is one of those old Spanish men who exists entirely in bars, materializing in the late afternoon with a newspaper and a steady flow of cañas that never seem to actually make him drunk.
I explained, in my questionable Spanish, that I was researching my ancestors. This was met with immediate skepticism.
“Your ancestors?” He squinted at me. “From where?”
“Madrid. At least, I think.”
He considered this for a long moment, took a sip of his drink, and then, in the most condescending tone possible, said, “Hah.”
What followed was a 45-minute interrogation on why an American would bother moving to Spain to research people who were already dead. Paco was deeply suspicious of my life choices, convinced that no sane person would care this much about genealogy unless there was money or scandal involved. Eventually, after I swore that no, I was not hunting for some long-lost inheritance, and no, I did not think I was secretly Spanish royalty, he nodded, satisfied.
“You should meet the others,” he said.
And just like that, I was introduced to the table.
There were five of them—old men who had clearly been sitting in the same seats for decades, holding an ongoing discussion that had likely started sometime during the Franco era and had yet to reach a conclusion. I was invited in, not because they particularly liked me, but because I was a novelty.
And so, my fate was sealed. I am now a regular at a bar I had never planned to step foot in. I still spend my days in the archives, losing my mind over documents and historical dead ends. But now, at the end of the day, I find myself here, at a table full of old Spanish men with very strong opinions about everything.
I’m still not entirely sure how this happened. But I have a feeling this is how history gets made.