Barfly Nights

I mentioned, just under four years ago, in the post of April 9th 2021 "Lost and Found", that I found myself in Lisbon for about three days, for work. I've written about bar encounters before: March 7th 2023, about my off-the-wall meeting with the Minister for tourism for Zambia in "A Bar in Berlin"; and other random encounters with random, transient people such as myself. Suffice it to say, I've always enjoyed inhabiting the world of the barfly, if only for fleeting hours. People watching is one thing, but setting oneself up as the watched, purposely or no, is another thing altogether.

I quite liked the lone travel thing at the time, and there's not many activities that encourage taking the rôle of the barfly quite like being alone in a foreign place and observing one's surroundings whilst introspecting on life and why the hell you've fetched up in a bar somewhere you've never been to before, surrounded by people you don't know, creating narratives out of the ambience of one's surroundings and the people inhabiting them. The great thing about being in that scenario, however, is that there are often others present similarly placed, engaged in similar thought modes, casting you as the figure in some imagined part in some imagined fiction of their own.

Obviously, the rôle of a good barfly is to sell their particular ambiguity to the room, appearing to inhabit the space natively, with the air of a well-travelled, somewhat frayed, but enigmatic person of possible interest. If this sounds like acting, I guess it is: but there is no agenda or purpose behind it other than the internal narrative one seeks to weave oneself into in the surroundings one has dropped into. Sometimes, however, a third party emerges that appears to buy into the ambiguity of one's place in whatever scenario they have created in their own internal fictive space.

This is exactly the situation I found myself in on that short working visit to Lisbon, all those years ago. I had been going to the same bar of an evening simply because it was close to my hotel, which had no restaurant or bar; so I hung out at the zinc-topped counter of the little place around the corner. Sitting at that bar, drinking rough red wine, espresso coffee and smoking Marlboro reds all evening, I was happy in my little film noir fantasy. However, there was a fellow traveller, who arrived a day or so after me, who'd also discovered the place: a woman from Australia, who obviously had constructed her own narrative and who approached me as if I were some denizen ex-pat journo, writer or some such.

One might assume what could have followed to be some steamy liaison - obviously in black and white - of two lonely travellers in a cheap but romantic hotel room: but frankly, I'm not the kind of person who can make real a fictive narrative for such a thing - and I was nearly fifty at the time anyway - that would simply be a tad psychopathic in my book. Call me old-fashioned or just plain daft, but it ain't me. We talked, drank, ate and smoked for a couple of hours or so, whilst both fessing up the fact that we were both quite boring people in humdrum jobs, and finally went our separate ways. Life, not the movies, but fun nevertheless...