The Great Andalusian Saloon Series / Manzanillaville
Rocca, Francis X.
Manzanillaville by Francis X. Rocca W hen sailor Paco Felix Enriquez went down with his ship some seventy years ago, his fox terrier survived, staying afloat long enough to be rescued by a British...
...A local guru in matters agricultural and mechanical, Paco Enriquez also practices the traditional blacksmith's sideline of veterinary medicine, and for decades rich horse farmers and grape-growing peasants have been coming to him for advice...
...Today the walls are decorated with ox yokes and horse shoes, plows of Roman and Arabic design, bull and cow skulls, branding irons, grape-treading boots (ankle-high with gridded soles), and some hard-to-identify items that patrons swear were instruments of the Spanish Inquisition...
...Before the tourist knows it, the local has picked up his tab...
...Paco's daughter wipes some numbers off the zinc bar, and chalks them on the back of a cask, where the regulars' accounts are discreetly toted up...
...Since the early sixteenth century, manzanilla has been Sanldcar's main export, but the place has other distinctions...
...Columbus started his third voyage to the New World here, and Magellan his circumnavigation of the globe...
...corner hangouts for old men, with a TV in the corner and a Madonna poster (not the singer) hanging behind the cash register...
...Its current owner, the grandson of the sailor Paco Felix, is a blacksmith by trade, and he used to use the high-ceilinged structure with its open patio for his workshop...
...He is just passing through on his way upstairs, still clad in overalls after a long day...
...Within a few years the bar had crowded out the workshop, which now operates on the outskirts of town...
...He put their bottles on a high shelf, each marked in chalk with its owner's name...
...The denizens of barrio alto, or the High Quarter, have always looked down, quite literally, on those who dwell waterside—that is, outside the walls that once meant the protection of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the obligation to pay him tribute...
...The wives of the foremen may enjoy manzanilla as much as their husbands do, but the etiquette of their class forbids them to drink in public...
...one day he finally told his disciples to start bringing their own refreshments...
...American trade for more than two hundred years, the city was a major European port until the early 1700s...
...Since then, the only entertainment here has been the conversation...
...At another table a teenage boy in Levis and a white sweatshirt begins clapping his hands, leading his friends in the bittersweet wail of flamenco...
...And ordinarily he frowns on singing...
...Near the door a buttoned-down Sevillian sefiorito and his blonde, Barbour-jacketed girlfriend stop their conversation and listen...
...A short, almost toothless gardener regales an enthusiasticallygrinning foreigner, whose four years of high-school Spanish are of no help with the Sanluquefio accent—the aspirated h's, smooth j's, and suppressed s's...
...Older folk around them take it up...
...There is a ladies room—which unlike its opposite number boasts the luxury of both a toilet bowl and door—but it is here for the benefit of the night crowd...
...people stand by the bar and even in the patio, despite a light drizzle...
...Their talk is shop talk—predicting the next Palomino grape harvest or rating the last, debating one more time the virtues of tank versus barrel fermentation...
...Paco used to pour everyone a drink, of course, but even Andalusian hospitality has its limits...
...The town's permanent community is as agricultural as maritime, and the natives have traditionallydefined themselves by their distance from sea level...
...That crowd is decidedly different...
...Rarely is he down here at night, when the bar is more business than pleasure for him...
...Africa is only 75 miles away...
...They have a full bar to choose from, but none ever drinks anything save the wine that is their corhmon stock in trade...
...One runs off and the other follows, over to their mother chatting spiritedly with the rest of her table...
...Many attribute its slightly bitter taste to sea-salt in the loam, others to the poniente wind which blows in from the Gulf of Cadiz...
...they arrive early in the morning and buy bottles to take home...
...She sees them out of the corner of her eye, switches her cigarette to her drink hand, and gathers them up just long enough to kiss each on the head...
...Manzanillaville by Francis X. Rocca W hen sailor Paco Felix Enriquez went down with his ship some seventy years ago, his fox terrier survived, staying afloat long enough to be rescued by a British freighter...
...A century and a half later the Duke of Montpensier began summering here, and turned the town into a fashionable resort...
...A sherry unique to Sanldcar, manzanilla is distinctively pale and dry, the result of fermentation in cool and humid coastal weather...
...Paco stops to listen, too...
...66 The American Spectator November 1995 p aco is a short man, stocky and muscular, with thickly callused hands and shrewd dark eyes which occasionally glimmer with whimsy...
...La Herreria, or "The Smithy," was actually built as a bodega—a winery—in the eighteenth century...
...But the numbers grew so large that it made sense to sell them his homemade wine...
...But the most unusual sits behind an unmarked door in a seamless row of whitewashed buildings...
...As the gateway to Seville, which held the official monopoly on...
...ultramarinos, where a sailor can get a drink along with his hard tack and rope...
...That whimsy led him for a time to keep a caged lion in the patio...
...You might find seven or eight of them around a table, men in their fifties and sixties with lined, weathered faces...
...Doubtless it was the scent of manzanilla, pungent yet sweet as heavy caramel, that drew him home...
...Nowadays nearby El Puerto de Santa Maria is more chic, but Saniticar still draws its share of tourists and seasonal residents...
...In a town with frequent and well-attended cock fights, there isn't much talk about cruelty to animals, but the local equivalent of the humane society did protest...
...The range here is wide: long, crowded saloons where rock blares and teenagersplay pool in back...
...Then they are off again...
...When the vessel anchored in the mouth of the Guadalquivir several years later, just off the small Spanish city of Sanldcar de Barrameda, the dog recognized his hometown, leapt overboard, and swam to shore...
...Politics never comes up, except for the occasional curse on the long-reigning socialists or their conservative challengers...
...Paco assured them he was merely fattening the beast before turning it into tapas...
...Lately the fishing industry's ties to hashish smuggling—and the corpses washing up on nearby beaches—have increased the tension between those who catch the langostino crayfish, and those who make the sherry that complements it so deliciously...
...From there it was a natural step to opening his doors to the public...
...Around eleven on a Friday night the dozen tables are all taken...
...He finally gave in and sent the lion to the Cordoba zoo on the insistence of his wife, who couldn't abide a man-eater just downstairs from the family quarters...
...Whatever the conversation, the participants are always men...
...A slender, bespectacled young father waits for his order while two little girls, a couple of years apart and dressed in identical yellow-flowered frocks, play at his knee...
...But he has a sure feel for his customers' mood, and tonight, he can tell, the crowd is in harmony...
...Francis X. Rocca is a contributing writer for The American Spectator...
...On weekday mornings and early afternoons, before the two o'clock Spanish lunch hour that begins the siesta, the bar is the domain of bodega foremen, whose job is supervising the fermentation and fortification of the grapes that yield the manzanilla...
...B y one local's count, there is a bar for every twenty-four Sanluquefios—a proportion high even for Spain, which alone has more licensed drinking establishments than all the rest of the European Union...
...Except for the three Enriquez daughters who run the place, women do not appear at La Herreria during the day...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
