Bodega Pifarré

The slot machines click, trays of fried pork belly, anchovies, and Russian salad emerge from the bar's kitchen, and the handful of men with late-Francoist mustaches that make up the local fauna huddle behind the stainless steel bar. The characters of Bodega Pifarré are failed laborers, outspoken madmen, and backstreet flâneurs who refuse to inhabit a city for tourists, progressives, and hipsters. In the stories that make up this book, there are players of clandestine card games, waiters with a cigarette in their mouth and anise liqueur in their hand, eccentric poets, readers of newspaper ads, village pious women, failed magicians, and sheepish footballers, and they all seek to finish their act, catch the subway, and return to the neighborhood, return to the bar. David Vivancos Allepuz boldly and ironically describes a city that once was but is no more, yet lives on in those who once understood the bar as the heart of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood as the heart of life. Cheers, reader, here's a beer and a tapa.