Old Caziss

In Bar Raval, on an unassuming corner of a typical side street, is the original window bait himself. Old Caziss, the 71-year-old hombre with a thousand faces. A make-up technician of the highest artistry, he’s the lonely face that’s adorned three of the last six editions of Lonely Planet Barcelona. A theatrical everyman for all seasons, purveyor of analogue café theatrics nightly from table two, still keeping on in the era of glance, swipe, ignore.

At around nine o’clock, the June sun is starting to climb down behind the grimy red and orange apartment blocks that somehow gain grace as they lose detail. Off the square, couples are doing that effortlessly lovely-looking wandering, laughing, smoking thing. For the newly-minted-with-him-or-her surely a quick trip to the Raval? Let’s go see what Old Caziss is up to tonight, chica? Maybe it’s something good, something coo-coo, then a drink and a dance?

The window, elegantly inlaid with fading silvered deco patterns, has been his stage for as long as anyone can remember – which in the context of Barcelona bar life is around 17 to 20 years, give or take. People usually assume that it’s his bar. Surely that’s the only reason he gets to do that thing, whatever it is, every night? Or perhaps, as parents tell naughtier children, he lives in the sewers below, just coming up for a little money and a free sandwich.

Tonight’s face is one for the broadsheet fans. Caziss appears from behind the bar and with a slight leftward nod to Maria who runs the joint, he takes the 1.4 steps required to inhabit the stage that is the final table on the left. His age is undefinable in that way of certain men who can’t possibly ever have been young. Or maybe it’s too many years applying a dense putty of foundation from six every night. Anyway, surely an actor of all professions should be able to stop time?

His make-up does the work of scenery. And drag scarcely does justice to the ensemble’s ambition. One table, a window, the odd prop and a lot of intention. Grab their attention and a performance should work anywhere, was this small company’s motto.

The crowd of tourists and regulars outside start laughing and clapping. For Caziss tonight has become Justice Beatriz Balzar, the judge busted only two days before for corruption in Bilbao. Luxury apartments, a Russian dancer, denials to priests and talk show hosts. The source material’s almost too rich to bother with, yet here we are.

Caziss pauses to avoid tripping over his legal gown and grimaces dramatically, but are we the jury beyond or the defendants inert behind bulletproof glass?

His heavy jowls and rouged cheeks are nice caricature touches. Caziss’s large hands pound the portable typewriter with a look of ‘Who? Me?’ angelicism (a deft jab at the dishonesties that fill Balzar’s once best-selling memoir Power and Precision: My Life at the Levers). His hands stab and knead the keys like a conductor reduced to bread making. Then, with another imploring ‘Culpables? Me?’, comes the climax, as two faux tear ducts taped to the sides of his face start to squirt tears at the window. The crowd goes wild.

It’s one for the review pages tonight, for sure. Better even than the Clinton/Trump two-faces-at-once debate he staged back in July during the US election campaign.

The whooping subsides and Caziss stands effortfully before giving a full theatrical bow as Maria places his customary brandy at the end of the bar. Inside the sound is muted by the windows and the continued chat of the other patrons. The usual and dramatic usually converge in bars; this is how it should be. And anyway, this is Caziss’s home, he isn’t the one who’s gone out to be entertained.

The crowd dissipates rapidly, leaving two mid-thirties guys right by the window miming their adoration. Caziss looks at them with the practised eye of a stage actor who can read the reactions in rows one through ten without making any actual eye contact. Both guys are dressed as Anselmo, a character he played in the long-running Amantes y Compañeros. A grimace of recognition as he turns away, then. Every act is his, but he isn’t any act. Brandy aloft, gracias Maria! Until tomorrow!