Ecce 4: A History
´Hello. How was school?´
´I don´t know. I haven´t been to school for a month.´
´Oh... ´
I have just finished reading about the DVD release of the films of Ben Hopkins. I even tried to write a comment on the site but failed somehow. I interviewed Mr Hopkins in another life, perhaps you remember? I was late for some typical reason. Then it rained and he made tea. We talked for some time in a flat that was higher than the ground floor and I enjoyed it because he was well-mannered and intelligent. But these things are of course disputable. Never managed to see ´Simon Magus´, but ´9 Lives of Tomas Katz´ (Thomas? Tomas? could be either I suppose) was both brilliant and very funny. I wonder if he has read Bulgakov´s ´The Master and Margarita´ I´m sure he has for that book does not escape people like him.
Ave, et cetera...
Still, if anyone reads this, anyone who knows him, will you please send my regards. Please tell him also that his film made me laugh many times and that this is rare. Please tell him that I shall purchase his DVD to add to my collection of one. Please also pass on the name of Bulgakov´s masterpiece or discretely suggest that perhaps it was time he read it again, but only if the necessary 30 days have passed, and only if he is in need.
Tonight the locutorio is stuffy and that glass of manzanilla did not satisfy my thirst. There is a little fear, a knot in the brow that is doing its best to ruin a day of freedom. Tomorrow I travel again and there will be no locutorio for a while. But then you don´t know any of this yet, for it hasn´t occurred. A woman is humming near by, as a four year-old might, waiting in his pram in a supermarket queue, long overdue his nap, while his mother looks at the pictures of an article in a magazine that will not be bought.
Where was I?
London? Still? Is it still raining? Give me strength!
"I will not miss this weather. This muck that leaves the terrasse bare. I investigated a tent today. Was served by some keen bean with much proud talk of water filters, triple-layer arctic sleeping bags (only they aren´t called that anymore) and omni-fuel primus stoves. I left bewildered. The bank manager would rub his filthy little hands together, if only he knew."
Some days later..... or so it seems..... by the way, IT WAS HER CHILD HUMMING!
"Bumped into X (Sheekey´s soon to be head bartender... but then I haven´t got here yet either! How confusing for you! Patience....) Candid talk about his plans for when he takes over the bar - the way forward for that colourful 20 year old scamp, JS, from Marseille. Apparently he scalded himself badly the other day. Only one way to burn oneself on that bar - the coffee percolator - very painful blistering over the top of his hand and up his forearm. As X interrupted me, (with a thick Loire accent)
"Yes Tom, we have all done it before but with J, it went everywhere! In the ice bin, in his hair, in the mixers, EVERYWHERE!"
We laughed, because J always makes us laugh. He could be stealing scooters for fun but he has found himself instead in the best restaurant in London (its true, you know), on the bar no less, the best and most demanding place to be. But then J has a way with catastrophe (he calls it ´malediction´), I had had a dream about him, his brow dripping from some fresh tussle with gravity.´
Later still. Maybe a Tuesday, judging from the scrawl.... in Café Boheme, I´m sure of it!
I want to tell my story of restaurant life. I want to tell you what I have been doing since I stumbled out of schoolhood some 14 years ago.There was a café that posed as a bar down a piss-streaked alley near the market square of a very, very dull town. At some point in my 16th year I bagan to frequent this bar as a means of filling the time that should have been spent at school and which obviously could not be spent at home due to the previous fact. It was not a pub, this was the difference.
There was a young man who used to drink his coffee, read his paper and smoke Marlboro cigarettes with a great Irish passion. (...oh, don´t be so stupid! Of course, they were red Marlboro! For we all smoked in those heady, ´Light´ free days) Everything about him stank of laissez-faire, at least more than I. It was this young man that epitomised the café and all that the word, café, would come to mean to me.
One afternoon I walked into the family kitchen in my school uniform. My mother was facing the window, perhaps doing something. It was summer and I was carrying a burden. A conversation took place,
´Hello. How was school?´
´I don´t know. I haven´t been to school for a month.´
´Oh... ´
There was a pause (as you can tell by the ......) during which I sat down on a black, wooden stool. I inspected the rectangular tear in the thick, red and black chequered, plastic table cloth that was never greasy but always cool to the touch. As always I rested my right foot on one of the three arcs of that round table´s only leg. I had released my burden, you see, so I could now sit down and wait for my future to be dictated to me. I remember some relief, and a love, that I had doubted and forgotten, for my mother. You see, I had anticipated a tone of great disappointment from her last response, even wrath, for I did fear her, in a way that I would rather not go into here.
´Have you told your father?´
´No.´
´Then you can tell him when he gets home.´
Maybe some of you have doubts about the validity of this conversation. Well, doubt away. I can´t stop you, but I´ll remember that conversation (and a few others) for the rest of my life. Perhaps it was the sudden release of my first great burden that makes me remember. Fear is a damp, heavy and cumbersome burden and yet happens to be made of nothing at the same time.
While I sat, praying hard for expulsion, outside a rarely visited office two men held a conversation in which one recommended that the other seek a third party´s advice for his son.
The child psychologist had an office near Bakers St. It was a great adventure for me, and, I believe, for my father for we had spent much of my life until that point apart. I was very excited but the informal aspect of the office and her cordial, unpatronising greeting disarmed me totally. I performed well in the tests. Then she asked some direct questions (and at least one leading one) and I did fight so hard to express my ennui that it all ended in tears, as it will when a teenager, realising that there is actually nothing wrong with being alive, resorts instinctively with a cry for sympathy, for love again, to make it all better. Of her subsequent report, the results of which I was secretly longing for, could have been abbreviated thus:
Bored
Sensitive
In a gloomy auditorium deep within my soul, a large crowd of frankly inebriated dockhands began to boo and to jeer and to throw ´items´ at the stage, just for the noise of it smashing. The house lights went up, producing an ugly effect on the mob, and the house manager (always was a nervous type, that one) edged towards a telephone marked ´Security´
Hhhmmm.... Thirsty now. Wouldn´t mind a smoke also. Perhaps another couple of manzanilla. But then Bar Paprika (with the quotes from Nietzsche, in Spanish, on the board outside) now serves Pedro Ximenez cold. Could you believe that they don´t sell much of that divine elixir around here? You know why? They never thought of drinking it on ice! Fools! I may have begun a cultural revolution.
Also, I must leave you all for a time. I don´t know how long, but I´ll be watching you.