preferably an indoors café, after which there’d be another place, and maybe another, before I turned in.
RIGHT NOW, BETWEEN me and the elements stood a blow fan at Café Algiers, just as between me and my rudderless summer sat the two volumes of Montaigne’s Essays which I’d been promising Lloyd-Greville to comb through, essay after essay. Pascal I’d promised to reread afterward. As for all the short novels ever penned by Europe’s middlebrow hucksters, I’d just have to do what they themselves claimed they did: wing it.
One could spend an entire day at Café Algiers. It was a tiny, cluttered, semi-underground café off Harvard Square that held no more than a dozen tiny, wobbly tables and that looked like a miniature Kasbah about to spill on the floor. How they managed to stuff so many tiny, rickety tables, chairs, and a giant antique espresso maker, plus a whole kitchen area in one-tenth the space needed was beyond me. The owner must have been an engineer by training who doubled as part-time cook, cashier, waiter, and busboy. They served coffee, juices, sandwiches, and cakes. Weather permitting, Algiers boasted a tiny alfresco area on what could have passed for a terrace but was really no more than a narrow passageway between Brattle Street and the bar Casablanca on the way to Mount Auburn Street. People parked their cars in a lot right behind the bar.
I hadn’t spoken to a soul all weekend. It was Sunday, everything was closed, and I’d been roaming from one coffeehouse to the next. It was now late in the afternoon. Another scorching weekend like this and I’d wilt, no one would miss me, no one would even know. I found myself thinking of the young couple in Apartment 43. They were having people over for dinner, she told me. Gazpacho and lamb chops and God knows what else—wine, always wine. He liked to cook. She liked books. After dinner, they’d wash and dry the dishes in the kitchen, and he’d playfully bump her hips with his, as I watched him do once downstairs when he stood by her while she took forever to empty their mailbox. Had he bumped her ass in jest, or simply to mean Will you hurry? They had two names on their mailbox. Soon they’d have just one.
I was reading Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond that afternoon, and was sitting in a relatively quiet corner of Café Algiers drinking an iced coffee that was to last me at least two and a half hours. Nursing a drink is one thing. But watching your ice cubes melt and turn the watered-down brew into clear soup and still pretend that your glass is half full was like trying to preserve the polar icecaps with a paper fan.
Then I heard him. He was sitting at a table not far from mine, speaking French. Correction: he wasn’t speaking. He didn’t speak; instead, he rapid-fired machine-gun style, in bursts and sputters. Rat-tat-tat, he took down civilization, Western and Eastern, no difference, he hated them both. Cranky, jittery, crazed, strafing his way from one subject to the next—it didn’t matter which—he’d mow it down. Rat-tat-tat, like shattered glass spun in a blender. Rat-tat-tat, like a jackhammer, like a chainsaw, like a power drill, every syllable spiked with venom, vengeance, and vitriol.
I had no idea who he was, what exactly he was talking about, or why he kept raising his voice, but in this underground café on a quiet midsummer Sunday afternoon, his was the only voice you heard.
Oui, oui, oui—rat-tat-tat. Bien sûr, bien sûr—rat-tat, rat-tat. Et pourquoi pas?—rat-tat-tat-tat? Long sentences, spoken with spitfire accuracy, while all around him sat cigarettes, napkins, matches, a cheap lighter, home keys, car keys, leftover change from his previous coffee before he’d decided to order a second and then a third—debris strewn helter-skelter about his table like the spat-out bullet shells of his hysterical prattle. Rat-tat-tat, down with capitalists, communists, liberals and conservatives, Old World, New World, the League of Nations, the Arab League, the League of Women Voters, the Catholic League, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, down with them all! Whites, blacks, men, women, Jews, gays, lesbians, rich, poor, cats, dogs—a flint storm of curses as unmistakably North African French as the cicadas on sleepy Mediterranean afternoons when they drown out every other sound with the raspy musketry of their hindquarters.
At that moment he was fulminating against white Americans, les amerloques, as he called them. Americans loved all things jumbo