While I look intensely at the man across the bar, the cup disappears into my hand. Steam weaves its way upwards like a Pepper’s Ghost and morphs with the barista. A real barista not like Nadya’s friend of convenience behind the counter of the ‘delicatessen’ shop at the corner of Tolbuhin Boulevard and Graf Ignatiev Street.
*
Nadya’s friend from the ‘delicatessen’ shop was young, overweight and walked on her small feet like a mother duck leading a row of fluffy ducklings. Her whole-front apron, once white, was greasy and stained. She was busy holding a knife to cut low-quality butter and tahini halva, or a ladle to scoop curds and yoghurt from huge aluminium basins, or a short-handle shovel to dig into the twenty-kilo paper bag of flour paying no attention to the weevils but waving off the white cloud that would engulf her and Nadya, or a funnel to pour the vinegar and sunflower oil from the drums into the bottles we carried along. Finally, we picked some coarse soap, made of primitively processed fat, smelling worse than any dirt it was supposed to take off. Now it was time for coffee; Nadya’s friend would plug in her bare heating-resistor burner and prepare the mix in a Turkish metal pot: two teaspoons of sugar, two of finely ground coffee smelling of soap and marinated green chillies, a cup of water and while waiting for it to boil, she would complain about her life to Nadya.
“My husband still hasn’t got a job so I am forced to steal, let god forgive me,” she would say. “I don’t keep much, only five or ten grams of everything for me.” Nadya would nod her head understandingly while I would play with the scales with the dark metal weights looking like monstrous chess pawns: 200 grams, 50 grams, 500 grams.
Nadya drank her coffee blowing and slurping to show her appreciation for the woman’s coffee artistry because this was the custom in the Balkans but I knew that Nadya hated doing it, yet she had to please the young, overweight woman so that later she would give us under-the-counter precious supplies like feta cheese or cheap salami dubbed ‘dogs’ joy’ at a time when the shelves of the delicatessen were empty and long queues of people waited in vain for the supplier’s truck. I knew it was another of Nadya’s modes to look after her family. She let me drink some of the coffee: gritty, bland, and watched me with a suffering look on her face because by that time she was convinced that Margherita’s new husband Boris was molesting me.
Besides gritty and bland, that coffee was strong. As strong as what I am drinking now in The Coffee Animals more than forty years later, miles away.
“Bliss.” I lick my lips. “Flavour’s so intense, almost solid. I could do some writing on it.” My bad mood is leaving me as if being sucked down a man-hole. The bitter taste of failure is melting, disappearing along with the folly of an ambition to trade myself in as a coffee writer for a title like Master Kaffeetier and a giant silver cupping spoon to go with it.
“I am Bruno, this is Jose.” The man points to a high-stemmed glass at the far end of the bar, where a Siamese fighting fish flaps in and out of its cloak-like tail.
Frank Sinatra sings his ‘Coffee Song’ from an inconspicuous music device, They grow an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. Brazil, the 1800: fazendas, black ships with of slaves from Africa — with hand and foot shackles, coffee barons, a time when coffee was king; plantation owners forcing their slaves into sadistic orgies; beatings, murders, the slaves retaliated — a scorpion in the boot of the baron or ground glass in the corn meal of his family.
The mercenary looks at me expectantly. Ah, yes, the introduction.
“Arnya.” I twist a lock of my hair.
It’s dyed. In coffee. My abundant, wild, almost non-human hair. Norma Jean Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe, also used coffee to dye things. She soaked her veil in a strong potion to match her cream wedding gown before she could say yes to Arthur Miller in one of those fatal attractions between beauty and brains.
“Arnya, the love affair with coffee is the most lustful one.” He looks at me through his heavy eyelashes.
“I get high on coffee and coffee stories.” I look at my cup. The espresso has been created by forcing water at nine bars pressure and 88 ºC through a tightly compact wad of eight grams of freshly ground coffee. Twenty-two seconds for the brewing that tears the heart of the beans for me.
The black blood still dripping.
The espresso relaxes me and I notice the posters of Van Gogh’s paintings scattered around the place. Blown-up prints, not framed, spilling unbearable flamboyance into the neat and somewhat empty interior. The artist’s Cafe Terrace at Night is placed in the window. An image of a street cafe, a magnet for decadent intellectuals and artists, something The Coffee Animals can hardly be taken for. The paved street, the sky paved with stars, the half-empty venue with drum-like tables under that crazy canary yellow spilling into green and orange. Figures of people, long dead as the artist himself.
Under the shelf with neatly arranged cups and glasses, in the middle of a back door hangs The Night Cafe in Van Gogh’s characteristic, eye-poking lime-and-lemon colours. Small wonder the artist describes it as “… an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace… ” Of course, The Coffee Animals is nowhere near a devil’s furnace, and no one can imagine anybody committing a crime in such a lifeless place.
Another opus of Van Gogh, Orphan Man with a Hat Drinking Coffee, has been reduced and multiplied to form a frieze over part of the sidewalls on the left, above a bookcase with neatly arranged books and magazines, on the right above damask-padded sofas and deep-burgundy chairs arranged around several round tables with marble centres.
An obsession with the crazy artist?
Bruno is fixing himself what in Australia we call a Koala Fart: two espresso shots, eucalyptus drops for sweetener, scorching water under pressure for bubbles. Sometimes I order it in Brisbane’s Cafe On The Park, a small shaggy den between Moreton Bay and the lake with tortoises stretching their necks in the hope of a piece of shepherd’s pie. The cafe’s blue walls are decorated with photos from the fifties, a time when cane-cutting in the region was booming: young male workers in dark suit trousers, naked from the waist up, dancing barefooted on the beach in couples.
“Why don’t you add some cardamom powder?” I ask Bruno teasingly.
“What for?” He looks at me suspiciously chewing on his lower lip.
“Cardamom’s known to kill the side effects of caffeine.”
He looks offended and I want him to hurt, but my spite has ebbed away. All I manage is, “Is it always so overcrowded?”
Instead of a reply Bruno does what men sooner or later do — he gives me an overall scanning for a final assessment: fuckable, non-fuckable. Another valuable piece of knowledge passed down to me by Dimm. Surprisingly, more often than not I find myself in the former category.
Women, on the other hand, love to think of me as PMS with a calcium deficiency and a hyperthyroid problem, but it’s not the case. My periods are regular, although each one could be the last, and if I have a thyroid problem, it’s more on the hypo-side so coffee agrees with me. As for my bones, I have never looked bulky. The only thing women can’t deny me is my glossy and abundant hair. What they don’t know, however, is that the abundance is not only on my skull, but also everywhere else. Every few days, I have to pluck my limbs diligently otherwise I’ll soon be looking like one of Tarzan’s adoptive parents.
The only disturbing thing is that there’s no surprise whenever I look in the mirror. Sometimes I wish I could see somebody else there: a kid with the gap of a missing tooth, a teenager with pimples and spiky hair, or a man with a long Pinocchio nose looking back at me, telling lies and making bad friends.
I open my purse and pick a ten Swiss franc note. “Enough?”
He takes the note and our hands touch.
I