Envy

It’s not my café. The old man doesn’t look at me, not today, not ever, as I walk by. Seedy and unkempt, he sits in the last seat to the left against the wall outside the café, warm weather or cold, and greets the people who come in or pass by on their way somewhere else because it’s their café and his—but not mine, so he never says bonjour to me or even nods his head. He sits alone, occasionally talking to regulars who stand though never pull up a chair to his table or invite him to theirs, but mainly he just sits, his legs crossed, a cigarette in his right hand, and his left foot, with the its bedroom slipper off, tapping against a chair leg. He always smiles, even when he ignores me. In the morning he has a cup of coffee on his table and in the afternoon usually a glass of wine, bought for him by a regular, I guess, or with money the regulars give him, but I don’t know for sure since I’m not there and never see the transaction. I could find out by stopping at the café and spending enough time to see who buys what and when—or if—for the vieillard, but I don’t. It’s not my café.

No question, it’s his. He is an habitué, as steady and expectable as the tables or the chalkboard, always there, and no more remarkable than the wallpaper: you’d notice if either one were removed, though it might take a day or two for the absence to register. For a while I liked the idea, since he always wears bedroom slippers and needs a shave, that he’s really the owner and wanders down from his apartment upstairs to greet les clients and see to it that business runs smoothly, but café owners don’t sit and consume. They prefer fussing and getting in the way of the staff—and they never wear slippers, but always look as if they shave three or four times a day.

He is a common enough phenomenon of Paris, an old guy down but nowhere near out, not a beggar but nowhere near a bourgeois either. They get adopted, he and the others I’ve seen here and there, by cafés or grocery stores, even a bookshop. They are there and not on sufferance, but as if there is an agreement in each place that he is our old guy, if not the others. He is welcome, and it wouldn’t be the same without him. That’s true, it wouldn’t be, and the cost of maintaining him with a cup in the morning and a glass in the afternoon is not much more than keeping a potted plant. Nor does the café expect him to earn his keep by sweeping up or going to the bakery for more bread. Maybe he brings good luck.

There’s no telling how long he’s been part of the café or how long it took him to be accepted on terms he and the café could agree on—or how they came to an agreement, for that matter. I know it takes time. A friend who’s been in Paris for many years was advised to find a café and make it his if he really wanted to be part of the city, and he has done so, but he can’t remember how long it was before he felt he belonged. Neither can I. I had a café and even though the waiter knew on the second day what I wanted for breakfast, it took—I’m trying to remember—maybe three weeks before he served up a sense of belonging along with my coffee and bread. If I went back, I imagine he would remember me and perhaps it would be, again, my café, but I’m staying in another part of Paris these days and it’s too far. I did try another one not long ago, but it didn’t work, perhaps because I did not spend enough time going to the café I chose or maybe it was my hair.

My hair gets blond in the summer sun. The waiter looked at me the first day I showed up and asked if I wanted a beer: perhaps he thought my fair hair meant I was German or Belgian, which is an almost polite way of saying you must be German, foreign anyway. I asked for un verre de Bordeaux tempéré, and when he brought my red wine at room temperature, I asked him if he had peanuts. He brought them and some very nice black olives, on the house. So far, so good. The next day, he greeted me with une bière, monsieur? And the next couple of days as well—and I also had to ask for the peanuts and the olives. It could be, had I spent more days going to this new café, that he would have made a gesture with his palm about three-quarters up and moving slightly outward, which I have often seen and means the regular?, and brought me wine and nuts and olives. Or maybe not.

The classic Paris café, the kind that looks as if you just might see Scott and Zelda or Marcel Duchamp having a drink and a smoke a few tables over, is expiring—and that goes for the famous and glamorous no less than the homely and obscure, even-steven. Many have gone out of business because fewer Parisians care for the between-the-wars atmosphere, the main item on the menu of any true and self-respecting café, preferring something more à la page, something with more glitz in the décor and the air of the place—and something that will not be the same in a couple of years. The up-to-date places, more like fern bars or a decorator’s daydream, may have also looked at all those cafés that have gone south—as many as ninety percent in the last two generations, I hear—and decided that another habitué nursing a coffee for two hours, scarcely more than 1€ an hour, isn’t paying enough rent on the table to keep the glitz shiny, let alone to replace it next year. Their favorite customers come often, but go soon because the café, or whatever the new thing may be, is certainly not their living room the way cafés, like English pubs, used to be: people have better apartments and big-screen TV to go home to. And the foreigners with the fair hair—well, let them go to La Coupole or Les Deux Magots where the high price of admission pays for the old-time Paris show, at least for the time being, because the foreigners aren’t coming back here to my café any time soon. So, what’ll it be, monsieur, une bière?

More patience might help, but I can’t scare it up. I don’t live here, and just when I’ll have earned my stripes as a regular, I’d pack up and be gone, and then when I returned, then what? The waiters used to stay forever in their cafés, but I’m not sure that’s the case with the younger ones. Would I have to start all over with a new waiter? It sounds like work. Nevertheless, on my way home again, the old man is having his wine and, though I don’t ever want to be in his slippers, I can’t help envying him as I walk by his café, even if he doesn’t return my nod.

© Joseph Lestrange