The walls advancing, turning the cafe into a landing, a man is falling into the jaws of darkness. Dimitri, don’t go!
“Arnya, are you all right?” Manoli was tapping me on the shoulder, then helped me to a table bringing a glass of water, another espresso.
“How do you know my name?”
No answer.
“Einstein, Beethoven and Casanova were religious about coffee, too.” I fired at him. Panic attacks made me chatty. “Naples is a great place to drink it. So is Brisbane. And the floating casino of Macau.”
He turned his back to me. There were customers coming in.
In the evening, Babylon was full. Often there would be a poetry reading. Someone came to take over behind the bar.
“Arnya, don’t go!” Manoli was standing behind me, his hand snugly on the nape of my neck. “Come home with me.”
Seducer.
Mortal.
Bastard.
We walked side-by-side back to the riverbank where a slice from the island of Rhodos with families fleeing hunger in post-war Greece had sailed across the oceans to anchor at Brisbane’s West End.
Manoli’s house was a temple of love.
I sat on the porch steps and through the open door watched Manoli giving a bath to his mitera.
Swollen joints, sunken eyes, thinning hair, the breasts that once fed him now fallen victims of gravity, the belly that sheltered him for nine months now a folded curtain above the gate through which he entered this world, victorious as Alexander the Great, mitera, mitera, mother, mother. He’d nurse her through his life, until the day of his death, he’d nurse his bed-ridden mitera with all his love, obeying, listening when she teaches him life, how to stay away from bad company in the cafenio; nai, nai, mitera, yes, yes, mother. A man of a lifelong childhood or a Colossus, Manoli put garlic in the moussaka. Panagia, prayed his ailing mother, calling him, don’t go out in the dark, don’t put salt in the moussaka, Manoli, paidi mou, my boy
He carried her in his arms to her bed, high like Olympus, and laid her among the handwoven linen and lace cushions. She dozed off, talking in her sleep, calling his name.
Manoli joined me on the steps. He took a sip of wine and looked up at the lonely moon, clinking glasses with me and the cooling breeze. His eyes telling me he was trying to remember the last time he had a lover. He returned to the house to rinse out the sponge and the cloth in the bathtub, the water still warm. Perhaps he was reminded of Archimedes and his law: the apparent loss in weight of a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.
I sat in the moonlight, the aromas of his cooking descending upon me. Manoli prepared dinner — garlic-laced eggplant moussaka, red Macedonian wine from Epanomi, tzatziki with ccucumbers from mitera’s garden, marinated sardines. Ah, those sardines, first charcoal grilled, then soaked in olive oil, vinegar, parsley, pepper and salt. The olive oil, drops of melted sun, swirled like a line of sirtaki dancers.
Down the street, in Babylon, someone was reciting a poem about old Greek men drinking sweet Greek coffee brewed in hot sand, the thick crema overflowing the magic of the coffee pot of my childhood.
Oh, Manoli, my impossible love because of my fear that one day I might get involved and hurt and bleed again. I wanted to go away travelling again, forgetting.
I wanted to try my luck in Switzerland.
*
The decision to make myself heard in Basel, at the annual meeting of the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers, the highest organ of the industry dictating trends and profits of the most sellable commodity after oil, was hard to take. The society was known for its absolute power and versatile tools to implement it.
Besides, it was strictly a man’s club.
Perhaps it had something to do with history: centuries of coffee indulgence in closed, male circles. Yet I made my move aiming to break into this society of heavy weights from the coffee world, alumni of Beethoven and Balzac, Freud and Wagner, Marquis de Sade and Pope Leo XII who left his coffee-inspired verses: “Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,/Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore,” of Byron and Voltaire, all passionate coffee devotees — Voltaire only supposedly consumed up to sixty cups daily.
Sixty cups!
Surprisingly, an invitation followed and I arrived in Switzerland with high hopes.
That afternoon when I entered the Basel Kaffee Klub my heart was pounding at the sight of the five coffee coryphées sitting on an elevated platform shrouded in aromatic steam that made them look like deities inside a shrine. The steam was coming from four caldrons over an artificial fire brewing blends of superb coffee so tantalising that for a moment I felt dizzy. Soon I sensed the steam distilled on my face but it could have been my own perspiration.
The urge to kneel and pray was overwhelming. I wanted to make an excuse for bothering the deities with my human presence. But I spotted the impatience in their eyes and quickly started to present my pitch:
“Coffee blending is like playing jazz,” I stated with a racing heart, “improvising is the key word, coded in the mystery of a sex-hot drink; moonlight and cosmic-clutter noise are the real ingredients in a frothy cappuccino, the cry of a coyote is resonating in the small bubbles of an espresso black as a solar eclipse, addictive as money.”
Money! Their ears pricked up in unison. That’s what they were here for. Was it worth spending time, ergo money, on what a certain Arnya Stefan had to say?
Yet they listened. The board of five men, conceited coffee coryphées, different ages, appearances, nationalities stared at me, registering a figure like a stirring spoon: Hawaiian Kana coffee hair, long, thick eyelashes, good for a froth-whipping device, deep and steamy voice, scratchy at times, as if coming from an old percolator.
They looked amused and exchanged glances, the chains of the heavy silver spoons hanging around their necks and defining their supremacy tinkled brightly. The men thought it was my naive way to intrigue them, and they engaged shadows of smiles. They chuckled rustily when I compared Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club house band playing ‘Mood Indigo’ with Guatemalan and Kenya AA coffee beans, all nicely blended with a moonlight drip over a Balinese rice paddy.
Then, they became annoyed. Who was I? How and when did Arnya Stefan slip into their busy agenda, wasting their time with ideas so immature, dilettantish, dangerous? Wasn’t the old rule that the society is a man’s club still valid? Who dared break it? One of the five men made a sign to the club’s owner. He got up and interrupted me politely, yet ironically, “Thank you Mr Stefan”. They had misinterpreted my name as a man’s! The awkward silence soon grew into a humming-like booing from the small, no need to say, male audience that had flocked to hear practical things about a money-proven vintage, a mass coffee cheaper-and-better line. The booing escorted me out of the shrine I had profaned.
By having ideas different from theirs.
By being a woman.
Shocked by the clash between the deceiving, near-shamanic atmosphere and the blunt and pragmatic approach, I knew that was the end.
That
