not those of driftwood! Unless it’s from the Fiji Yasawa islands — a copulating point of the sun and the ocean. A toy for the parrotfish and the giant clams, marinated in kava, passing down the generic code of the three-pronged fork. Ashy notes, as if from a volcano cloud or a powdered Egyptian mummy, added as medicine? Woody, ashy, low-acid, nutty, slightly nutty. A marriage of convenience — fifteen percent Sumatran and eighty percent Brazilian. Brazil churns coffee, any coffee, turning it from an elite indulgence into an everyday drink. The remaining five percent comes from a Costa Rican plantation in Tres Rios near San Jose. Yet it’s not all. A trace of rotting-flesh sweetness, distant, yet palpable, like a voodoo spell? A mistaken bean of authentic Blue Mountain, a Jamaican bean in a bag of Sumatran? A dirty batch? It’s not Blue Mountain, though, not even a fake. It’s a spare throw of medium roast, medium grind organic Goroka Paradise Gold from Papua New Guinea, from the same part of the world where some men grab each other’s balls to say hello when they bump into each other. Or it’s a fistful of monsooned beans forgotten from the time when ships were wooden, and it took ages for them to travel, circling the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe. A length of time in which the green coffee beans would turn golden and all the acidity would be gone, replaced by a gentle sweetness.
These days they monsoon them artificially. I make eye contact. “Don’t get what?”
“A coffee book writer drinking espresso.”
“You don’t have Dracula’s ‘blooduccino’ or camel milk latte… ” I stop, my eyebrows arching. “How do you know that I’m a coffee book writer?”
“You stormed in and grabbed the cup.” He gestures to the cup left on the shelf to dry. “Slurped the leftovers, whispering, ‘My coffee book is the real thing! They can get… stuffed!’”
“I don’t use ‘stuffed’ but the f-word and I am not a coffee book writer in that sense.” I utter trapped in a sudden, raw and vivid flashback to my recent humiliation, to the mockery on the faces of the five coryphées shrouded in coffee steam, the booing from the audience. My out-of-control chatting with chattering teeth every time I get an anxiety bout is becoming a worry.
“What’s the sense then?” He waits for another reaction, but all he sees now is my poker face.
Why am I having this conversation?
“It’s not recipes or coffee venues that I’m writing about,” I say haughtily only to hear my voice breaking the moment I start to repeat my pitch from an hour ago. “I focus on coffee’s mystic and mischievous qualities as a cultural phenomenon, turning them into coffee lovers’ portraits.”
“You must have many of them.” Tantalisingly slowly, he serves the tiny cup in the shape of a beheaded cone. A miniscule lace-intricate teaspoon lies next to it on the blue porcelain saucer. In a Kama Sutra mood, of course!
I have difficulty taking my eyes away from the beheaded-cone cup, yet the sudden jolt of my heart makes me lean back in my stool.
In front of me is a mercenary on a mission, on a payroll of the mighty coffee empire. A mercenary trained to kill with sophisticated weaponry. The weaponry of palate-exploding sensations. A barista dressed in black, the coffee colour. I get a glimpse of his small ponytail of slick black locks, a black mole on his latte-coloured right cheek. A solid gold earring. An epitome of the five coryphées, a faithful employee and shameless seducer — selling the black beans by chanting woody-peachy mantras, camouflaged as a connoisseur but blind for the real spirit, the poetry of coffee.
The vision of my bare hands around his neck strangling him brings an unexpected confusion to me. The sexual tension hanging in the air between us, a spider thread swaying gently over the scorching aromas, animates the vision into another one: my bare hands sliding down his naked body in search of pleasure-trigger points. I can’t deny that his language has stirred my curiosity, but my hatred blinds me for his subtle ways about coffee. Driftwood? I never thought of driftwood in terms of coffee before. The mercenary speaks in such a romantic and knowledgeable way about coffee. Something is not right. Shavings from a Stradivarius? Crazy!
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.
