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 say, “The coffee wasn’t peachy or woody. Nevertheless, it was good. I enjoyed it.”
His kiss lands between my knuckles. “Today it’s my lucky day. I turn forty,” he says to my knuckles.
Seducer.
Bastard.
The words stick to my teeth like fine coffee grounds.
At the far end of the bar Jose flaps in his water domain. Bruno turns his back to me and takes his time to rearrange some sample jars and featured collectables like original tins of Nash’s and Hills Bros Coffee, Solitaire Cowboy and a couple of Mac Laughlin’s Gem Coffee Bags. Then he washes his hands, repeatedly increasing and reducing the volume of lather.
I prepare to go.
Right then Bruno produces a packet of one hundred percent Guatemalan from a crop that comes once in decades, a crop after a long dry season when even the ocean breeze from Belize gets stuck somewhere along the Gulf Stream, and sailors can hear its distant singing luring them the way the sirens lured Odysseus when he had to wax-tap his crew’s ears. The aromas stay sealed inside the beans fusing to a perfect result.
Bruno opens the packet, lets me sniff it and takes it away. I feel like a child that has lost her ice cream to the family dog. A little Puppe, a red berry princess that has to learn to lose loved ones to death.
Bruno turns his back to me. There are customers flocking in.
Soon the place is full. A younger man comes to take over behind the bar.
Bruno brings his tall cup of coffee and leans against the bar not far away from me and the cup of espresso made with the freshly ground Guatemalan, which he also serves. The fragrance is as strong as Martian winds and makes me feel weak and dizzy. It’s like an invitation to hell.
“You always have it long?” I say matter-of-factly in the direction of his coffee but suddenly aware of my double-edged remark. I try to laugh it off.
He smiles and soon watches me sipping on my coffee that might also need some chewing. “How about you?”
The hot flush caused by my badly concealed excitement gives way to pleasant warmth with a hysterical ingredient which I can’t entirely blame on the bronco kick strength of the coffee. I feel the stranger’s magnetic aura three stools away. I hope he notices more things about me than the five coffee gurus. Like over-sized, hazelnut eyes, a dimple in the chin, more like a coffee bean groove actually; skin that has seen better days, yet maintains a moist, nourished look without me bathing in coffee grounds fermented with pineapple pulp, a Japanese wrinkle killer. I raise my hand to rearrange my hair.
After having a sip that looks more like a mouth rinse, Bruno returns his cup next to my espresso, David and Goliath, sort of, and shifts into the stool next to mine wrapping me in his body warmth. It’s scary and I feel the moist cold coming from the river crawl into my marrow, my teeth chatter, and I clinch them biting on my lower lip. As if it’s the most natural thing to do, he places his hand on my shoulder and caresses my hair with such tenderness and intensity that I experience a meltdown.
Or a déjà vu.
Casanova, Don Juan, Marquis de Sade
