Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [14]
6INCIDENTALLY—for the following paragraphs it may be useful to view the map at the front of this book.
INTERLUDE 1
Coffee
Market Square
Café Louis, Market Square 14. Open 10:00-23:30 tel. 316 80 24.
Market Square is found easily enough on Arsenal Street in easy walking distance from Cathedral Square, and is always a worthwhile place to visit. The square abounds in cafés: there are no less than twelve open every weekday; on weekends five are available to accommodate the Saturday evening adolescents in search of noise and love and beer; or three are open for the benefit of the Sunday morning stroller in search of coffee and peace, but who may become irritated by the sudden arrival of the after-church family crowd. On Wednesdays, market day, the square is of course particularly busy and populated by many stalls selling fresh produce, electronic equipment, a wide variety of second-hand clothes, religious amulets, antiques, plastic objets d’art. The buildings that surround the square are all fifteenth century with terracotta tiles and wooden beams. But sadly, due to our earthquake, many are replicas.
CAFÉ LOUIS, a red building with ‘LOUIS’ clearly marked on its front (in any case the café with the wonky awning), is where I would recommend our distinguished foreign visitors take their morning coffee break. If on entering you are initially disgusted by the smell of tobacco smoke, do not immediately rush out in search of another café—all cafés have this smell: we are a nation of smokers. Instead, allow the smell to remind you of Linas; it is good that you should consider Linas now.
I have suggested this café not solely because it is one of those places which offers a 10 per cent reduction to all readers of this book. (Though this should of course be taken advantage of—and be sure to exhibit the book each time the waitress comes forward, and perhaps even to point at it indiscreetly.) But I recommend the café also for its excellent thick, bowel-moving coffee. In fact not even purely for the coffee, or the 10 per cent reduction, has this place been selected above all others; nor is it even for the scores of beautiful late-teenage waitresses that Louis has employed over the decades of his café’s existence to soften the hearts of hard old men and make them linger and care less for the thickness of their wallets. No, the principal reason for my recommendation is that sitting amongst you now as you drink the faultless coffee are various men and women from our city, regulars at Café Louis, who happen also to be characters (or the children of characters) from this book.
Let us start with the couple in the darkest corner of the bar, two men, both sitting with coffee or beer in front of them, not talking but with anxious expressions on their faces, as if they dare not talk, as if they are waiting for something or someone. One is older, he is tall and podgy and nervous, he drums his fingers on the table’s surface; the other, shorter with greying hair, sighs noisily every now and then. But these two characters have yet to be introduced in this history (perhaps that is why they are so impatient), so let us leave them alone for the time being with their secret anticipation. Let us turn instead to Louis himself, for he is invariably there, or at least his body is—his mind travels increasingly longer distances until one day, surely not far from now, it will never come back. Look at stationary Louis: what a wonderful wrinkled old fellow he is. Look how white his hair is, see how mildly he looks ahead—he had such a temper once that he smashed all the dozens of coffee cups and all the lines of beer glasses one evening, two decades back (out of love), as if all those glasses and cups were the containers of his happiness, and so had to be broken because he was miserable. Louis, even in his