Lost times

‘We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?‘

‘Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.’

–HELD, Anne Michaels

The air-conditioner at home needed servicing. So I called the contact that I had on my phone. I had tried calling the number a couple of weeks ago and then again that day. The phone had gone unanswered on both occasions. That evening a text came in. It says ‘I saw quite a number of miss calls from u.’ The person’s daughter texted to say her mother had passed away and the air-conditioning business was now closed. I had not met the person whom I usually contacted to arrange for services. Now I knew that she had a grownup daughter. Very often mobile phone numbers are exchanged for convenience and the bearer of the phone number has a face and a life that we do not know and will never know. Occasionally some trivialities may be unwittingly spilled and shared by the person on the other side of the line even though you may never meet. You will be surprised that we are not all that different in terms of our likes and dislikes.

Coffee shop culture is an integral part of urban living. In the American sitcom ‘Friends’, six good friends regularly meet at the fictional coffee shop in Central Park to catch up with each other. The coffee shop is where they hang and share updates . I thoroughly enjoyed the show that started in 1994 and ended in 2004. Whenever I feel anxious or overwhelmed at work, I take a stroll to the independent bookshop a block away from my office. Along the way, I stop by a café, have a coffee and read a few pages of the novel I happen to be reading at the time. In Capote Truman‘s novel ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s‘ to the main character Holly Golightly, ‘nothing bad can happen at Tiffany’s”. To her is Tiffany’s is a place of solace and a symbol of comfort and security. To me , a bookshop is a place of safety and happiness and a café is a convivial place where we unwind and have a drink or a meal. With technology, digital nomads travel with their laptops and mobile devices. At the café some people are seen taking a break from their daily grinds or meeting friends for a catch up while others are typing away as they work remotely.

 Café Unfiltered:
Published by: New Vessel, 2022 (232 pages)

Cafe Unfiltered written by Jean-Philippe Blondel and translated by Alison Anderson is an engaging read.There is a medley of stories about the customers who go to Le Tom’s, a small French café owned by Fabrice Michel Joseph Ortega who runs it with the help of Jose, an old friend of his. Fabrice has taken over the café from Jocelyne. The book plays out a kaleidoscopic view of the customers and the owners, both past and present, of the café in the course of a day and night from 9a.m. to 6 a.m.the following day. The narratives are in the first person’s voice of the characters in the book. Amongst these characters who enter the café, a young woman who visits the café daily and poses as an artist, a mother and son who realize their vast differences, an award winning author who meets up with a childhood friend whom he had fallen in love with and a woman who crosses paths with the ex who abandoned her in Australia. There is also the stories of Jocelyne, the previous owner of Le Tom, and both Fabrice and Jose. Thirty-one year old Fabrice used to frequent The Atlantic a café previously run by Jocelyne. She then decided to start Le Tom’s, and she was pleased to see him when Fabrice went there for the first time. Jocelyn is grateful for his loyalty and regards him as a son she would have liked to have. He studied computer networks but he was bored of the jobs he had been offered. He took up Jocelyn’s offer when he was asked to take over the café. The offer came with the sole condition that he would have to maintain Le Tom’s as the name of the café.

Thirty-one year old Chloe visits the café daily and sits on Table No.8 every day doing sketches of the people who come into the café.After spending some years in Finland, Chloe returned to France during the pandemic. She is now trying to find her new bearings. She is seen posing as an artist with her notebooks and pencils and the big fountain pen. Incidentally she can sketch quite well. After the lockdown people are starting to adjust to ‘normalizing’ their lives. When customers enter the café, ‘they keep their mask within reach, and finger it nervously.‘ as they are worried about new variant. In Chloe’s voice ‘The terrace, on the other hand, is often packed with people. They’ve heard that there’s virtually no risk out in the fresh air, that droplets are dispersed on the wind and won’t contaminate our skin. Droplets, too have been let out of confinement, have become immaterial.’

At Table No.2, an award-winning author Thibault Detressant, aged 57 years old, is there to meet Pierre a friend from the lycée. Thibault used to be in love with Pierre who was flamboyant, cheerful, confident and popular in the past. In school, Pierre was tall and slim with dark hair and very black eyes and edgy with the perfect erring. He loved being adored by his classmates particularly Thibault. Both of them were aware of what was happening, Pierre being aware of the suffering he was causing Thibault and Thibault couldn’t repress a sort of idolatry despite knowing that there was no hope.Thibault worked hard to improve his grades. As he puts it, he managed to get admitted to one of those elite programs in Paris, where ” my lack of culture would clash with the refinement and cruel courtesy of my classmates.’ He made his parents proud. And he just wants to forget the unpleasant memories in the past and the insults he had suffered and now he is caught unaware; ‘all it takes is one photograph posted on social media‘.

In Thibault’s voice :

‘ He caught me off guard, at the worst moment and in the worst way, two nights ago. I had no plans that evening — with age, I have to admit, invitations have gotten scarcer, even for a local hero like me. I was scrolling through photos of other people’s lives on Instagram and Facebook. I feel a certain tenderness toward Facebook, it’s a network for old people who’re convinced they can compete with the younger generation. All these people taking pictures of the meal they’ve ordered who write “yum,” followed by four exclamation marks. All these quotes half of them wrong, paired with reflections about the meaning of life. It’s roughly the euqivalent of those black-and-white photo romances my grandmother used to read in Modes de Paris.’

He was at a loose end just when Pierre posted the photo of them on Facebook. He felt both sadness and rage at the time. ‘So forty years later he still had to go and flaunt the relationship he once had with me. To blow his own trumpet.’ He remembers Sophie the girl who took the picture and he has found out that Sophie has passed.

As it happens, Thibault has now clearly outshone Pierre.

Thibault has become verbose. Thibault muses,’Nostalgia is a dangerous treacle, and not many people enjoy losing themselves in it.’

In Pierre’s narrative,

‘ I remember the day I saw his portrait splashed across the front page of the regional daily,five or six years ago. There he was , with that ironical half smile. He was also splashed across pages two and three, in a marathon interview. The prodigal son, returning to the fold. To his ” territory,” as they like to call it nowadays. Before , it was referred to as the provinces. Or even the place where the hicks lived. But “territory,”, as they like to call it nowadays. Before, it was referred to as the provinces.’

In his words,’There was jealousy, of course – because all of us somehow dream of the limelight. i suppose I wasn’t the only one. Everyone who’s ever crossed paths with Thibault must be drooling with envy. But admiration, too, for the courage that i didn’t have, the courage to leave everything behind and start a new life. There was nostalgia, obviously for those years hwen I was the sun the other planets revolved around. I went to the lycée to shine. I basked in the other students’ admiration.’

At Table No. 3 twenty-five year old Gillaume is meeting his mother Françoise. He is surprised that his mother is now changing her habits at age sixty. She refuses to play by the rules and he cannot believe it. She has befriended Lucie and his father is worried. To both her husband Marc and son Gillaume, she is acting weird.

In Françoise’s voice,

‘My husband is incapable of speaking to me directly, Our children have become something like telegraph boys at a time when everyone else on the planet is sending tons of text messages and videos.

‘I think maybe I intimidate Marc now. Once again he can see the woman he was briefly in love with, and whose relative coldness paralysed him. He didn’t understand that beneath my impassive air,I was seething. I dreamed of reading all the books in the library, but also fo traveling to every country on earth, and practicing every profession, rising to every challenge. My parents had agreed to let me study modern literature – remnant of a nineteenth -century education where girls devoted themselves to literature or languages, while waiting to find the right husband.‘

Françoise knew Lucie from the past. She visits the bookstore that is recently opened by Lucie. It is called Lost Time. She says to Lucie : ” I would so have liked to be you.”

She immerses herself in the books that Lucie has recommended . In her narrative, ‘ What I wanted was the here and now, an encounter with characters of the sort I might meet in my everyday life. To get to the heart of their behavior. Share their anger, their frustraitons, their hopes and joy. It wasn’t escapism I wanted from my reading. I wanted to find my bearings again . I had lost them so long ago.’

Françoise finds out that her son, a model student used to bullie Lucie’s daughter Léa in school, causing her to lose all self-confidence, as a result, Léa had to change school. She has resigned that Gillaumne is a scumbag, her greatest source of regret . She takes her share of the blame. Her husband thinks their son is a success but she thinks he’s an absolute failure for his misogynistic behaviour.

In Cafe Unfiltered ,the narratives alternate between different characters and their observations of what they see at the café and what they make up of others just as we do when we sit at the café terrace and watch people walking by us. I came to know about the book through a book review by Words and Peace. Cafe Unfiltered by Jean-Philippe Blondel is indeed a delightful and insightful read.