LEARNING TO DRINK COFFEE SLOWLY
By Martin Bennett
Outside Bar Trombetta Geoff Higgins is sitting between lessons. ‘Between’ meaning what ideally should be during them, for again one of his private students has failed to show up. Forget about lexis and syntax and all that, he reflects between sips and the odd glance at his watch. The key qualification for the freelance English teacher, which more by chance than intent he has become, is learning to drink coffee slowly. He turns the phrase over first on his tongue, converting it into phonetic script, pondering back, front and middle vowels, the penultimate diphthong. It would make a good title for a short story. Or perhaps the chapter in an autobiography where, extending his anonymity still further, the non-event takes centre stage. In short, exactly what’s happening to him at this rather pointless point in time: 10:18 of an April Tuesday, though it could as well be any day and month after or before.
Or what is not happening to him might be a more accurate formulation, so lessons have recently developed a worrying tendency to turn into non-lessons as now a train or bus strike, now a traffic jam out along Rome’s Grande Raccordo Annulare exact their toll. Another taste of ironically named espresso. Another glance at his wrist. 10:25. With each minute’s lateness, expectation takes on the likeness of a tiring boxer. The opponent, Rocky Resignation, cannot, however, quite find the strength to deliver the knock out blow. Next look downward at his watch and the allotted hour is half-way through, even if the absentee did arrive, a possibility more unreal with each sip. Again Geoff’s not so carefully planned lesson plan lies in shreds. The Roman sky and cityscape for which others cross alps and oceans passes, in Geoff’s case, unobserved. Distantly a bell chimes, reminding him how time is money. Especially when as nowadays the money is not forthcoming. Waiting forms a sort of less a mist as a slightly nervous haze, concocted of restless grammar and not so solid home economics. That stone angel set there on the horizon to remind the faithful how there are other things in life and to provide vacationers with a perfect photograph opportunity stretches wings which might as well be invisible.
‘Well, I hope you make your No Shows pay,’ Eleanora, his flatmate, had reproved him from the tangled bed, high-heel boots and matching black underwear backing up her claim, the expensive perfume which he had bought her doing the rest. Plain common sense rarely got so glamorous and in Eleonora’s case was also trilingual…
‘You’re right, I really should,’ he had replied evasively. ‘Make them pay, I mean…’ But he knew all along that he wouldn’t. How could he? More modal verbs had chimed inside his head. Charging absentees for missed lessons risked making them even more absent than they were already. Absent, period, returns terminated in both sense of the word. As if his timetable didn’t have enough blank spaces already, these punctuated by last minute crossings-out. Yes, time here was not so much money, as the lack of it, a multiplication sum whose result tended towards minus. For the sake of his thinning wallet then, the best tactic in such cases was to smile Englishly and pretend in Italian: ‘Nessun problema. No, capisco bene…Alla settimana prossima allora…’ That way he also saved on having to pay for a translator, ‘I quite understand. Don’t worry, next time then…’ Et cetera, et debtera. This rounded off with a hollow ‘Okay’ which really meant, particularly with this month’s rent pending, ‘Not ok at all.’ ‘Libero professionista’ – the job title on his ‘Permesso di Soggiorno’ – took on a meaning that the dictionary had not yet caught up with.
Meanwhile it might also help if Eleonora would get up and put her talk about becoming a model into practice, he had thought but never said. One stroll down the catwalk of her slinky body or a photo shoot for one of those calendars the Italians go in for – either could earn more than who knows how many language lessons. But in whichever of her three languages Eleonora’s mind had a syntax of its own and it was not, thank goodness, for him to correct it. Even pedantry had its limits. Especially given that she was twelve years his younger by the calendar, twenty if you judged by looks. He should, he knew, count himself lucky. And so back in the flat she lolled among the copies of Vogue and Oggi and Gente, now riffling the pages with her slender fingers, now pausing to varnish her toenails somewhere at the end of her long-long legs.
Except he is daydreaming again, his self-appointed Walter Mitty, Casanova manqué. Blame it on the coffee or a dodgy libido, but Eleonora does not exist. At least not the one related to him. His room in fact is all too empty. The nearest thing to a flat mate are piles of grammar exercises photocopied in over-optimistic piles. Drills on ‘may and might’; ‘the real versus the unreal present’; from ‘put off’ to ‘be down and out’, phrasal verbs ad nauseam: They have already taken over his table and desk, the uncarpeted, rarely swept floor. Now they are beginning a similar occupation of his wardrobe, nurturing, if not knowledge, at least the odd beetle as he discovered round 2 a.m last night after being woken by an insistent rustling. Work-a-night creatures on a wage of dog-ears, he hadn’t had the heart to kill them.
And so, yes, for the third day running he is drinking a beverage which he does not want and, given those cancellations, can no longer afford. One espresso picked you up, giving your life as little lift as the advert said. Three or four made you jittery. Again grammatical formulae take a back step and in their place rushes a exercise in Home Economics. The apparent financial pluses of a few days ago turn into a minus. Meanwhile, on the bottom of the fraction, stands the numerical constant of his monthly rent. For ten years in the Middle East the fractions had looked after themselves, more favorable than he could have dreamed. Indeed, he would once happily have forked out a hundred quid for a bottle of forbidden wine. Addition and multiplication had been the order of the day and month; investment was even a favorite staffroom topic as humble teachers turned wheeler-dealers on the stock exchange and dreamed of early retirement in Sri Lanka, Australia or Thailand.
Back here in Europe arithmetic is another matter. His mind reverses three decades and there is Mr Paine, the maths teacher, his nicotine-stained hand applying another twist to Geoff Minor’s ear. ‘Five-hundred-and-sixty-eight minus two-hundred-and-two? Come on, Higgins. It’s not that difficult. Out with it.’ Or whatever other numbers Mr Paine had improvised for his own amusement. ‘‘No, think harder, boy.” Small wonder then that, O level maths once stumbled over with a minimum pass mark, Geoff had opted for Humanities, in particular English Lit., going on to study the same at university with the result that he now taught English Lang. Or ‘sometimes’, ‘occasionally’, ‘seldom’, ‘every so often’ taught it, choose the most appropriate adverbial of frequency, a, b, c or d.
Mr Paine must be well into retirement by now. That or in another world completely as Geoff without the benefits of Dante’s perfect tercets relegates his ex-tormentor to some minor bolgia of the Inferno, his maths teacher/torturer’s ‘contra-passo’ being doomed to count out, say, an eternity of baked potatoes, always dropping the last just before he could round off the sum. So Geoff’s thoughts launch into what, it occurs to him, could be another paragraph…
Putting down his cup, he has not just a title for a story but its first headlong scribble, fact – and the odd bit of fantasy – dressing itself up as fiction. Well, if fact did not pay – at least not recently in his case – maybe fiction would. He dabs at some sugary dregs with the teaspoon and into his head floats the announcement of a Nobel Prize for first time writers of micro-fiction. Sheer vanity, he’d be the first to admit, but the association of presumption with the making of books was as old as Ecclesiastes. Books meaning here, with a lot of luck, the smallest part of one, some anthology for the as yet unpublished. Encouraging himself further, he imagines himself on the short list of one and, for good measure, also on the Selection Committee. Not a million euros as in the Stockholm version, but a few thousand would do. Even three hundred would be ok, that being what he needed by the end of the month if he was to pay his rent. All right, thirty euros then.
Then suddenly, animating his jacket pocket, comes, ‘Brrr, brrr, brrr.’
Dear old Stockholm vanishes down the other end of the mobile phone. Mauro, full-time seller of prohibitively expensive kitchen equipment and occasional part-time learner in a bid to break into the international market, announces not that Geoff has won that prize. No, it’s just, er, to let him know that, sorry, a very important customer has just shown up in his shop. The lesson (which is now three-quarters over) will therefore have to be cancelled. He then proceeds to give Geoff some free practice in the use of the Italian subjunctives by wondering if they might re-arrange the lesson for next week instead.
‘No problem, it doesn’t matter.’ This time, though, Geoff really means it.
‘A dopo allora, ciao,’ Mauro avoids speaking English to the last.
‘Ciao,’ chimes Geoff. Present Perfect Passive, Mauro has been promoted from umpteenth No Show to unwitting muse. Geoff, transferred to the right side of indolence, gets out the notebook battered with too much handling. He crosses out another lesson slot and on the blank page opposite writes ‘LEARNING TO DRINK COFEE SLOWLY.’ Simultaneously comes the thought that once you relax into it, ‘nothing happening’, inverted commas, can be anything but.
A tall dignified figure in black and white, the waiter appears. ‘Un altro caffè, Signore?’ goes a movement of his moustache.
Geoff, to avoid giving up his seat, responds, ‘Thanks, the same again.’ Then after paying, he adds euro for table service.
With an urgency that has nothing to do with cash or rent or grammar, more sentences follow. In his head one moment, on the page the next, they run from his shoulder to his fingertips. And this time no ringing of his mobile phone can stop them. There in sprawling ink is his waiting come good. To the scent of espresso all those stifled minutes are suddenly letting off words ten to the dozen. Let second thoughts, the inevitable revisions and re-revisions, come later. For a few pages, here in the un-pedantic present, the only timetable that matters is his own.