A Café Memory

Above the fireplace hang prints by Howard Pyle, N.C. and Andrew Wyeth. The Flying Dutchman defiantly leaning on deck. A marooned pirate between adventures. A gentleman standing alone in a simple bedroom.

Massive burlap bags of coffee beans from Brazil, Columbia, and Costa Rica are stacked in the roasting room to my right. There’s a steady stream of people all morning. The tables fill, half of people with agendas or meetings or romances to nourish, the other half here for the coffee and wifi, ear buds and head sets isolating them just enough to be somewhere else.

I was tapping away on my MacBook, no different than anyone else in a crowded cafe.

Never like dripped coffee. I became a coffee lover, not after graduating from a generic chain using Italian numbers for coffees, but from regular visits to small cafés in Lisbon (spent five years there), where ordering coffee was vital and a bit complicated.

Most expats wanted to blend in as much as possible. As important as learning Portuguese was knowing how to correctly order coffee.

Um galão escuro was the morning drink – a tall glass of steamed milk rich with fat and two shots of espresso. Tasted like chocolate. Mid-morning we took breaks and went for um bica or um café duplo, then a cappucino after lunch, then mid-afternoon another break for um pingado, and either another bica or cappucino after dinner. Coffee was how you functioned 18 hours a day.

You never ordered a cappuccino before lunch or a galão after noon. And you were regarded better if you began with Eu gostaria (I would like) instead of the mildly rude Eu quero (I want). The ritual of ordering was also about manners.

Yesterday I found that photograph of Vanessa. My calendar shows we met twenty-five years ago, in a Lisbon café, two expats from different countries in an old city bustling its way into modernity.

On the back of the photograph was her family’s address in Paris, something I hadn’t noticed until I was digging through old photographs trying to find the picture of her with the broad-rimmed beige hat and those eyes that used to capture me.

That morning she turned around after ordering. “You are American, no?”

“Yes, I am,” I stammered. I had seen her before breeze by me on the streets. Friends had said I would inevitably meet this woman in from Paris, and there we were.

It started with coffee that morning, two strangers at first, eyeing each other with equal parts suspicion and attraction, ordering galãos in our best version of Portuguese.

There were other pictures – of Vanessa and I at dinners and beaches and castles and cliffs – but the picture of her with that small smile and beige hat in a garden always got me.

I can’t remember all of the details of what wrong, then right and then wrong again. Only that I had left things badly, recklessly confident that there would always be another chance to make things right again.

I stared at the blank page on my screen. Tipped back the espresso and tuned out the music and chatter from the other tables and began tapping.

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