Is it safe to come out, I mean to go in?
Cafe Unfiltered by Jean Philippe Blondel
The emergency phase of Covid19 is over. But the repercussions from the pandemic won’t be disappearing anytime soon. I listened to an interview a few weeks ago with a doctor whose new area of specialization is Long Covid. The book I just read, the book I want to tell you about, Café Unfiltered (New Vessel Press), takes a look at the pandemic through a rear view mirror. It’s not a long view, but at least, it’s a rear view. It’s about that moment when we all, like bears waking up after a long hibernation, tried to find our place in a world that was both reassuringly familiar and disconcertingly different.
I’ve written about artists for whom the confinement itself, that period of enforced isolation, was a gift. A break from their quotidian lives. A time to concentrate on their art, artists like David Hockney and Damien Hirst . What they created was joyful.
I didn’t catch the virus, But I did catch something - the feeling that I was drowning in a sea of stagnant water. I’m talking about that first confinement here in France, when we could leave our homes for an hour a day and go no farther than one km from our residence. During that hour, we were required to carry a dated form on which we had written our name, date of birth, address and time of departure from our residence. A new form was required every day. A friend gave me a pen with erasable ink. So I could use the same paper but change the date (always) and the time (not often). Economical and ecological. I was stopped by a police officer once, he scrutinized the paper and told me that if he caught me a second time with a detectably reused form, I would be fined. In San Francisco, my kids, going through California’s version of Confinement, spent the better part of a very mild winter enjoying picnics in Golden Gate Park. In France, parks were off limits. Walking along the shore was sanctioned but the operational word was walking - no sitting, no loitering.
The authorities estimated that nearly 60% of Parisians left the city for the countryside. Given the demographic of the 16th arrondissement where I lived at the time, the percentage was closer to 90. I couldn’t have gotten sick if I had tried, there was nobody on those ghostly, ghastly, deserted streets to infect me.
I did eventually find something to do beyond waiting for and taking my 60 minute walk along the Seine between Pont Bir-Hakeim and Pont de Grenelle. l researched all the small museums in Paris. By the time the most oppressive part of the confinement was over, I knew a lot more about my adopted city and my museum beat.
Luckily for me, I never suffered from claustrophobia like so many, whose tiny apartments are barely big enough for a bed and a hot plate. The people for whom a café is, in normal times, a living room, a life line. Café Le Tom’s of Café Unfiltered.
This book could be a play. The action takes place in one place and unfolds in the course of one day. It is a random day, in July 2021, unexceptional in every way except that people are once again sitting inside a café, when the idea of doing that was still new and still scary. Most people still preferred sitting outside. Just in case.
The first person we meet is: “Chloé Fournier, 31 years old, Table No. 8, room at the back, to the left, by the picture window” 09h00. Unlike Cheers, the neighborhood bar, where everyone knows your name, the customers here mostly don’t know each other or the café staff. They may say a few words to the waiter or the manager, but they mostly conduct interior conversations with themselves and, by extension, with us.
Chloé describes confinement this way: “All these curfews have accustomed us to behaving like pet mice. At night we scurry around at home, without sticking our noses out.” I felt less like a mouse in my flat than a rat in a maze when I was outside. I would walk for 30 minutes, then stop, turn around and get home before my coach turned into a pumpkin. Chloé calls the 18 months during which Covid upended our lives “a sort of suspended present.” For me, confinement was a sort of suspended animation. We submitted to ever more draconian regulations. Not knowing for how long, not knowing how much more limited our lives might become.
Chloé started coming to the café as soon as it reopened. She gives us hints about what she was doing in Finland before she found herself by herself in her mother’s home, in a small town in France. She keeps mentioning two people who were in her life and aren’t anymore. I imagined a husband, a daughter. I was close about one, not at all about the other. I think you’ll find the ‘reveal’ as surprising as I did.
She says this about the Swedes. Their idea of managing Covid was ‘herd immunity,’‘Natural selection Nordic version” It was, according to Chloé, “a cynical way of handling retirement.” It reminded me of the French scandal some 20 years ago, when a heat wave wiped out a generation of old people in old age homes. They perished in the intense heat. The loss of all those people gave France time to get rid of the worst ‘maisons de retraite’ and equip the others with air conditioning and elevators.
Fabrice, the café manager arrives at 9 a.m., soaking wet from a sudden downpour. Sitting on barstool #1, he reminisces too, about the confinement which might, just might, really be over this time. Talking about Chloé he says, “She inhabits the place” and he is grateful for it, since “..the place definitely needs to be inhabited, after a year and a half of orders and counter-orders, of closures, of reopening with QR codes on the menus and masks…then curfews. I don’t know how it is we’re still standing. Like the healthcare workers, I suppose: because we had no other choice.”
Chloé is our guide to most of the café patrons. She doesn’t know them but she gives us her impressions of them. Eventually we are invited into the heads of the people she describes. They are almost all there to meet someone. One fellow has become famous, Chloé sort of recognizes him. He is there to meet a man with whom he was in love many years ago. He recalls a photo of the two of them in which they tried to strike the same pose that Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassady did in a photo they saw when they were in lycée together. His mind wanders to the girl who took the photo, a girl he tracked down to sad results. Then we are invited into the head of the man he is here to meet. And we learn his side of their shared story.
Chloé describes another couple, a young man with an older woman. She speculates that they are mother and son. Which they are. The older woman shares this about her son - he is much admired by his father, her husband, but it is a sentiment she doesn’t share. Not at all. It’s a shocking revelation for a mother, at least this mother, besotted as she is with her own adorable son. In fact, we learn that she is divorcing this boy’s father because of her revulsion for their son.
We spend time in the heads of the café’s manager, Fabrice. his sole employee, José. And we eavesdrop on their conversations. Fabrice tells José that Chloé doesn’t think he likes her. And we learn why. Jose doesn’t know her, but he has dismissively dumped her into the category of people who fled the small town where they grew up, to move to Paris, to follow their dreams. But who, when they discovered, “they would be stuck in their tiny two room apartment in that shitty building which, yeah, maybe it does overlook the Canal Saint-Martin, but the plumbing is always blocked and the roof creaks,” fled Paris to return to the towns and villages they had abandoned.
I hadn’t thought about that particular moment for a while, but José’s description brought it all back, in vivid detail. When the government announced that roads into and out of Paris would be closed in a few days, people panicked and began fleeing the city. The bottleneck stretched for miles on every ring road and autoroute. People who had homes in the compagne, went there; people whose parents lived in the towns and villages where they grew up, went back home. The rest of us stayed in Paris.
The circle of significant people is complete when Jocelyn, the café’s owner, comes in and through flashbacks and reminiscences, we learn how she came to own this café and why she has decided to give it to Fabrice.
Finally, a new day dawns, connections have been made, voyages have been initiated, loose ends have been tied up. This is a new genre of literature for me, a post pandemic poetic effort to put into words, to make sense of, what we have all just lived through. The reminisces of the characters in this short book and my own sometimes coincided, sometimes collided. I think that wherever you found yourself between February 2020 and July 2021, this slender book will have something to say to you.
Manon, sitting on the terrace sums it up perfectly, “I felt like getting some fresh air. … I hadn’t planned to stop off at a café, … For the last few weeks now, it’s been okay to go where you want, for as long as you want, but my body still seems to be in lockdown, expecting curfews-well, limiting social contact… I have to domesticate it, teach it all over again what the outdoors is, what personal interaction is… I suppose I’m not the only one: a whole host of individuals became recluses and are finding it difficult to open up again.”
With the realities of global warming upon us and threats of World War III, a nuclear war, in front of us, I am actually feeling a bit nostalgic for the time we have all just experienced.
Copyright © 2023 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved
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