A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

“You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
Bill Gorton to Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Last summer, shortly after I returned from England, I got to go back to Europe and got to observe a unique species of Romantic European lifestyle: café culture. By café culture I mean people leisurely sipping wine or espresso at little metal tables spread across the sidewalk in the narrow alleys, the broad avenues, and the wide plazas of France and Spain. Café culture had fascinated me ever since I had read Ernest Hemingway’s impossibly perfect short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Then, when I read his full length novel The Sun Also Rises, the idea of a café intrigued me even more. When I set off for France and Spain, I tried to observe and immerse myself in café culture, but I found it quite difficult.
As an American, I had trouble with café culture because the concept is so alien to American mainstream culture. In America, we eat quickly, ask for the check before the meal has even arrived, and hurry on to our next important event. We talk on cell phones instead of to the person sitting across from us. Waitpersons try to rush you out, eager to make another tip as quickly as possible. In America we also seem to have a paranoia of eating or drinking alone. Look around a restaurant and see how many people dine alone. Sure, we all know about those old men alone at the bar, but we look at them with a mixture of embarrassment and pity and wonder why these men have to “drink alone.” We seem to believe that sitting alone in a public place is a sign of weakness and an empty, marginalized life.
The situation is completely different in Europe. In France and Spain I marveled at the number of individual people sitting at their small tables—old, young, men, women, rich, poor. Drinking or dining alone does not suggest that these people are in any way pathetic. Rather, these people have a simple security in themselves. They do not worry about appearing “lonely.” They simply want to have a meal or a drink and have a perfect security and serenity in themselves. Sometimes they read newspapers, but sometimes they just sit, perhaps thinking, or perhaps just observing life. Many of the more well-dressed men and well-heeled women do bring out their palm pilots and place them atop their ever-present package of cigarettes. But while they may check these devices once in a while, they do so discreetly, slowly, and quietly.
Many of these French and Spanish people can make a tiny demitasse cup of espresso or one glass of wine last for an hour. We in America are so accustomed to speed, that, try as I might, I could not make my beverages last as long as the natives did. In Europe they still know how to simply sit, enjoying and savoring each sip and each piece of pleasant conversation. Friends move in and out, people come and go with various degrees of greeting, and still these people can sit with their wine, coffee, and cigarettes, perfectly at ease with the velocity of the world.
We reached the town of Arles, France, where the café immortalized above by Van Gogh still exists. I have to say that it is just as beautiful today, in person, as it appears in the painting. Van Gogh expertly captured something in the way that the light moves and the bumpy cobblestoned street. The tinkle of glasses and china still creates a gentle murmur that mingles with soft plashes from a nearby fountain. I wanted to sit at that café and blend in with the Europeans and have a quiet cup of coffee by myself. I wanted to make an experiment of it—could I really slow down that much? The answer was no. Somehow, I did not yet have the confidence, the essential French attitude.
But last Friday night, not in France, but in Albuquerque New Mexico, I found the French attitude. I decided to go hear my favorite local band play—they play a style of Gypsy jazz that immediately transports you back to 1950s Paris. I sat, all by myself, at a table on the softly lit patio and made two glasses of Gewurztraminer and a small plate of crostinis last for two and a half hours. I had put on a fabulously sexy little black dress which I don’t get the opportunity to wear very often. I sat there in the warm, soft night listening to the fantastically French jazz in my chic outfit. I felt confident, cool, sexy, and entirely European. Within the year since I had visited France, I had somehow found the confidence, security, and serenity to sit alone listening to some romantic music, enjoying and savoring some wine, and feeling neither self-conscious nor hurried. Instead of imagining the passersby ask, “Why is she sitting alone?” I imagined them making the French observation: “What a chic and attractive young woman.”
I think I can sum up the essential difference between the American and European experience of cafes: in America, restaurants/cafes are somewhere to go. In Europe, restaurants/cafes are somewhere to be. I challenge all of you out there to put on a fabulous outfit and go, alone, to your favorite local spot, slow down, have a glass of wine of cup of coffee, and just try to be.