Around 7:30 in the morning, in a bar whose name I’m not sure I ever knew, in a town of four thousand people in the middle of Italy, my Australian flatmate looked at me with the kind of enthusiasm only someone from the southern hemisphere can manage when they discover they can have coffee early in a place that looks like it came out of a Pasolini film. He wanted to see it — the ritual, the pause, a European who sits and breathes between the night and the work. I just wanted to not freeze.
I came prepared, or at least I wrongly thought I had. Already when I left the airport (and it was warm, seven degrees Celsius) I realized the clothes in my suitcase might just about do it. Anyway… A base layer, a shirt, a sweater, a coat, a beanie, one of those neck gaiter things from Inter Milan, bought alongside an advent calendar full of small chocolates from a discount shelf at Conad, also known as the section for items nobody wants but that might still find some unexpected buyer. Another base layer on my legs, jeans, two pairs of socks, regular sneakers (the ones you bring precisely to walk enormous amounts across Europe, and that in the end just leave your feet numb) and gloves. And still, Jesus, it was cold.
There were a few rail workers from somewhere nearby, I assume from the local station, though I could be wrong, because Marche has the quality of always being near something without being exactly in anywhere. The tracks were there as a mere geographical fact, and the men inside the bar were eating something in a silence I can only describe as sepulchral, though not because it was contemplative or because it was the poetic pause my flatmate had hoped to find, but the silence of people who had woken up, figuratively, two minutes ago, and had not yet reintegrated the awareness that they existed, that they were in a body, and that such body was hungry. We ate and left.
What he wanted, I think, was the version of Italy that gets written about. That is, the one where stopping for coffee is a small act of civilization and the espresso at the counter is a brief, precise, almost moral declaration that the body deserves at least this much before the day begins. There is a version of Italy where that is true. I have seen it, later, in other hours, in other light. But at 7:30 in February in a town of four thousand people, what we found was something else: function, stripped of ceremony. Hot liquids. A body crossing the threshold from frozen to merely cold. A man in a vest eating his cornetto without looking at it.
But the myth was not wrong, it was just not there. And the distinction that a myth can be geographically accurate and still miss the room you are standing in took me a while to understand.
The coffee itself is worth a moment. However, not the drink itself, but the institution that it involuntarily creates. Because in Italy the coffee at the counter is one thing: fast, standing, two sips, done, a punctuation mark in the day rather than a sentence. In Portugal, where you might sit down and the bar has a different weight, it is already something else. And in Brazil it becomes “café da manhã,” which is, if you think about it, a coffee happening in the morning, named for the drink and the time of day and nothing else. No reference to anything it might be smaller than. No hierarchies present.
The Portuguese say “pequeno-almoço.” Small lunch. A word that carries its own diminishment, since there is a ‘real’ lunch, and this is its lesser version. Poetically, a ghost showing up too early. Something is being acknowledged there, perhaps it’s a structure maintained even in miniature since you’re not having breakfast; you are having a small version of the thing that actually matters, which comes later, at noon, with weight, duration and the full attention of the day.
In Brazil the word for that thing (the noon thing) is just “almoço.” It exists, yes. But something else has gone missing. Because the café da tarde, the late afternoon coffee that used to mark the end of the working hours and the beginning of the evening, that pause between the afternoon and the night — that has simply disappeared. Without a magical touch, it just stopped being a thing people had time for. Interestingly, this ‘compression’ didn’t stop at lunch and moved into the only space that was left.
And this is where I find myself uncertain, because I do not want to say (and I will not say) that Italians have figured something out that Brazilians haven’t. That would be too easy and also wrong. The rail workers in that bar were not there because they had decided, consciously, that their bodies deserved a warm drink before a day on the tracks. They were there because it was 7:30 and the bar was open and this is what you do. Structure, not wisdom. Habit, not philosophy. The Italian who takes two hours for lunch is not making a statement about the dignity of the body, he is doing what happens at 1pm in Italy, which is that you eat, because everything closes, because everyone else is eating, because the structure does not offer another option.
The executive in São Paulo who eats in twenty-three minutes at his desk is also not making a statement. He is doing what happens at 12:15 in an open-plan office in Pinheiros, which is that you eat fast, because the meeting is at 1, because eating slowly feels like something you have to justify, because the structure rewards the compression and calls it discipline or productivity.
Neither of them is choosing — they are both inside something much older than choice.
This conclusion renders a third person, so far unacknowledged, who eats in their car, more honest in a way, than either of them. Because at least that person is not pretending the meal is a pause. The car eater has simply accepted that the category of pause does not apply to them, that the time between tasks is not time for anything except the next task, that hunger is a mere logistical problem and the sandwich is the solution and the car is where the solution gets implemented. There is no ritual to degrade because no ritual was ever on offer. For the sake of the argument, we’ll call him American.
This is the version that wins, but not for being better, but because it is the most frictionless. There is no “performance” there; it asks nothing of the space around it. It requires no bar, no chair, and ultimately no particular hour. It is completely portable, completely compressible, completely invisible. You cannot miss something you have no word for. It is, too, very lazy and reprehensible.
Now, semantically speaking, there is an interesting edge to be discussed: “Pequeno-almoço”, for instance, at least mourns its own existence in its own way. “The smallness is an admission”; “This is not the real thing”. In Brazil, where the afternoon coffee was lost without ceremony, there is no word for its absence. You cannot point to the gap because the gap has no name. You cannot say I want back the pause at five in the afternoon that my grandmother had and my mother had less of and I have never had because there is no compact way to say it plus no word that carries that specific loss.
When a thing loses its name it becomes harder to want back. Harder to notice missing. Harder, even, to grieve.
We ate and then we left. Outside the cold was the same cold as before, which is to say absolute and indifferent and not interested in what we had come looking for. The rail workers went wherever rail workers go at 7:45 in February in the vicinities of Macerata, Marche. My flatmate said something about the coffee being good, which it was, which was not the point, which was also entirely the point.
I have thought about that bar since then, though not often, but at specific moments. When I eat at my desk, at first, then when I eat standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down feels like a commitment I cannot make. When I eat in the car, which I do very rarely, while I try go through it mechanically so I don’t have to think about too carefully and, inevitably, ponder over how I even would choose to do it. I think about the silence of those men and how it was not the silence of people at peace, and also how it was not the silence of people who were suffering. It was just the silence of people who were doing what you before manual labor, in a ‘random’ bar, before going to the tracks.
Whether they knew they were inside an institution, I cannot say. I’m not sure I do, either.
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