They called
him a lotus eater. At least I did. The name came from a short story by Somerset
Maugham and told of a man who chose to settle on a remote island to see his life
to the very end. He had his savings and he was determined to never work again.
The man had it all planned out, and on the final day, when the money and the
food supplies were supposed to run dry, he would shoot himself in the face.
This, however, did not happen, as when the final day arrived, the man could not
pull the trigger. He chickened out, and was reduced to spending the rest of his
life as a beggar. I may have misplaced a few details here and there, but this
is the rough outline of one of Somerset Maugham's better stories.
My lotus
eater was not a beggar. After all, every Wednesday he came to one of the best
bars in the city to have a drink. The drink was whisky sour. The man never
actually had to order his drink because the moment he got to his stool (third
from right, which mysteriously remained vacant even when the bar was crammed
with a hundred people), the barman knew the size of the cube he was supposed to
carve out of a huge block of ice. Occasionally, there may have been two solemn,
barely visible nods, one denoting a question and one denoting an answer.
"The
usual, sir?"
"Sure".
But I never
heard him speak, except once. When he finished his drink, and it usually took
him from forty-five minutes to an hour, he simply placed one ten-dollar bill on
the bar counter, grabbed his hat and his cigarettes and left. Sometimes, again,
there was a nod, but you had to be a regular like me to register a minute
ripple in the air that was vomiting clouds of dense, thread-like smoke.
And then
there were rumours. These rumours were summoned by the quiet whispers uttered
by invisible barmen when they got sick of talking about Bitches Brew and the dead shadows of their ex-girlfriends. They
said, for instance, that once there had been risky investments reaping great
returns, and lots of them, but there had also been a few bankruptcies.
Eventually, he shut it all down and was currently living off the money left
after the devastating court cases. "Just like that lotus eater", I
whispered back through my cigarette and was met with a stare both ignorant and
polite. I did not question the story as it made perfect sense to me, and in a
bar, late at night, you agree with whatever doesn't kill your thought process.
The barman suggested that the man was probably trying to ration the whole thing
now, what with one whisky and four cigarettes, and the memories of the Maugham
story came flooding back.
One whisky
and four cigarettes: that was his routine. I believe that my interest in this
man was first expressed when I noticed the strange pattern that never got
broken. The single variation could be the gap between cigarettes that was
relatively random, even though he never failed to synchronise the last drag
with the final sip of whisky sour (terribly watery, as I knew from my
old-fashioned, yet totally irresistible). In other words, you knew the exact
succession as well as the fact that he would not stay longer than one hour.
After which he would put on his felt hat, pull up the grey trousers and be
gone. And more often than not he would remain unnoticed all the way through.
But then if you ask me, only a dead soul could miss a lone guy at a bar counter
staring at the latest new cocktail chalked on the board and never actually
bothering to order it.
And,
indeed, only a dead soul could overlook the fact that his trousers were two
sizes too big and that he was wearing black suspenders strapped over his
impeccably white shirt. Suspenders were significant as I always believed that
they had once belonged to the original lotus eater. Besides, they were the sort
of thing that was worn either by tiresome hipsters or people whose midnight
croon you were dying to hear (something told me he could do justice to
Coltrane's Ballads that were often
played in the bar).
I did of course
want to talk to him, oh numerous times, but equally I never imagined the
conversation. To be able to project, to have an impression, you need a sample,
something to go by. I never had that sample, or rather, when I did, it was too
late... Also, and I realise how odd this may sound, I was afraid to disturb
some balance. I did not want to be that butterfly that always has to clap its
wings with such mindless effrontery and with such intense silence. Or else I
did not want to spoil my Wednesdays in the bar, of which there were suddenly
more and more.
All those
questions I wanted to ask him, from his past to the size of his trousers, they
all had to be stored away indefinitely. Besides, there was no way for me to
start that conversation without making a complete fool of myself (human
nature's biggest nightmare), even if I was sitting right next to the smell of
his strangely odorless Dunhill. So that I was reduced to looking at the way the
barman cut the block of ice into perfect cubes and distributing them among the
glasses touched with bitters and sugar. I knew through the corner of my eye
that he was equally enchanted by it. After all, the process was much more
intricate than the mixing part that, when you got the hang of it, seemed
arbitrary. "That's some skill, you don't find?" "Haven't I seen
you here before once?" "These barmen are the absolute business!"
"Fuck the weather tonight". Etc. All of it seemed fake, none of it
had a remote chance of success, and as the ice melted I realised the futility
of breaking it with my clumsy attempts. Still, I was obsessed.
As for that
one time I did hear him speak, it happened in late January. The Christmas tree
was still there, purposeless and abandoned, and there were just a few people
inside due to the storm outside which for once amounted to something
bigger than average media overreaction. Apart from early Monk and the clinking
of the ice, the only sound was coming from a young couple talking in the
corner. Everything else was quiet and stately, coated with crooked fingers of
smoke.
It had the
feel and the look of the first date. You could see it in the initial silence.
You could even see it in the way the girl was holding her glass, which was all
wrong as her wrist was too tight. These two, they must have been here by
accident, and I've seen chance drifters like that a million times. They come
and they order cheesecakes only to find out that the place does not sell any
cheesecakes. Or, alternately, they never get to the point of ordering as they
see the in-crowd and walk out. Or else they hear the music, which is usually
Ornette Coleman when they come. This couple, however, they may have been pushed
here by the weather but they chose to stay. And by staying they talked.
In a bar,
your conversation has to be fulfilling yet utterly meaningless. It is not fed
with words but with sips of various lengths and pitches. Like everything that
has any value, this conversation cannot be taught but comes with time. The
young couple had no such time and they were doing it the wrong way. They were
talking in punchlines, they were in desperate need of making sense. They were modern. They were loud,
too, which in a bar is anything above audible.
The lotus
eater was sitting to the right of me, doing the familiar routine of one whisky
sour and four Dunhills, gazing at empty space as though it had molecules and
atoms that did not add up and made visible shapes and figures instead. As if
the conversation, conspicuous to the point where the barman was supposed to
make a polite remark, was not happening in his timeline. But it was, and at
first I could not for the life of me figure out how it happened that I heard
his voice. To this day I cannot believe that at some point between cigarettes
number three and four he spoke to Thelonious Monk or to God or to the block of
ice which had been transferred from the fridge seconds ago:
"You
shouldn't be with her, you know. She is not your type".
Which was
five seconds followed by absolute silence. We all know how it happens:
disbelief at first, then it sinks in. All the air is sucked out of the room and
suddenly you notice something you have never noticed before. Like that carved,
opulent pattern on your old-fashioned glass. Then, thirty seconds later, you
admit to yourself that the words have indeed been spoken and everyone has heard
them right. And slowly the room hums back to its former self and that is no one
else but Sonny Rollins playing in the background.
Having said
what he did, the man smoked his fourth cigarette, finished his cocktail, placed
a ten-dollar bill on the counter, picked up his hat and left. His voice? Just
the kind of husky baritone I had always imagined.
His own
words had no effect on him and might have easily been written off as my drunken
fantasy but I knew there was more to it. The young couple had changed. Their
conversation was all but dead. Some new tension, horribly asexual, had
punctured their whisper, and suddenly they looked random and even more out of
place. Like those chance drifters, like someone who came to see the Christmas
tree that was not even supposed to be there. It was half an hour later that the
young man paid in silence and they left.
As I did,
too, at my usual time.
This
happened a while ago now, and I only remembered it yesterday, when a barman
leaned towards me and asked how the drink was. I looked up in disbelief as it
was not the sort of question you should ever be asked in a bar. But it was a
new barman, and I nodded. Of course. Of course, it was good. I asked him if it
was his first day and he said that he had been working in that bar for over a
month now and had seen me numerous times. I was a bit stunned but then it could
easily be explained. After all, you can talk to a barman, but you are not
supposed to see him. Now I did and his face was saying nothing to me. And then,
completely out of the blue, he asked about the old times and how well I
remembered them.
"Pretty
well", I said.
"I was
just wondering if you'd seen the man who used to come here once a
week...".
And I knew straight
away whom he meant. I hadn't really seen him since the time when he talked, but
that had nothing to do with him. It was me. I had stopped coming to that bar
for reasons perhaps connected with work or some other matters. It must have
happened immediately after the incident. And then, when I did come back years
later, the man was gone.
"You
are talking about the lotus eater, aren't you?"
"Sorry,
sir?"
I realised
now that I hadn't thought about the man in years, and now this new barman, of
all people, was telling me about him. And I kept listening as I kept
remembering.
"Oh
God. How?"
"Hanged
himself in his apartment. I thought you knew - this was a few years back. And
no one knows why. Apparently the man was an absolute legend. Every great bar
should have one, you know".
"I
guess".
He then
asked me a few questions but there was not a lot I could say as I was too
easily distracted every time the tune changed or the door was swung open.
So it was
after this conversation that I began thinking about the lotus eater again. I
was looking at the clumsy way the new barman was cutting the ice and I was
wondering why all those years ago, when we heard that
baritone, husky and old, neither of us could get it out of our system. And why
I was sitting here on a Wednesday evening. And why it was mid-January and they
no longer had a Christmas tree.
