Harvard Square

by André Aciman

  “Other sources,” snapped the North African. And before the young man had a chance to cross-examine him, there it was again, as good as new, oiled, rammed, reassembled, and reloaded, louder and more articulate yet: rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  I knew I’d heard his voice many times before at Café Algiers, but on that late Sunday afternoon, the hammering staccato of his words was impossible to ignore. I could tell he knew people were looking over in his direction. He pretended not to notice, but it was clear he was picking his words and buffing his performance, like someone who while speaking to you is looking over your shoulder at the mirror behind you to make sure his hair is well combed. His speech was growing a touch too studied, as were his gestures and the exaggerated pitch of his explosive, out-of-control laughter. Obviously, he liked people to wonder about him. And I was—there was no doubt—wondering about him. I’d never come across anyone like this before. Primitive, yet completely civilisé. He crossed his legs in a very distinguished manner—but the look, the clothes, the hair were a ruffian’s.

  Suddenly I heard him again. Rat-tat-tat.

  “American women are like beautiful manor houses with lovely rooms and lavish art, but the lights are switched off. Americans are not born, they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz, Buick-ersatz. I always know what Americans will say, because they think alike, speak alike, fuck alike.”

  Young Hemingway was listening to this tirade, trying to sneak in a few words edgewise to draw some sense from the diatribe; but there was no stopping the string of invectives that came rattling forth like pellets fed on a bullet belt. Rapid-fire Kalashnikov stuff, G.I. Joe ducking in the trenches with bullets whistling overhead and mud-buried mines exploding underfoot, and all about him senseless strafing and detonations. No sooner had he lambasted the female sex than he took a swipe at human greed, at Mormons, at underpaid Mexican waiters who steal food when the owner isn’t looking, finally taking on NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceauşescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it, all of them big, shameless signs of a world gone completely mad and ersatz. I had never heard such abominable agitprop in my life. The American president he renamed le Boy Scout. “The Italians are rotten thieves. The French will always sell their mothers, throw in their wives, then their sisters; but their daughters they’ll sell you first. As for Arabs, we were infinitely better off as colonies. The only one who understood history was Nostradamus.”

  “Who?”

  “Nostradamus.” No sooner named, than out poured a litany of quatrains predicting one catastrophe after the other. “Nostradamus and the myth of the eternal return.”

  “You mean Nietzsche.”

  “Nostradamus, I said.”

  “How do you know about Nostradamus?”

  “How do I know!” he asked rhetorically. “I know, OK?”—which he pronounced oké?—“Must I teach you everything I know?”

  I couldn’t tell yet whether this was amicable sparring or comic banter about to turn ugly, or if they were engaged in the besotted ramblings of Vladimir and Estragon. But the louder of the two was definitely a cross between Zorba the Greek on steroids and Rameau’s nephew on speed.

  At some point I could no longer resist. I stood up and headed to his table. “I couldn’t help overhearing you. Are you students here?” I asked in French.

  No answer. Just a dismissive shake of the head, immediately followed by that sinister gimlet stare of his, which seemed to ask, And if we are, what business of yours is it, anyway?

  I wanted to say that I hadn’t spoken to a single person, much less in French, for two days, and with Apartments 42, 21, and 43 I traded nothing but distant glances, and frankly this sitting on the roof terrace every day was not good for my soul, and eating by myself was no better, to say nothing of the watered-down swill they called coffee here. But the silence between us was hard to take, because it came with a decidedly hostile stare. I was already preparing to apologize and bow out, saying that I hadn’t meant to interrupt, thinking to myself that I should have known better than to barge in on perfect strangers and expect to make small talk with a street ruffian and his acolyte.

  Before I returned to my table, the words slipped out of my mouth:

  “Sorry to disturb. I just felt like speaking to a Frenchman.”

  Again the stare.

  “Me, French? What are you? Blind? Or is it deaf you are? With my Berber skin? Look here.” And with this he pinched the skin of his forearm. “This, my dear friend, is not French skin.” As though I’d insulted him. He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. “This is the color of wheat and gold.”

  “Sorry, my mistake.”

  I was determined to step back to my table and pick up Montaigne where I’d left him face down.

  “How about you, are you French?” he asked.

  I couldn’t resist.

  “With my nose?”

  He was playing with me. I knew he wasn’t French, just as he must have immediately guessed I wasn’t either. Each was basically letting the other think he could pass for French. A tacit compliment that hit the mark in both of us.

  “How come you speak French if you’re not French?”

  Anyone born in the colonies would have known right away the answer to that. He was definitely playing.

  “For the same reason you speak French,” I replied. He burst out laughing. We understood each other perfectly.

  “Another one of us,” he explained to Young Ernest, who was still trying to sort out what possible importance Nostradamus could have in today’s complex geopolitical conflicts.

  “What do you mean one of us?”

  “Il ne comprend rien du tout celui-là, this guy doesn’t understand a thing,” he said, with typical mock hostility prickling his voice.

  We exchanged names. “You can call me Kalaj,” he said, as though yielding to a public nickname he preferred to his own name, but also because there was a vague suggestion in his voice that one could call him Kalaj “for now”—until, that is, he got to know you better.

  He’d been here for six months only. Before that Milan. This was home now.

  He threw out a word in Arabic at me.

  I threw back another.

  We laughed. We were not testing each other; more like feeling the ground for how to improvise a tentative pontoon bridge.

  “Perfect accent,” he commented, “even if it is Egyptian Arabic.”

  “Yours is difficult to place.”

  “I seldom speak Arabic,” he said, then asked, “Jewish?”

  “Moslem?” I replied.

  “Just like a Jew: always answers with a question.”

  “Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.”

  We were both laughing, while Young Hemingway stared uneasily, thrown off as he was by our chaffing and mock-religious slurs.

  “Why did the Arab store owner buy fifty pairs of jeans from the Jew?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because Isaac promised Abdou to buy them back at a higher price.”

  Laughter.

  “But why did Isaac buy them back in the end?”

  I didn’t know the answer to this either.

  “Because the Arab agreed to sell them at half price.”

  “Did the Arab ever buy blue jeans from the Jew again?” I asked.

  “All the time! You see, the jeans were made in Egypt and cost the Arab a fraction of what the Jew paid for them to begin with.” We laughed heartily.

  “The Middle East!” he said.

  “What do you mean the Middle East?” asked bewildered Hemingway.

  Kalaj ignored the question.

  “Were you waiting for someone?” he asked.

  “No, just reading.”

  “But you’ve been reading for hours. Why don’t you just sit down with us, and we’ll talk a bit? Bring your books.”

  So he had been aware of me all along. He told me about his taxi cab. I told him about my forthcoming comprehensives. We were talking. Talking is what humans like
to do when they’re together, talking is natural. On Sunday afternoons, people talk, laugh, drink coffee. I had almost forgotten that people did this. Before I knew it, he ordered a round of coffee for the three of us. “Talk is good, but someone needs to order coffee,” he said.

  He was, with this round of coffee—and it happened so fast I almost didn’t notice—celebrating me. This blustering volcano is probably kind, I thought. But crafty, ill-tempered, and mad. Stay away.

  I was the exact opposite. Interest in other people came naturally enough; but it came the long way around, with so many bends, hurdles, doubts, and deferrals that halfway toward a friendship, discouragement and disappointment would invariably settle in, and something in me would simply give up.

  Once again, Kalaj ranted against American women. He told us an obscene joke about an Arab who is arrested and beaten by the police for jumping a naked blond woman sunning herself on a deserted beach in North Africa. As they shackle him and pound him with more blows and accuse him of defiling a dead body—“Can’t you see she’s dead?” shouts one of the policemen—all the Arab could do in his defense was to shout back, “But, officers, I thought she was an American.”

  Kalaj pointed to the various women sitting in the café. This one over there wouldn’t speak to him again because he’d refused to use protection. This other one sitting with her beau had turned him down once by saying “I think I’m going to take a pass.” He had never heard such insipid ersatz-speak before, and he repeated the words to us as if he were mouthing a ritual incantation spoken by extraterrestrials: I think I’m going to take a pass. In his rudimentary English the sentence was suddenly exposed for what it was: bland treacle-speak that sounded as artificial and no more capable of passion and arousal than a linoleum tile or a Formica tabletop. He pointed to a tall, slender, model type with a stunning figure. “She thinks I’m about to speak to her, but I’ve seen her come in and out of the bathroom too many times already. She has bathroom problems. Not for me!”

  “What do you mean, not for you?” interjected Young Hemingway, who by now was utterly outraged by such unmitigated misogyny.

  “I mean I wouldn’t neek her with your zeb.”

  He was, as always, aware of every woman in the café. “They’re here for one reason only, and that reason is us three.” Young Hemingway asked him why he didn’t make a move if he was so sure. “Too soon.” The only people I’d heard speak this way were fishermen. They look at the sky, gauge the wind, the clouds, have a sixth sense about things, then when you least expect it, they’ll say, “Now!” The woman with the slender figure had just cast a look at our table. With absolutely no discretion, Kalaj began to chuckle out loud, “She looked!” We caught a smile ripple on her face.

  There are two kinds of men about town in France: flâneurs and dragueurs. As becomes obvious in no time, la drague—cruising—is not a hobby, not a science, not an art, not even a question of odds and probabilities. With him it was the perfect alignment of will with desire. His desire for a woman was so relentless that it would never cross his mind that a woman might not desire him back. He never doubted that a woman wanted him. They all did. As far as he was concerned, all women wanted all men. And vice versa. What stood in the way between a man and a woman at Café Algiers was a few chairs, a table, maybe a door—material distance. All a man needed was the will and above all the patience to wait out a woman’s scruples or help her brush them aside. As in a game of penny poker, he explained, all that matters was simply the will to keep raising the pot by a single penny each time; a single penny, not two; a single penny was easy, you wouldn’t even feel it; but you had to wait for her to raise you by a penny as well, which is when you’d raise her by another, she by yet another, and so on. Seduction was not pushing people into doing things they did not wish to do. Seduction was just keeping the pennies coming. If you ran out, then, like a magician, you twirled your fingers and pulled one out from behind her left ear and, with this touch of humor, brought laughter into the mix. In the space of fifteen minutes one morning, I saw him offer a woman a cinquante-quatre—a fifty-four-cent cup of coffee, tax included—put his arm around her each time he burst out laughing, and be off with her.

  “But don’t get me wrong. In the end it’s always the woman who chooses you, not the other way around—always the woman who takes the first step.”

  “What about all this bit about raising them with a penny each time?” asked Young Hemingway.

  “That was bunk,” Kalaj replied.

  “And Nostradamus, then?”

  “Bunk too.”

  His friend stood up to go to the bathroom, huffing, “Nostradamus—really!”

  No sooner has he left our table than Kalaj said, “I can’t stand this guy.”

  “I thought you were friends.”

  Dismissive smirk again. “With that face of his? Are you serious?”

  Suddenly, Kalaj put on a pouting face, stared intently at his cup, meditated on its shape, and began spinning the cup ever so slowly on its saucer. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing. He was mimicking Young Hemingway’s way of pondering every syllable coming out of Kalaj’s mouth. I burst out laughing. He laughed as well.

  AT CAFÉ ALGIERS, people dubbed him Che Guevara or el révolutionnaire, but mainly they called him Kalaj, short for Kalashnikov. “Have you seen Kalaj?” they’d say. Or: “Kalaj is haranguing the brotherhood of man over at Casablanca.” It meant he is arguing about politics in Cambridge’s most popular bar. Or: “Kalaj shouldn’t be long, it’s almost l’heure du thé, teatime,” some of the regulars would say to make fun of how ill-suited he was for anything resembling the ritual civility of five o’clock tea. Sometimes you could even hear him arguing with someone on his way to the café, always loud and contentious. “Our soldier approaches,” one of the waitresses would say. Told he shouldn’t argue so much, he’d snap back and say “I wasn’t arguing.”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “It’s how I talk. I can’t change how I talk. It’s who I am.”

  And out sputtered louder protestations yet: he was no hush-hush, privacy-enamored ersatz American. Nor was he the simpering, self-effacing, you do your thing, I’ll do mine, and let’s all get along fine type who thronged the bars and coffeehouses of Harvard Square. Not who I am, he’d repeat, emphatically, as if this were the simplified version of a complicated syllogism he’d picked up years ago in a crash course on identity, chatter, and wit in some working-class café on rue Mouffetard in Paris where your nickname is branded on your forehead, your clothes, and your feet. Everything I am and everything I feel is written on my face. I am a man—you understand?

  He excelled at tawdry existential fluff and superannuated clichés pawned off like darned-up hand-me-downs that had just enough bluster to spirit another generation of deadbeat combatants from who knows what battlefield—anything to impress a woman listening in on his conversation at the moment.

  And listen in is what most women did. They were there at Café Algiers that first day I saw him, listening at every corner. But it took me weeks to realize that everything he was, said, and did was intended to accomplish one thing only: to rouse a woman’s interest—any woman’s. Everything was show, everyone knew it, and everyone fell in with it. Identity as performance, courtesy Café Mouffetard. Sometimes a costume was all the identity you needed. Anger itself, like passion, like laughter, like his most ineradicable beliefs, was, when all was said and done, for show.

  Sometimes.

  Sometimes, after a near squabble had been averted between him and Moumou, an Algerian regular at Café Algiers, I’d draw my chair closer to his and try to tidy things over by saying something as hackneyed as “He didn’t mean a thing by it.” “He meant every last word of it,” he would say, raising his voice as though about to start an argument with me now. One had to be patient with him, yield a bit, reason a bit, give him the breathing space he needed to let off steam, because steam, vapors, fumes he had plenty to let off. Zeinab, the
waitress who was also Tunisian and who had a temper of her own, especially with customers when they didn’t tip well or asked for too many refills or more variations on the café’s bare-bones menu than she wished to remember, would become sweetness itself when she saw him flare up with one or another regular there. “Oui, mon trésor, oui, mon ange, yes, my treasure, yes, my angel,” she would whisper, and whisper again, as if smoothing down the ruffled hair on a cat that had just seen a mean dog. You didn’t argue with him when he got that way; you simply said something sweet and soothing. “I know exactly how you feel, I know, I know,” I’d say, until it was time to speak reason, “but how do you know he meant what he said?” I’d whisper. “I just know, oké ?” Oké here meant, End of argument. Go no further. Get it? I didn’t always know how to tame his temper. Oké was his way of nipping what could easily erupt into a squabble between us as well. “Why be so sure?” I’d whisper, all the while trying to press the point and show there was no risk of our ever getting into an argument but also to make him see things from what the rest of the world calls another perspective—a totally foreign concept to him. In his world, there was not and was never going to be another perspective. When we couldn’t arrive at a consensus, he’d look away from me and say, “Leave it alone, I said.” Silence. And he’d right away order a fifth cup of coffee. “Leave. It. Alone,” he’d repeat.

  To emphasize the silence that had dropped like a deadweight between us, he’d quietly pick up the emptied cup before him, remove the spoon, which he’d always leave inside when drinking coffee, and place it neatly and deliberately on the cup’s saucer, as if trying to straighten things up and bring order in his life. It was his way of saying See, you’ve upset me, I’m trying to compose myself. You shouldn’t have said what you just said. A moment later, he’d be all laughter and jokes again. A woman had walked into the café.

  Kalaj’s place at Café Algiers was always the same. Center table—not just to be seen, but to know exactly who was coming in or stepping out. He liked to sit inside, never outside, and, like almost everyone born and raised on the Mediterranean, preferred the shade to sunlight. “This is where Kalashnikov takes position, aims, and fires,” said Moumou, who, like Kalaj, was also a cabdriver and loved to tease him, the way an Algerian and a Tunisian like to chafe at each other before their taunts degenerate into a full-fledged tussle of words—which invariably happened when one or the other or both lost their tempers. “Either he sits there with his Kalashnikov between his knees waiting for you to make a false move or he’ll smoke you out, pin you down, and then, when you least expect it, bellyache you to death about his women, his visa, his teeth, his asthma, his monk’s cell on Arlington Street where his landlady won’t allow him to bring women upstairs because he makes them scream—did I leave anything out? A Kalashnikov with perfect night vision. You name it, he shoots it down.” Their arguments and taunts were legendary, epic, operatic. Kalaj would say, “I’ve got the eyes of a lynx, the memory of an elephant, the instincts of a wolf . . .” “. . . and the brain of a tapir,” would interrupt his nemesis, the Algerian. “You, on the other hand,” Kalaj would retort, “have the looks and sneaky bite of a scorpion, but you’re a scorpion without a tail, a tail without venom, a quiver without arrows, a fiddle without strings—shall I go on, or do you get my drift?” he’d say, alleging the Algerian’s notorious failure to achieve an erection. “At least this scorpion here will take anyone to the top of the mountain—ask around!—whereas with you, they’ll barely scale a tiny molehill, give out a courteous little yelp to torment the old lady’s sleep, and seldom come back. I can go on if you wish . . .” would come the Algerian’s not so oblique reference to Kalaj’s marriage that scarcely lasted a fortnight. “Yes, but during those few moments up that tiny molehill I’ve done things you can’t even remember doing since you were twelve years old, despite all the horse pills I hear you take four times a day that will do more for your bunions than for the little pinkie the good Lord gave you and which you wouldn’t know what to do with except put it in your ear.” “Shush, everyone,” the Algerian would interrupt when the place was more or less empty in the early morning and their jibes were not likely to disturb customers, “Monsieur Kalashnikov is going to impugn my manhood—speak to him if you dare, but wear a bulletproof vest.” “Oh, it’s our Arab comedian coming out of his magic lamp, fart end first,” Kalaj would retaliate, putting down yesterday’s Le Monde, which he picked up every day for free from the international newspaper stand on Harvard Square because it was already twenty-four hours old and no one else wanted it.