The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  •

  It’s in relation to The Hills’s art collection that another of the regulars, Tom Sellers, comes into the picture. Tom Sellers is the polar opposite of the Pig. Sellers was in Düsseldorf and Cologne (right place) at the right time, and became a figure in the scene around Kippenberger, so they say. Sellers has always denied that: such Kippenberger connections are double-edged swords. Sellers has never been an artist himself; he’s not interested. But like everyone who was a “figure” in “the scene around Kippenberger,” he carries a hint of the aura from there, and he certainly knows several of the other “figures” from the scene—meaning he also has access to this piece or that, which most people do not. A good number of the best works donated over the past fifteen to twenty years are hanging here thanks to Tom Sellers. It was he who gave us the simple little Werner Tübke drawing of a foot hung above one end of the bar. His crowning glory is the tiny Victor Hugo watercolor of an octopus above a castle in the Rhine Valley, made using soot, coffee, and coal dust. Through his donations, Sellers has built up a considerable amount of goodwill here. His contributions, however, come with a sidecar, a protuberance, an avec—a pendant of slacking, disorder, and unruliness. But there’s a place for that at The Hills. We should be tolerant here, says M. Hill, the General Manager. I do agree. Some days I don’t.

  There are also portraits of past regulars on the walls. In addition to being a personality (finance, culture, academia), you also have to spend both time and a pretty penny here. The actor (blown, bankrupt) hasn’t qualified for a portrait, and considering the fines he was given after the forgery scandal, the question remains how much he’ll be able to spend in the future. A portrait of the Pig also glitters in its absence, but for other reasons: the Pig offered a polite no when the General Manager suggested it may be time for a portrait. The Pig has good taste. He’s certainly interested in art. Rumor has it he has a wonderful Kittelsen at home. “You know,” the Pig said to M. Hill, according to the Bar Manager, “when you’ve studied Carl Larsson’s dry points like I have all these years, well, it’s a bit tricky to find a portrait artist who . . . well, you understand. You know . . . now, today. But thank you.”

  YOUNG LADY

  THE LATECOMER STILL HASN’T ARRIVED when I serve the Pig’s meal.

  “Would you be so kind as to check whether our friend has made an appearance in the cloakroom? A young girl . . . lady,” he says quietly.

  “Certainly,” I say.

  The Pig pulls out his phone and shows me a picture of the girl. Very unlike the Pig. What kind of tastelessness is this? There’s a small queue by the cloakroom desk. They’re all older, and men. Since “young” and “girl . . . lady” is the description, it doesn’t look good. Old Pedersen is handling men’s jacket after men’s jacket.

  “Is there anyone here to meet Mr. Graham?” I ask. Four don’t react, and one shakes his head. I ask Pedersen, but he hasn’t seen anyone. I go out onto the street and look towards the tram stop, then down in the direction of Parliament. My eyes move over the so-called dance hole, a small dip in the ground in which old Widow Knipschild once tripped. She stumbled and had to take long steps to avoid falling, swinging her arms from side to side like some kind of razzle-dazzle, hence the name “dance hole”; all the waiting staff saw it. It’s late November, and though it’s a glorious day, I can’t quite take it in. Habit is like a blanket which settles over the nature of things, so they say. The city is colorless despite the brilliant autumn sun, always the same, banal.

  “I didn’t find her.”

  “Hmm.”

  The Pig grants himself a slow sip of white burgundy. Blaise’s eyes are fixed on him.

  “Let me know if there’s anything else,” I say.

  In the thirteen years I’ve worked here, I’ve never seen anyone be short-tempered or unpleasant in the Pig’s company, but Blaise is speaking to the Pig with a firm tone now. And the Pig, who couldn’t by any means be described as yielding or weak, is making a series of apologetic gestures. Eventually, at 2:22, Blaise stands up so abruptly that his chair toots against the floor; he throws down his linen napkin and walks towards the exit with stiff, business administration steps. I glance at the Bar Manager to make sure she has seen it—she has, like always—before I move forward and cross a line by placing my hand between the shoulder blades of a slightly flustered Pig. Katharina is still sitting, stabbing at the nuts and seeds before she mechanically puts her things back into the handbag and silently gets up.

  “Is everything OK here?”

  “Indeed,” says the Pig.

  “Would you like anything else?”

  “No thank you. I’ll take the bill.”

  The Pig plucks at his wad of cash and Vanessa clears the table, slightly too soon, slightly too hectically. None of the three have finished their meal, and the white burgundy will have to be poured away; the bottle is still half full of golden drops. I take that job: I’m happy to pour white burgundy down the drain. Grape juice from Aloxe-Corton vanishes into the sewer. The Pig remains in his seat with one soft hand on top of the other, waiting for me to return with the change that he is only going to give back to me anyway, but I let him continue his little ritual of pushing the change dish towards me and saying “You keep that,” after which I will thank him deeply for the tip, the Trinkgeld, which was traditionally money the waiter could use to drink at the end of his shift. But I don’t drink much, and my shifts go on and on. The Pig shakes down one trouser leg and goes out with his slightly warped back.

  “Not every day the Pig gets stood up,” says the Bar Manager.

  “You can say that again,” I say.

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “I don’t like first times.”

  •

  As though on cue, the Maître d’ appears. He’s always on the scene whenever there’s a whiff of trouble. “What’s going on?” he asks. He’ll snoop now. He has to be in control. He thinks he owns the place, possibly because his father used to be the Maître d’ here, and his father before him. I tell him the truth, with a neutral face, that I’m not sure. He stares at me for a long moment and, like usual, slowly brings his big face closer to mine. As a rule, a child’s face is a pure, rounded surface, the bearer of symbolic features: the eyes and the mouth. The eyes and mouth are prominent on a child’s face. The eyes and mouth can be the source of fascinating beauty, an interface for communication: you can read uncertainty, joy, and sorrow in them. But with age, the face becomes more and more dominated by the face itself, and the eyes and mouth are thrown into the background. The Maître d’s face is a striking example of this “triumph of the visage.” His eyes, which I’m sure were sparkling and clear at one point in time, are not only sunken and colorless; they’re also oddly small in relation to the total surface area of his face. The eye bags beneath them make as much of a statement as his eyes. Where his eyes and mouth were once responsible for the majority of expression when he was younger, they now make a minimal contribution to whatever else is “going on” on his face. His mouth, once bursting, potent, and soft, is tight and lipless, surrounded by vertical lines which make him look like he is constantly playing the flute. What is left of his “lips” now function more like shutters over his yellowed teeth. He has plenty of forehead, jaw, and cheek, with hollows, pores, and furrows, rough and slippery areas, oily surfaces. His face contains a wealth of shades and nuances, small webs of broken blood vessels, wear and tear from years of shaving, slapping on aftershave, plus alcohol consumption. Certain expressions and grimaces have taken hold. It’s easy enough to see on the outside what’s going on within, regardless of how “buttoned-up” he is.

  “Happiness and unhappiness live side by side,” he says.

  Now, I can’t really talk when it comes to the face. If I want to meet my own concerns head-on, so to speak, then it’s just a case of looking in the mirror. It’s as though my face is a cast of all the concerns that have built up within me over the years: the concerns are the mold
for my face. I often feel tension and I know what it does to my face: tissue and subcutaneous fat are swept away by worries. I can feel the corners of my mouth being dragged down. A pull on my face, that’s what I’ve got. I feel the emotions tearing at my face. How can they do it? It’s understandable that a drink problem can wear out and ruin a face; it’s logical that the blood vessels and pores are widened by the alcohol; you can see all that playing out in the Maître d’s face drama. But the idea that emotions can ruin a face—that seems unfair. If you’re nervous, you end up with a so-called nerve face. Is the face some kind of hand puppet for the nerves? It’s clear that we communicate using our faces, but if we try to conceal our nerves with a poker face and still end up with a nerve face, what good comes of that? What kind of evolutionary dead end is that? You help a child when it cries, but you run when the nerve face enters. No one helps nerve face.

  “Sometimes,” says the Bar Manager, “the Maître d’ goes around the corner there to apply face cream. Hence the sheen.” I must laugh. “He hides it well, but I can hear him rubbing it in,” says the Bar Manager. We chuckle about that, the Bar Manager and me. Audibly rubbing in. “But that,” says the Bar Manager, “isn’t something we can let Sellers and his group, for example, get wind of. They could spin an entire architecture of mocking out of a detail like that.”

  •

  Not long after three, a young woman comes in through the blanket curtains. She walks straight over to me and asks for Graham, aka the Pig. Her voice is at once soothing and sharp, and she manages to squeeze a series of confirmations out of me. Graham has gone? Yes. Were there others there? Yes. Was there a middle-aged man with him? There was.

  The girl looks like her picture; I feel a faint sense of déjà vu. She is as thick, or should I say thin, as a lifestyle magazine. Her self-confidence and air of naturalness could easily be mistaken for intelligence, and maybe it is intelligence. She looks like debauchery dressed as asceticism. This may sound hair-raising, so forgive me, but I get the feeling that a person like her is a product of misogyny—and I mean that in a positive sense.

  Not to be quirky here, but if you’re familiar with Mathias Stoltenberg’s portrait of the fifteen-year-old Elise Tvede, the one with the good mind, from Tvedestrand, it’s something like that. The girl in front of me might be a lighter version of Tvede. A version with fewer tangible concerns in her life. And surrounded by a kind of deafening contemporaneity, I suppose you could say, with everything that involves. She is wearing an excellent Dries van Noten, and carries it without effort, which is afforded to very few. Her feet are strapped into flawless Aquazzura shoes, with colorful little pom-poms at the ends of the laces. But, as they say, I think that behind all the elegance, there rests an undethronable tackiness. I believe this girl could be described as a good, even if I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. What kind of figure are we dealing with here? The Hills is not the place for young blood. Is she the Pig’s new flagship or something?

  The Pig is careful with everything bordering on the tasteless, including the opposite sex. You can observe a steady supply of well-maintained women around him, but they’re always of the established variety. Not the kind who carry the harsh glow of aspiration, in other words, and not the kind who crane their necks and possess a greedy ambition in there somewhere. A woman who spends time with the Pig is a woman who has already mastered the game, a woman who does not give the impression of “needing” the Pig and whom the Pig cannot “use” at all—a woman who is the Pig’s equal.

  But the specimen standing in front of me here is a little young, is she not? Could she be a family member?

  “Was there anything else?” I ask.

  The girl stares at the mosaic on the floor. In the middle of each tile circle there are three stylized peonies in the palest of pinks. She looks up and suddenly seems ten years older.

  “No, I’ll come back. You can say I was here.”

  “Graham won’t be back before tomorrow. Are you a Graham?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I beg your pardon.”

  The girl has a cold glow, and when she thanks me and goes, she leaves behind a so-called personality vacuum, an absence which feels palpable. The Hills dims a couple of notches when she disappears through the curtain. As my friend Edgar often says, that kind of lumbar represents the last bastion of utility value. The Maître d’ comes over and takes my arm, which is relatively awkward, since I consistently hold my cards to my chest in a work context. “You shouldn’t jump so high that you trip on your own beard,” he says, gesturing with one hand that I have a job to do. I glance over to the Bar Manager. She has a questioning look on her face. Doesn’t she know who the girl is? It’s rare for the Bar Manager to be at a loss about the guests. Her mental map of Oslo’s café- and restaurant-goers is exhaustive. The Bar Manager is like an encyclopedia. She takes an interest in and researches the clientele at The Hills like it is an academic field, or maybe some kind of hobby. She has catalog knowledge of the diners. She behaves like a vinyl collector when it comes to who comes and goes. Her expertise can be irritating, in the way vinyl collectors are irritating, or in the way men with a deep knowledge of, say, bikes are irritating, or men in photography shops, men “completely nerding out.” To be fair, it should be said that the Bar Manager occasionally shares information that I enjoy. Never use, but enjoy in some sneaky way. But now she’s standing there like the embodiment of a shrug.

  EVERY MORNING

  REGULARITY AND SERVICE ACT AS a bulwark against inner noise. I work as much as I can. My days might seem endless, but that’s how I want them. Every morning begins with me putting on my waiter’s jacket. I take the white jacket from its hanger in the cramped changing room behind the kitchen. In with one arm, then the other. Shrug it onto my shoulders. Do up the buttons. Always the same. Sheer routine. I’ve had the jacket for eight years, minimum. We get our jackets from a manufacturer in Belgium which also makes military shirts. The jackets are of the highest quality, made from the same type of thin, plain-weave cotton canvas as the military shirts, and they’re just as hard wearing. The jackets have a row of twenty-five-millimeter horn buttons on the front, plus two small pockets. I use the right one exclusively for the bottle opener; the left one is usually empty. The jackets do show wear, but in the nice way robust clothing does; the quality of The Hills’s interior is found again in the jackets. Both The Hills and these jackets are from a time when things had to be durable and settle through use. Find their form. Not useless and disposable, like most things today. “The adornment of a city is manpower, of a body beauty, of a soul wisdom, of an object durability, of a speech truth,” Gorgias writes in the Encomium of Helen. The part about the body is the only one which still applies, it seems. The durability of objects has been thrown overboard, at least. Some hold up; the tools the head chef surrounds himself with are durable—all of them. He avoids replacing things. As far as I know, he owns zero electronics. The fact that you constantly have to buy new electronics means that they aren’t reliable. Electronics are a source of endless aggravation. We have the jackets washed and pressed three times a week, and the aesthetic span arising between a durable but worn piece of clothing and the rinsing and pressing of it, plus any possible starching, is irresistible. They use the same jackets at De Pijp in Rotterdam, Majestic in Porto, and Fuet in Badalona, as well as at the old Kronenhalle in Zürich. The waiter’s jacket is standard dress, and that suits me fine.

  It’s not so easy, the whole clothes thing. What do I wear when I’m not at work? Normal clothes. Deeply ordinary clothes. As Edgar says: the fact you have to get dressed every day means that, every day, you have to say yes to the aesthetic choices made by a random fashion designer, high or low on the ladder, on either a good or a bad day. I often agree with Edgar, even if his reflections can be a bit grandiose. When I wear normal clothes, either on the way to or from work, I find myself falling into such a pattern of thought. My attention moves from the random designer behind the design of m
y underwear to the man (usually a man) who has designed my marine-blue socks, the person who came up with my tank top undershirt, the everyday shirt on top of it, my trousers. I picture the designers. There they are, on good or bad days, designing clothes which I might pull up my legs or over my head before I go out, through town, heading straight to The Hills and home again, and in a way I’m giving them publicity, these clothes and their creators. I parade their business concepts all around town. That’s not something I’m comfortable with. I’m not saying I’m much to look at, and I dress as neutrally as possible, but around one conference table or another, in one office or the next, the word “neutral” has been given as the designer’s motivation for this piece of clothing, and here I am, showing off this wretched designer’s idea of neutrality, and that kind of thinking can make me all hectic. And as though that weren’t enough, my thoughts then move on to shoes, watches, handrails, and so on, into town, until that attitude also takes over facades, display windows, road networks, food, movies, etc. And I walk around simmering away in my own mess, convinced that everyone is caught in a trap weaved from everyone else’s more-or-less successful aesthetic choices and clever ideas. Business ideas, pure and simple, conceived during more-or-less successful working days, and always driven by money. And it’s this money-driven lobster trap that I’m caught in. I wrap myself in a herring net of unnecessary business ideas every single day. I’m innocent in all of this. Not once have I asked for such a transaction, and not once have I forced such a transaction on anyone else. Now I sound just like Edgar.