The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  I’ve got a hemorrhage beneath the skin: a blister the size of an unused condom puffs up. It’s swelling, and I’m thinking of piercing it, but I’ll have to go and see the chef for that; I’m not aware of any medical tools down here. I grab the two bottles of Niepoort in my right hand and clamp the injured left one in the opposite armpit. I’ll be damned. I flip the cellar trapdoor (steel) shut with my heel, and it makes a terrible noise as it hits the frame (also steel). That’s just how it’ll have to be. I go round the corner and in through the back door, into the kitchen.

  “Can you poke a hole in this?” I say to the chef, holding up the blister.

  “We’ll see to that.”

  “It’s really bursting.”

  “I’ll do it with the oyster knife.”

  At the same time, I hear a “Hello” from the swing doors. It’s the Maître d’, puffed up, staring. I reply hurriedly:

  “Yes?”

  “Vanessa needs a hand,” says the Maître d’.

  “Vanessa’s back?”

  “Yes, she’s back. Hair cut.”

  “Ah.”

  “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

  “. . .”

  “She needs help. She hasn’t served table thirteen before.”

  “Table thirteen’s arrived?” I say.

  “Table thirteen has arrived,” says the Maître d’.

  “Oh no.”

  PART III

  SELLERS AND HIS GROUP

  UGH, TOM SELLERS AND HIS group have placed themselves at table thirteen, their usual table, right by the bar, two tables away from table ten, where the Pig sits enthroned with his chosen ones. Table thirteen is also my table. This isn’t good. Sellers has, on par with the Pig but for radically different reasons (to do with the aforementioned donations), access to The Hills as his own “parlor.” Sellers and his followers usually come at night, when the noise levels are slightly higher and the morals a little lower, but they’re here now, Sellers, Bratland, and Raymond, at 1:47, right in the middle of the day.

  He never makes a fuss per se, Sellers. He’s a so-called gessæl, as they say in the countryside; a scamp, but a cultured one. Gesell, they used to call them in the olden days. When the apprentices began their roving, particularly to Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term “wandering Gesell” developed something odious about it, meaning vagrant or vagabond. Strictly speaking, Sellers is fairly well rooted, but he possesses that stray, vagabond-esque aura which characterizes certain people, perhaps fewer and fewer, particularly here in the organized north. He’s a rascal. The image of cultivated scamp that he radiates makes him irresistible to many. Maybe not irresistible but appealing. Or maybe not appealing in the sense of being attractive, or magnetic, but of being desirable to aspiring scamps. The scamp in Sellers gives him an authority in certain environments. He has an aged scamp’s face. Sellers has that thick, leathery George Clooney skin on his face, but he’s more worn, grayer, and without Clooney’s fortunate bone structure. He’s not an ugly Clooney: he’s got Clooney’s skin stretched over a bigger skull. Clooney’s skin smoke-clogged, boozed up, and stretched over a scamp’s cranium. His hair is starting to turn gray. He looks like a Picabia who’s had a bad night’s sleep. He gives a mousy impression, even if he is fundamentally “robust.”

  Hence Sellers doesn’t radiate the type of upkeep which otherwise characterizes the clientele at The Hills. He’s a handsome man, I want to say that. A bit threadbare and rough, but tranquil. No nerve face. He looks intelligent, and that gives his shabbiness bite. He’s rustily al dente. And then there’s the effect of the alcohol. Some people’s drunkenness is helpless or foolish. Sellers’s drunkenness is perceived as intended and challenging. One can interpret Sellers’s drunkenness as a critique of other people’s sobriety. He snuggles when a situation gets tight. Sellers is someone who likes devilry. Fun is produced all around him. He’s almost impossible to knock off his perch. Sellers looks uncomfortable. He looks double. He isn’t simple. Sellers is complex. There’s no understanding him. Is he an enigma? He probably is. What does he want? you ask yourself. What does he do?

  “Never will I work, O torrents of flame!” Was that Rimbaud? Sellers doesn’t do much. But he keeps on. There are plenty of stories about him. The General Manager, M. Hill, who, on her part, is very obliging to Sellers and his group (donations), claims, via the Bar Manager, that Sellers and his friends, without contributing a thing, relate to a certain story precisely because of this intended uselessness, a certain historical trend, a tradition which puts infantile nonsense above all else. Sellers has never been part of any historical trend, the Maître d’ protests—rather the opposite—but the General Manager, via the Bar Manager, claims that Sellers’s endless stream of nonsense actively reflects certain features of the twentieth century’s cultural history. The Maître d’ says that that is being too generous, he isn’t impressed; but the General Manager stands her ground. Taking pride in her profession, as she does, she wants there to be a trace of this cultural history at The Hills, the family business, which, strictly speaking, there already is, in the form of the stickers and all the art, but that’s not enough for the General Manager. She wants the story to continue to play out, not to go on or evolve, but to be repeated indefinitely, so that everything that wasn’t ridiculed, distracted, and mocked fully during the first round, from 1914 onwards, can be ridiculed and derailed again and again in the same way. The great ridiculing which began in the early twentieth century, in The Hills’s golden days, was never completed, according to General Manager M. Hill, via the Bar Manager; it’ll never be completed, and that means a cut through time is needed, so that the positions begun but never finished, and the ridiculing, which are the only positions of value, can be picked up anew and repeated, played out again and again. These are positions which will always be misunderstood, and which therefore always have to be repeated, so that the misunderstanding is maintained forever, since misunderstandings are often more effective here and now than as history. The Hills is one of the few places where there is room for that. That’s what the General Manager says, pompously.

  •

  Sellers is dour: he’s no picnic, that’s true, but that in itself doesn’t make him heir to the dadaist throne or anything, says the Maître d’. Sellers, Raymond, and Bratland carry on with their tenacious, aimless, stagnant nonsense, but from there to the Pantheon is quite some distance, the Maître d’ insists irritably. The beach that’s said to be beneath the cobblestones—well, Sellers and his colleagues usually find it at the bottom of a bottle, the General Manager says. But being drunk and disgusting isn’t an art form, the Maître d’ protests; no, on the contrary. The bitter attacks that Sellers and his group direct at everyone around them are weak, a bit schmuckish. The only thing they’ve worked out, if you ask the Maître d’, if we’re following the General Manager’s line of thought via the Bar Manager, is the classic question of whether they should have fun in the here and now, in life as such, or save the unleashing of desire until after the “revolution.” Since we’re no longer in a position to see “revolution” on the horizon, Sellers, Bratland, and Raymond have fun—fun—right here and now. They’ve long known, the General Manager argues, that we’re moving about in a representation; a social, political, economic, existential representation, which, as an increasing number realize, has become a sheer parody of what was once an “existence”; the situation, the conditions, have moved so far past being a joke, a pure jest, that all suitable responses have stopped being suitable. Mockery is the only thing left. Sellers once said to her, the General Manager claims, that what he is trying to do is prevent the day from being nothing more than twenty-four hours of wasted time. Well, even the Maître d’ agrees with that. But that’s where the agreement comes to an end.

  It might look like Sellers is smoking in here, but he isn’t. The smoking ban came into force years ago, and even the avant-gardist smokes outside now. Sellers “acts” like he’s smoki
ng; he looks like some kind of ’20s photo, or, to be more precise: he looks like a photo from 1923. I look like a photo from 1890, if it weren’t for the Child Lady sitting right behind me being wildly contemporary. The Pig looks like a photo from 1984. Sellers’s slender friend Bratland looks like a gnome. His face is at once young and old. I’ve never liked this Bratland. Eyes close together. I have quite a liking for Sellers and Raymond, despite all the nonsense, but I can do without Bratland. I’m jumpy around Sellers, but he is dashing. Bratland is foul. He always has a foul expression on his face. A snakelike smile. Dead, mackerel eyes. Always a remark. Bratland will be bald in three seconds. He’s not much to look at. To be more precise, and keep the mood in the early twentieth century: he actually looks like Jacques Vaché. He’s got the ratty, Conan O’Brien–like face of Vaché placed on the high shoulders of Bernie Sanders. And with bad teeth.

  If an obscure name is mentioned around table thirteen, the otherwise talkative Bratland goes quiet. Then he goes to the toilet while Sellers and Raymond continue to talk, and when he comes back, he suddenly has plenty to contribute. He’s been trawling the internet from the toilet seat; he’s been reading up. A crowd-sourced genius emerges from the bathroom. He always uses the internet to cover over his grotesque incompetence. Raymond, the great beluga of a third man in Sellers’s group, is the opposite. He looks like a hobo with a greasy fringe. His face is a mask of hairy old leather with two holes and a ravine, but what comes from this ravine, his ravine of a mouth, is pure gold. Raymond has internalized knowledge; he isn’t a toilet-porcelain dean like Bratland. Raymond has a scar under his mouth which makes him look slightly affected, slightly sore, as though his chin is constantly rippling with tears. Raymond has a sweaty charisma and is well liked. He is extremely capable. I don’t know what a genius looks like, but I can recognize one when I see it. He’s only ever addressed as Raymond and has always gone by that one name, despite the fact that he is the golden child, while Bratland, paradoxically, is the one with many names. “Sir Hiss” is one of them, the result of his serpentine snaking around Sellers. Bratland once sold a flat well below the valuation and became known as “the Valuation Man” afterwards. “Bucket” is from the day they went berry picking, when Sellers tricked him into only picking unripe fruit. “What have you got in your bucket?” people kept asking him nonstop. On a trip to Warsaw, Bratland went a bit far in dishing out his local knowledge—he studied there six months during the ’80s—and became known as “the Polack” the following autumn. And, as Sellers’s partner in Düsseldorf, after shouting “Genug!” at a shoeshine boy who had shined his new leather shoes too hard, he became known as “Genug.” That’s the name used most often, after Bratland, particularly by Raymond. He says “Genug” every time he should say “Bratland.”

  THE SITUATION

  HAVE THE FESTIVITIES GONE FULL circle? Sellers and company are slow in their movements. They’re by no means loud or screeching, the way people usually are after, say, a liquid lunch; instead, they seem to be in the slump you experience when the party has gone on for almost twenty-four hours, when the party has become a test of endurance, a marathon, some kind of job. Sellers’s group seems more concentrated than festive. They’re baby animals on their first day. Sellers’s hand gestures are sluggish and his gaze is slow. I hold the hand with the blister behind my back and come to the aid of the newly hired, short-haired Vanessa as she wanders about with the stack of menus clutched to her chest. I know Sellers. Or know and know—I know him as well as I know all the other regulars here. I’ve been seeing him for years. He’s been seeing me for years. I know plenty about him. He knows nothing about me.

  “Would you like to see the menu?”

  Tom Sellers rubs his thighs. He rubs his avant-garde thighs. It’s hard to tell whether he’s an alcoholic as such, but that rubbing could seem addict-esque. A bit needy. He’s always drunk. They decide on a round of Birra Morettis; all but Bratland, aka the Polack, aka Bucket, aka Genug, who wants white wine.

  “The house white?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Would you like to see the wine menu?”

  “Rather not.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t have a Californan chardonnay? Californian.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll have a huge glass of that.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  There’s something about keeping up the formalities, even with boisterous types like Sellers and his group. We all know that they’re going to eat, but we also know that it’s comme il faut to ask rather than assume, so I take the job of asking, staring, and waiting. I can do that. The exchange of glances ends with a nod from Sellers; I take my hand and my blister over to the bar, where I find the Morettis, previously brewed in Udine but now owned by Heineken—isn’t that right?—plus the chardonnay, which has been grown, picked, and crushed in sun-drenched California. My blister throbs and stings. I need to finish serving the drinks before the chef and I get to work with the oyster knife. Puncturing stuff, poking holes, penetrating, is never on top of my list. But what are the alternatives? The blister is about to pop.

  •

  Sellers starts singing quietly:

  E ricomincerà

  Come da un rendez-vous

  •

  Many years ago, we had a jukebox here, just like Cuneo in ugly Hamburg, which played Paolo Conte and other Italian classics with plenty of echo. Gli impermeabili, and so on. I think Sellers misses it.

  “Please, Sellers,” Bratland says.

  “Keep out of it, Genug,” says Raymond.

  The atmosphere around the three is a strange mix of refreshing and unpleasant. Can you imagine a smell that’s both fresh and rotten? Once, I had to swap a bunch of lilies which had gone off in their vase. Our florist had let it happen. They didn’t smell of lilies anymore; they smelled like crap. The strange thing was that the lilies were still in bloom, but their stalks had withered. A sweet smell of decay mixed with the fragrance of the flowers. Lilies have a truly disturbing scent, especially if you don’t cut off the small stamen, or whatever it is that’s inside the flower; that’s what stinks. Our florist annoys me. He lets that happen sometimes. No one from Sellers’s group looks up when I serve them their beverages. I turn my left hand inwards, like a claw, to avoid showing the blister. He’s an observant guy, Sellers. Not rude, but sometimes he’ll comment on small things that embarrass you. What am I saying? They embarrass me. I can’t speak for others. He’s the intelligent type, someone who always sees more than he says.

  I don’t want any questions about it: I hide the blister. It was unfortunate that it happened. It was no one’s fault. I can’t point the finger at Widow Knipschild for sending me down to the cellar. Widow Knipschild! Damn it. I glance over to her table, and there she is with an empty glass, looking straight at me. Ugh, her old eyes are staring, her colorless eyeballs searching me and asking, yes, wondering what happened to her Niepoort and why I’m prioritizing these youngish (really middle-aged) woozy men. Widow Knipschild’s poor eyes. Just imagine everything they’ve seen. Imagine all the tears that have spilled from them. They’ve had their fill, those eyes, throughout their long lives, of staring and crying. And here they are, let down again. The last thing her tired eyes need is to register yet another disappointment. The opposite of “opening your chest” seems to be happening to me now: I can feel my chest contracting. My breathing becomes shallow. It often does when I’ve got too much on my plate. Widow Knipschild is sitting there with her eyeballs; she even lifts a bony hand into the air to catch my attention. Her hand shakes so slowly that it looks like she’s waving. And as though that waving, bony hand weren’t enough, the Pig also turns his head and nods to me. What does he want now? What does he want, this Pig, who has everything? I signal that I’ll be with him in two seconds. Vanessa is still circling Sellers’s table. The blister is pulsing. I hurry into the kitchen.

  •

  “Can you pop it?”

  �
�What?”

  “The blister.”

  “Let’s see.”

  The chef takes my wrist in an excessively hard grip and breathes a long, slow breath through his squashed nose. He studies my hand the way a blacksmith would study another blacksmith’s work, for example, or the way a sushi chef would study a piece of fish by turning it and peering at it from different angles. I don’t know why he wants to seem so “professional”; he’s a chef, not a surgeon. To him, to whom God gives office, He gives also understanding. But the chef’s office isn’t the puncturing of blisters. He takes the oyster knife from the magnetic strip—it’s mounted beneath the bench, not above it—and presses down firmly into the blister. The stream of blood must be thinner than a strand of hair. Like an acupuncture needle, inexplicably thin. I don’t think the chef sees it to begin with; his eyes aren’t the best. The squirt has time to hit the chest of his worn, white chef’s jacket before moving upwards, across his collar, up his neck, towards his face. Suddenly it’s on his cheek. Now he reacts. Maybe he’s equipped with particularly sensitive nerve endings on the skin beneath his eyes. “Eeeeiii,” he bellows in disgust, with some kind of euhhh/aaah sound, meaning his bellow becomes an odd mix of a word and a shout, a noise with no specific meaning, almost like retching, a sound produced by the body when language falls away. He grimaces, or smiles, and it looks like he has a tear of blood on his cheek, which he quickly wipes away with the arm of his jacket. He wraps one of the tea towels around my hand before he presses on the blister and empties the blood into the linen.