Café de Nuit, Arles, 1888
(Oil on jute, 73 × 92 cm)
BY Paul Gauguin
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

The diner is on the corner of Broadway and a hundred something street. Heavy plate glass windows, green wooden sidings, chrome-plated metal fixtures. It’s Tom’s Diner of Suzanne Vega fame. The door is slow and heavy to the touch. The bell rings as I walk in. The clamour of Manhattan fades as I enter a space that is dim, quiet, introspective.

“Yes?” inquires the bald man with the salt-and-pepper moustache.

“You still serving breakfast?”

“Of course. Sit down, sit down.”

“Chilean? Argentinian?” He rolls his ‘r’s and looks like a general from one of Gabriel García Márquez’s surreal sagas. Behind the bar, a woman with dyed blonde hair chatters to the man who has just come in. Big muscles. And macho. “Sugar. Dos. La mujer- Puta! Una Puta!” He goes off into a clatter of Spanish syllables, while the woman says: “Twoo badh” in her dry, ironic voice.

I sit down at one of the big tables with the formica tops. Two old people sit huddled over the bar. Their faces are completely hidden. I assume they are a man and a woman from their clothes. They sip coffee in dead silence. It’s a working class crowd. I twist around and notice that most of the workers are Latino. Three wipe the floor with diligent attention.

Two twenty-somethings sit in the far corner, talking about college. “You’re going to finish up next semester? Is she going out with him?” I sit there while I wait for my order, letting the sounds enter my conciousness. Ping-pings of the adding machine. Creak of door. Clatter of kitchen utensils. The two young people are the only customers having a conversation. The rest sit in silence.

I finish the last of my sunny-side-up egg, and watch the middle-aged, overweight man at the next table who is eating grits, alone. His eyes roll strangely like old scientific globes. I also remember that he has not looked at anybody for the last fifteen minutes. He looks at the ceiling of the diner. He does not just stare — his eyes swivel and examine each part, minutely, desperately. I am drawn, against my will, to watch him.

Who is this man? Where is his home? Where is his family? What is he doing here, all alone, eating grits and searching the ceiling with the fascination of an agonized astronomer looking for the next comet? But I have been living in the States for too long, and have adjusted well. I have learnt to observe the insanities of the world with urban cool. So I continue to watch him without seeming to do so, looking at him and through him with the proper detachment. I do not get up, walk towards him, and ask him these three easy questions: Where’s your home? Who’s your father? Are you married? Those three famous questions with which Nepali men have stopped me in T-stops in London, in airplane flights to Doha, in Donut shops in suburban Palo Alto. He’s probably insane because he has been abandoned by the world in the most crowded city in the world. There is no point in drawing unnecessary attention to myself, so instead I look down, see the yellow yolk on the white ceramic plate. I lift the heavy fork and poke the tines into the perfect circle. As a stream of yellow flows out of the sunny-side-up egg, I scoop it up with a spoon and put it in my mouth with elaborate care, as if I were eating a precious aphrodisiac.

Who is this man? Where is his home? Where is his family? What is he doing here, all alone, eating grits and searching the ceiling with the fascination of an agonized astronomer looking for the next comet?

But now my attention is diverted to the other side of the room, where the old woman with the powder blue blouse, the pearl choker around her throat and white curls stands up on her booth. She turns towards the counter and starts talking with the desperate gaiety of a woman who has found a captive audience: “That man told me that he was raising the rent. What the hell do you think you are, I told him. I do not take that from a young man like you. He is usually such a gentleman, but today he told me to leave, and I gave him a piece of my mind. I am sorry I am shouting, but I had to tell you…” The loud and desperate gaiety is lost in the silence and low hum of the college students. People continue to eat, roll their eyes, sit motionless by the bar. They do not turn.

“You all right,” says the waiter as he walks by. I wonder if I am still half-asleep, still dreaming. He has asked me if I am all right with that concern that you show when somebody who is about to freak out. “Yes,” I reply, catching a glimpse of the man next to me rolling his eyes.

The boy who has been wiping the mud tracks on the floor comes by again, pulling a big mop behind him. The waitress, a tired looking young woman in a dirty apron, is asleep on the long, narrow bench. I walk towards the bathroom. By the time I come out, she is dressed. Coat with silver fur at the neck. Tall, dark red, leather heels. Her butt is encased in black velvet. She sways down the aisle that has been wiped for the umpteenth time since I walked in. I catch a last glimpse of her, swinging down the street in her designer sunglasses. A true hip New Yorker.

When I exit, I look into the diner one more time through the windows. The old lady in powder blue is visible through the grimy glass windows. She looks demurely down as she eats her bacon, a picture of bourgeois propriety. Behind her, a man sits and looks straight ahead. If I had not sat in front of him, I would never have known he was staring straight at the ceiling.