A Clean, Well-Lighted Life: Dominque Fabre’s “The Waitress Was New”
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Like white wine on a rainy afternoon, Dominique Fabre’s English debut is both relaxing and a little bracing. The story of a 56-year-old barkeeper whose employers may, suddenly, be closing shop, “The Waitress Was New” (Archipelago Books, 160 pages, $15) transcends the slice-of-life category to which it would otherwise belong. Having written nine works of fiction, in French, since 1995, Mr. Fabre is a minimalist who’s not afraid to insist on his themes, and “The Waitress Was New” becomes a forceful meditation on loneliness by its end.
Pierre has been working at Le Cercle, a café in the busy Parisian suburb of Asnières, for eight years. He has been a bartender for all of his working life, and Mr. Fabre’s book is chiefly a meditation on what that life has made of him. In some ways, it has made him humble and slightly invisible. But like Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day,” Pierre is more than a Jeeves: His years of service have been a genuine moral education. He seems to know more of the finer points of human conduct than his bosses, Henri and Isabelle, whose seemingly fuller lives have actually distracted them. They have been married, raised a daughter, dealt with taxes and a life of small business proprietorship, and are now dealing with Henri’s oddly severe midlife crisis — but they are still children, compared to Pierre, who after an early divorce has merely had girlfriends and kept bar.
Mr. Fabre doesn’t romanticize the life of a barman, and Le Cercle itself is nothing special — just the type of lunchtime café of which there is always another, very similar only more popular, right across the street. Pierre thinks a lot about what it’s like to be a barman, in part, we suspect, because of the indignities he has to endure. Every bartender is the front man of his organization, the bar’s public face and something like its mascot. As the most senior employee at Le Cercle, Pierre also acts as a de facto boss, once Henri runs away — chasing a girlfriend, everyone presumes, including his despondent wife.
Yet Pierre is still only a bartender, and he knows it. “You really are a useful thing in other people’s lives, when you’re a barman,” he reassures himself, though “the customers don’t realize it outright, of course.” He thinks of himself as a member of a network of like-minded souls. He talks of the barman’s stock in trade, his ability to listen and to play dumb — a technique he increasingly has to use with Isabelle, the boss’s wife, as she becomes frantic about her husband’s disappearance. As a virtually confirmed bachelor, and a man whose job it is to “get attached to people you don’t even know,” Pierre makes a brilliant confidante. But he also knows exactly what is and isn’t his job, and he resents Isabelle’s confidences, almost: They remind him just what an odd bargain he has made with life. He can be very forthright about the astringent life of a barman: “Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be wiped away to make room for the next.” He admits that at the end of the shift he’d rather not come out from behind his counter.
In Jordan Stump’s wonderfully quiet translation of Mr. Fabre’s obviously deft language, Pierre’s cleansed, simple, supposedly empty days become — of course — full. And Pierre knows, in his almost disappearingly modest way, that he has somehow lived a great life. He respects art and book learning, but he is most convinced by the quotidian life of bars and carefree weekends. Faced with a youngish regular, dressed in black, who every day comes in with a book, Pierre concludes that “After all, he seemed like a kid who needed a blowjob and then a Mars bar, or maybe even both at the same time. What will you have done with your youth, my lad?”
In what is ostensibly the book’s climax, Pierre, having finally been told that the café is closing and that he is out of a job, visits the social security office. The social safety net of France has, unspokenly but palpably, been a part of Pierre’s calm, especially when he sympathetically considers the immigrants — his neighbors — who don’t have their papers in order. He takes Paris as a very earthy kind of blessing, making regular visits to look into the Seine and remarking of the Place Voltaire that it “is one of the ugliest squares in my suburb, but I’ve spent some of the finest times of my life there, so that’s how it is.”
Pierre visits the welfare bureau, and is happy to learn that everything is in order: After a few more years, he will be eligible for a full pension. This is a modest prospect for a 56-year-old man who applies Nivea cream to his face every night and still looks at women — but the way he spreads out his old pay stubs that night, in the now-shuttered café, and realizes with satisfaction that there are some jobs he can’t even remember, speaks to a less-is-more outlook that will not fail him in retirement. Here is a barman with all of the wisdom of Hemingway’s, from a “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” but with none of that older Parisian’s desperate cynicism.
blytal@nysun.com