Bar "L'amertume"

I do not know who will read this. I just have to put it in words, and hope that it is a work of fiction.

 

I recently went to a bar, called “L’amertume”, in Paris. "L’amertume" roughly translates to bitterness, and I thought it fit my mood like a glove. I had just been left by the one I thought to be the woman of my life, and, when this happened, everything had not crumbled around me. I was still alive, still miserable, without any plan for the future, but I had expected things to be worse. I had expected I would have lost my will to live. I was bummed at life, angry that things were not as movies and books had insinuated they should be. A pretty fucked-up feeling.

So when, wandering aimlessly in the streets of Paris, I found myself in front of this bar, bitter at the normality of it all, it felt pretty natural to go inside.

The walls were Gray, decorated with framed pictures of old actors, turned yellow with time. There were wooden tables and chairs like in most places in Paris, and the floor was stone-paved. The air was humid, yet did not stink of moisture. It was dark, it was grim, the music was depressing. This, I felt, was what I needed.

 

The few angst or melancholy-ridden customers were sipping cocktails at their tables, in groups of varying size, and an elderly barman stood behind the bar. The latter paid me no heed and was murmuring through his wrinkled lips the words to a song that was clearly not the one that served as ambient music to the place. I approached the bar, and sat on one of the high stools. A hunched figure of a man was sitting two stools away. The sleeves of his shirt were pulled up, his coat was hanging on the stool besides him. He seemed to be nursing his drink.

The music played on, the barman muttered lyrics to songs a personal muse was whispering to his ears, and the stranger kept downing his drink, with slow, ponderous sips. For a while, time passed.

  

I contemplated my choice of drink.

As I was about done with my contemplation, the hunched man surprised me:

 

“Michel, un Bourbon pour monsieur.”¹ , he said to the barman.

  

“J’espère que vous vous offusquez pas.”² He proceeded, in my direction.

I was baffled that he had ordered the exact drink I had been willing to order for myself. The shock had momentarily snapped me out of my brooding mood, and this shift in my mood made the general atmosphere of the bar “L’amertume” feel quite surreal.

I opened my mouth to protest, only to find him saying the words I was about to utter, a fraction of a second before I could say them, but doing so in a flat, emotionless tone.

“Comment savais-tu ce que je voulais commander? C’est la première foi que je commande un bourbon de ma vie.”³

A few seconds passed. The man had short-cut hair, of a colour that best resembles the one found on the fingers of obsessive smokers. He looked tired, in his 50es. He was of above average hight, and I could have called him handsome. Clearly not a married man, although I was not sure how I knew this. His eyes were a pale hue of blue, and seemed like pools, in the depth of which he hoarded sorrows and time.

I felt lost. Once again when I was about to talk, I was in for a repeat of the previous strangeness:

“How did you do that?”, he said before I could talk. He had said it in English, just as I had intended to, switching languages.

I stood up, freaked out. My stool fell back with a clang, and this brought out some exclamations and protests from the patrons. I sprouted a quick “Pardon” in general, and fled the place. At the door, I got one last glimpse of the man. Michel had handed him my Bourbon and he was holding it in a salute towards me, a sad smile on his face.

I ran in the streets, until each breath I took was agony, and then I run some more.

Days latter, I got back to the same neighbourhood, and the bar “L’amertume” was not there. On the internet, I could not find any trace of it ever existing.
 

And just like that, I stopped complaining about life feeling ordinary. I will take ordinary, any given day of the week. Yet I still sometimes pass the place I think I lived these moments, and wonder.

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Translations:

¹"Michel, a Burbon for this man."

² "I hope you are not offended."

³ "How did you know what I wanted to order? It was the first time in my life I wanted to order a Burbon!"