Notes from Bar St. Angele

 

NOTES FROM BAR ST ANGELE  

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The only names of the songs I can remember were “A Night in Tunisia” and then “Strange Meeting.” I tried to hear their title in them.  

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Alone, and crowded, there was nowhere for me to sit except on the stairs. No doubt, a violation of the fire code. Many sat with me.

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Like an entire flock of birds on every branch of a leafless tree, the audience was spread. Remarkable, ephemeral, and present. Their principle of being a crowd, fleeting as the music.  

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The bar is halfway beneath the road. The window directly behind the band frames, as if severing from faces forever, passing pedestrian feet. Feet which pause, almost without exception, to dwell on the sound. If whatever you see, and only whatever you see, thereby lives forever, then there are pairs of legs walking alone out there, mastering the cobblestone, a little jealous of the ears, of the mouths on drinks.    

*

 It’s across from a Chinese restaurant. Red lanterns float and keep a late night vigil over the street. It's all on a downward slope, so that when the men stand there to smoke between sets, they are inevitably tilting to the right or left. A young man might stand there at 11 pm letting one leg rest a little behind the other while he chats, casting into a certain lure the simple strength of his silhouette.  They did not have one cigarette only, but two, immediately. Coolness is a kind of resting into readiness; a posture that heralds an ambiguous action that will succeed it, though it will not come.

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Handsomely, the men are about to do something. But they stay that way. 

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The guitar player is chubby, his shirt is colourful, like it represents Mexico and Aztecs. Someone brought him donuts earlier—the young woman who’s tattooed “amour” near her exposed neckline, beneath the faux pearls she’s wearing. She wears her little “chapeau” the whole night long and seems to know everyone. Mistress of the bar, she works alone. She swings from giggles to engrossed seriousness, when measuring the parts of your old fashioned.

*

Not a single person who plays in the ensemble is young or pretty. The hair is long and grey or balding. But the music wanders like the guitar solo. The man on the cello has not opened his eyes in five minutes. One almost imagines them gouged out. Blind, like Homer. Experimental, the players' constancy beautifies the youth of the room they hold in abeyance.

*

Frozen, her face has a harsh, even mannish feature. But she sips. Now she applies some chapstick. Then she applies it to his lips. When she stands, she takes a moment to run her hands over her white dress to straighten it. The kind of woman whose beauty is absolutely betrayed by the photograph, by the lie in the stillness of photography. 

*

Tall, thin, middle aged. He doesn’t take his coat, when he retrieves his pack of smokes, but after fishing them out of the pocket, still on the hook, he stops to grimace. He forgot something. He mutters inaudibly. He returns to take his scarf, stuffed in the sleeve. It is not cold enough for a coat, but it’s cool enough for a scarf.

 

The neck, the throat is precious. The night is warm and cool. A strange meeting of air. He wraps his neck only.

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Madame Angèle (no relation) said: it is simply not possible to speak French unless you are willing to do great violence to your face. You must contort and grimace your expression. It is very much like the principle of suffering for fashion, which is often said about shoes. I mean, for example, that a woman absolutely wrecks her feet so she can fashionably walk in heels. A true singer forgets how she looks when she sings a song, the servant of an invisible grace. Imagine, if you will, a mouth like a foot in a shoe and a melody a clack of a heel on a road on an early summer evening. On the same principle, a French mouth takes over the whole face. Madame Angèle said: that’s how we like it and how it needs to be.

 

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Because of the way they sit at the bar, turned to see the show, he must talk to the young woman from behind her. Thus, only from where I am sitting can one see the dismissal in her expression as he drones on, while across the floor a tender couple—a woman with rich black hair, full blossomed in white, whose beauty far exceeds her partner’s. But this fact is hidden until she moves. If they refuse to move, they are equal.

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In fact, I remember one more song. It was called: “Exactly like you.”