There was a sunday morning in the city center and me, recently turned into a father.
Twenty years later, most of it is a blurred fog. It was great and it was hard and it was wonderful and we were fully expended most of the time. After the first months, the mother went back to her job at the office and I took care of the little one at home. I really liked the idea of becoming a full time father, but not 24/7: Sunday’s were mine. I was still busy writing whatever I discovered in my abandoned PhD, and I thought that I needed at least a shred of time to keep my identity as scientist alive. And, never mind my scientist ego: no matter how gratifying being a father is, it is also exhausting. I really needed time for myself.
So there was the first sunday, when I left home early and searched for a cafe to sit, think, and eventually write. Now, Utrecht isn’t Paris. I walked through the deserted streets, and every other cafe that I remembered was close and with no intention to open anytime soon. I still remember that it felt like having fallen into some sort of dystopian future. Did I really become a father? Was I really living in The Netherlands, after Argentina, Venezuela and Switzerland? Why wasn’t anybody in the street? Is this some sort of dream that is about to become a nightmare? Eventually I did found an open cafe. I walked in, saw a rack full of international newspapers not a day old, and few seconds after I sit, I was politely asked what would I like to have. Even more impressive, when I came back a week later, the waiter brought the same cafe au lait with the words “same as before, sir?”. If I was dreaming, a dream it was, and not a nightmare.
So I have been coming back to this cafe for the last twenty years.
I suppose that this is one of the many things that made my father call me a petit bourgeois. For many years I brought my son to school, and came here after, to read the press and have another coffee. I loved to see the city awakening, the parrochians changing by the hour. I would come with the first wave, the partygoers that did not made it to their houses and needed a coffee to get on the right bus, or train. Then the few sunday workers having a decent coffee before submitting themselves to the horror of the coffee machine at work. Now and then two or three persons meeting to go to their sunday museum visit, or coming out of it. And then, when people would begin to settle and order lunch around me, I would know that I had been the whole morning here, and was time to get to do better things, like go back and have lunch together with my beloved and my son.
The years passed, and I kept coming back to this cafe at different times in different days. Like today friday, after having been interviewed about GroenLinks, my political party, I end up sitting in the table that I have been using in the last twenty years. I have the espresso and the cola that I have been having in the last five years, and see the city around me, the city at midday. Other day and other time. On a friday, the university students arrived from everywhere that started studying a week or two ago, are discovering Utrecht and her cafe’s; the other students having an early beer, boasting of their membership to a student fraternity; the one or two parrochians that, like me, enjoy the place and the sight. A bit further the family on their friday shopping spree, tired adults, happy teenagers and bored infants, sourrrounded by paper bags with recognizable logo’s. My city and her people. My city and some of her people, that is.
In this cafe I have been given a window, a window to the city. And not only to the clients. A syrian waiter, arrived in NL as a small kid, studying to become a sport teacher. With whom I talked about my own parents, sport teachers themselves, and who did end his studies and teaches and is a waiter no more. A daughter of italians that came here in the sixties and went back to Italy in the nineties, went to Italy too, never feeling really dutch in despite of having born here. A beautiful and charming one who told me yesterday that these were her three last weeks, since she is leaving to Texas to become a nurse. And yet another one, that I didn’t see for few years, who came back and with whom I talk about his growing family, about how his own kids are doing. The eccentric greek, poet and dj, rounding his income as waiter. And the parrochians that now and then I would recognize in the street, exchanging nods. Almost as if we would be members of some secret logia.
But we are simply inhabitants of Utrecht.