A Clean Well-lighted Place

She wondered why the bars around here were called “cafés.” After all, these establishments were full-serve bars and offered much more than coffee. I (again) recalled (for me and for her) Hemingway’s short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” There, too, the place was referred to as a café, though in fact the bartender served drinks from what was apparently a full bar. Somehow, café connotes something different than bar: I think that for me the former offers respite and latter eschews solitude. In Hemingway’s story an old man sits alone at a table with saucers before him representing the brandies he has drunk and for which he has not yet paid. It is two thirty in the morning and as the old man sits quietly and peacefully alone, the two waiters talk about him. The old man is already a familiar; he is wealthy and deaf and 80 years old and it would seem he comes nightly to the café. But perhaps the old man is not at peace. The older waiter reports that the previous week the old man had tried to commit suicide to get away from the darkness, but his niece had cut him down. When the younger waiter who wanted only to return home to his young wife and bed asks why with all his money the old man tried to kill himself, the older waiter answers that he was in despair. Well, the younger waiter complains, there are other bars where the man can sit through the night, but the older man responds, that this café serves as a refuge. He says, "Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the café. You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves." The older waiter recognizes the importance of such a place. Here the old man feels safe: in this clean well-lighted place there will be no music nor the indignity that attends to having to stand at a bar. No, what the old wants is a café with just quiet and light. The older waiter understands the old man’s need for a clean well-lighted place. And that is why the story is placed in a café rather than a bar!
            But the younger waiter is angry that the old man remains seated and refuses to leave and that he even now asks for another brandy and then still another. Exasperated, finally the younger waiter refuses the old man’s request and orders him to leave. But the old man has nobody awaiting him, only the darkness and despair of the world that had led him to attempt suicide. The older waiter, however, recognizes the old man’s need: the clean well-lighted place serves as sanctuary from the emptiness and dark. “What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.” The older waiter recites mockingly a parody of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Nada Who art in Nada, Nada be thy name . . . Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.” The older waiter knows the nothingness of existence and the importance of a clean well-lighted place. He acknowledges, "I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night." It is not the bottle he desires but the space well-lit and clean. He is loath to leave.
            I have sought the refuge of a clean well-lighted place. I remember once walking about with Steven Schaeffer around 57th Street in NYC stepping in and out of bars until we found the café that was clean and well-lighted. Steven was dying of AIDS. Today it is almost impossible to find a bar that is not filled with loud music blaring out of speakers and displaying at least one single wide-screen television behind the bar overloud and sense-battering. Often there are four or five screens each displaying a different sporting event. Sometimes there are even more hanging throughout the bar. In such places I feel assaulted and can find no peace. 
            Here I have found Café Mar Azul. I do not seek sanctuary because I know the world is too much with me, late and soon. But there I can be alone and no one bothers me. It is quiet and there are no televisions; though on some nights there is music, I do not go there. It is not the old man’s clean well-lighted place, but it is a quiet respite from the world. There, there is a certain cleanness and order. I order another brandy and the waiter brings it with cheer.