#137: Enemy Territory
Brussels Commune Advent Calendar Day 12: Anderlecht
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This is part 12 of a series of short sketches from of every one of Brussels’ 19 communes, and today we’re at Chez Maria/Café Stella Vaillance in deepest Anderlecht.
PSA - PINTJES VOL.3 LAUNCH INFO
Just before today’s newsletter, a brief PSA on Thursday’s launch event for PINTJES VOL.3. The event takes place at CHAFF on Place du Jeu de Balle, where we will be selling copies of the latest edition alongside some extremely limited edition prints of this and previous editions. Festivities start at 19h, and when we’re sold out, we’re sold out.
Walking Tour - as part of the launch, we are organising a short historical walking tour for attendees, to explore the square, its history, and some of the stories of the surrounding streets. It will feature, in no particular order, rabble-rousing socialists, man-eating potholes, mysterious manuscripts, and a funeral procession for Hitler.
The walking tour starts at 19.15 sharp, gathering point at CHAFF’S terrace.
And now, normal service resumes…
Pre-match, 20.00
Chez Maria on Anderlecht’s Dapperheidsplein confirms the truism that the best Brussels cafés often have two names above the door. In this instance, the café also goes by the name Café Stella Vaillance, and it was the promise of Stella Artois at less than two euro a glass that lured us there for a pre-match warm-up.
And sure enough the bar is covered in Stella livery, from the familiar shield above the door, to adverts running alongside the building, and even above the bar an enamel plaque memorialising Stella’s success at early 20th century beer competitions. The place may have gone through several name changes, but inside it looks untouched by the passing of time. There are old drinks adverts all around the walls advertising Palm and Martin’s and Coca Cola, and of course Stella too. They’re hanging next to watercolours and pencil sketches of scenes of old Anderlecht, above dark wood panelling and wall-mounted pitted leather cushioning.
The entrance to the toilet is accessed via a vertiginous set of stairs hidden behind a wooden door with signs alerting drinkers to the “COUR” and “ATTENTION A L’ESCALIER”, and on the floor just inside the door is a large red sticker filled with big bold font reminding drinkers to keep their distance from one another, but it’s fraying at the edges and most of the text has been worn away by five years of foot traffic and apathy. All this squeezed into a narrow triangular plot where the square meets the Rue du Chapitre, with big plate glass windows that look out on the square’s car park and looming over everything the brightly-lit steeple of the parish church.
Lingering at the entrance is a hard-faced man with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and half-empty glass of beer held in his hand down by his side. It’s unclear what his allegiance is, and nor are there any insignia or flashes of mauve inside the bar to suggest any overt affiliation with the usual occupants of the Lotto Park stadium three streets over. A gaggle of men with faces like wrinkled concrete are huddled at the bar and eyeing us up warily as we slip inside with our brightly-coloured scarves and nervous pre-match bonhomie. Are they Lotto Park regulars, only supporting the stadium’s usual inhabitants rather than us squatters from across the canal?
Ordinarily we wouldn’t be in Anderlecht for pre-match beers, but Union St-Gilloise’s Stade Marien being deemed uninhabitable for European football nights we’ve decamped across the city to the home of our rivals, and their stadium has been a midweek home away from home, and not an altogether happy one. Routines have been adapted, and Chez Maria has become a useful pre-match basecamp in what is otherwise enemy territory. The subtle side-eye our insignia receives from the regulars suggest they are will at best to put up with our intrusion, tolerant of our temporary occupation in anticipation that their own club will eventually knock us off our nouveau riche perch and return to their rightful place among Europe’s elite football clubs.
In fairness, most of the attention at the bar isn’t directed towards us but towards the games of backgammon taking up four of the bar’s wobbly old tables. Chez Maria could double for someone’s living room, such is the size of the place and the quiet concentration of most of its drinkers, fixated as they are on their games and only occasionally letting out a quiet yip or grumble. Not wanting to disturb the peace any more than we already have, someone is dispatched to the bar for a round of those cheap Stellas and the rest withdraw to the terrace outside, where confidence is high. The backgammon players pay us no heed, loading up their dice into their little black cups and throwing them onto the green baize without so much as acknowledging our presence, or our absence.
Post-match, 23.00
By the time we’ve returned to Chez Maria we can see through the windows that the backgammoners have begun to pack away their equipment into big black plastic cases, all the while sneaking in one final beer. “Nondeju, nondeju, jongens,” a man loitering at the entrance says in commiseration, when he spots our scarves and our hangdog expressions. “Wat een miserie”. It’s hard not to agree with him. Misery indeed; not battered this time, but robbed.
A table looks to be free, but someone has left their brown corduroy baseball cap on one of the chairs. At an adjacent table, a woman with a voice like crushed gravel shouts across that we can sit down, it’s not being kept for anyone. We’ve already settled into a table right at the back, spreading out our jackets and our disappointment across several chairs and an empty table. Behind us, pinned up on one of the large wall mirrors, is a chalkboard that has been filled in in our absence by what looks like scores, but none of our group can decipher the meaning behind the various numbers, columns and dashes.
As the backgammoners leave, they are gradually supplanted by more Union fans trickling out of the stadium in search of a beer and some solace. Over a red Super Bock fridge by the bar, a flatscreen TV replays high-contrast highlights of the nightmare we’ve just experienced up the road.
Someone produces a cornet of fries doused in sauce andalouse, ripping the packaging in half and placing them in the middle of the table for the rest of us. Orvals are ordered and then decanted into their glasses and the post-match debrief begins in earnest.
Ahh, Orval and fries are a sound poultice to reduce the swelling of a broken heart.