#156: Anxious City

Hôtel Espérence, Friday, 2pm

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This week’s newsletter deals with a city of fraying nerves.

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The door of the Espérance was locked. Or at the very least it wouldn’t open. I thought maybe it had become stuck in its frame; it had been raining recently and these old bars are not always very good at keeping the damp out. I pulled again at the brass handle, but instead of the door swinging out towards me, I was pulled back in towards it by a surprise recoil. I stepped back out of the bar’s entrance and assessed the situation. It was, after all, strange.

The door’s little sign had been turned to “ouvert”. On either side of me and the entrance, on the Espérance’s little patio were round tables set with fresh white tablecloths held in place by the weight of little metal beermat holders. It was still just about lunchtime, barely the early afternoon, and this was not just a bar but the reception of a working hotel. From where I was standing I could see into the bar and I could see that the lights were on and down the back, at the very end of the room by the entrance to the toilets, I could see one or more people sitting at a table talking to one another. I was supposed to meet someone here and I was already late; having to find a new venue at the last minute was one stressor too many.

So I stepped forward and tried again; though the handle and the lock jangled a little in my hand, the door budged no more than it had the first time I tried. With one hand on the handle and another shading my eyes, I leaned in and looked as ostentatiously as I could through the door’s glass panel. And from the gloaming a woman detached herself from the group at the back of the bar and walked up to the door, a set of keys in her hands.

“Désolé, monsieur,” she said, once she’d let me in and I’d installed myself on the green bench tucked into a little alcove between the door and window. “But I have had to lock the door because yesterday des types rares came into the bar and, well, you never know.” Her lips were pursed and she had crossed her legs at the ankle, and fiddled with a thin gold chain around her neck. Her blow-dried blonde hair reminded me of the way my mother’s friends used to wear theirs.

I ordered a beer, and she went off to get it from the fridge under the reception desk-cum bar counter. All the tables had been set in the same manner as those outside - white table clothes pulled tight over low enamel tables arranged around racing green leather banquettes. Sitting at the table directly across from me, the only other people in the bar aside from me and the group at the back of the bar were four-fifths of the way through a bottle of wine, a little red bodempje in the bottom of the woman’s glass. The woman and her partner were sitting side by side engrossed in a hushed conversation that was difficult to hear above the tinkly background jazz music coming from a speaker by the cash register. Next to them were a couple of unopened cases of wine, and a haphazard pile of coarse floor mats or blankets.

“Un bon Orval,” the owner said as she returned with my beer and its matching glass on a small tray with a bowl of mixed nuts. “A good beer to start the weekend.” She placed the glass on the table and proceeded to pour out the beer. I smiled and she laughed when I agreed that it was a good beer to start the weekend. But still she was preoccupied. She hadn’t re-locked the door after ushering me inside. Her husband, she explained and jerked her head in the direction of a bald man in a white shirt sitting at the table furthest from the door with several open copy books in front of him, would prefer that she kept the door open. But, well, you can understand, given everything happening outside, she said while her eyes moved towards the door and the terrace beyond. I nodded in sympathy and made an assenting grunt. Her street, in fact all the laneways between Adolphe Max and Rue Neuve are scuzzy in a very inner-city Brussels way, and it didn’t help that the name of hers translates to “the street at the end of the world.”

She went back to her husband and commenced to complain loudly but indistinctly about municipal politics. I returned to my beer and my notebook. When the friend on which I had been waiting arrived, the door was still open but the owner repeated her apologies and explanations. She said again that she would keep the door open from now on. They were a hotel still, after all.

But when we were finished with our drinks and stepped out into the city again and the door had been closed behind us, I saw her lingering behind us on the threshold and the metal click of the key turning in the lock.

The next time I’m down on Rue du Finistère, maybe to be sure, I’ll knock.

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