Fidel sat in his wonted corner of the Café Franck in Flagey and perused the Saturday essay columns of Le Matin. It seemed that somebody had translated one of Paul Scheffer's Amsterdam contributions to Volkskrant in which that tousled haired pedagogue was arguing that the age of cosmopolitanism was over and only local politics mattered any more. Fidel sniffed, muttered 'troublemaker', and frowned.

Despite his name, Fidel was not Cuban or even Iberian of any stock. To the world, his publisher and his students he was Guus van der Looy, Professor of Applied Rhetoric at the Free University of Ixelles. And despite that deeply Flemish name, he was Francophone in language, attitude, lecturing style and habit. He always wore black, never wore a tie, and if the aforementioned Paul Scheffer's hair was tousled up in Amsterdam, Professor van der Looy's was a storm of white, a carefully encouraged Medusa's head of independent anarchy.

The name thing had developed when a couple of students from St. Andrews, having a little Scottish difficulty with the version of his name in English, had rendered it as 'on the loo' with predictable results: laughter at a particularly inappropriate section of his lecture on Cicero. Unable to mention him without sniggers and giggles, they had shortened it to VDL, which wasn't much better. Fidel had been the agreed outcome. After all, what could be a more fitting name for a Franco-Flemish anarchist of unwavering gravity and interminable intellectual flow? It had stuck, not just for the Scottish but for all. At first its owner had hated it but as the years went by he took it with the same affection as its begetters had intended.

This Saturday morning Fidel was not at his most amiable. More than sufficient ten year-old Rioja had slipped into the system on Friday night, largely because the jazz concert he had dragged himself to in a depressing concrete theatre in one of the side streets off the square had turned out to be ‘new fusion’, in other words not jazz but rock music with an occasional saxophone. It was not that he didn’t enjoy rock music. He had cut his intellectual teeth in the early seventies, after all. It was mucking up jazz that he objected to. Fidel had fled to the bar, where he found the Rioja was better than to be expected out of plastic glasses.

Normally one glass to douse his grumble would have been enough before he clambered home up the hill but also taking a break from the noise was the scarfed and silent figure of Hugo de Greef, once incumbent of the substantial director’s office of the performance complex of which Café Franck was a merely a corner. De Greef was the perfect foil for a grumble, partly because he never said much and partly because he couldn’t care less. He listened, finished his drink, and wandered back into the hall with a noncommittal nod, leaving Fidel alone with the wisp of a barmaid who (he discovered somewhere about glass three) was called Elise and just starting a postgraduate degree in Modern Circus Studies (MCS, she called it before explaining patiently). Fidel was still not sure he quite grasped what modern circus studies entailed but by Elise he was enthralled until swamped by the audience when the music stopped.

The swamping had been the excuse for several more glasses, of course, as the many who knew Fidel assumed he had been with them in the theatre throughout and sought his opinion. He was, after all, an opinion former, a man of whom it had once been said on Brussels TV that to be of lasting fame in the city one had to have been pronounced significant by Guus van der Looy. He pronounced, drank and, after a slightly unprofessorial farewell to Elise, was respectfully escorted to his door by three of last year’s graduates. 

By the time on Saturday morning when Mercedes was goading Saskia into action, Fidel was wishing the music had stopped a little earlier up the bottle. Had Elise offered to show him all the moves that went with contemporary trapeze, as long as he tried a freshener with his coffee, he was certain his refusal would have been profoundly firm. He watched in glum disapproval as the drama unfolded – the collision with Catrina, the scalding of Mercedes and the ousting of Saskia. It was not what Café Franck was for at breakfast time.

Even from his regular corner by the most distant window the fuss was loud and unsettling. The café chatter diminished to a whisper, except for the relentless piped music. The wailing of Mercedes, the remonstrations of Jordi and Jose, and most of all the purposeful arrival of Patrice from behind the bar, was all enough to interrupt even the most earnest of morning conversations.

From the kitchen the pot-washers emerged, drying their hands on ankle-length aprons. There were three of them, two of whom Fidel knew all too well and disregarded as being perfectly fitted to their role and unlikely to rise above the ordinary, whatever their nominal field of study. They had served him drinks, they had swabbed his table, and they had treated him with about the same interest as any of the one-time drinkers who found their way to the Café Franck before a show next door. But the third of them was new and different; so slight and fragile she barely filled the jeans that tried to support her apron, her long black hair massed on top of her head in the current Flagey fashion.

Fidel’s hung over heart had a little skip. Elise.

Her back was to Fidel but he had watched enough of it the night before – indeed talked to it for many minutes at a time – to be utterly certain. Why the flutter of pleasure, he wondered? Surely he was beyond such things and the entrancement had been just from the Rioja and the accident of his lone drinking as the ‘new fusion’ blared. Apparently not.

As the door closed behind the humiliated Saskia and the café buzz returned, Elise turned to go back to the kitchen. Turning, she saw Fidel, caught his eye and smiled.

Fidel smiled back, nodded and resumed his scan of the paper. Le Matin was no longer engrossing. The pain behind his eyes was unaccountably lifting.