André Aciman - Harvard Square

I had no idea who he was, what exactly he was talking about, or why he kept raising his voice, but in this underground café on a quiet midsummer Sunday afternoon, his was the only voice you heard.

Oui, oui, oui — rat-tat-tat. Bien sûr, bien sûr — rat-tat, rat-tat. Et pourquoi pas? — rat-tat-tat-tat? Long sentences, spoken with spitfire accuracy, while all around him sat cigarettes, napkins, matches, a cheap lighter, home keys, car keys, leftover change from his previous coffee before he’d decided to order a second and then a third — debris strewn helter-skelter about his table like the spat-out bullet shells of his hysterical prattle. Rat-tat-tat , down with capitalists, communists, liberals and conservatives, Old World, New World, the League of Nations, the Arab League, the League of Women Voters, the Catholic League, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, down with them all! Whites, blacks, men, women, Jews, gays, lesbians, rich, poor, cats, dogs — a flint storm of curses as unmistakably North African French as the cicadas on sleepy Mediterranean afternoons when they drown out every other sound with the raspy musketry of their hindquarters.

At that moment he was fulminating against white Americans, les amerloques , as he called them. Americans loved all things jumbo and ersatz, he was saying. As long as it was artificial and double the value if you bought five times the size you’d ever need, no white American homemaker could resist. Their continental breakfasts are jumbo-ersatz, their extra-long cigarettes are jumbo-ersatz, their huge steak dinners with whopping all-you-can-eat salads are jumbo-ersatz, their refilled mugs of all-you-can-drink coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash with triple-pack toothpaste and extra toothbrushes thrown in for the value, their cars, their malls, their universities, even their monster television sets and spectacular big-screen epics, all, all of it, jumbo-ersatz. American women with breast implants, nose jobs, and perennially tanned figures — jumbo-ersatz. American women with smaller breasts, contact lenses, mouth spray, hair spray, nose spray, foot spray, scent spray, vaginal spray — no less ersatz than their oversized sisters. American women who were just happy to have found a man to talk to in a crowded café on a midsummer afternoon in Cambridge, Mass. would sooner or later turn out to be jumbo-ersatz all the same. Their lank, freckled toddlers fed on sapless, bland-ersatz, white-ersatz bread and swaddled in ready-to-wear, over-the-counter, prefab, preshrunk, one-size-fits-all, poly-reinforced clothes couldn’t be more bland-ersatz than their big, tall, fast-food lumbering football giant daddies with outsized shoes, penis enlargers, and sculpted, washboard, eight-pack abs who personify the essence of all that was ever jumbo-synthetic on God’s ill-fated, jittery little planet.

This, I would soon find out, was standard fare whenever he found someone to buttonhole. He’d start with the First World, work his way down to the Second, then to the Third, till he’d wipe out every visible bare-bottomed savage in the rain forest and thrown the hapless survivors to the Huns, where they all belonged anyway, or to the Ottomans, who’d know what to do with them, or worse yet, to the Jesuits who’d sing a prayer before burning them alive and making missionaries of their children.

He couldn’t have been older than thirty-four, wore a faded army fatigue jacket with many pockets, and was speaking in a Maghrebi accent to a bearded American college student who was clearly trying to look like Hemingway. The American occasionally dared to interrupt with tepid pieties in decent enough French, while Machine Gun Mouth was catching his breath to take lingering sips from his coffee cup, which he held from the rim, as if its handle were missing. “But you can’t generalize about all Americans,” said Young Hemingway, “nor can you say all women are this or that. Every human being is unique and different. Besides, I don’t agree with what you say about the Middle East, either.”

Machine Gun reclined on his seat as he rolled his nth cigarette, licked the glued end of his cigarette paper after filling its midsection with tobacco, and like a cowboy who’d just spun the cylinder of his revolver after carefully reloading its chambers, pointed a stiffened forefinger that almost touched the temple of the startled young American, who had clearly never had a finger, much less a loaded pistol, pointed at his head: “All you know is what you learn from newspapers and your boolsheet television. I have my own sources.”

“What sources?” asked the bearded American, who was beginning to look like a timid prophet about to bicker with the Lord God Himself.

“Other sources,” snapped the North African. And before the young man had a chance to cross-examine him, there it was again, as good as new, oiled, rammed, reassembled, and reloaded, louder and more articulate yet: rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

I knew I’d heard his voice many times before at Café Algiers, but on that late Sunday afternoon, the hammering staccato of his words was impossible to ignore. I could tell he knew people were looking over in his direction. He pretended not to notice, but it was clear he was picking his words and buffing his performance, like someone who while speaking to you is looking over your shoulder at the mirror behind you to make sure his hair is well combed. His speech was growing a touch too studied, as were his gestures and the exaggerated pitch of his explosive, out-of-control laughter. Obviously, he liked people to wonder about him. And I was — there was no doubt — wondering about him. I’d never come across anyone like this before. Primitive, yet completely civilisé . He crossed his legs in a very distinguished manner — but the look, the clothes, the hair were a ruffian’s.

Suddenly I heard him again. Rat-tat-tat .

“American women are like beautiful manor houses with lovely rooms and lavish art, but the lights are switched off. Americans are not born, they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz, Buick-ersatz. I always know what Americans will say, because they think alike, speak alike, fuck alike.”

Young Hemingway was listening to this tirade, trying to sneak in a few words edgewise to draw some sense from the diatribe; but there was no stopping the string of invectives that came rattling forth like pellets fed on a bullet belt. Rapid-fire Kalashnikov stuff, G.I. Joe ducking in the trenches with bullets whistling overhead and mud-buried mines exploding underfoot, and all about him senseless strafing and detonations. No sooner had he lambasted the female sex than he took a swipe at human greed, at Mormons, at underpaid Mexican waiters who steal food when the owner isn’t looking, finally taking on NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceauşescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it, all of them big, shameless signs of a world gone completely mad and ersatz. I had never heard such abominable agitprop in my life. The American president he renamed le Boy Scout . “The Italians are rotten thieves. The French will always sell their mothers, throw in their wives, then their sisters; but their daughters they’ll sell you first. As for Arabs, we were infinitely better off as colonies. The only one who understood history was Nostradamus.”

“Who?”

“Nostradamus.” No sooner named, than out poured a litany of quatrains predicting one catastrophe after the other. “Nostradamus and the myth of the eternal return.”

“You mean Nietzsche.”

“Nostradamus, I said.”

“How do you know about Nostradamus?”

“How do I know!” he asked rhetorically. “I know, OK?”—which he pronounced oké ?—“Must I teach you everything I know?”