Othon, the Waiter Who Lost His Memory

On top of being tidy and diligent, Othón knows the ins and the outs of the restaurant he works in like the palms of his hands. Nimble and thin like a transoceanic clipper, he flows through the congested routes of the establishment carrying provisions without ever breaking the subtlety of his smile. He skirts the capes of the bar and overcomes the archipelago of tables. He crosses gulfs, navigates the peninsulas and without warning, like the fulfillment of a long hoped for dream, he breaks through the fog born of the stew or that which hovers above coffee cups, only to shore up at some steamy bay stifled with customers.

Many people know some version of his story, but the majority ignore the real one. He didn't arrive in a tattered basket so that the father of the actual owner of the café would pity his sorry luck; he isn't the bastard offspring of some high-powered politician who, to placate his gone awry conscience, paid the proprietor with favors to hide his shameful paternity. And, despite his Central European aristocratic semblance, he did not arrive with the undertow of refuges forced to flee totalitarian regimes only to find their way onto the shores of our country.

None of this is true and there is no one alive who can dispute this without blushing. Othón's origin is as simple as most of ours. He climbed through the ropes of the restaurant industry's hierarchy, from way down at the bottom. He ascended gradually, with the parsimoniousness of a saint, to the heavens of the situation in which I met him; yet prior to our encounter he had seen the hellish infernos of the restaurant's kitchen and the anodyne purgatory experienced as a busboy.

Although his experience busing tables, doing everything required of the low man on the totem pole, subjected to the ups and downs of tips, was not at all gratifying nor inspiring, Othón paid for his noviciate with the certainty of a man who knows himself to be on the threshold, not of a job, but a vocation. A waiter's job, let' s face it, is as mystical as a priest's, deserves more self-sacrifice than teaching, and, categorically, requires more commitment than politics. All of these careers not only demand enough discipline, serenity and good sense to face and solve the vicissitudes of daily life and to counteract the intemperance proper to their practice, they also force their practitioners to face with humility the challenge to retire when the time comes.

Othón reached minimum wage paradise and the haven of profitable tips for two basic reasons: because he learned to smile graciously even before the most vinegary of mugs and amid the most insolent examples of rudeness one could imagine with the refined elegance of the executioner who sharpens the guillotine he will soon use and because he converted his prodigious memory into an implement on which his position depended, one which was constantly tested every day of his punctual existence. Because, in other words, he polished until they glittered the two most indispensable attributes of a good waiter: his vast memory and his unyielding smile.

The story of his smile I will leave for another who is more interested in facial expressions. Mine tells of his astounding memory and of how he lost it along the way, so many months ago that the number can be measured in years.

Though few would dare verify it without some degree of reluctance, there is no doubt about it: memory is kept by historians but also by waiters; and if those record it with devices of different persuasions, these last ones don't even contaminate memory with a rose petal. Despite scientific advances (there have come about revisionists who, rather than take notes on a pad of paper, record the customer's order; a...