Another Round

Page 16 American Book Review The Waitress Was New revels in the banality of the tipple. B O O K R e V i e W s Another round steven G. Kellman The WaiTress Was neW Dominique Fabre Translated by Jordan Stump Archipelago Books http://www.archipelagobooks.org 120 pages; cloth, $15.00 To a playwright, all the world’s a stage. But a barman’s universe is colored zinc. Pierre, who has been serving drinks since he was nineteen, looks at life through a shot glass darkly. His current place of employment, a bistro called Le Cercle, is located just across from the bustling Asnières train station in northwest Paris. A large lunchtime crowd keeps Pierre much too busy to spend time at the window gazing at the passing scene, even if he were inclined, and he is not. “I don’t look outside too much,” he explains, “because everything that matters to me in life always ends up sitting down at my bar.” In The Waitress Was New, Dominique Fabre seats his reader at Le Cercle in order to attend to the interior monologue of its amiable but unexceptional dispenser of libations. A short, spare narrative in the tradition of the French récit, it is the first of Fabre’s nine works of fiction to be translated into English. The story begins with the arrival at Le Cercle of a new waitress, Madeleine, to fill in for Sabrina, who has been out with the flu. Without a waitress, the remaining staff at Le Cercle—Pierre; Amédée, the Senegalese cook; Henri, the boss; and Isabelle, his wife—have been under strain. The newcomer Madeleine appears to be competent, but when Henri walks out the door and disappears for the rest of the week, it provokes a personal and professional crisis for those who keep Le Cercle running. Isabelle, who lives with her husband in an apartment above the café, is distraught at the thought that Henri has evidently abandoned her again for another sexual fling. Pierre, who opens the doors in the morning and locks up at night, mopping down counters to start and end each day, is forced to consider his own situation. For eight years, his life has been defined by the daily routines of squaring Le Cercle. It is he who takes charge of purchasing supplies and coaxing payments on overdue bills. Maintaining balance amid the boisterous ebb and flow of orders from thirsty strangers has provided Pierre with an identity, not just a vocation: “I’m just a barman, and the longer I stay on the more life goes by in the best possible way,” he explains. “So there we are.” Where he is now, however, following the disappearance of his boss, is at loose ends, a difficult position for a loyal employee who takes pride in emptying the establishment ’s ashtrays and scrubbing out the coffee machine. He is burdened by dreams of dead leaves littering his immaculate café. At fifty-six, Pierre is not quite eligible for a full government pension but can no longer count on spending his days wiping the table tops clean. Fabre’s novella covers three days, and despite its title, which is also the book’s opening sentence, the new waitress at Le Cercle is not its principal figure. Madeleine’s entrance disrupts the café’s reassuring rhythms, but as soon as she settles into the patterns of her job, she recedes into the margins of the story, which belongs to Pierre. The waitress was new, the boss was missing, his wife was despondent, and the cook was incensed, but the barman tries to keep things working.According to Pierre’s stringent ethic of service: “You really are a useful thing in other people’s lives when you’re a barman. The customers don’t realize it outright, of course, but when all’s said and done, in good times and bad, there’s always a bar in their lives, and a barman, a bit wizened but very professional, to serve them whatever they want.” Le Cercle attracts regulars, some of whom even address Pierre by name, but he never establishes anything but a...