FELIX CAFÉ, ANTIBES, Saturday 25 April 2015

I’m sipping a coffee outside Felix café on the corner of Rue Aubernon and Boulevard Gullard, perpendicular to and parallel with the harbour, respectively. I try to brighten the screen so I can see to write but instead find taking my sunglasses off more effective. I can see the port through the arch of the Roman wall a few metres away. A tall man with a shabby blue jacket, matching blue trousers and a kind of mullet haircut is walking around the fountain talking to people who aren’t there. He’s very relaxed and very drunk, with a bottle of fancy yellow liqueur at the end of his gangly arm. Is he schizophrenic as well as drunk? We wouldn’t have asked that question a few years ago, just as when we were thirsty we wouldn’t have described ourselves as ‘dehydrated’ and reached for bottled water.

Across the road a black man in a wheel chair his fifties holds animated conversation with a slightly tubby man in his thirties wearing a pale blue t-shirt and jeans beneath a brown hat with three holes in the side for ventilation. They point all over the place and sometimes jab each other. Big clapping handshakes and arm holds that twists the black man around in his chair as they part, both full of joy. Now he’s rolled across the road and addressed the group of English men who introduce themselves as ‘David and Ross’. I don’t think he knows them and has now rolled off.

A pigeon flies down to the rim of the fountain in an indignant way, does not stop to drink but hops down to the pavement to search for crumbs dropped from the table, head shooting backwards and forwards as it walks a circuitous route beneath the chairs and tables. The round plastic tables are red, the chairs are covered with a kind of silvery grey weave of plastic wicker strands and bright silver arms that curve down to the floor. Two little bushes grow from the architrave of the rusticated pedestian’s entrance to the port. Beside them is a group of little yellow flowers, all clinging to the rock. Traffic weaves through the larger arch by the side of the pedestrian tunnel, mainly grey and white cars with a blue Lambretta or two. More are coming in to the vieil ville than leaving it. Now the major colour of the cars has turned to blue and dark grey.

There are a plethora of prams pushed in either direction, pushed by almost as many fathers as mothers. Is it because of Catholicism? I am reminded of the father of a new baby on the cycle path between Cagnes sur Mer and Nice who was rollerblading the pram along at a breakneck speed while the baby lay fast asleep. Is that an incredibly irresponsible thing to do? (he had no crash pads or helmet, and neither did the baby of course!) It didn’t seem so at the time. At the time it seemed he had found a temporary way of combining the responsibilities of fatherhood and remaining a young blade. Do you think the mother knew?

Directly opposite and above me the face of an old satyr with ears like wings or cabbage leaves spouts water through a metal pipe (PHOTO 1). The man in the shirt has just washed water over his head. Now an African selling sunglasses and hats walk by (PHOTO 2). Does anybody ever buy them do you think? According to my body weight I can only drink a maximum of four something cafes au lait a day (or 11 cups of instant coffee, which would be sacrilege round here). Sometimes a big car rolls in heading for the really big yachts. The swanky car of choice at the moment is the Merceds SE 350 Bluetec. Up the road is the Blue Lady pub where young people who crew the yachts drink out their money. An average wage would be AUD 3,000-3,500 with up to 1,500 or more a week in tips, but the maximum age is supposed to be about 28, so what do you do then?

A crowd of elderly tourists walks past. I don’t think they’re French. One of them thinks my café is worthy of a photo on his ipad. My green tea has arrived. A solitary tourist in her fifties takes an ipad photo of an old lampstand fixed to the roman wall that I had not noticed before. What did John Berger say about photography? ‘Seeing this is worth recording.’ What is that book of essays? Art Historians who have Changed the World? or something like that. Someone complained that John Berger wasn’t in it and I thought ‘je m’en fou’. There is something about Berger that makes me ill, something tendentious and relentlessly trendy and pseudo-socialist because so irremediably upper class in how he writes and thinks. But I bet if I sat down and read everything I’d find brilliant stuff. Better than Fuller at any rate, whose probably better than me.

Sometimes some old geezers wearing lycra churn past on good-looking racing bikes. The way they stood on their pedlles and take off up the hill to the fortifications the last time I was here three years ago made me think they had somewhere wonderful to go to that I didn’t know about, and that is what persuaded me to hire a good bike for three weeks this time round. Now I know where they were going! Round the Cap and on to Nice. The road hugging the cliffs between the Cap and Juan le Pins is indeed very beautiful, full of lightly used public beaches and old tower on broken stone piers and occasional old fishing boats. There are photographs in the back of Felix café of Antibes harbor full of fishing boats, but now there are only ten licensed fishermen with rowing boats with lamps suspended on the back to attract the fish at night. Picasso shows them in the Nightfishers of Antibes at Vallurois, but nothing else there is good enough to make me go there again, so I won’t.

A woman walks past with an E cigarette. Cars mostly black for a while, though parked across the road is a convertible red VW golfe. The French grandmother of an elderly friend of mine in England came over to the emerald isle, saw a field of cricketers and remarked with an indignant hough and a tendrilled hand: ‘ha! Le golfe!’

Who the hell was Marechal Foch? His names all over the place and I bought a postcard of him which the vendor joked about as if I knew who he was. My guess is that he was someone in, or against, the Vichy government. I must go for my bike ride soon.

I googled him. Marechal Foch was the leader of the allied forces credited with brining the first world war to an end, but he was also held responsible for numbers slaughtered at the Battle of the Somme. He said if Germany wasn’t crippled after the war then it would invade France again in 20 years time. He was a few months out. He maintained the old school of Napoleonic tactics. He once said ‘my centre is yielding, my right is in flight. Excellent situation! Time to attack!’ He is unrelated to the incompetent Irish military strategist who just says ‘Foch dis, Foch dat.’ There is an Irish pub up the road, which is feeding me these stereotypes. Irish pubs keep Abbot in speeches.

There has just been a loud altercation  between a cyclist and an older pedestrian with trendy long silver hair, shouting at each other across the street. I would imagine that the cyclist didn’t want to stop for him at the crossroads out of sight around the corner. They were going at it hammer and tongues holding up the traffic on either side of the road when the cyclist in bright blue lycra suddenly road off. I saw the pedestrian fuming in unappeased anger with no one to inflict it on. Always embarrassing that. Then I saw that the cyclist had turned back to confront him again in the pedestrian street of Boulevard Augillon, satisfying both their appetites for venting. Maddeningly the sign of the next restaurant in all it’s pedantry – ‘PALANGRE meuniere avic son beaurre a l’ail 28E, ST PIERRE entire grille ou roti 35 E NOIX DE ST. JACQUES  a la provencale 26E)’ – got in the way so I could only see their legs and hear their voices escalating. I was amazed how quickly two uniformed policemen walked up to cool things down, which they did very diplomatically, as if heightened emotions were the norm. The blue cyclist departed for good, leaving the pedestrian continuing his fulminations to the gendarmes, who clearly weren’t going to do anything. Both of them will be thinking about that for several hours afterwards. How much of it was what happened on the street and how much what had been happening in their lives beforehand?  Jason, the gay boyfriend of my host, has a theory that the same people who shout at cyclists from cars are the same people who shout at drivers on their bikes. Well what would his view of this situation be?

Another cyclist has arrived to fill his waterbottle at the fountain. Moorish complexion, bright white hair, 60s. black bike and lycra. Looks very calm and powers off after fixing me through his sunglasses for a moment. A Yellow van! A plump woman with the photograph of a much younger and thinner woman on her t-shirt walks across the road. What was she holding in her hand? I shouldn’t have looked at my screen while I was writing. The woman who took the photo of the lampstand has walked back. She is eyeing the fountain but no photo this time. She has splayed feet.. I must go and ride my bike. The cars have gone grey and white again. A man in a white suit walks by. He has slid back his bunny head with its pink ears and looks serious. Oh he’s just walked back the other way wearing the bunny head. I think it’s him, I can only see him from the back. Could there be two of them? I should say that while all this is going on there is also a traffic of random French phrases passing through my mind without any relevance whatsoever: ‘Calme toi!’ – ‘Mais c’est MARRON, ca!’ (the word Marron does not exist as an adjective) and ‘Faites vos jeux!’. A man with a thick beard and a shaved head wearing red trainers and ear phones. The satyr’s head keeps spouting, looking straight ahead. A man starts to read a book on the bench against the Roman wall. He’s only got a few pages left. That’s always a funny feeling. The drama always thins out at that point because reality is going to replace it. It looks like a library book.

There is a biblioteque up Rue Aubernon which is only open a couple of hours a week. Perhaps it’s from there. He has a blue parrot on his t-shirt and is half blocked by the tall square stem of the fountain. I have just done a quick count and there are about 40 people in view, including the ten or so seated at my café. 4 grey cars and one white one. Two Renaults, a Nissan and two Mercs, two of them SUVs. I’m looking for a child. Lovely little girl with a maroon dress, wriggling from side to side from her mother’s hand. Absolutely no one glamorous in view now. For a brief moment there is no traffic. There next car will be … a blue Lambretta! Just occasionally a very well-presented and dignified old man will walk by with a well-fitting jacket and a matching tie. Looking after themselves. Three little boys look for fish in the fountain but don’t find them. Why do I assume they’re looking for fish? Mum walks on with the pram. The motor of a scooter revs up unnecessarily under the arch of the wall like an annoying bee. A man in his forties with a black moustache fills a red metal bowl with yellow flowers with water from the fountain for his dog. His wife holds the dog on its lead while it drinks. She wears glasses too. I’m sorry to say I don’t know what kind of dog it is, but a white poodle on a pink lead takes scant interest in it, and the first dog is too interested in the water. Five years ago, was it? – behind the roman wall is where I waded into the ocean with my first mobile phone in the pocket of my trunks.

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