Interlude: coffee with milk

I sit at an esplanade in Lisbon, on the day an unexpected storm transforms some streets into canals, making one believe seven hills have sprouted in Venice. A man sits down across from me, after investigating which chairs hadn’t been cleaned by the rainwater. He doesn’t take long to choose and considers whether to sit or let himself fall. He opts to let gravity do all the work.

He inhales in such a way that he can’t avoid coughing. Pulls out a cigarette to calm the cough. A paradox, like so many others we’re made of. This business of being “rational beasts”—I remember Plato, Spinoza, and Kant—is something else. We have the gift of reason, yes. But we remain as irrational as the other beasts.

I continue sipping the coffee with milk I’d ordered minutes before. This is indeed coffee with milk and not milk with coffee, judging by the color of the liquid filling the glass. The distinction matters more than it seems—it reveals intentions, priorities, the subtle hierarchy of our small pleasures. There are coffee-with-milk people and milk-with-coffee people, and they rarely switch camps. I’m a coffee person. Just coffee. This time I wasn’t completely myself. I added milk.

I pull out a cigarette without wanting to smoke (I still smoked then…). I don’t have a cough but there’s something else I need to calm. I follow, I imitate, I’m influenced. What a beast!

I write these words by hand. It’s been ages since I wrote anything like this, by hand. The pen feels strange between my fingers, like a tool from another era. Actually, I opened the notebook to write other words, out of obligation, out of duty. I find myself writing this instead. There it is, our weak reason! The one that lets us presume we’re stronger than the other beasts.

The man, the one with the cigarettes, is already on his third. He inhales with difficulty, almost panting. At the same time, he exhales a certain tranquility. It must be only apparent, for his chest and shoulders, advancing and retreating with false, feeble vigor, reveal tension, effort; that difficulty. But there’s something calming in this self-destructive ritual, a toxic meditation that soothes by slowly killing.

I fight against what I think and what I feel, I should stop writing these words and start writing the others, the ones I should be writing. I stay here and make a pact with myself: I’ll stop writing these words when I finish the coffee with milk. It’s an arbitrary but necessary contract—we need these small structures to give shape to shapeless time.

I look at the glass and see there’s only a small sip left. I drink it more slowly, trying to postpone the inevitable. But contracts are meant to be kept, even the ones we make with ourselves. Especially those.