Chekhov’s Mistess

June 02, 2008

Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New

 

“They never forget what they are, or all the things they have to do, but for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, they put themselves between parentheses, and I bear the name of that thing in their lives.”

To choose one word to describe Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New it would have to be “quiet.” A short novel of 117 pages, Fabre’s first translated into English, The Waitress Was New is a peek into the consciousness of a Parisian bartender over three days at the end of his career.

The story begins as Pierre is introduced to a new waitress at La Cercle, a small, non-descript restaurant on the outskirts of Paris:

“What I really wanted to say was ‘Welcome to the Club,’ and then give her some tips on the questions she was probably going to ask. The boss isn’t much of a talker, but he’s him and I’m me. I’m only the oldest employee of Le Cercle, which is the café where I work, across from the Asniéres train station, where there’s nothing to see but people coming and going out…” “She had a firm grip, when she let go I noticed she had a big wedding ring on her left hand, and I wondered if that’s really where it’s supposed to go. That was all too long ago for me, maybe I’d forgotten. Still, I’d stayed married for eight years, I was a young man then. I kept my ring on at first. Then I put it in my nightstand drawer. I lost a lot of illusions, but not her. My ex remarried, lived happily; and had two children. Then unhappily, and still two children. Then we lost touch. Her name was Marie, like my adoptive mother. The boss looked around, he’d picked up his cigarillo again.”

Pierre is matter-of-factly attuned to his environment because he is the one person not passing through. He’s a fixture like the bar itself. He listens more than he talks, he observes more than he listens. But for his attentiveness he doesn’t seem to learn much. He acts as though he understand others’ relationships but his own are withered, distant or shallow. He thinks he gets what’s going on around him but then is sideswiped by the truth. Much of the novel surrounds the disappearance of “the boss” (which in French is, I think, “le boss”) and everyone’s speculation, including the boss’s wife, that he’s having an affair with one of the restaurant’s former waitresses. Pierre stumbles confidently through what seems to him a given only to be met later by the truth and throughout he never truly doubts himself.

In depicting someone on the side of society (not on the margins, just side, if you will) Fabre slips into a barely comfortable pathos. Pierre is neither particularly likable or unlikeable and his existence appears without purpose or meaning. The affect is a lack of tension such that we pity Pierre – the man can’t even bring himself to masturbate – but don’t care about the outcome of the story. This is why I think of The Waitress Was New as quiet. It doesn’t try to draw attention to itself, just like Pierre. If we had any doubts of Pierre as something of an anti-hero, Fabre casts him firmly against Pierre’s own reading material that he, naturally, learns about through a customer at the bar: Primo Levi’s If this is a Man “the story of a Jewish Italian resistance fighter who lived through the concentration camps, he wanted to bear witness.” “Now there’s somebody I’d like to have as a customer,” says Pierre of Levi.

Where Fabre excels is accreting pieces of Pierre’s world into a somewhat whole portrait. While the drama is not exactly intense during our brief time with Pierre and Le Cercle, Fabre wastes not a word, packing in layers of detail in every paragraph. Looking at the quote above (beginning with “What I really wanted to say), Pierre gives us glimpses of the new waitress (married, probably strong-willed), the boss (silent type, which might be odd for a restaurant owner, owns a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, smokes cigarillos), Pierre’s ex-wife (divorced, happy, two children, unhappy) and himself (long-time employee of Le Cercle with a fondness for his job, older, divorcee, adopted).

Of course, our observations are limited to what goes through Pierre’s mind, leaving sketches of the boss, the new waitress, the bosses wife and other characters merely impressions. We can only come as close to them as Pierre and he is nothing more than an onlooker on these lives, but still the richness lies in what we don’t know about them. I suspect in reading this novel that I’ve come a little closer to a life about which I knew nothing before, the kind of life that I might pass by with little thought. I may not be any closer than Pierre comes to his customers, filling in blanks where needed with imagination, but that is an oddly compelling pastime.

• posted by Bud Parr
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