Had the type of fatigue that accompanied me since my wakeup so surely coffee was not to resolve my problem. Still I went to the café at the other end of the little square, or commercial center if you will, in the center of Wolfsburg. Once two Italian men from Lamborghini said they discovered this great café and we must all go there after lunch. Superleggera. The very ordinary sweaters they were wearing seemed extraordinarily fashionable because of their Italianness. We passed on that invitation for some unstated reason, and I got my coffee-to-go from the ubiquitous German chain pastry shop, almost with a sense of shame. How can you ever pass on the invitation for good coffee. I then went and discovered Superleggera as well, on my own terms, after the Italians discovered it. Good coffee indeed. With a bar full of espresso-savoring men, some maintaining the Italian way of drinking it standing. One amazing thing about Wolfsburg is that ostensibly half of the population have Italian heritage here, meaning you could hear Italian half of the time. They switch nimbly between Italian and German, the same way as the Alto Adige people (except their German is probably more German, if you know what I mean).
I ordered my usual cappuccino to go at the bar from the usual ginger-bearded bespectacled young man with an amiable smile. I could well imagine him to be an artist in Berlin, producing the kind of art I neither understand nor try to understand, nor appreciate. But nice chap, no doubt. Not the rush hour after lunch, there were only a handful of people lavishing their time. Two elderly men were sitting at the bar. They watched me indiscreetly as I stood there. Cappuccino zum Mitnehmen? I turned to him. Cappuccino zum Mitnehmen? I said yes. I asked because otherwise you could sit here with us. I smiled good-temperedly and said, no time. They were talking in Italian with the bartender before, but switched to German to talk to me. The bartender made fun of him in Italian. Something about taking a photo. Warum haben Frauen immer keine Zeit? He exclaimed. The bartender answered, weil sie arbeiten müssen. I seconded that statement, and pronounced a light-hearted tschüss. They said ciao. When I stepped into the elevator, I examined myself in the mirror, only to see that I could not look any normal, as good as on any other day. Language is a beautiful and strange creation that serves both as facilitator and hindrance at the same time. To human communication, of course. If there is anything that I know for sure I want to do in this lifetime, it is to understand languages well. Plural form, yes. I myself may have changed a lot but this resolution never has. Or rather, it has changed in quantity but never in substance: sometimes eight, sometimes five. When I was in Lisbon and happened to be in front of the Belém Palace before the president of Portugal and the crowned team were arriving, I inquired an enthusiastic Portuguese woman standing firmly across the street from the palace leaning against the handrail. What's going on? She told me in her enthusiastic tone in Portuguese that the team was passing by here at a certain time. I only made out uma and quarto, but could not fathom if it meant a quarter to one or a quarter past one, or maybe if it's the same rule as in German then it could have meant something around twelve. I never got it, as the team turned up considerably late, well after all the speculated times. I have a Portuguese vocabulary book somewhere in this world, or maybe I have ceremonially given it up by giving it to someone I barely know, as my Swedish textbook. I remember one time I wrote an email to a Swede in Beijing, on a somewhat business development capacity, and ended with a cordial tack så mycket. He replied in a heartbeat. But at the time, I still had more knowledge to support that benign showoff. Now I'd never use that phrase, just as I never say obrigada or even je voudrais, afraid of failing expectations. Once I exhausted Google to search for un cours de francais en fin de semaine à Vienne without luck. I do miss all those French classes taught in German but I'm afraid I've returned most of what I learned to that thin Austrian lady always dressed in black who said to speak French you just have to be elegant und arrogant gleichzeitig, especially the chapter about ménage, which I never really got. I think I caught the whateveritis from Anthony Burgess in his bewildering narration of the story somewhere between twisted facts and loyal fiction. I wonder who Jakob Strehler is, and I must read the (auto)biography of Burgess to understand where he gained his knowledge of all these languages. Travel, I suppose. Travel, and literature. My delicious coffee is finished. My thoughts must rest with it.
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