That smell arose as delicate as expected from a new smell in a place like that. Very little time passed, however, from the moment I noticed the citric essence waving around my nostrils until I was subtly taken by wrath. Nothing that could make me shoot a gun or break a strip mall’s windows or anything, but it was wrath. And I knew it.
I was in a cafe on Whyte Avenue when that happened. I had ordered a Caramel Correto “with cream and served in a mug, please”. I tried to play classy by pronouncing “Correto” with what I thought to be an Italian accent, which probably sounded like I had some sort of speaking impairment. The young woman who took my order responded with great zeroness — she was not harsh, of course, after all she relies on her smile if she wants to get some reasonable tips, but my faux Italian clearly did not impress anyone in that building.
I sat by the front window that day. It was around five hours in a Sunday afternoon. We had changed to daylight saving time the week before, so it was quite sunny for the time. I feel more comfortable with natural daylight, I guess. I do like those small yellowish bulbs they put over our heads in fancy cafes to shed fake sunlight on our books, but natural light is still more comfortable, for sure. I sat at the corner and disposed my books on the counter in front of me.
Before doing anything, I plugged my earphones on my cell phone and set the Sunday evening playlist, composed of cheesy remixes of Beatles’s and Michael Jackson’s songs. I remember very precisely of one of them, which started playing from the random playlist, whose chorus was “Michael Jackson is not dead”, sang by a voice that sounded like one of those text-to-speech softwares. The lyrics were about the supposedly fake death of Michael Jackson and how it was thoroughly orchestrated by the singer to make it look authentic. Every four beats there was a friendly Michael Jacksonish “ooh!”. It was funny.
I went to a cafe so I could concentrate and read the chapters of my textbook due to the following week, but thinking it would happen that easily is of an optimism I do not even pretend to have. I can usually keep myself from paying attention to other people’s conversations if and only if I am in a crowded space AND nobody around is whispering or trying to be silent and not succeeding. That makes me hate libraries as places for studying, for example, and enjoying cafes for the same purpose. But the fact is that I was not really into studying—or doing anything besides laying on my bed—that Sunday. I went to the cafe anyway, expecting that the coffee would wake me up somehow.
There was a woman sitting close to me at the counter. If my nose was noon, she was sitting at eight and a half. I unwittingly sneaked my eyes at her and noticed she had a stack of paper sitting beside her laptop. The top sheet had a sentence written on in French: “Il neige en hiver”, or any other sentence with the word “neige”, I cannot recall very precisely. It was written by a child, I inferred, since the sentence was spread over three lines of two inches each, and the handwriting was either of a child or a chimpanzee. “She must be a French teacher”, I thought. “But she looks too young to be a teacher”, I thought again. “Yeah, but she might be an intern”, I then concluded. She might have been, I did not check.
During this whole period of time in which my eyes prowled around the probably French teacher my head kept facing straight towards the counter. I’m very good at pretending I’m not looking at people. From my perspective, at least, my stealthy analytic gazes are impossible to be noticed by a regular, untrained passer-by. It would be really embarrassing if people actually notice I’m staring at them and just pretend it is not happening in order to avoid a more awkward situation.
Speaking of awkwardness, I was on the metro with my friend the other day and a girl sitting in front of us discreetly pointed his cell phone at us. Seconds later we heard that typical iPhone camera noise: “clickth”. She had probably forgotten to turn the noise off, and, yes, for our surprise, apparently she took a picture of us. She noticed we noticed, and started shaking her hands while sucking her juice from the cup with a purple straw. We noticed she noticed we noticed, and we made a point of highlighting that fact.
Back to the cafe.
I had successfully accomplished my brain’s desire to scan the young lady; I moved my eyes back to my books and started reading the first of three chapters. I was allowed to perform such action for a period of twenty-five seconds, when then my attention was captured back to the woman. This time, not by any visible attraction, but by the smell I told you about in the beginning. I sniffed twice—it was tangerine—and I hated it immediately.
I looked around, setting my eyebrows for the evil bend formation, as though I particularly inquired each client about the source of that disgusting smell, while holding a bazooka. I turned my eyes to the French snobby woman sitting at the corner as if she was the owner of the place. She was using those sassy hands to peel a shiny damned tangerine. I turned my face back to my books, for I did not want to bother, but I should have gently asked her to either leave the place or respect the minimum standards for a peaceful social coexistence. I think I faintly growled of cholera.
Everything smelled like a picnic by that time. I tried to take a sip from my cup, but the mix of flavors reminded me of landfill juice, and that is something you don’t want your Caramel Correto to smell like. I don’t expected that place to be the pinnacle of all human good manners, but peeling disgustingly smelly things indoors should be considered a bylaw offence. The problem is not fruit in general, but tangerine. I would totally support you if you brought some pears to have as lunch, because pears don’t stink. If the smell of a tangerine had a hundredth of the strength it currenly has, I think we could even consider to allow the fruit inside closed buildings. Until then, better not to bother everyone in any given room with what is comparable to a dinossaur in cupcake shop.
My pain lasted for about five minutes, until the woman finally left. The smell stayed there for a while, of course, but it was progressively fading away. I came back to my books, while my cell phone played a Tiny Tim cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Great Balls of Fire—that artist is terrific, by the way.
An old man approached the chair next to me and looked at it—I was surreptitiously observing him with my old technique. He might have been talking to me, so I took my phones off and looked at him. He arched his eyebrows and looked at the chair. “Pardon me?” I said. “Can I have this chair?”, “Yes, of course,” I replied. And he sat there and took a laptop of the size of Manhattan from inside his backpack.
A woman came in and occupied the seat left by the French tangerine-lover. My scanning noticed she was Indian and had the university website open on her computer. I continued my reading until a bizarre smell knocked on the doors of my nose. “That tangerine girl again??” I thought. It was not. The very spot where the Indian girl sat must be the official chair of people who bring stinky food to a cafe, and nobody ever told me anything about.
I was amazed. Not even ten minutes have passed since the last disturbing source of hatred left the room and a substitute was already at place. I looked at the woman and she was having a real supper at her corner. One that smelled like my socks at the end of those days I have to walk home from school. This is another smell you do not want to have wandering around your Caramel Coretto. I complained in silence while leafing aimlessly through my criminology book.
I’m not sure if it was the woman’s supper or the remix of The Sound of Silence playing in my phones that made me feel a little inebriated. The environment was awful at the time. Some of my senses were being deliberately ridiculed by the others. It was time for me to leave before the next client came in just to find that the pipelines under the building needed fixing, or my aunt showed up with a jar of pumpkin jam. It’s hard to tell which would have been worse.