All along the California coast, is the little café

I acquired from my father a willing-

ness to read the same noir detective

writer, over and over, when I was a

boy. Ross MacDonald was an enormous-

ly popular writer of what Greene

had called, entertainments, albeit

in the latter's case at an unpar-

donably respectable level of lit-

erary and moral bite. Of course,

this genre was one of the prin-

cipal vertebrae if not the back-

bone of American cinema, in which

medium it still has appeal to the

young. But what I enjoyed in the

writings of MacDonald was his cap-

acity to revive for me the com-

paratively undeveloped California

of my parents' youth and my four

grandparents' wintertime settle-

ment, in which the isolated road-

side café figured both hopefully

and forlornly as an inevitable

place of meeting, rather like a

blog between hamlets too distant

to know each other's existence.

The seaside café has always stood

out, for me, as a category of dining

establishment able to claim exemp-

tion from restaurant characteristics,

for being primarily a shelter, in an

inherently romantic seascape. To this

day, of course, I retain my favourites

in my olfactories and in the creak of

my chair upon the tile or wooden floor.

They were not about being fed. They

were about what a relais is really

about. They were about being relieved
of travel, being drawn inside; about
being recomposed in being still.

Now that I am spending days and

nights after surgery involving a

leg, being still, elevating it and

doing my best to be quiet, the iso-

lation of the noir café settles in-

to me as another inherent element 

of this aedicular, littoral shelter

between progress and past, much

as a blog between footfalls, paused

in its stride. The time offers re-

cuperation, whose necessity I can

not dispute, but at no immediate or

conscious gain in replenishment.

I am sheltered, but not fed. I am

indispensably but unconstructively

interrupted, the café seeming to

have liberated me of more than my

driving jacket.

There is sometimes a sorry 

grandiosity in this, of tone, 

an incidental, not of predicate.

Even suspended, I know the pur-

pose in my journey here, but in

this café, I can cite its prin-

ciples without feeling much sight

of its resumption. I have given

such signals as I've been able,

of the vitality of a trajectory

for which I hold, in normal times,

a keen if not relentless attach-

ment, and for which the page's

immense readership is almost in-

fallibly nonparticipatory, but 

incredibly, gratifyingly atten-

tive. 

I'm a pursuer from an unforgotten, 

undeveloped California, whose 

detective work continues, not for

a fugitive but for a rightful heir,

not of mine, but of his own being.

Bastiaan van Gaalen

Carlotta Manaigo, photography

L'Officiel Hommes Italia©

Spring/Summer, 2012