I stayed in a small cottage on the river with no electricity and a primitive but effective wood-burning stove. It was a modest abode, the kind of place where a man could go to flee the bustling of the big city. I went to find peace. I also went to see an old friend.
Serge had called me weeks before I arrived. He had opened a sleepy bar near the river and wanted me to leave the United States for the French countryside. I gladly obliged - I owed him, after all. We had known each other for a long time, since our meeting in Laos years ago. It feels like forever ago looking back upon it.
The bar was called Le Petit Chou-Fleur. It was a tiny, bistro style bar with patterned tile floors. My feet hurt. Serge was behind the bar. I greeted him and we kissed on each cheek. The bar was mostly empty, except for one old man, sitting at the very end of the bar. The old man methodically sipped cognac from a tiny snifter, giving the glass a quarter turn after each sip. He looked easily over a hundred years old. I looked down the bar at him, and he shot me a fiery look that made me quickly look back to Serge.
Serge was a stout man, proud of his belly, and the fine food with which he filled it. He was short of stature, but his personality filled a room. While I had been looking at the old man, Serge poured me a glass of anisette, shaken with ice. The milky white highball sat on the oaken bartop. I sipped it slowly. Serge drank red wine out of a juice glass.
Serge and I reminisced about the old days. The old man stared. I realized then that he wasn't glaring at me. His eyes were cataracted. They were as cloudy and pale as my drink. I wondered if he was born that way or if it had developed in the hundreds of years during which he appeared to have been alive.
Serge brought out a large platter, piled high with oysters on ice. He gave me an oyster knife and took one himself. We shucked oysters and drank, laughing and gesturing. The old man said nothing. He sipped his cognac, turning the glass.
Serge was in the middle of pouring me another anisette when the sweaty Turk arrived. His clothes were shabby and his perspiration made his white shirt translucent. The Turk was a hirsute fellow; body hair erupting in tufts from nearly all his exposed skin. His beard was a vast jungle of blackness upon his face. The Turk stumbled over to the old man and put his arms around his ancient physique in a threatening grip.
The old man was frail and I was concerned. Before I could do anything, the old man stood up and smashed the Turks head on the bar. He deftly flicked out a pocket knife and shucked the Turk's left eye completely out of its socket. The old man ate the eye, slowly, chewing with his mouth open. I walked over to make sure the old man was okay, and then he shucked out the Turk's right eye, which I only ate so as not to insult the old man. The vitreous fluid from the eyeball exploded in my mouth and tasted like an especially mucus-filled loogie mixed with ocean water.
"This happens all the time," Serge said in a calm monotone.
The old man laughed. Then he took a sip of his cognac, spinning the glass. For a second, he looked just a little younger. And in the mirror, I looked into my face, and I looked younger too.
