Cybercafés. Do they still exist? Now that we all carry the internet around with us? I found a reference
to one in Enrique Vila-Matas’ París no se
acaba nunca, from 2003 (Never Any End to Paris, 2011, translated by Anne McLean). If they’ve disappeared, it wouldn’t be too sad—there’s
something disordered about them in the first place, something so antithetical to the
spirit of a bar. A waitress comes and takes your order, you mumble something
without turning away from the computer screen in front of you. The closest
comparison I can think of to them is a bar I know in Fredericksburg where they have video poker, and where one afternoon I watched a woman, a regular, get transfixed by the game. She was there
without being part of the group; any time she participated in the conversation at the bar it was in the same disdainful way a teenager responds to her parents
from the couch without looking up from her iPhone.
Still, I have to feel some personal sadness since I went to
Spain during the height of the cybercafé’s relevance, in the summer of 2000.
That was how I talked to H while she was back in the States: most days, at an
appointed hour, adjusted to account for the time difference and her summer work schedule, I
would be hunched over a screen at a cibercafé in the Huertas neighborhood in Madrid. Chatting. On Yahoo.
[Note: sometimes she went to a cybercafé, too, the only one
in the US I ever heard of. It was in Georgetown, Texas,
and it was a “Christian” establishment—which meant that they were vigilant
about not allowing anything unseemly on their computers. Which meant there was very little
privacy there. Which was ironic, because she only went there when she was staying at her
parents’ house in Georgetown and, therefore, needed to get away to get
privacy.]
My cybercafé had a decent menu. I usually ordered gazpacho, but I also remember having patatas bravas, and croquetas, and a
tortilla sandwich. I think I drank beer there, too, but maybe not. I went to a few other cybercafés when I was out in different
parts of the city, too. My second night there, my exchange program met downtown for
a get-together night out, a small walking tour followed by drinks. And I remember
that the penultimate bar we visited that night was a cybercafé.
Isn’t that funny? It was a night like so many out of books
or whatever, a bunch of Americans out in a European capital, drinking too much
and then staggering home on the metro. But in the middle of it, we all agreed
to pause the merriness and spend a few minutes checking our email,
absorbed in the blue glow of the computer screens which (for some reason I
remember) were embedded in the tables of this bar. Then, finishing
one-by-one, we each patiently waited for the others to complete their business. We
came back together at the bar’s vestibule, a mass of young people heading
rosily back out in the summer night.
Anyway, the reference from Enrique Vila-Matas comes early in the novel: the protagonist and his wife are trying to find the Dingo Bar, where Hemingway supposedly met Fitzgerald, on the Rue Delambre in Paris. The wife says, "You know what, I'm going to look up the Dingo on the internet, I'll go to that internet café on the corner..." The bar is gone, but the fact that they find it on the internet is I guess a commentary on how we've moved our lives online. Still, it already feels like a pretty dated detail to me.
