He dragged his pirogue onto land and joined some workers beneath a length of black oilcloth stretched over four wooden posts. In an hour or so the boy dropped us off at the foot of a muddy embankment. Patti smith m train Photo: Courtesy of Random House The first anniversary of the 1980 military coup that overthrew the democratic government was looming: an anniversary just days before our own. We finally landed in Suriname at dawn a handful of young soldiers armed with automatic weapons waited as we were herded into a bus that transported us to a vetted hotel. In Grenada and Haiti, all passengers had to deplane while the hold was searched for smuggled goods. The short stay readied us for the extreme heat we were about to face. We ate red beans and yellow rice in Little Havana and visited Crocodile World. We flew on a Sunday to Miami and stayed for two nights in a roadside motel. When he embraced an idea he looked at things from every angle.
Fred bought maps, khaki clothing, traveler’s checks, and a compass cut his long, lank hair and bought a French dictionary. Preparing for our trip, Fred and I spent our days in the Detroit Public Library studying the history of Suriname and French Guiana. Photographs adorning the walls: a melancholic portrait of the café’s namesake, and a smaller image of the forlorn poet Paul Verlaine in his overcoat, slumped before a glass of absinthe. Just silence black coffee olive oil fresh mint brown bread.
I imagined threadbare Persian rugs on wide-planked floors, two long wood tables with benches, a few smaller tables, and an oven for baking bread.
Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum. The slow-moving atmosphere surrounding the café captivated me. A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a café with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The walls were covered with printed murals of the city of Florence and scenes from The Divine Comedy.Ī few years later I would sit by a low window that looked out into a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach Café. I finally got the courage to enter Caffè Dante on MacDougal Street. In 1965 I had come to New York City from South Jersey just to roam around, and nothing seemed more romantic than to write poetry in a Greenwich Village café.
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