“Can we meet at twelve?”
“Okay. Bye!”
At a couple of minutes past twelve Sophie walked into Cafe Pierre. It
was one of those new fashionable places with little round tables and black
chairs, upturned vermouth bottles in dispensers, baguettes, and sandwiches.
The room was small, and the first thing Sophie noticed was that Alberto
was not there. A lot of other people were sitting at the round tables, but
Sophie saw only that Alberto was not among them.
She was not in the habit of going into cafes on her own. Should she just
turn around and leave, and come back later to see if he had arrived?
She ordered a cup of lemon tea at the marble bar and sat down at one
of the vacant tables. She stared at the door. People came and went all the
time, but there was still no Alberto.
If only she had a newspaper!
As time passed, she started to look around. She got a couple of glances
in return. For a moment Sophie felt like a young woman. She was only fifteen,
but she could certainly have passed for seventeen—or at least, sixteen and a
half.
She wondered what all these people thought about being alive. They
looked as though they had simply dropped in, as though they had just sat
down here by chance. They were all talking away, gesticulating vehemently,
but it didn’t look as though they were talking about anything that mattered.
She suddenly came to think of Kierkegaard, who had said that what
characterized the crowd most was their idle chatter. Were all these people
living at the aesthetic stage? Or was there something that was existentially
important to them?
In one of his early letters to her Alberto had talked about the similarity
between children and philosophers. She realized again that she was afraid of
becoming an adult. Suppose she too ended up crawling deep down into the
fur of the white rabbit that was pulled out of the universe’s top hat!
She kept her eyes on the door. Suddenly Alberto walked in. Although it
was midsummer, he was wearing a black beret and a gray hip-length coat of
herringbone tweed. He hurried over to her. It felt very strange to meet him in
public.
“It’s quarter past twelve!”
“It’s what is known as the academic quarter of an hour. Would you like a
snack?”
He sat down and looked into her eyes. Sophie shrugged.
“Sure. A sandwich, maybe.”
Alberto went up to the counter. He soon returned with a cup of coffee
and two baguette sandwiches with cheese and ham.
“Was it expensive?”
“A bagatelle, Sophie.”
“Do you have any excuse at all for being late?”
“No. I did it on purpose. I’ll explain why presently.”
He took a few large bites of his sandwich. Then he said:
“Let’s talk about our own century.”
“Has anything of philosophical interest happened?”
“Lots ... movements are going off in all directions We’ll start with one
very important direction, and that is existentialism. This is a collective term for