If, as Swedenborg says, there is a special paradise for Turks and the Dutch, then I look forward to the paradise of poets and dogs; though I am neither in reality, despite having certain traits of both. Still I hope to be admitted for those qualities we share. For instance the vehemence of our love, our craving for space, and our stupid inability to expect cruelty. Perhaps also because I believe in finding the correct place to shit.
I used to visit a restaurant in Mexico City that specialized in breakfast. It was windowless, like a mausoleum from the outside. Its interior was dim, but made lustrously so by needles of vertical light on linen. It was a dark prickled by diamonds, like a frozen nightclub. The floors were deeply carpeted in red, and carpet even tumbled down stairs under a canopy to the street, where uniformed valets swapped banter. The restaurant didn't occupy a single room but rather spread through different landscapes and topographies, its tables extravagantly hung with white linens and loaded with silver. On each table – none of which invited more than two or three patrons – a single pink rose stood in a silver flute, frosted and dripping with dew. The sugar bowl was also silver, the sugar was pink.
It was a tranquil arena when the breakfast service began, with staff wafting rather than bustling, to respect the natures of those who would come to such a place; and who would come was often a milieu above the set of bristling businessmen you would expect to find. The breakfast set were accustomed to darkness and deference, and had time and ambition to watch languish. Naturally, exorbitant hangovers were ministered to here. Dinner-suited captains could telephone your day's appointments and tell lies. For the right consideration they would also abandon the restaurant and go about your business. No request seemed too great. I think the place opened at seven. I never went so early though.
Outside sat the city's most important avenue, three lanes each way. As a valet took your car you could ballast your mind with morning traffic, and the idea's weight would help you savour a quiet breakfast by contrast. Come peak hour, over the hush that accompanied the day's first alcohol, you could hear occasional klaxons and air brakes outside, which in the city's concrete pastures are its imitations of peacock cries and horses frisking against their bits. Like all vast cities remote from the sea, Mexico is a living organism that noticeably breathes; a crisp intake of breath in morning, and a warm, odorous exhalation in afternoon. In keeping with this rhythm, extremely cold vodka was the way to polish an appetite for breakfast. Bitterly chilled vodka, followed by champagne. The morning's first oysters with salt. Some tobacco. And to erase any vestige of the previous day and its night, lightly fried toasts with blue cheese, chopped onion and capers, served with a shot of beef juice, Tabasco and lime.
Then sweet fish and eggs Benedict.
Cheese, breads, and Muscat.
Until by the third, fourth, or fifth hour of your stay, when crêpes and coffee were finally served, the table looked for the first time like a breakfast table. Precisely as things should be, because the meals of our day are punctuations, and the dark time between the last course of supper and the first of breakfast is often best left unacknowledged. This was a stitching together of the last and first hems of a day, sewing the night into a sac beneath; a breakfast that began by finishing supper.
Continues in the print edition. Order now.
