22 - 28 March 2001
Issue No.526
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 March 2001 Issue No.526 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
The perfect rendezvous
There can be few more enervating places than Groppi's flagship coffee house on Midan Talaat Harb. If prizes were awarded for the most desultory place to sit, it would be less a case of Groppi's pipping its competitors to the post than leaving the competition standing. Those sad tables of young(ish) couples, looking balefully at one another across cold cups of coffee or heart-shaped dishes of virulently coloured ice cream: it is difficult to imagine a more dispiriting scene. It has, for as long as I can remember, been the perfect setting in which to end a relationship. By the time Groppi's has become the scene of your regular rendezvous you might as well admit it -- your social life is dead on its feet.
Yet still it appears in every guide book ever written about Cairo. Visitors are reminded of its glory days, told that it has fallen on hard times, but are still exhorted to pay at least one visit. And the pay-off for sitting and staring at your travelling companion balefully over two cups of cooling, instant coffee is that, in entering and exiting you get to pass through the shop, with its fabulous secessionist lamps and blunt, Mackintosh inspired reliefs. It is probably the most distinguished retail space in Cairo, and thankfully, one advantage of the timewarp in which the institution exists is that nothing has been done to spoil the shop. So take time to glance up at the wrought iron chandeliers, with their wonderful, abstracted spirals, and the clusters of stylised roses, echoed in the reliefs that run at cornice height erratically around the room. Even the cracked marble flooring has its charms. And if you go before Saturday, the place has an added charm. For the long-closed bar has been reopened, for the duration of the Nitaq at least, housing a large installation, a metal structure, a kind of truncated Eiffel tower, set among illuminated cloches that run in strips across the floor.
The actual artworks are not exactly thrillsville -- the few paintings included are at best insipid, and the installation, the girdered structure, is a little too demonstrative. If you linger too long it could easily come to appear bombastic. So pass through the new entrance, skirt rather than linger around the art, but take in the painted panels on the far wall. Part of the original decorative scheme, they consist of faded birds, herons and the like, looking very Japanese in their restraint. And then enter the coffee shop.
On the opening night of the Downtown festival this is precisely what I did, and so surprised was I by the transformation wreaked by the occasion that the following day I returned, this time for coffee. And the day after I repeated the experience.
Social life on the slide? Well it's always seemed a bit of a downhill journey, but things have not, I like to think, sunk quite this low. The simple explanation for my sudden fondness for the coffee shop has everything to do with a particular state of mind. There is a perfectly reasonable argument that could be made for slapping a preservation order on the cafeteria as well as the shop -- the latter because of the distinction of its decorative scheme, the former because it is a concrete realisation of a difficult, though not uncommon, psychic state. And having spent the previous few days wandering around endless installations -- they are the genre that everyone is trying during the current plethora of art festivals -- and having my psychic space assaulted with various degrees of competence by hundreds of artists, it was somehow refreshing to be in a space that so consummately, so without any obvious effort, contrived to do what so many of the installations were trying, unsuccessfully, to do.
The coffee shop should be an essential stopping point in any tour of Downtown's art venues. Sit, linger, and look. Once upon a time the place had rather sinister prints on the walls, a blood red moon in front of which was the black silhouette of a thorny, leafless bush, twisted into tortured arabesques. There used to be several of these prints, the moon always the same, always blood red, the only difference in the prints being the number and shape of the barbed silhouettes. Now, though, only two remain. In the place of the others are marvelous framed photographs, hung in extravagant groups. And the photographs have but one subject, though it is presented in infinite variety. And that subject is the cake.
Cakes, cakes, cakes, with cream, with fruit, with enormous bouquets of chocolate roses exploding from the top of an ice-cream Vesuvius. Voluptuous cherries, exquisitely tinted, envelop a cannon ball of pistachio-coloured ice cream which sits on a lemon-colored plate, the lemon so delicate as to be almost not there. And each of these concoctions has a name: the Diplomat is a fabulously stodgy, layered construction, more Prussian architecture than patisserie; Taïti is just plain exotic, pineapple, pineapple and yet more pineapple, while Dalia looks as louche as one could hope. There are dozens of these photographs, hung in pyramids, in triptychs, in pairs and alone. Someone, apparently, discovered them in a dusty cupboard, wiped them down, and hung them on the wall. They are relics from Groppi's glory days, and manage to insinuate a disconcerting amount of pathos in the atmosphere.
Nor are they the only change that has been wrought. Someone else has taken the trouble to pin lengths of peach coloured satin, carefully gathered into ironed folds, at strategic points of the cafeteria, lending the whole place the air of an amateur dramatic stage set. And then there are the plants, another new addition -- so new, in fact, that by last week no one had found time to untie the leaves, which remained strapped tightly to the stems, making of these fluffy, frondy palms a series of surreal cucumbers.
It is a quite remarkable transformation. No longer is this the place, par excellence, to end a relationship. It is now a set for a quite different kind of drama, with a non-sequential plot, that subverts anything so prosaically narrative as the possibility of terminating an acquaintance. The audience is the cast and last week everyone was playing their parts wonderfully. One felt more than obliged to join.
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