Rue Saint-Martin

The man walks into the cafe, which is empty except for a gray-haired customer at the corner of the bar, sitting in the sun which is streaming in from the street-side window, and myself, sitting at a table reading with an empty coffee cup in front of me. Naturally, the barman is standing behind the bar. The man walks up to the bar and thinks for a moment before ordering a Leffe. Instead of standing still at the bar, next to his drink, he leaves his drink on the bar, and walks around the open space of the empty cafe. He returns to the bar to drink some of his beer, leans against the bar with his arms outstretched, tapping on the zinc counter with his fingers, and then leaves the bar again, pacing around the cafe. From my perspective this man has succeeded in setting himself apart from the gray-haired customer, who sits docilely at the bar with his coffee, not moving, not looking like moving. Before the entrance of the man, the gray-haired customer had made banter with the barman, speaking of current events, and awkwardly making a bad joke that the barman did not even acknowledge. Now, this customer is silent. The standing man has claimed the calm space of the cafe as his own. Immediately, the air of peace is lost. It has become a space of hierarchies. I put my reading away, and go stand next to the man as he drinks some more of his beer at the bar. I feel as though I need to make a show of being unimpressed by his presence. I hand the barman a 2-euro coin and, without looking at either the man at the bar or the gray-haired customer, I say goodbye and exit to the sunny street.

From Harry Mathews' "20 Lines a Day"

“When you go to piss in the bathroom with people within possible earshot (and sometimes with no people around at all), you direct your jet at the edge of the pool of water in the toilet bowl so as to reduce the noise you make. (Long ago you observed that peeing on the enamel of the bowl splashed a spray over its edges—something even less nice than making a watery racket.) You are astonished when other men disappear into the bathroom and immediately produce the almost roaring sound of drilled water that you so anxiously avoid, pissing happily, or at least with no audible sign of hesitation, straight into the center of the pool, its deepest and so loudest point. You notice that your astonishment contains no trace of disapproval. You not only take no offense at the undisguised noise you hear, you even feel a certain admiration and respect for its instigator, like those a timid little boy feels for a confident grown-up. Perhaps your admiration is centered on this man’s so surely knowing that his behavior has no relevance to people’s opinion of him—he knows that no one cares whether he is pissing or not, openly or not, because everybody does it, and does it in the knowledge that they are practicing a universal act. This knowledge has somehow escaped you. What exactly have you imagined in its place?”

[I love this almost imbecilic prose mode that Mathews gets into in this book. An earnest/honest, observational/confessional mode of writing that lacks any narrative panache, but is somehow very effective. I never understand why people always call Mathews a "great prose stylist"—often the basic character of his prose is determined by its total lack of style, as with this excerpt here.]