Into that sober vacuum plunged premium coffee like a hippo in a
hot tub. The public quickly went crazy for the dark and delectable sin.
Plus, with Biddenbrooks playing up the “purity” and “quality” of the
beans, they could fairly have their coffee and drink it too: This was a
wholly natural, if not healthy beverage. Additionally, the exotic
names and places associated with the different beans provided a
sense of adventure and the exotic, all the more important in the
burgeoning intercultural worldscape.
Biddenbrooks therefore wasn’t just a place to drink coffee, it was
a health spa where, for the price of a cup, one could be issued a
passport to the world, sampling its finest fruits from the safety of an
insulated paper cup.
There were other discomforts the company insulated their
patrons from besides temperature: Though the walls were decorated
with posters of bucolic coffee bushes and high-tech roasters, the dirty
and displaced peons who picked the fruit were not similarly
celebrated. Other unsettling aspects were glossed over too, such as
the Biddenbrooks expansion strategy: Locate popular independent
coffeehouses, open a flashy new outlet next door, and bleed them dry.
Biddenbrooks could afford to lose money during those first lean
winters. The others did not. And as they generally purveyed a
superior product, the customer seemed only poised to gain from this.
Still, something ineffable had been lost, a quality too evanescent to
identify.
But it was easily forgotten, made up for by the smiles of the
personnel, the cleanliness, the perfectly crafted coffee, the
engineered ambience. And everywhere, repeated. Imperfection had
been eliminated and the skin stretched tightly against the bone. One
felt only the dimmest sense of absence, a throb in the marrow.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote that there should be
more words for the varieties of love. Eskimos have many for snow, a
substance important to them. But kind-hearted Ms. Browning
missed the point. The Eskimos beheld snow every day. They were up
to their ears in it. But love is something considerably more rare. How
can one attest to the diversity of something they seldom get to
experience?
Roy didn’t really like Morris all that much. He grew to hate
Biddenbrooks. But he loved his job, and he loved a lady who in his
opinion had too many definitions for love. In time he came to
discover that in a world where the supply was low and the demand
ABYSSINIA
14
 |
 |
 |
 |