The Stranger Who Edited My Poem on a Napkin
An old man at the next table asked to see it, then improved it.
I was crying into a cappuccino I could not afford when the old man at the next table asked if he could read my napkin. Not my poem. My napkin. That was the word he used, and he used it the way a customs officer says passport.
To explain the napkin I have to explain the morning. At 9:04 a.m. a literary magazine I had worshipped since college rejected four of my poems with a single sentence that included the phrase competent but safe. I took the day off from being a functioning adult, walked into the Irani cafe near the bookshop, ordered the expensive coffee out of spite, and started rewriting the best of the four poems from memory on a paper napkin, pressing so hard the pen went through in places. This is not romantic. This is just what the cornered animal of a writer does.
The old man had been there when I arrived. Cream shirt, brown sweater vest in April, a pot of tea he had made last ninety minutes, and a folded newspaper he was not reading so much as auditing. I had noticed his hands first, because you notice trembling hands, and then felt bad for noticing, and then forgot him entirely... until he spoke.
"The napkin," he said again. "May I? You have been fighting with it for one hour. It is winning."
Every city instinct I own said no. Some other instinct, older, the one that makes you show a stranger your bleeding thumb, slid the napkin across.
He read it twice. I know it was twice because his lips moved both times, at different speeds. Then he took out a fountain pen, unscrewed the cap with visible effort, planted his left hand on his right wrist to steady it, and drew one wavering line through my favourite sentence in the poem.
"Excuse me," I said, meaning several ruder things.
"This line," he said, tapping the corpse of it. "You wrote this one for the judges. The rest you wrote for yourself. Readers can smell the difference like smoke."
He struck out two more. My opening image, the one with the migratory birds. Gone. An adjective I had been proud of since Tuesday. Gone. He moved my last line up to the top, drew an arrow so shaky it looked like a stitched wound, and pushed the napkin back across the marble.
I read what was left... I want to tell you I argued. I want to tell you there was a spirited defence of the birds.
The poem was better.
It was so much better I felt slightly sick, the way you do when a doctor presses exactly where it hurts and says, there it is.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Thursday customer," he said, and poured himself more tea, using both hands on the pot like it was a ship's wheel in weather.
Thursdays
His name, extracted over the following weeks at the rate of one biographical fact per visit, was Mr. Furtado. He had spent thirty one years as a copy editor at a newspaper that no longer exists, and before that he had published two thin books of poems that he referred to, without bitterness, as "my crimes." He was eighty two. The tremor had a name I will not put here because he hated the name, and it had taken from him, in order: his signature, his handwriting, and finally, four years ago, the ability to write a line of his own...
"I compose in my head," he told me once. "Then I lose them. It is like keeping birds in a room with the window open."
So he edited.
That was the whole mystery, laid flat.
Every Thursday he sat in that cafe with his auditor's eye and waited for students, diarists, letter writers, the man who did the crossword in pen, anyone visibly wrestling with words, and he offered the one thing his hands could still deliver: a line through the lie. Crossing out, he said, requires less penmanship than writing. "Destruction is easier to hold steady. Ask any government."
I started coming on Thursdays with drafts. He charged me nothing except honesty and one refill of his teapot. He never added a single word to anything I wrote, not once. He only ever removed, rearranged, and interrogated. "Did this happen?" he would ask, tapping a stanza. "Not in life. In you. Did it happen in you?" If I hesitated, the line was already dead.
"You do not need better words. You need the courage to keep the true ones company."
He said that on the third Thursday, and I wrote it on a napkin of my own, and I have it still, pressed inside a book he would have found sentimental.
Under his crossings out my poems got shorter and heavier, like something reduced on a stove. He sent me home once with instructions to read, of all things, an essay he had liked about why safe poems lose, and when I admitted the rejected poems had been exactly that, safe, competent, wearing their seatbelts, he did not comfort me. He said, "Good. Now you know what the judges knew. You are only four years behind them," and laughed until he had to hold his teacup with both hands.
The napkin poem, the original one, the one he had operated on that first day, I typed up exactly as his arrow had rearranged it and entered it into a monthly poetry contest. I did not tell him... It felt like taking someone to meet your parents too early.
It placed second.
Second, out of some number with three zeros in it. The poem about my grandmother's hands, minus the migratory birds, minus the line for the judges.
I came to the cafe the next Thursday with the printout and a box of the almond biscuits he pretended not to like. I had a speech. The speech had jokes.
His table was empty for the first time in eleven weeks.
The waiter, who had watched our whole arrangement for months with the studied indifference of his profession, told me Mr. Furtado had had a fall. Nothing broken, he added quickly, seeing my face. His niece had come. He was resting at home, and he had left instructions, actual instructions, that if the girl with the napkins came in, she was to be given his table and told not to waste it.
I visited him twice at the flat before I understood what I was for, there at the end of the story. The second time, he was propped up in a chair by the window with the afternoon light on him, and he asked me to take dictation.
Just like that... as if asking for water.
He closed his eyes and recited a poem, eleven lines, about a woman on a railway platform in 1967, and I wrote it down in my own handwriting while my throat did complicated things. It was the first poem of his own to reach paper in four years. He made me cross out one line of it, of course. Said it was for the judges.
We did nine poems that way over the following months, his birds finally landing in someone else's room. When I read about healing now, I think it is mostly this: two people at one table, dividing the labour of a sentence, one supplying the truth and the other the steadiness, neither embarrassed by the arrangement.
I still write my first drafts on napkins. It is terrible for the pen and worse for the napkin.
But a napkin, he told me once, forgives you. It expects to be ruined. That is what it is for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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