Near the beginning of the 21st century you’d step up through the doorway and walk inside and you’d notice it was a bit dim, always – the time of day didn’t seem to matter much. That was the first thing - the dark fuchsia walls seeming to absorb the lighting or maybe the electric bulbs were all old and sputtering along, as it were, or the lamps all so dust covered that that was as light as it was ever going to be inside the long, deep bar, Cafe Notegen. Then its scent - the next thing - a mix of superficially cleaned pavement, tomato sauce, fruit, old wood, polish with again dust just whispering into the background but recognizable on the third sniff. Along with the scent you’d start to register the collection of seemingly drawn people hanging and sitting and leaning in various places as if part of an animated painting. Which is sort of what Notegen was: a painting, not well defined in time but a colored background somewhere between Cezanne, Van Gogh and Degas in which you stepped and, if so inclined, became part of.
The bar was situated in the center of Rome between Piazza Del Popolo and the Spanish Steps in via del Babuino. It had seen brighter, whiter days, having been the white-colored hangout of via Margutta artists and directors and an odd actor or two in the fifties and sixties. Even Fellini took his coffee break there in the daytime, along with Masina, Flaiano, Guttuso, Bertolucci, Alvaro, Milani, Olivetti, Brodskij… D’Annunzio and others before them. Giovanni (von) Notegen came down from Switzerland and opened the original Notegen drugstore in 1875, later expanding by adding a candy shop and caffe.
In the period when I would stop into the bar from time to time those its happier days had already long passed. Even the enthusiasm surrounding its re-opening in the late 80’s – after closing awhile the bar’s closure had actually been brought up in the national parliament, with the result of a successful project to reopen – had waned. Still, Notegen with its cartoon-like players and time-slowed atmosphere kept hanging onto something which today is becoming ineffable in many if not most large cities: an elegant intention. Not chic or fad or theoric or cool or in. Its relative failure to bring that intention to fruition has more to do with downtown Rome’s, and maybe all of the west’s, cultural decline over the past few decades than with any financial mismanagement. And, as the passing of many of the people who used to go there, a sort of inevitability.
But step inside back then, not so long ago at all and still…there near the back always slumping on the bar counter, dressed in tailored tartan wool, is the British ex-pat who landed in Rome…nobody knows how long ago. 10 years, maybe 20, with lightly thinning and subtly graying straight blond hair, a slim man with small eyes surrounded by sad lines, in his late 40’s or early fifties. He doesn’t speak a word of Italian yet follows along with whatever discussion is going on, nodding quietly. Two chairs over is the American opera singer, a New York jewish girl in her thirties with a mild opera girth and thick but well done makeup, lashes and all. She hated my constant mispronunciation of Eastern European conductors but still you could talk about a piece or an interpretation and if she agreed she’d slowly open her thick lips to reveal a pretty, big and genuine white smile. At the table in the back sits the local poet, fairly well known, with a round face and big round nose and big round eyes and a big round belly, a quick wit with just enough meanness to bridge a mischievous humor into his playful lines. Next to him sits a short-ish, wiry Sicilian scoundrel, not a bad guy but the type who always has just enough gas in the tank to make it home, not one drop more, always going from one get rich scheme to another, a jack of all trades with a rusky tobacco voice and southern charm. A living cliche of the old adage ‘I’m going out to get the cigarettes’, only in his case he actually did use the phrase, leaving his wife and kids behind because that sort of containment just will not do for his kind.
His contained opposite sits instead appropriately on the opposite side of the table, a middle aged judge appropriately dressed as such: thin lips, center parted straight brown hair, thin mustache – (you can almost see him in the morning looking in the mirror to make sure he recognizes the made face reflecting back) - but somehow always seeming to be wearing cowboy boots (‘don’t fence me in’.) An amateur poet, something of an order maniac, compulsive, maybe a mild psychopath. Kafka.
There were others of course, not least of which the owner/manager couple, he behind the bar a Notegen, tall and thin with a prominent lower jaw, very Swiss-German looking but with a neurological disorder which gave his face a constant expression of distracted, wise bemusement – which wasn’t so far off from the truth anyway. His wife instead took position at the cash register, a short, feminine woman with long, wild, curly dark hair and rich dark eyes peering out from beneath a pair of thick glasses, the whole of which made her look effectively like something of a sister from a Shakespearean play -(THAT play, the Scottish one. ‘Boil, boil…’) Then there was the great grandson of a noted Italian playwright and writer (Pirandello), tall and wide-faced, elegant and proper, stepping into the cafe with his limping gait wearing a dark, tailored suit and proper tie, he, to, a relic from a more elegant age, imagined or not. Or maybe like the subject of one of his father’s paintings. His voice seemed like a non-reverberating Italian tenor version of a Mongolian throat singer, a tone and rhythm to his words that made them seem almost a song.
Each character was different, so very different, from another and yet like a spectacle on the wild African planes, each belonged and expressed what they were without trying – and so were a pleasure to watch and listen to. No D&G or other vulgar publicity on their clothes, no imitated affectations in their manners. Before we all bought smart phones. I left Rome for awhile and when I returned Cafe Notegen and they were gone. The space where it used to be is one of those temporary outlet stores now. You know, the ones that sell D&G, 40 percent off. The odd collection of people had drifted away to other places, at least the ones still around. Or so I hope. Maybe the Brit finally went home.
Once at least I did run into that great grandson of one of the best, if not the best, Italian play writes. He was walk-hobbling about, heading toward the Pantheon with some difficulty. We exchanged a friendly hello, he gave me his calling card and we agreed we would meet up for a dinner or a coffee or something but as he hobbled away along the downtown Roman streets now filled with Tiffany stores on one side, MacDonalds on the other, still wearing a proper tailor made dark suit from another time, he already looked the part of an elegant ghost leaving a town he didn’t belong to anymore.
But I miss Cafe Notegen. We all should. Borrowing a different phrase from another, different time: ‘They’re a rotten crowd, you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together. Good-by…I enjoyed breakfast, Notegen.’
