An Essay Tells Us What Is and a Story Imagines What Could Be
Agnès Madrigal and Sara Parrot
A fictionalized space becomes activated in real life, and in real life, an imaginative story occurs. We designed “Duos” to reconceive of a traditional review and to approach the world around us in a more creative and multidimensional spirit.
Sara Parrot: I love to write about my experiences “out and about,” in fact, I’ve created a series for Madrigalia titled exactly that. In it, I can share my thoughts about great shops, eateries, and more, here in San Francisco or further afield, wherever my travels take me.
Agnès Madrigal: I write in various places. I write at my desk at home, on my living-room couch, or in cafés about the city—I still love writing in cafés. Sometimes a whole story will form in a café that is entirely independent of the space it’s conceived in. But, at other times, a story will develop within the setting where it’s made, and the café or restaurant becomes a character of sorts in the telling. Years ago, I collected these very short stories into a group I named “Written in Cafés.”
SP: I’ve always loved Agnès’s simple stories and the way she brings her observations and musings into a certain space in the world, a space that is not cerebral or private, like a mind, but rather very physical, very public.
AM: When I wrote these types of stories, I never mentioned the actual venues. It did not seem important to the story, which was about an “any café” rather than a particular one, although, of course, often very specific details from a place emerged.
SP: And I recognized a few of the cafés from these details! I thought it would be fun to blend them, to offer both a review of the café and a story.
AM: Often sitting in a café, I’d look at the people around me and imagine their lives—I’d create whole fantastical lives for some of them, just based on the traits that I could witness in this space. I imagine that my ideas were not particularly close to who these people really were and are, but it was a fun exercise.
SP: And it created another type of description of these places, another way to think about how these places feel. I loved it, and the first time we paired a review and a story, it was magic!
To give a sampling of our “Duos,” the following are extracts from a review by Sara Parrot and a story by Agnès Madrigal. Sara’s piece is about the now-closed Momi Toby’s Revolution Café and Art Bar in San Francisco, and Agnès’s tale is set there. We chose this venue in homage to it—we both wrote many of our earlier pieces here.
From Sara Parrot (extract from “Momi Toby’s: A Really Good Cup of Coffee at the End of the World”):
At the corner of Laguna and Linden Streets in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, it is still possible to enjoy a quiet and amicable little corner of this ever-bustling city. Momi Toby’s Revolution Café and Art Bar is entered through a banging screen door and offers a small light-filled room and a simple lunch menu including sandwiches, quiches, and a selection of fresh pastries on display under glass domed vitrines on the marble countertop. Various coffee drinks—always delicious—are available throughout the day and there is also a curated list of wines and beers. In a city that feels more and more saturated with tech-driven crowds and expensively designed little eateries, Momi Toby’s remains a holdout and a breath of fresh air for those looking for a place to quietly read a newspaper, write in a journal, or share a bottle of wine with a friend after a day of nearby shopping.
The now-closed Momi Toby’s Revolution Café and Art Bar in San Francisco
From Agnès Madrigal (extract from “Fantaisie in D Minor”):
Lucky Brand dungarees—the crinkle-edged label appeared in her straight-ahead vision of the woman seated in the chair bent over a notebook on the café table. Beside the woman, out of a slim vase, there was a groping iris, but groping for what? The air felt sweet. The café was sun-warmed and music played—what was it? Chopin? Another woman, a married woman (by her ring), sat reading a textbook in a calm way, with her no-nonsense red-rimmed glasses, her long partly mussed hair, and a swept silk scarf of palest pink around her neck. There was also a baby in a striped shirt in a stroller. The baby gazed at her for a long intent while, the way that babies do. Why did babies do this? It was as though they were gripped by the something that they were still so close to, whatever preceded birth and succeeded death. They were like this before the habits of the new life made them focus differently, perhaps more fixedly, and, consequentially, more harshly. The baby, slobbering, continued to gaze at her, twice, three times, maybe more—she had to avert her eyes. Averting her eyes, she saw outside the window a dog with a sleek brown dogskin stretched over its skeleton walk by, its owner striding ahead, talking on his phone. A woman and a man holding hands and shopping bags, laughing, walked by, too, with their bright mouths filled with teeth, wearing their colored shirts, hers magenta and his orange. They sheltered their eyes behind fashionable sunglasses. It was a blazing bright day outside.