Ode to the Perfect Café con Leche

by Alexandra van de Kamp

For the baristas at Kapej, Coffee-Food-Art, San Antonio, TX

I walk into Kapej to pick up my weekly avocado & cheese 

bocadillo. Brick floors glisten beneath my feet; 

earrings, bird-delicate in their red and blue beads, 

dangle from wooden displays. On spindly metal racks, 

greeting cards swivel: some painted with wide-eyed

terracotta cats, others with Spanish Missions 

in their heavy-lidded, yellow stone.

The first time I happened upon this small café

on a street populated with flat-roofed medical buildings,

I had no idea how the coffee would taste in its blue 

and white ceramic cup, the width of a poached egg. 

One sip, and I was back in Spain, where I had lived 

for six years, years ago. The coffee a rich, echoing road 

unravelling, history by history, down my throat.

But I have come to this point in the journey down 

the page’s throat to attempt a portrait of the baristas 

who concoct the café’s daily lattes, shot through 

with brown sugar, honey mint, honey vanilla; who devise 

plates of chicken breast sandwiches, salads laced with 

lemon and olive oil; who blend turmeric, mango and banana 

smoothies, yellow as a Van Gogh field at noon. Food prepared 

with steady, daily attentiveness, a love of fresh ingredients 

so untarnished it reminds me of Vermeer going broke 

in 17th century Netherlands just to purchase lapis lazuli 

from the pharmacy, just to take home pure blue 

in a small envelope. 

Once, I sipped a lavender latte in this café, and felt 

the intact leaves of lavender, small stars 

prickling down my throat. One barista, I believe, 

is from Central America, another from Mexico

and another from San Antonio. Each time I go in, 

they chat to me in Spanish, patient with my half-forgotten 

Castilian, and we trade slang. They do not know the idiom

es una paliza, one of my favorite Madrileño sayings,                                                           

meaning “it’s a drag” to get something done, meaning 

something weighs your limbs, the ribs of your soul, down. 

One day, I forget the exact word for humidity, 

and they gently remind me: humedad. Praise for those 

who give us plates of food we happily take into ourselves, 

who patiently accept us, as we are, into their days, 

who play with what the earth has gifted us without taking it 

for granted. Praise for language: its melon-syllables and 

mango-syntax, its broken and stumbling alleys and skies 

of hope; its cardamom and rose histories, 

never fully told.