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Socorro socorro, estou caindo!... There was an alarming rattle when the bag was turned upside down, and together with hundreds of other coffee beans it fell out onto a table in the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
The coffee bean looked around cautiously. Oh yes, there was a foreign voice, the voice of an artist. From Finland! It could have been worse. Finland has a reputation of having a prominent, though diluted, coffee culture. An authentic Da Ponto-bean from the most respectable shop in the Mercado de Pinheiros is not indifferent to whose pot it ends up in.
But what in God's name was this artist doing! Gluing beans together to form a huge butt which would be part of an installation-sculpture, Marcel Duchamp dans la douche. The coffee bean could hear its friends screaming when they were being picked up, one by one, and dipped in a sea of glue. They were never to know the long awaited metamorphosis of being slowly ground into a soft powder and released in an extatic cloud of fragrance. In Brazil this metamorphosis is very powerful, since the coffee is made very strong and black, and mixed with an equal amount of sugar it becomes a power-drink that gives necessary energy during the hottest hours of the day. The coffee bean rolled to the edge of the table in a desperate attempt to escape. And it worked! The artist considered his work finished, and the remaining beans were swept into the golden bag again.
Several weeks later they rolled out on a table in a small apartment in Ĺbo, Finland. The artist was at it again. Now he was gluing the Brazilian coffee beans on to a copper pot. Oh, horror! And he put a layer of revolting, smelling polyester resin on top. But once again the coffee bean was lucky, and it escaped the cruel fait of being coating on a cream jug.
Now it seemed like it had hit the jackpot, because the artist had an old-fashioned coffee-mill where he ground his morning coffee. One by one the remaining beans disappeared into the mill, and he could hear them crackle with joy when the metamorphosis took place. But no, the artist grabbed the bean, folded a napkin around it, and off they went somewhere... A strange feeling of uneasiness filled the coffee bean, and it had a strong urge to be a bastard and split in two.
Then it felt the artist's thumb and index finger slowly caressing its rounded shape. The bean enjoyed it, it had to be time for the mill. But the fingers kept on rolling the bean between them, and it started to feel warm all over. The thumb slid down into the little crack, incitingly scraping off a few surface molecules with its nail, continuing with a slow, rolling motion around the smooth edges.
There was a sharp sound, and suddenly the bean felt a sting in one end and a drill ran resolutely through its body. A small amount of coffee powder poured out on the table. Aaah, wonderful, yelled the bean, more, more! But the artist didn't hear. He was slipping a string of sewing thread through the hole, tied a knot, and fastened the other end up in a tree branch. Then he let go, and as the swinging motion slowed down the bean could see where it was. The branch rose up out of an asymmetrical table! And the table was packed with the most unexpected things.
Over on one side it discovered a white plastic can, it looked like an ordinary oil-can for cars. The can contained milk, and it stood on a foundation of track-rubber, the kind you use for surface coating worn out tyres. The shape of the foundation resembled that of a church bell.
Close by the bean could hear suppressed cries for help from the coffee beans in the layer of resin on the copper pot, now functioning as a cream jug. It stood on a copper foundation the shape of a coffee bean. From over there came a proud murmur from the brown sugar cubes living in a heart-shaped bowl of bronze made from a prototype built up of sugar cubes.
The white sugar had a proud task too. It had volunteered to be a sea of snow for a little porcelain polar bear living inside a shiny, bent up metal pipe. The coffee bean looked straight down and saw an inlay of summer flowers made of leather, synthetic grass, vinyl carpet, and plexiglass gushing out from a giant vase turned upside down. And what was that? A delicious scent of triangle-, circle-, and square-shaped pastries.
Having made it through the initial shock, the bean started to enjoy its place in life, being the symbol of global coffee energy on the coffeholic's super-table in Café Andersson. And slowly, like a giant wave, the message flowed out: COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOfffffffffffffffffffffffeeeeeeeeeee