R. Crumb, Rafito el Varado, and Django Reinhardt at a café table in Nice, France

More about R. Crumb, Rafito el Varado, and Django Reinhardt at a café table in Nice, France

A late afternoon in Nice. The café awning flaps lazily in the warm sea breeze. Three men sit around a small round table: R. Crumb, hunched and owlish; Rafito el Varado, sunburned, contemplative; and Django Reinhardt, immaculate in his suit, fingers tapping silent chords on his coffee cup.

Crumb: You know, this city is too clean. It makes me nervous. I need a bit of grime to feel honest. A crooked alley, a man yelling at pigeons… something with personality.

Django: Mon ami, you want grime? Go to Marseille. There the alleys have more personality than the people. But Nice… Nice is for breathing, for letting the fingers loosen.

Rafito: That’s why I like it. A place where you can sit still and not feel like the world is demanding something from you. Back home I can’t sit at a table this long without someone asking if I’m “working on something.”

Crumb: They think artists are factories. “Draw me something!” “When’s the next thing coming out?” They never imagine we’re just trying to figure out what the hell is happening in our own heads.

Django: Exactement. Music doesn’t come from factories. It comes from the ghosts living in your hands. Mine whisper to me. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they refuse to play anything at all.

Rafito: Mine whisper too, but mostly about beach sand, broken bottles, driftwood, stuff the tide drags in. I’ve been thinking—maybe a person is just a kind of shoreline. Things wash up. You deal with them or you don’t.

Crumb: That’s… actually not bad. Better than anything my therapist told me. Shoreline psychology. Maybe I should draw that. A whole comic about a man who collects the junk that washes into his life.

Django: Only if you make the junk swing. Life must swing, otherwise what is the point? Even sorrow should dance a little.

Rafito: You talk like the world has melody built into it.

Django: It does. Most people just don’t listen. They hear traffic. I hear the rhythm of tires kissing pavement.

Crumb: I hear deadlines.

Rafito: I hear seagulls threatening litigation.

(They all laugh. A waiter passes, leaving the faint scent of citrus and cigarette smoke.)

Django: Look at us—an illustrator, a wanderer, and a gypsy guitarist. We meet in Nice for no logical reason. This is how good stories begin.

Crumb: Or disastrous collaborations.

Rafito: Or a postcard no one sends.

Django: Bah! It is simple. Life arranges meetings like chords. Some resolve, some don’t. But this—this one resolves nicely.

Crumb: Yeah. I’ll draw this someday.

Rafito: Make me look younger.

Crumb: No promises.

Django: Make me sound better.

Crumb: That, I can do.

(They raise their glasses—wine, water, tiny espresso cups. A strange trio in a quiet French afternoon, caught somewhere between art, music, and the eternal daylight of wanderers.)