Dating : Modern times

This text has been automatically translated in Google Translate, from Portuguese to English, because my English language is even worse. Excuse me.

Montijo
The cupbearer of Mimosa, a plump, pudgy woman, tiptoed through the window of the door and watched a man standing in the middle of the room, holding the black tray uncomfortably with a drip and the croissant with cheese she had made herself. It would take some time for people to get used to the extinction of table service, he thought.
Joao Maria walked around the room with a pleading look, stopping in the face of a guy in fact and tie (who should work in the real estate forward) but this ostensibly turned his face. He had his coffee to cool down, and although some people looked at him with the sly curiosity of an accident on the road, no one invited him to sit at his table. He took a deep breath and turned to the wide, rounded back of another client. She looked at his neck and picked him up. “If there are eyes that intimidate us, there are nucas encouraging us,” he said. He approached. He laid the tray on the table, slightly pushing the man’s, which contained only an empty cup of coffee.
— Excuse me, may I?
“I’m … waiting for one person,” stammered the other.
“How quickly, I clean the crumbs off the table and disappear before your friend arrives.”
The man had light, slightly orange skin, so he must be red even though his hair was brown. He lifted his arm and authorized Joao Maria to sit down.
The fat ones outline their gestures with more elegance and softness than the others, noted Joao Maria.
“Excuse me,” he said. He sweetened his coffee and drank his first sip. Then he attacked the croissant, exactly as he had promised.
“How do you know I’m waiting for a friend?” The fat man asked.
Joao Maria reacted with surprise and shrugged.
“Sometimes my imagination betrays me,” he said apologetically.

Hama
The tenant on the 4th floor of one of the surviving buildings of the great bombing opened the window with a coffee cup in hand and peered into the crowd of people on the street. He had not heard a crash; maybe it was a run-in. He took a long swallow of bitter coffee. She had not been able to find sugar for two weeks, and to her surprise, it was as if she was already used to it. He listened to the voices coming to him from the street, but he remained oblivious to the words, as well as the drama that apparently involved the van where he had bought, a few weeks before, a black and white sweater, which he offered to his grandson. Downstairs, a woman cried disconsolately.
She, too, had already lost a child in the war and had no word of her daughter, a widow, who had once told her that she wanted to flee to Europe and take her three-year-old grandson.
He turned to a reporter, probably a foreigner, who photographed exhaustively the woman who was crying and all who tried to protect her. He noticed that the ambulance had the emergency lights on and the rescuers moved around the stretcher, trying to immobilize the inert body of a little boy. People who looked at each other murmured.
After exhausting his interest in running over the child, the reporter looked up and walked slowly through the bumpy buildings. When she noticed the vacant look of the fourth-floor tenant at the window, sipping coffee, she lifted the camera and fired several times in her direction.

Tokyo
Beneath a black nylon umbrella, a man passed the street, stopped in front of the shop window and peered without much conviction into the pastry. He walked through each of the tables, then the counter, the maid, and finally the ceiling. Only then did she realize the young woman who was staring at him unashamedly and was preparing to frame him on the phone’s display. Intimidated, he decided not to enter and continue the path, leaving behind a monotonous curtain of rain.
The young woman was Saori and had left early in the morning for breakfast at her favorite pastry shop in downtown Tokyo, with cell phone phones tucked into her ears, debuting the music of Reggae Au Go Jazz, Roy Burrowes’ album, Clifford Jordan, and Charles Davis, published in 1998, the year in which he was born. A revelation, she thought, stimulated by the caffeine in the cappuccino that the maid had prepared according to her guidance, which consisted of ½ espresso, ¼ of steamed milk, and ¼ of frothed milk foam.
He put his cell phone on the table beside the glass, on croissant crumbs, and wished he had not been able to photograph a man. He looked around, but found no point of interest in the people who accompanied him and who seemed immeasurably distant from him and his music. Like them, none of her friends listened to jazz. Jazz was a secret of his, jazz and cappuccinos on weekend mornings.
He put his glass to his painted lips and watched the passers-by on the street in raincoats and one or other of the more unprepared, running along the promenade by the large TVshop. He put his glass down and peered at her cell phone to visit the photographers’ albums she was following. He especially liked an image in which a football club’s jersey seemed to float in the water. Enthusiastic, she turned on the camera, searched for a good reason on the other side of the road, and photographed. Then she enlarged, corrected the framing, the color and the exposure, chose a filter and posted the image, pleased with herself.

Mediterranean
Chiara, the wife of photographer Enrico Costa, slightly dipped the bucket-shaped eye on the blue surface of the water and peered into the sea. Installed like a powerful spotlight above her head, the sun helped her illuminate the multiple small fish that randomly swam under the boat. She picked up the telescope and nodded approvingly at her husband, who was already preparing the camera, after checking the oxygen bottle.
Three years ago, there had been a storm in that region, but today the sea was calm, slightly undulating, with a turquoise hue. A good day to photograph the lunar landscapes of the seabed, the colorful fish and, if it were so lucky, some corals; although his dream (not so secret as that) was to discover Roman artifacts. He raised his hand in Chiara’s direction and plunged back.
The woman remained on the boat. The insistence of the husband in that region bored her, and so it was already the second time that she did not dive with him. He put on a broad-brimmed hat, opened the thermos with coffee, and poured a portion into the lid. He drank, looked at the horizon, and took refuge on the screen of his cell phone. A Japanese girl had posted the curious photograph of a man standing on a walk in the rain, looking at a huge television screen that showed what appeared to be the wreckage of a refugee boat and the lifeless body of a naked child. Agonized, Chiara closed the application.
A couple of years ago, also days after a particularly revolting storm, Enrico had plunged there with his wife to take some photographs, and eventually found a Roman statuette and a few other artifacts, ranging from wormy coins to a Roman dagger, all of them in very poor condition, but still a treasure, at least for him, not for her. Since then he had insisted on returning to that area.
He took advantage of the beginning of the dive to photograph the largest number of fish, so as to enjoy the clarity of the water and the game of penetration of the rays of the sun and obtain a good sequence of images. Then he went down to the bottom, where the landscape still had a great depth of field, and the fish roamed, and here and there (like him) the sea floor.
Defraudado, in the ascent of the return, identified in the green backlight of the surface a small sport jersey. He pointed to the camera and photographed. He approached. It was, no more and no less, a counterfeit imitation of the official Juventus jersey! Enrico smiled proudly. He sought a particularly favorable angle and made the best diving picture. That one would go straight to Instagram!

Montijo
The cupbearer Mimosa went back to tiptoe to peer out the window. The movement of the room had dwindled dramatically, so he opened the door and left with a soft, almost elegant step, to stand outside the counter and order a coffee from his colleagues. They greeted her with a broad smile. Satisfied, the head of the glass turned on her heels and watched to see what remained of the customers, stopping at the table where a lonely, plump, light-skinned man, slightly orange, slid his finger across the screen of the phone and read a small article beneath the image of a ruined building, completely stung by the impact of the bullets, from where a woman leaning against the window directly fixed the camera with her blank eyes and a forgotten mug in her hand.