So it was not without a great deal of surprise the other day, while savoring a large cappuccino at Jimmy’s cafe in Valaoritou Street, that I heard a murmur of protest from somewhere to the left of my stomach.
“Speak up,” I commanded.
“Who are you and what are you trying to say?”
“This is your pancreas speaking; how do you read me? Over.”
“I read you loud and clear. What frequency are you using? Over.”
“I have tapped a nerve pathway to your left. ear. I wish to lodge a strong protest against the stuff you are pouring down your gullet this very minute. Over.”
“The stuff in question is a large cappuccino and a very good one at that. Would you like a stuffed croissant, as well?”
“Not for the moment. Haven’t you heard that coffee can give me cancer?”
“Yes, I have, and so have lot of other people but everybody still keeps drinking it.”
“I am surprised at their temerity. But I don’t care about other people. It’s my skin I’m concerned with.”
“Look, pancreas, if I listened to all the advice given by doctors I wouldn’t be here. I’d be herding goats on a mountainside in the Caucasus and ingesting large quantities of yogurt. Is that what you want?”
“I wouldn’t mind. I can handle yogurt better than coffee.”
“Anyway, my intake of coffee has been fairly stable during the past three decades, give or take a Nescafe or a sketo or two, so what are you hitching about? You seem to have dealt with it quite competently up to now.”
“Yes, I have. And I think it’s high time you showed your appreciation. I bet you don’t even know what I look like or how I operate.”
“Well, I know that in edible animals you’re called the sweetbread and that you probably make a fine ingredient for magiritsa soup but I admit I’ve never seen you au nature. Also, I know that when you don’t work properly in some people they get diabetes. Right?”
“Correct… I have microscopic cells all over me that are called the islets of Langerhans which produce insulin. But I do much more than that. Do you realize that every twenty-four hours I pour about two pints of pancreatic juice into your duodenum through my ducts of Warsung and Santorini?”
“You sound very geographical. I went to Santorini once, on a cruise.”
“Not that Santorini, dumbo. Santorini was a professor of anatomy at the University of Padua in the 18th century who discovered that particular duct.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“And do you know that my juice contains trypsin, lipase and amylase which break down the proteins, the fats, the starches and the sugars you eat into the peptones, amino acids, glycerol and glucose which nourish you and keep you alive and healthy?”
“And add inches to my waistline!”
“That’s because you’re a greedy guts. If you ate less I wouldn’t have to work so hard and if you drank less coffee or none at all, you wouldn’t be exposing me to unnecessary risks.”
“Look, pancreas. I rather resent being harangued in this way by a subordinate organ. What would happen if my gall bladder, my spleen, my stomach, my liver and my kidneys all started making bright suggestions on what I should or should not eat or drink? I would be so occupied with internal arguments that I would have no time left for more important occupations such as playing bridge, watching TV or reading the funnies in the Herald Tribune.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. It is precisely because they can’t speak to you that you have no idea what’s happening inside you until something goes wrong and you end up in hospital or under the surgeon’s knife. You should be thankful to me for having a little more initiative and trying to warn you before it is too late.”
“I see your point. Okay, what is it you want me to do?”
“Basically, I want you to lay off the cappuccinos. But if you have any social conscience at all you will agitate to introduce laws against coffee similar to those that are now being applied against smoking. No more coffee advertising in the media with mustachioed models on TV slurping the stuff and singing its praises.
Also, an inscription on all cans and packets with the clear and legible warning that ‘coffee may be hazardous to your pancreas’.”
“But what will happen to the. millions of people in the world engaged in growing, marketing and retailing coffee, from the man who plants the beans to the kafedzis round the corner, if everybody stops drinking coffee? They would all starve to death.”
“I haven’t noticed any tobacco growers, cigarette manufacturers or tobacconists starving to death so far, have you?”
“Well, then, what’s the point of mounting a campaign against coffee drinking?”
“I see we don’t see eye to eye. You’re thinking of people and I’m thinking of pancreases. So let’s forget about the campaign for the moment. But do me a favor, will you, and lay off those cappuccinos?”
By this time, the other customers in Jimmy’s, who had been watching me conversing with myself, in fascination at first and later in some alarm, had edged away from me as far as they could, while the girl at the cash register and the staff behind the counter were all looking at me rather curiously.
I grinned apologetically at them as I walked out of the place, and then I realized it would not be at all difficult for me to give up the cappuccinos. I wouldn’t dare show my face in Jimmy’s ever again!
