The man in a suit breakfasting a few tables down from me on the sidewalk just got up to get something from his car, and a man in a dirty shirt stopped to take a big swig of the café au lait left unattended.

This is someone for whom the 28 dirham prix fixe on a petit déjeuner – such a glorious steal to me – is prohibitively steep, for whom the antimicrobial fetishist horror of pathogens left by a stranger’s mouth on the lip of the cup that I am steeped in and rely on as an anti-half-drunk coffee theft device in the overdeveloped world is a non-consideration in exchange for its rarefied, steaming, bracing contents.

The first man started to yell at the second one, and the second one looked back at the first and picked up the glass to take another big, slow swallow, just about emptying it, and then set it down and sauntered away.