Say cheese! It's a new year

The Saturday after New Year's we were at the market ordering cheese at our favorite cheese stall (run by two cheese geniuses, whom I'll call M. and Mme. Cheese.) when a round-ish, fur clad woman swept up and brushed us aside.
She fixed Mme. Cheese with a stare. "I must say this in front of everyone!" she said.
Mme. Cheese, who had been chatting with us and packing up our order, stopped dead in her tracks. "How was it?" she asked.
The fur-clad lady, now that she had everyone's attention, repeated her announcement. "I am obliged say it in front of everyone," she trumpeted.
M. Cheese had dropped his own order and hurried over to his wife, who had paled visibly. They both stared anxiously at the fur-clad lady. "Well?" M. Cheese asked.
The fur clad lady's gaze swept up and down the line of people waiting for their cheese. "Picture this," she said. "Twenty people." She gestured to indicate a long table. "Twenty of the most discriminating people." She held up her hands, palms flat up, to indicate a platter. "I bring it out. I put it on the table. I serve it." She paused and looked around again. The rest of the patrons of the cheese stall had given up any pretense they might have had of minding their own business and were staring openly. The air was thick with the possibility of a scandal.
"And?" Mme. Cheese prompted.
"Silence." The fur-clad lady waved her hands up and down the imaginary table in front of her. The cheese stall was also silent. The fur-clad lady drank it up.
"IT WAS SUBLIME," she thundered. "SU-B-L-IME!!!"

Here's hoping that 2010 is as rich and full and delicious for all of us as the fur-clad lady's brie.

(Photo by Joe Hale)

Where Everything Is Sold

Only Kamel knows his way entirely around his grocery store, which is small and dim.
He can find you 30-liter trashbags, or saffron, or tortillas,
or fresh mint,
or an extension cord.
If he doesn’t have a funnel to sell you, he’ll lend you one.
Everything is piled in so close together
you are worried:
if you pick up that can of tomatoes maybe the whole store will fall over.
Kamel’s answer to any request is “Ask me for the sun;
I’ll give you the moon, and the sun to go with it.” If he doesn’t have it today, it will be
arriving tomorrow. He will get the word out, too, that he has it for you.
His store is named Le Jardin d’Ulysse for Djerba’s first tourist,
and from time to time he disappears from the rue Vasco de Gama,
to the spare, spacious opposite of his grocery store.
He hasn’t eaten any lotuses, and Djerba is always bright in his mind,
and he will show it to you
if you know him well enough -
the flat expanse of the courtyard, the cool stone hallways,
the vast kitchen he built for his wife. In the pictures,
his children are never far.
Kamel, in a white robe, presides happily over them;
orange trees, grape vines, date palms and olive groves crowd around his big white house,
and his youngest son trails everywhere after him, adoringly.
Kamel’s children are his pride and joy.
Two or three weeks, at most, and he is back in the rue Vasco de Gama
in his dark sweater and wool fisherman’s cap,
standing in the doorway of his store beside a wealth
of fruit and vegetables.
He has returned to the other people who need him,
to his emporium
of cat food and milk on Sunday evening,
of beer and gumdrops after the other stores have closed.
Kamel likes to talk but will not tell you much: he loves the scent of jasmine, pistachio ice cream, the voice of Oum Kalthoum; in the morning, he drinks his coffee with a drop of orange flower water.
But one night, François (remember him?) calls to tell us Kamel has an urgent message.
“You’re late,” he says, when we walk into the store. He hands us a covered terra cotta dish. “Get out,” he tells us amiably. “Eat it before it’s cold.” And he sends us back to our apartment with a little taste of home.

72, rue Vasco de Gama

François Pierre Stefanaggi,
who loves anything caramel,
would have liked to be named Arnaud
or Guillaume
or Clément
- any old name.
François was so old fashioned - rinky dink, sort of.
He doesn’t like people you can’t trust
or the taste of dirt.

François came to the rue Vasco de Gama because he wanted a job that would feed him. Also, he wanted to stop working as a checkout boy at the supermarket. Really, what he wanted was to quit the Sorbonne. He wanted to make music and write - he wrote a short story last night, actually. He wants to write a novel that would be like snaphots of life, snipped apart and reassembled. He plays the guitar.

When he got out of the metro for the first time he thought that the rue Vasco de Gama was long and empty; lifeless, but the restaurant was warm, much friendlier than he’d expected. He was coming from a certain emptiness himself. The first person he met here was the old chef - a foreshadowing of what was to come? Corinne, the owner, was late.
He came to be a waiter
(no pun intended),
and at the time he didn’t know the first thing about cooking.
It has been a year, and now he is the chef. He learns fast; he is proud of his adaptability.

He’s grateful to wake up every morning,
though he hates getting out of bed,
and likes a big cup of coffee with one sugar in it,
preferably accompanied by a cigarette.

In the kitchen he moves fast - sometimes too fast. His favorite thing to make is poitrine de volaille entre chair et peau de foie gras with choucroute au miel et aux raisins secs. He attracts problems,
confidences,
people.
If he had a soundtrack, no doubt about it,
it would be “Hotel California,” by the Eagles.
He gets a little melancholy sometimes
but really,
compared to the troubles he could have,
everything is so small,
he’d say he’s got a good lot in life.
Just because I’m interviewing him doesn’t mean he’s a complicated boy, you know?

The rue Vasco de Gama

Vasco de Gama was a Portuguese explorer who, among other things, did a lot of bad stuff in India.
I hope it was for more noble reasons than that
they named our street after him.
You can see what it looks like.
And soon you can meet the people in our neighborhood...