Missing French Cheese in Mexico

Here is how this scenario is usually played out: Sunday is market day in Anglet, where we live. The French love to pretend they still live in small villages where the friendly, local farmers take the product of their gardens and fields into town to sell at modest prices to the village folk hungry for the real taste of range-free chickens, freshly skinned rabbit, soil encrusted fruit and vegetables (more later on how dirt "enhances" the taste of radishes according to my wife!).

The fact of the matter is that these city "markets" are filled with suburbanites in silly hats and casual clothes (sunglasses, Bermuda shorts, and sport shoes which cost in the 300 euro range) carrying plastic baskets (Oh, that really makes them look live villagers), and who drive to market in 4-wheel monsters to carry back a home a bag of bread and a basket full of carrots.

And don't get me started on the prices! The "farmers" who sell stuff of these markets are really a sampling of the European Union citizens (in our case a lot of Spaniards and Moroccans) who sell their wares at twice the price of any supermarket. The "handmade" goat cheese comes from Spain and the bread is made by women from Morocco. Ah, the real taste of France!

My wife drags me to this city-sanctioned highway robbery so we can get "real" French cheese which she says she "missed so much" when we were in Mexico. Of course, here we buy paper-this slices of the stuff not only because it is literally worth its weight in gold but because, according to her, it is a threat to her waistline becoming perilously close (in centimeters) to her height.

French women are not afraid of clogged arteries, as any student of the "French Paradox" knows, but they all do want to look like waifs on a calorie-deprivation diet. According to my wife, she is size 38 dress, just one above the smallest size for an adult woman, and she would love it if she were a 36 and even more so if she could make such a dress look like it was a sack of potatoes.

Any way, that was my rant for the day, prompted by the 36 euros we spent on three slices of cheese. Next posting will be on the marvelous taste dirt and mud give to vegetables!

Let me begin at the biginning...

Home is where your bags are.

In northern Mexico, where I was born, the days are very long and hot in summer. One has time to have dinner, linger a bit, converse about the day's events, and then go sit outside to have your coffee and watch the sun go down.

When I was a boy I would follow my grandfather to the patio and while he quietly had his after dinner brandy, I would sip my coffee (heavily laced with milk on my grandmother's instructions) and watch the red-orange, glowing disk slide down slowly between two thin, very tall palms.

"Don't stare at the sun like that, boy. It'll ruin your eyes," my grandfather would say. My eyes were not ruined but my desire to stay in one place was.

Many years later, a man interviewing me for a job asked, after reading my resume, "So, where is home?"

"Are you going to give me a job?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Then its here," I said.

The image of the sun going down between those palms has stayed with me all of my life. I remember that it stirred in me some sort of absurdly romantic urge to go someplace, somewhere, anywhere.

Later on in life, a film-like image was added to my catalogue of pet obsessions. I think it came from a book, or a dream, or a movie, I am not sure which; in it, a captain of the French Foreign Legion was kept prisoner in a palace which was in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara.

"There are no bars in the windows, captain," the sheik, lord of the castle, tells him. "There are no guards at the gates. The desert is better at keeping you prisoner than either bars or guards."

I don't know if the image of the captain, sitting on the ledge of a palace window, looking longingly out into the vast desert is something I invented but I can still see it in my mind. The reason it was importart to me, and perhaps the reason I was obsessed with it was that I can remember feeling like that captain: a prisoner of a desert, except in my case it was a cultural desert not a physical one.

Even at a very early age I was aware of the limited possibilities of our little town. The only bookstore had few works of fiction. It sold mostly textbooks. I asked the owner why he didn't have any of the classics or even best sellers. He just shrugged and said, "What for? Nobody reads in this town."

But, unlike the captain of my imagination, I did escape. After my father had a row with an aunt, who also lived at my grandfather's, we had moved out and our family went to live in the United States. We ended up in the "Big Chief Camp" in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Camp was a ramshackle conglomeration of wooden cabins that had once catered to summer tourists. Now they were rented as temporary homes to some of the many immigrants that were flooding into the United States after World War II.

That beautiful little port was a boy's paradise. We played in the harbor and climbed aboard the ships that came in to load up with oil and gasoline. We scurried among the bales of cotton that were stacked high on cargo barges, or scampered around the harbor waiting for the sailors on guard to turn the wrong way so we could sneak on board the destroyers or Coast Guard frigates that came in to the port. The sailors on the commercial vessels gave us fruit and showed us pictures of their homelands, and the sailors on the warships eventually gave up chasing us away and showed us around their ships; we had a grand time.

In the Big Chief Camp there were German, Polish, Portuguese, Mexican, families. They too told us stories about their countries, the war, the things and places they had been and seen. Food was passed around and shared. We ate the delicious bread made by the German Jewish families, and Italian raviolis and, the Portuguese fishermen would send us shoe boxes full of huge shrimp they had caught off the coast of Mexico. My mother would make mounds of flour tortillas to send back in return for bounty we had received.

I wanted to go to those places that these people talked about. A French man who had lived in Morocco told stories of the desert. He said it was like a sea of sand, with huge dunes that stretched to the horizon and shone gold and red in the evening sun. Then, on a school field trip to the city library, I found T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom". I checked it out and marveled at the pictures of Lawrence astride his camel, and of the Arabs charging over the desert, and of his descriptions of Wadi Rum.

Having escaped a cultural desert, I was now infatuated with the idea of going to see a real one. The National Geographic Magazine in the school library had pictures of archaeologist working in tombs in Egypt. That settled it! I would study to become an Egyptologist or something. "Home is where you start", said T. S. Elliot. I was certain, with the certainty only a romantic child can have, that the desert would and should be where I would start.

I never went to the Sahara and never found my place to "start". I did not become an archeologist trekking the desert or jungle looking for lost cities and forgotten tombs. Instead I became a rather stodgy engineer whose jobs and companies took him to many of the world's cities and towns, yet never staying long enough in any of them to be able to claim them as "home".

I had almost given up finding my private "Wadi Rum", until one day, I decided to go to Paris. Why Paris? Well, I was in the middle of divorce proceedings, I had been told by my lawyer that I would have to move out of the house as demanded by law (and my wife), I had lost my job and had decided not to go to work for another company but rather to "freelance" for a living, and I was watching "Singing in the Rain" on television, so why not Paris?

Twenty years before I had been in Paris for a month while on a consulting job. But the job had only been an excuse to follow a girl there with whom I was very much in love. The city, at that time, had come closer to being my Wadi Rum than any other place on Earth. So, why not Paris?

As I remembered it, Paris welcomed the homeless, the artistic, the disenchanted, the romantic, the talanted, the curious, the tourists, the wanderers, the monied, the chic, and infatuated lovers from all over the world. I guessed it would have room for a burnt out, over-the-hill, ex-businessman looking for a place to call "home".

The purpose of this Blog

I wanted to name my blog "I Married a French Woman and Other Horror Stories", but that would have made the blog name too long. But, you must understand: the "horror stories" part is not an exaggeration.

Before I begin, let me tell you what this blog is NOT about: it is not about the fantastic amount of paperwork and bureaucratic rigmarole one has to go through to get married in France, especially when you are a foreigner marrying a French national; it is NOT about learning a confoundedly difficult language which the French, for reasons that I will discuss later, mistakenly believe to be the most beautiful in the world; and, lastly, it is NOT about mastering the innumerable permutations that can result from combining nearly 300 types of cheeses, three or four dozen regional cuisines, each with dozens of dishes, and a seemingly endless list of chateaux specific wines from a myriad of regions.

It is more about trying to cope with two of the most intractable traits of the French character: Gallic price (read boneheaded stubbornness) and the other world form of logic, which seems a product imported from Bizarro World, that rules everyday life in France.

To illustrate the first point, let me transcribe a recent conversation with my wife:

My wife: (Sounds of glass breaking) Ah, zut, alors!

Me: (Interrupting my perusing of Le Monde): What's the matter, darling?

My wife: I cut my finger with this broken glass:

Me: (Getting up from my comfortable chair to inspect the wound) Darling, what happened?

My wife: I was taking these glasses to the table outside and they broke.

Me: Darling, you have to stop rushing around and be more careful.

My wife: It was not my rushing around; it was that I was in a hurry.

Me: Dear, that's my point: you rush around or hurry, if you will, when there is no need. You have to be more careful and do things in a calm...

My wife: (Interrupting) I was not rushing around; I was hurrying and running because I wanted to get this done quickly.

Me: Yes, well that's my point: you were rushing, or hurrying as you call it and...

My wife: Please do not insist that I was rushing around! It was that I WAS IN A HURRY, can't you understand that? I was doing things fast, quickly, as I usually do, because I like to do things quickly, not rushing around...

Me: Well, it might be a difference of semantics but the point is that you should try to do things calmly: this is the third thing you break, not this week, just this day!

My wife: You must stop accusing me of this rushing around! I work quickly, and in a hurry, and per'aps, too fast but I never rush around!

SECOND EXAMPLE

My wife: (Trying to pick up a crepe with her fingers from a hot skillet) Aye!

Me: Dear, use a palette to pick up the...

My wife: I do not need anything; I have fireproof fingers (burning herself again) Aye!

Me: Dear, you are burning your fingers every time you...

My wife: I am not burning my fingers; the problem is that the skillet is too hot.

Me: Of course the skillet is hot, we are making crepes and the skillet is on the burner. If you used a...

My wife: I do not need anything. My grandmother never used anything, my mother never used anything, I do not use anything...the French never use anything to turn over a crepe.

Me: So, you are telling me that the French are smart enough to build the world's largest airplane, not not smart enough to use something to turnover a crepe instead of burning their bare fingers.

My wife: We do not burn our fingers; the problem is that the skilled is hot!

As you can see, Gallic pride shares a common border with Bizarro Logic. You have to live with a French person to begin to understand how this strange mixture operates in the real world.

I am Mexican, and I have learned Mexican cooking from my mother and grandmother; my wife and I have traveled in Mexico extensively and she has loved the Mexican dishes she has had there; she has watched Mexican women in the markets prepare Mexican dishes in the traditional way, with traditional ingredients. YET, when we decide to make Mexican food in France she argues that I am not preparing Mexican dishes correctly, NOT because I am not following the traditional Mexican way of preparing Mexican dishes using authentic Mexican ingredients, but rather because I am not following the FRENCH idea of what Mexican dishes should be. Example:

Me: Ok, so now we beat the egg white until it is fluffy and coat the stuffed peppers with it and...

My wife: We do not need to beat the egg white. We will use it as is and also use the yolk...

Me: But, you know that the egg has to be beaten to a stiff foam; you saw Mexican women prepare the stuffed peppers in the market!

My wife: Yes, but WE French never beat the egg white; we prefer it just like that...liquid.

Me: But, but, this is a Mexican dish, and Mexican dishes are NOT French cooking, you know...

My wife: Nevertheless, in France one never beats the egg whites...

Of course, the dish was a disaster. The stuffed peppers instead of being coated with egg looked like they had fallen into scrambled eggs. She, nevertheless, proclaimed the Mexican stuffed peppers a success because the French know more about Mexican cooking than the Mexicans!

In the next posting I will share an example of the incomparable French sense of logic.