Meeting France in Bordeaux

after 18 years.

Nov 20, 2022

One of those enchanting little streets of Bordeaux.

About two months ago I took my first photo on French soil and posted it on Facebook. The next morning I woke up to a message, also via Facebook, from someone I haven't heard in many, many years. “Oi Jaíne, welcome to France! I live near Bordeaux, but I would love to meet you.” I promptly replied with the most enthusiastic “I would so love to meet you too! When would be good for you?".

It was Mariana, my childhood friend and the daughter of my French preschool teacher, who is probably the lady that made me fall in love with France even before Julia did (and you can read more about her here). They left our village in the Amazon 18 years ago and we lost contact right after that due to the nonexistence of the internet or proper mail service there.

Mariana and I having the best time over wine, cheese, and charcuterie.

We messaged back and forth and set out a date. "My mom lives in Périgord”, she said, “but she would be happy to take the train to Bordeaux if that's an easy ride for you". It was. And we agreed we would meet at the gare on November 19th at 9 am.

Mom and I woke up in the dark, chugged down an espresso, and packed our umbrellas to the Montparnasse station. From there, we hopped on a train to Bordeaux and in two hours we were there, gazing at the Garrone river.

The last time I saw Mariana, she was 6 and I was 8, so we couldn't really recognize each other if we occasionally met on the streets nowadays. But she spotted my tall figure (which sometimes comes in handy) with no trouble and approached me with a big hug and a warm hello in Portuguese, but melting into a delicious french accent. From that moment, it felt like we had been close friends during all of this time.

"Maman is arriving in half an hour", she announced and then continued to tell us where she lived now and why she had an injury support device in her left hand. “I was chopping frozen fruit for an entremet and the knife just went through my thumb". and kept on stating “I'm a pastry chef at this patisserie in…". It was just the most automatic of bonds.

By 10 am Maman arrived, wrapped in a wooly yellow scarf; she was not as tall as I remember, but her eyes were still piercing blue. She approached us somewhat shyly. It had been almost two decades without seeing each other, I don’t feel timid to say our friendship needed a reintroduction.

To be in France, after all these years, meeting someone I thought I would never hear from again, was just magical. Being a writer, I live to observe people and their emotions, to capture stories, to catch that moment when their hearts' melodies happily dissonate from that measured beat. This is the type of thing writers dream of writing about, and there I was, living it. Of course, I had instant misty eyes.

It's the four of us sitting in a café. As France starts to talk, she immediately apologizes for her Portuguese, although it's still in perfect shape for someone that hasn’t practiced it in so many years. She complains she doesn't who to practice with and I immediately offer a deal, which warms the conversation. Our bodies, still shaking from the cold walk through the streets of Bordeaux, are warmed up with coffee & croissant. The Portuguese talking made us closer and kind of opened up this window of memories we all had forgotten for so long, and so did sharing the table. Food and languages do these things.

We then just explained where our lives were at. France remarried last year. She divorced Mariana's dad 11 years ago. Mariana's dad is this incredibly friendly Brazilian man and his name is Gilmar, just like my Dad's. Both dads were good friends. Their Gilmar still lives in France, but he often visits his brother in Boston who happens to be one of our dearest friends back on the East Coast. Funny thing.

I tell her about how I ended up in France and her vivid blue eyes smiled in combination with her mouth, as she agitated her beautiful, thin hands in a French symphony of incroyable, génial, and extraordinaire.

I show her a polaroid of Doug I carry around. She showed me a photo of her wedding last summer. Her husband, Jean-Léon, is a musician. "He's learning Portuguese so he can sing me Bossa Nova and I've never been happier". In Périgord, they live in a maison de campagne. One of those aged houses that are renovated by coupled in love just like you see in the movies. In her words, life had given her another chance, and I feel so happy for her that I almost want to cry again.

Hours go by as we feast on foie gras with cherry jam on toast, glasses of Bordeaux wine, and so many laughs. France insists I try foie gras while she explains about this delicacy from her region of France. “You have to understand why the French eat it, for it to make sense". I smile, nod, and think what a delight is to have her, once again, teaching me. There's no awkward silence between us, there's only exciting curiosity. I take a sip and ask her why the Amazon. Why us?

She tells me she was 22 when she first thought about volunteering two of her young years to benevolence through church work. Her brother had volunteered in Africa before and she was sure she wanted to do the same. She had already signed up for Togo but still needed to get a response from the agency that arranged everything when she met Father Paulo, the French priest who runs the catholic mission in our little village.

France had finished law school by then and was doing a master’s in journalism in Paris. She never wanted to be a lawyer, and much of her time in law school was to please her upper-class Parisian parents, but she believed she could become a writer. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? My parents had nothing to do with the upper class, but you still can get it.

Father Paulo then told her the mission was financed by a magazine connected to the church that reported about the Amazon and raised funds for many other projects. She then agreed to visit the magazine offices in Paris and hours later left carrying a bag heavy with old issues back home.

Her parents loved the work of the magazine and loved the idea of France spending time in the Amazon. The next thing she knows, the plane arrived in Porto Velho, the capital of our state of Rondônia. “I just knew I should be there”, she says with a docile smile, “and I'm so glad I did".

Me too, France. Me too.

The main focus of their mission was decent education for the forsaken in that remote area, giving France the whole school Jardim Beija-Flor for her to better. So she became a teacher. France was chosen by this career, she really didn't think much of it. What I can see is that she offered us her whole self and really represented the meaning of being a missionary. This is so beautiful to me.

She offered us tools with which we could have a better shot at this game. She changed our destiny without even realizing it. And I can only think of how much she still does it, as she tells me she is still a teacher, but now she works in a public school with kids on the autism spectrum. Once again I hold myself not to cry.

And I can't stop thinking about how this woman changed my path for me. How she kindled my mind to believe I could become whatever I wanted in this adventure we call life. She made me believe I could, one day, be learning how to be a chef in Paris. She was the first woman to ever tell me I could fly from whatever cage society ever happened to cage me in. The next to tell me this was Julia.

I know this might not sound as resonant to you, my dear reader, watching me pour all of these emotions here. I know we lived different childhoods and I might never be able to put into words what growing up isolated from the rest of the world was or how it shaped me. But I hope you can understand through my words now what the influence of someone with such a generous heart can do for the imagination of a child who dreams.

Now, as I type this in a language that is not my own, but that one day I dreamt I could learn, and as I live this fantastical time of studying culinary in Paris because one day I had to courage to immigrate to a country I dreamt I could live and build a career in. Now, this makes me cry. But they're all happy tears, and I owe many of them to France.

Please forgive my tender heart. France does it to me. Both of them.

Our day together finishes by 8 pm with none of us really wanting to go. We hug each other tightly once, and with our crying eyes, we promise our friendship will only get stronger and inviolable.

We also promise that we will keep influencing each other from afar. France tells me she wants my help with coming up with diet-inclusive recipes, as she had, for health reasons, to go gluten-free. We concomitantly think about the cuisine of the native Amazonian people and the lack of gluten in it. France knows that food is the way to my heart, and to please me, she says with a twinkle that now I am the one in the role of teaching. We then hug again and seal the promise of spending Christmas together in Périgord next year.

I take the train back to Paris feeling as if I had just spent receiving the biggest of gifts. Then I lay my head over my mom's soft shoulder on the train seat next to me. I thank France and her country. I thank Dad. And Julia. And I feel so abundantly happy that it feels as if this magnificent lifetime opportunity I've been nourishing in France has only brought the people I love the most even closer to me. In this wonderful life of mine, they're guiding and teaching me.