she’d sold him—he was slumped over and fully blacked out—and I found myself unable to go through with it. Of all the times I’ve needed to be fully in possession of my wits, here and now, totally alone in the world with my whole existence crammed into my pockets, was the most urgent of all. I backed out into the cold street, starting to really unravel and nearly defeated.
Several blocks later, I found a café—the European kind with coffee and snacks—and went in it to warm up and to sort out some of my anxieties. I ordered a sandwich and sat in the grip of my own fuckup—impossible to go back home, impossible to wander another frozen minute in another impenetrable city, impossible to last much longer on my dwindling traveler’s checks and impossible to go straight to balmy, exotic and indecipherable Indonesia until I’d gotten some more experience as a lone female traveler in friendly western recognizable Europe—until the waitress put the plate in front of me. There was, as I’d ordered, a cold ham sandwich on good buttered grainy bread, but it came with a warm salted potato and a wedge of Gouda that had aged so much that it had gritty, very pleasant granules in it, which at first I thought were salt grains but then realized were crystallized calcium deposits from the milk of the cheese. I ate the little potato right away. Its pale yellow flesh was perfectly waxy, and its skin snapped when I bit into it. I don’t know under what other conditions a simple, salted, warm boiled potato could ever taste as good as this tasted. Probably none.
Usually the food that meets your hunger sends you into a calmed and expansive state of deep satisfaction, but I instead sat in that café and became quite heavy and defeated. Yes, I had wanted to leave everything behind—I had grown to hate my country, my culture, my own first and last name—but the sharp and creamy cheese, the starchy, warm small potato, somehow made it starkly apparent how weary and lonely and physically uncomfortable one could become in exile. I had fantasized I would be gazing at the Van Goghs while my bicycle with the basket rested outside against a lamppost, unlocked. But instead I had just seen some guy in a coffeehouse fully blacked out at the table. I was about to return to three drugged-out and frightfully skinny roommates.
I needed a better plan. Slowly savoring the last bites of my ham sandwich on that corky pumpernickel bread, I pored over my travel notes and found the letter from my mom with the list of her relatives and friends in France. There was also a contact in Algeria—the family of one of the dishwashers from Mother’s—but when I imagined trying to manage that phone call, shouting over the static from an international booth at the post office, our words overlapping in the delay, and trying to cheerfully introduce myself while asking if I could be their guest for, well, several weeks, I immediately opted for France. I would be welcome there.
Marie Nöelle had a crêperie, tabac, and bar des sports in the tiny town of Montauban-de-Bretagne. I was silently thrilled to get off the train and, not one other backpacker or drug addict in sight, be met by this luminously blue-eyed old friend of my mother’s.
“Gabrielle!” she waved.
“Marino! Salut!” And we were off, my heavy pack in the back of the Volkswagen Rabbit and she, as if I were her peer, began to speak of everything—complex and troubling, simple and pleasing—that had arrived in her life these past many years since we had seen each other. We drove through small villages on our way from Rennes to Montauban, and pulled up finally to her little spot in the center of town. The bar was closed, on a Sunday evening, and so we went without interruption upstairs to her apartment and settled me into the attic room.
While I unpacked a little and arranged my things, Marie Nöelle put together a simple dinner of soup and cheese and brought it up to her room on the second floor, where she said she preferred to eat in the winter when it got dark so early and the nights were so very long. Her husband of a few years had just months before killed himself by mouthing a hunting gun and pulling the trigger—right in front of her.
I slept more that night than I had in thirty