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If you come to France and visit its famous food markets—stall after stall spilling over with fruit and flowers and roasting chickens and the candy smell of cooking crepes—you’ll sigh and say, this is heaven. But if you are a local, you know that it’s very much earth: It’s people, and if you want the good stuff, you’ll have to deal with them.
Sure, you could survive on the supermarket, never making eye contact as you scan the shrink-wrap, but you wouldn’t get that pink rockfish with the crystal eyes, or the meaty boletus mushrooms that only appear for a few weeks, or the Corsican sheep’s-milk tomme without a name. Plus, you wouldn’t get charmed or educated, berated or swindled, so what’s the point?
We moved from Ireland to a village outside Paris for my husband’s job just as COVID restrictions were lifting in the summer of 2021. It was also four months after my brother—born two years before me, a precondition of my existence, a voice I’d never not heard—died of a rare cancer at the age of 41.
Readjusting to human contact after COVID was already weird, but the trauma of losing my brother had scary, unpredictable effects on my behavior—I could suddenly burst into tears or rage in front of strangers. It was as if I’d reentered the world and all the chairs had only three legs and the letter C had been removed from the alphabet, and, worse, people went on as if this was okay.
At the market I cannot get vegetables from my vegetable lady without crying. She’s so mean to me but also loves me? She must be over 80, the knuckles on her hands as large as the Brussels sprouts she forces me to buy.
“Take a kilo, they’re superb right now.”
“I can’t fit them in my bag.”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot, with liquid blue irises that don’t end crisply but fade into the whites of her eyes as if eroded by 50 years of precisely this stare:
“You didn’t bring your trolley?”
“No, I…I biked, I…”
“What can I do for you if you don’t come prepared?”
I take spinach instead, leaf spinach, veiny and buckling.
She tells me that with this batch, in this season, I can eat the stems. She repeats herself: “Do not throw out the stems.”
“I heard, I heard.” We are exchanging leaves and coins; this is not a war, and yet she is somehow my general and I am her grunt.
“You cook this with a little crème fraîche and those babies of yours will love it.”
Goddammit, she got me. I’m crying. She knows I have babies.
Does she love me? I wonder. She turns to the next customer as if I never existed.
There is another vegetable lady, younger, prettier, who tells me I’m adorable, but she once showed me beautiful green beans, then sent me home with rotten ones. Now when she calls me with silken voice (“ça va, ma belle?”) I look at her like I’m an evil witch shooting curses at her through my narrow eyes, which is a cool way to shop for beans.
This isn’t a story about how the market saved me or gave me a hopeful vision of humanity at its best. On the contrary, the market offers no coherent picture of the good life, of easy pleasures and satisfying trades. Your dead chicken will look you in the eye and that hot, empty smell you smell? It’s blood, and it’s on the soles of your shoes. In the course of your morning you’ll see blandishments and bull, loyalty and lies. Roaming through the rational, well-lit supermarket, managing loops of anxiety, I feel like the crazy one. But somehow, sidling up to Angry Ham Guy with my battered wheely-cart (I came prepared this time!) holding crumpled cash and rehearsing what I’ll say under my breath because I’m kind of scared of him, I’m part of a meaningful social ritual. Guess what? the market whispers: Everyone’s insane and you’ll be fine.
Would you like apples from the man who sells only apples? You can’t have any because he’s always away having a sandwich. That is life: That is life. Sometimes people would rather have a sandwich than an income and you just have to go without. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was one of my brother’s favorite songs, and I’d love to sit in a car and annoy him by singing it really loud right now, but I have to go without. Grief trains you in the conditional tense: He would laugh at this joke; he would love this place. Now I’m well suited to unattainable apples: Those apples would be amazing, I think. I’m almost convinced I’ve had them.
My favorite stall is the triperie because the couple that runs it like to make innuendo-filled jokes, winking as they hand over kidneys that look like a perfect pair of balls. Also, their tripe in broth is the best I’ve ever had, so full of collagen that it’s solid at room temperature, sliced like glycerin soap from a big block. Warmed up, it’s a viscous stew that makes our home smell like a herd of cows just did hot yoga in every room, so my husband makes me eat it in the garden like a filthy pet. Fine by me! I’m not here for personal dignity. I’m here for a five-euro lunch so nourishing that I can feel it filling all the potholes in my joints.
The triperie couple never berate me or swindle me, maybe because no one eats as much tripe as I do, or maybe because I come to them like a simpleton, always asking about their pallid lobes and velvety mounds. “What is that?” I ask, pointing to what looks like a rugby ball made of purple stone.
“Ox heart.”
The husband slices it thin and gives me precise instructions to grill it quickly and serve it with pickles and parsley, which I do. It tastes like bavette steak, and when my children ask what it is, I lie to them because they don’t yet know that hearts get eaten. They don’t know how imperfect I am, or what I went through to come home with this treasure.
They’ll learn about people later, but for now they eat their spinach, stems and all.
Julia Langbein is a writer and art historian. Her debut novel, American Mermaid, hits bookstores March 21.
