People are bigger than places

📰 A report of a brief visit to Mariele's Paris

I write this as I wait for my plane to leave Paris, thinking about what I can tell you about this brief trip.

Differently from Hemingway, I can't write inebriated bohemian stories, filled with descriptions of adventures by the Seine. Unlike Paul B. Preciado, the city didn't make me reflect on the most critical themes, resulting in angry letters fueled by the horrors of modernity. I will not come home and compose an album about my magical discovery of the alchemists, as Jorge Ben Jor did, and hide easter eggs from the very first to the last song.

I will, on the other hand, tell fragments of things I lived alongside someone not from Paris, but in Paris for quite enough time.

A chef’s domain

The Paris I visited orbited around Mariele, my host, friend, and crush. She owns and runs La Bahianaise, a Brazilian restaurant near Gare du Nord and Gare du Lest, in Paris.

The small bistro-like restaurant, without a big Brazilian flag or green-and-yellow all around, gets the attention of passersby by the straightforward approach: Brazilian food without adaptations for French (or anyone’s) palate. The cashier answers — in French, English, or Portuguese — the questions from the crowd, explaining in detail what comprises a Feijoada and what a Coxinha is.

All those descriptions are hand-made by Mariele, who also comes up with the recipes and makes the (very hard, according to her) decision of what version of a plate to do. "People ask me why I did this recipe this way instead of the way it’s done in their state or city. I answer them plainly: because I like it this way".

Mariele is from Salvador, Bahia, one of the oldest cities in Brazil, having its oldest recorded history (by Europeans, of course) in 1510, with the shipwreck of a French ship on Salvador’s coast. Mariele didn’t shipwreck in France and, unlike Caramuru, the survivor of the 1510 accident, didn’t erase her identity and origin in the new place.

One of the ways she expresses her Brazilianess is as a chef, serving dishes like Baião de Dois, drinks like Caipirinha, and desserts like the Chocolate Covered Carrot Cake.

Another way to show her devotion to her origin is by the restaurant’s decoration: handwritten menus, original products on shelves, and a framed, fully signed, Brazilian Female Soccer shirt on the wall — Mariele accompanied the Brazilian Female Soccer team as their chef a few times. Another piece of her origins is the small altar with an Exu statue on the corner of the counter, a religious connection to her religion, Candomblé.

She had her connection with another kind of deity when she served food to the singer Anitta. Yeah, Mariele is a big deal.

Another Paris

It’s important to say: I didn't visit Paris, I visited Mariele.

It’s not that I despise the city, I just saw those things already, some good 10 years ago. Seeing the Eiffel tower is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but finding out that the steel frames on Mariele’s building were built by the very same Mr. Eiffel brings a brighter smile to my face.

She didn’t just host me, but, by my request, showed me her vision of the city and how she spends her time. It's very nice to visit the Louvre or see the Arc de Triomphe, but I preferred to see life as it is, crude and simple, and find beauty in it. That’s an ongoing exercise I’ve been practicing.

The day after I arrived she showed me what I’ve told you about already: the restaurant. Sitting on a bench by the counter, I saw dozens of customers ordering Pastel while DJ Çaravá spun the known and unknown Brazilian tunes. French- or Portuguese-speaking people delighted themselves with brigadeiros and cachaça. It was nice to feel a part of my country so close to me again. I've been missing this so much (and I've been thinking: did I, all of a sudden, become a patriot? Read more about this here). Mariele took me by the hand and remembered me of a few things I miss about my country: delicious food, unstoppable talking, and, well, affection.

Mariele's Paris had a visit to a cheap and cozy bar. We drank beer and wine discussing banalities — like how old Loulou, the owner and namesake of the establishment, is — and not so banal subjects — like how the police rounded up African immigrants, that were just hanging around, with no apparent reason other than pure racism. We discussed that at a table with cis and trans people, with white, black, and yellow skins, some from France, others from Brazil. Almost everyone at that table was queer in some manner. Mariele's Paris is diverse in gender, sexuality, and color, in a much more colorful Paris than the touristic routes.

With her, I found out that Paris' subway smells worse than Berlin's, and that you have to keep the ticket you got in with you so you can get out. She showed me that any wine you buy tastes good — even the 3 Euro ones — and a huge supermarket that sells stuff for restaurants. We agreed that Paris' bike lanes are poorly built and the traffic is awful. She was my guide to her own city.

Mariele's Paris had a visit to a graffiti-covered bar by abandoned train tracks. I learned that the city government half built a train section that would go around the whole city until the city itself overgrown these tracks and they just gave up the plan and abandoned what was built. Some people took control of these ruins and made places like this bar, in which I saw a saxophonist that used to play with Miles Davis do his job.

I had shrimp risotto, wine, and magic cookies in Mariele's Paris. We discussed life and death, did an impromptu drunk hair dying session, slept spooning, and had sex. From beginning to end, affection was the main language, and it was spoken delicately, in our special ways. We hugged, we kissed, we fought: all in a week's worth of intimacy. Mariele filled my stomach and heart.

Mariele's Paris had tarot. In my reading, the cards screamed loud from the very first draw to the last. Every arcana told us truths we needed to hear, giving us warnings about what might come. It had incense, cats, nudity, cats, dancing, and more cats. Jupiter became my friend on day one, Feijão slept at the restroom sink, Brigitte was sick and Bakunin didn't even let me touch him. I still have cats' hair in all my black clothes, even in the ones I didn't wear.

I find that people are way more interesting than cities and their thousand-year-span story. It’s awesome to see the ruins of a long-gone empire and stand on the same path that great people stood. Personally, though, all of that doesn’t beat that curve in someone’s smile, the receding hairline of a fifty (forty? sixty?) year-old bartender, the specific dancing of a person in love with themselves. People are bigger than cities and envelop them, make them be what they are, filling every lost empire ruin with newfound life and joy.

Some will say I didn't see Paris because I didn't eat a croissant or because I didn't drink wine by the Seine. The funny thing is: regular and touristic Paris made me leave the city with no reason to come back.

I already want to visit Mariele again.

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I also met Nelson. He’s a nice guy. You should meet him too.

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💻🌀📄

I wrote a very technical article on my blog, about creating a NodeJS script that automatically creates a .md file for you, with the correct FrontMatter, in a separate branch. All in a single yarn post . Read it here.

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I didn’t read or watch much these last few days, so no updates on that part.