It is not zee tortilla. It is zee French crepe!
He delivered the rest of his tirade in French, drowning out the noise of the passing traffic with the smack of his spatulas against the metal table. I retaliated by cupping my hands around my mouth and yelling, “It’s a flour tortilla, bro!”
THE ANGRY CREPES OF BELLEVILLE BY EDDIE P GOMEZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 45
When I pulled up to The Loft hostel where I had reserved a room for six nights, a young French African with a shaved head and big brown eyes ran across the road and circled me as I unloaded the car. He smiled pleasantly and his English was rough but I understood that he lived on the corner somewhere down the street, near the lower terraces of Parc de Belleville. He said that he was on summer vacation from high school but would be returning soon for the fall semester.
As I locked the car and made my way towards the entrance to the hostel he walked briskly at my side offering to carry my bags, jumping up and down with excitement.
“Are you tourists?” he asked. “American, oui?”
“Just here to work like everybody else,” I said. “My name is Eddie. What’s your name?”
His shoulders drooped and the smile on his face disappeared as he let out a sigh and softly said, “I thought you are tourists, man. I’m Moskel.”
Moskel and I shook hands and fist bumped before he ran off in the direction of the park after some kids with a basketball called out to him.
On my way through the lobby I noticed a gas-fired stove with large ovens in a spacious kitchen. Having a kitchen meant that I could make my own meals without depending on restaurants or street food.
Later that evening I took a stroll down the rue de Belleville towards the place de la République. Crowds and traffic lumbered up the busy thoroughfare or coasted down towards the Seine. The Eiffel Tower sat on the horizon like a toy.
As I passed the Belleville metro the strange sensation of having been there before came over me. I somehow recognized the drab structures that lined the boulevard, the occasional pie-slice buildings in the side streets. The infrastructure seemed familiar because of an art and architecture class that I’d taken at UC Merced the previous fall where we studied how Georges-Eugène Haussmann on orders from Napoleon III razed Paris’s slums in the 1860s, replacing them with streetscapes of wide boulevards, roundabouts, and plazas.
But I felt a closer connection than textbooks or old blueprints could offer, a distant childhood memory flickering in the back of my mind, The Red Balloon filmed in Belleville by Albert Lamorisse in 1956. My familiarity had actual roots because anyone who grew up in California during the seventies and eighties remembers the movie. It served as a reminder of the power of dreams and living adventurously. The movie intended to cultivate a sense of beauty in the world around us and to let us know something of its cruelty. Suddenly I had one foot in Paris and another in the life that surrounded my first and second-grade classrooms in California circa 1977. The streets of Bellville in this way held an unfathomable charm even though they were dirty and much of the quarter succumbed to demolition and rebuilding since the filming of The Red Balloon. Nonetheless, it felt good to travel and travel in time on a warm August night.
Further down the rue de Belleville I noticed roasted meats on a spit in a Middle Eastern butcher shop. I ordered a box of beef short-ribs and some potatoes, and returning to the hostel I intended to augment them with vine-ripened tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin olive oil that I’d purchased at a market near the airport in Pisa.
Returning from the butcher shop I had an encounter with a Frenchman with whom I would exchange angry stares over the course of the week. The man sold crepes, dressed in a chef’s uniform that was meant to add an element of showmanship to his street act, handling two spatulas as if they were swords. I bought one of his crepes and melted into the scenery around the booth, washing down the jam-stuffed crepe with a small carton of milk, all the while feeling lost in the hustle and bustle of the enormous intersection.
Then I noticed the street chef’s negative reaction to my attempt at conversation. He became even more irritated when I inquired about his method of making crepes. He acted as if crepe-making was some high art of closely guarded secrets, deserving of his attention only, but I knew better. Making crepes is a simple process and open to much greater efforts of creativity than his simple pairings with marmalade and Nutella. His adverse reaction triggered an unpleasant attitude of my own because I’d only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation about street food.
I took the crepe-maker’s dismissal of my inquiries as an affront to my knowledge of food, causing me to antagonize an already escalating situation. My excuse for what followed was that the situation had arisen, simply, from my need to take up oxygen in what the Frenchman perceived to be his private air space.
So I took up more of his oxygen by letting loose a barrage of chatter. I talked about my summer in Italy and my dog back in California. I held forth about how French cooking had its roots in the chefs that accompanied Catherine de Medici to the court of her future husband and king Henry II.
The man frowned and his face contorted with every turn in the one-sided conversation. When I mentioned to the man that his crepes looked like giant flour tortillas, the kind that my mom made back home—in California that by the way was as beautiful as its reputation and a place every French person should visit—he came out from behind the three round hotplates in his booth and began to bang on a metal table with his spatulas, the same spatulas that he’d just used to flip and fold my crepe. He was livid, had obviously missed the section at chef school that regarded customer service and positive business models.
“It is not zee tortilla, it is zee French crepe,” he yelled in the most irritating nasal groan ever communicated in the history of language. “It is not zee Mexique. It is French!”
He delivered the rest of his tirade in French, drowning out the noise of the passing traffic with the smack of his spatulas against the metal table.
I retaliated by cupping my hands around my mouth and yelling, “It’s a flour tortilla, bro!”
“It is not zee tortilla. It is zee French crepe!” he shot back.