At this stage of his Berlin wanderings, Mauro often takes a break. He goes into the first bar he finds, grabs a table near the door, and thinks about Jeanne.

A straw hat on her head, a pair of cut denim shorts revealing her sprinter’s thighs, small rounded feet in leather ballet pumps, and a staggering workload—sheep, chickens, pigs, vegetable garden. He watches her as she crosses the farmyard, spade in hand, concentrating. He listens to her when she sits down outside the kitchen door and says to him as she rolls a cigarette: So, you’re doing economics? Startled, he nods. He’s leaning against the hot wall, holding a beer. Jeanne is interested in economics: she takes part in discussions on blogs, in forums, reads theoreticians of degrowth, studies new networks for organic agriculture. She smiles: Aside from the cigs and the wine, the vast majority of what we consume here is produced on the premises, hadn’t you noticed? Mauro shakes his head; no, he hadn’t noticed anything.

She is the first cook he meets. A professional now, she’s been cooking for as long as she can remember. That summer, she shows him something beyond the gastronomical ingenuity of artists, which is the kind of cuisine he already knows, the kind done by friends who mix up their cultures. She introduces him to another realm—the realm of ecology, the territory of earthly resources. This is a vast expanse of fruits and vegetables: blond pears, speckled zucchini, new carrots and beefsteak tomatoes, tasty roots, elongated eggplants and wild herbs—chervil, sage, nettles. It is a continent populated by small poultry birds that you grab by the neck, where there’s a pig called Napoléon, where the bull Soleil is king. It’s a humane kind of cooking. Another world. Something is happening. Mauro loves how she lives, the way she thinks, connected to the earth, to the seasons; he loves her energy and the purity of her moods—sunny cheerfulness, stormy anger—and I feel certain that he was blown away by the assurance of her gestures, her gait, her look.

He doesn’t go back to Paris right away, preferring to stay at the farm past the summer, working with the seasonal laborers and, in late September, leaving the Landes for Berlin, where he will meet up with Joachim—a way of extending this period of uncertainty. In Paris, Mauro stops by the Gibert bookstore in Place Saint-Michel, where he buys a Berlin guidebook and a stack of textbooks on cooking aimed at students taking professional exams.