Fernando's Saturdays

On Saturdays I go running at seven, when Lyon is still half asleep and the Saône has that milky-tea colour the morning light gives it. I go down the slopes of the Croix-Rousse, run south along the quai Saint-Vincent, cross to the other bank on the Saint-Georges footbridge and keep going until I run out of willpower, which is usually sooner than planned. I run badly and slowly, with the technique of a man who took it up at forty on doctor's orders. But I love the river. In Bogotá there's no river you'd want to look at; the one that ran through the old centre we buried under an avenue, the way you hide something you're embarrassed about.

On the way back I walk through the market on the quai Saint-Antoine, sweaty, phone in hand, and I always end up at the same stall: Fernando's.

Fernando

Fernando is Portuguese, from a village near Viseu, and he came to Lyon in 1979 aged nineteen with a cardboard suitcase, or so he says, though I suspect the cardboard suitcase was added later because it suits the story. He sells fruit and vegetables from growers in the Drôme and the Monts du Lyonnais. He has enormous hands and a French accent that is still intact after forty-seven years, like mine, which isn't going anywhere either.

We became friends over avocados. About ten years ago I asked him, in still-clumsy French, whether he had any that would be ripe that same day, and he answered in Portuguese, having guessed I spoke Spanish. We've talked like that ever since: him in Portuguese, me in Spanish, each understanding about eighty percent and filling in the rest with gestures. It's the only conversation in my week where I don't have to translate anything. Not outward, not inward.

Fernando keeps things for me. For years he kept the ugliest avocados aside, the ones nobody buys that are perfect inside. Once he found me, from who knows where, some corn cobs that weren't quite like the ones back home but almost. When I told him about ajiaco, the Bogotá chicken and potato soup, he listened very carefully, asking about the three kinds of potato, and a week later he brought me, from a cousin's shop in Villeurbanne, a jar of dried guascas, the herb that makes the soup, imported from Colombia. How that jar ended up in a Portuguese man's shop in Villeurbanne is a mystery I'd rather not solve.

This Saturday

This Saturday it was busier than usual, because the warm weather has arrived and Lyon has come outside. Inés came with me on her bike while I jogged alongside, looking ridiculous. Fernando gave her a cherry, as he always does, and then, while weighing my tomatoes, he told me he was leaving. In September he's selling the stall to a young guy from Givors and going back to his village, to a house that belonged to his parents and that he's spent thirty years fixing up bit by bit, one holiday at a time.

I told him that was great, that he'd earned it. I said it in Spanish and of course he understood. But that wasn't what I felt, or not only that. What I felt was selfish and a little shameful: I was losing the one person in Lyon I talk to without thinking about which language I'm using.

He must have noticed, because he stood there quietly for a moment with the tomatoes in his hand. Then he said there's a river in his village, a small one that almost dries up in summer, and that maybe one day I'd come and we'd go running together, even though he hasn't run since 1985. Inés asked what he'd said. I translated it into French. She said she wanted to come too.

We went home up the Montée de la Grande Côte, me pushing the bike because Inés refused to pedal uphill. I was carrying the tomatoes, a Cavaillon melon and a bag of cherries Fernando wouldn't let me pay for. I have thirteen Saturdays left. I counted them on a bench halfway up the hill while she ate the cherries.