by Marie Ndiaye
You thought so too, that her life was pure misery from her earliest childhood on?
So what do you do with the Cheffe’s own experience, facts and dates aside, of ways that many young people today, raised with all the comforts of a respectable upbringing by parents who want them to know everything about life but never run into anything unpleasant, must find terrible and unjust and incomprehensible and archaic?
I don’t mean to say that they aren’t all that and worse.
They may well be.
But if the Cheffe felt differently about those facts, wouldn’t it be condescending not to try to judge them from exactly the same angle as she did?
She’s the one who actually lived them.
And so, since all through her certainly poor and even destitute childhood the Cheffe found many opportunities for fun, and could later even say she was as happy as a little animal bursting with health, perfectly attuned to its environment, unwilling to change it for anything, then we’ve got to believe her, in all simplicity, and not do her the disservice of presuming she dressed up those early years in a joy they never held.
You’re thinking, and I once thought the same, that no one could genuinely remember himself or herself as a happy, fulfilled child in that kind of environment, I certainly wouldn’t have been happy, I would remember that time with sorrow, the sorrow I would most certainly have felt at the time.
So that child can’t possibly exist, and the Cheffe was misremembering or deluding herself, it makes no difference which.
But no, not at all. I’m certain everything she said was the truth.
It’s our job to work at reaching her there, in her early happiness we find so hard to imagine.
Yes, it’s almost too much to ask.
“Such a wonderful childhood I had,” the Cheffe used to say when she talked about Sainte-Bazeille, where she’d spent her first fourteen years, where her parents hired themselves out here and there as farm laborers, dragging her along with them, putting her to work once they were reasonably sure the boss wouldn’t notice, that was already forbidden back then, hiring children.
And like them she pulled beets or gleaned corn, ever ready, on a prearranged sign from her mother, to drop whatever she had in her hands and mime some sort of play, should someone who might report them come near.
Yes, the Cheffe was born after the war, in ’50 or ’51, I never knew exactly, for all my digging.
I went to see that little house in Sainte-Bazeille where the Cheffe claimed she lived the best years of her life even though she never went back to it, even though she refused to make the briefest detour to see it again, like that time we were driving from Bordeaux to Grignols to buy fattened ducks from a promising new farmer and I suggested we make a quick side trip through Sainte-Bazeille.
She was silent for so long that I said it again, thinking she hadn’t heard me, I imagine my voice was filled with the repressed but tremulous, proud, happy excitement of someone who’s sure he’s had a wonderful idea, and I turned my head for a glance at the Cheffe, very pleased with myself, I so wanted to make her happy, to satisfy her every wish, I so longed to give her the tiniest pleasure, even at the expense of my own, I mean my immediate pleasure, which meant nothing to me because at the time I found my happiness only in the Cheffe’s.
And although her face had been unusually serene ever since we took the main highway out of Bordeaux, I saw a shadow come over it then, and even two angry little creases fencing off the corners of her mouth.
The clear, silvery, majestic light of that November morning so precisely set off the Cheffe’s head, her hair pulled back and imprisoned in a pitiless chignon on her nape, her long, straight neck, smooth and solid as a young beech trunk, that for a moment I thought it wasn’t the Cheffe there beside me on the passenger seat but only her image, two-dimensional, without flesh or life, but nonetheless captivating, grand, and aloof, as she often appeared in my dreams, or as I saw her, felt her beside me when I found myself in my room after work, alone but because of that never truly alone.
A very tight chignon, yes, almost torture for her poor hair, grown fine and lank from having been too long pulled tight.
She never wore her hair any other way, and it’s only another effect of the cursed Sud-Ouest photo that you find that surprising, because it’s true that in the picture you see her with a cloud of soft brown hair that seems less to surround or encase her skull than to float delicately around it, and since as I told you that photo misleadingly accompanied every article ever published about the Cheffe, all sorts of people who’d never met her, who could never have hoped to meet her, were convinced she let her hair spread out like that, like a weightless nimbus, all around her temples, her brow, a freedom that in truth she never granted it, and I can’t imagine why, on that day of days when that deceptive picture was taken, she had.
No, I’m not in the photo, I wasn’t yet working for the Cheffe.
But I know she always bound her hair behind her head, and not only for the obvious reasons of kitchen hygiene, I know she would have been happier with no hair at all, and if such a thing were conceivable back then she would have shaved it all off rather than torture and blight it by strangling it in a rubber band twisted over and over.
She would have liked to be only that face I saw against the cold, bright November light coming through the car windows, she would have liked her art to be incarnated, since it had to be, in only the plainest way, the strictest way, the most neutral: by nothing more than a face.
Oh no, I’ll come back to that, being a woman mattered to her. I’ll tell you about that later.
But it had nothing to do with her face.
It wasn’t a feminine face, there in that pallid, distant light, and even less, if this makes any sense, a masculine face.
It was the idea of a face, the emblem of a face, proclaiming, in that exact, impartial morning light: “Since my cooking must be represented by a human face, here’s the face that best expresses its deep simplicity, even its poverty, because this face isn’t seductive or pretty or adorned, it’s a face beyond all consideration of beauty or ugliness.”
Which is why, even though I never knew the obviously random and anomalous reason why the man who took her picture found her that one day with her hair set free, yes, it’s true, almost proudly showed off, even though I never knew that reason because no one would tell me the precise circumstances of the photo shoot, in the very middle of the day, in front of a restaurant that must have been packed at that hour, I’m sure the Cheffe was later sorry that on top of everything else she’d displayed that mane, which in a way didn’t belong to her, that mane she tolerated only for the sake of convention, in every way incompatible with the essence of the face she wanted to show the world.
And then I saw how deeply she was annoyed by my suggestion of a pilgrimage to Sainte-Bazeille, the place of her childhood.
Without even a fleeting look to soften her words, she murmured, “That’s none of your business.”
And of course she was right, I couldn’t deny it, but it was still a cruel blow to my sensitivity, which was always particularly tender where the Cheffe was concerned.
Stupidly, not out of pride, with her I had none, but because, reeling, I must have thought a kindly insistence on my part would bring a less brutal answer, one that would partially wipe out the first, I added: “You were so happy there, it might be interesting to…”
“Will you be quiet, be quiet, you don’t know anything about it!” she shot back, her voice muffled, contained with great difficulty, and the effort I could see her making not to let her irritation explode in a furious shout crushed me just as much as the words she was saying.
I mumbled my shamefaced apologies and she shrugged, tense, irked, suddenly all the sunniness this outing had brought her was gone, and it was my fault.
It came back when we drove home to
Bordeaux with three little crates of beautiful fattened ducks that she would come up with the idea of glazing with white-fig jelly and slow roasting for hours in a pastry-sealed pot.
But I never forgot her sharpness that morning.
When, much later, I went to Sainte-Bazeille on my own, telling no one, and after asking all over the village finally located the house she grew up in, I wondered if she was afraid of coming face-to-face with what I then discovered in all its sadness: not so much a house as a hovel shabbily built by the side of the road, on a plot of land ringed with sagging barbed wire, and to be sure everything about the place suggested no one had lived there for years, the windows were all broken, maybe by the same people who’d covered the siding with tags and graffiti, but even at so long a remove it was all too clear that a family of eight (yes, the Cheffe had five brothers and sisters) who lived in such a place had to be among the poorest in the village, and even very likely the poorest of all, especially, as the Cheffe once let slip, because her parents were only renters on that tiny patch of land, an embankment where nothing much grew, despite all her mother’s efforts to make a vegetable garden.
Maybe the Cheffe would have been embarrassed to show me that house, maybe she was ashamed?
No, the Cheffe was never ashamed of anything that wasn’t her doing, and besides, at the age I was then I meant far too little to her, she couldn’t possibly have cared how I might judge her or feel about her.
No, I think she feared her own pity at the sight of so vivid an image of her parents’ misfortunes, the whole family’s public disgrace.
Because, the Cheffe used to say, her parents always managed—were always trying—not to make their troubles seem fewer and slighter to their children but to teach them to find those troubles far less interesting and therefore less serious than what common sense told them, common sense in Sainte-Bazeille being personified by their neighbors and teachers.
So the Cheffe could always counter pitying words and veiled looks of disdain or reproachful contempt with her parents’ healthy optimism, the expression of their indomitable spirit, and in this case their heroism.
They always assumed things would get better, and they thought they’d been proven right when things simply didn’t get any worse.
Which is why, since the Cheffe so loved her parents, so protectively watched over their memory, and since all their lives her parents had worked at not being pitied (or pitied only in a global way that wasn’t aimed specifically at them, didn’t touch them), she would have thought she was betraying their memory if she’d felt, if she couldn’t help feeling, a stinging sympathy at the sight of that Sainte-Bazeille hovel, even if hers would have been slighter than mine on seeing that jumble of boards where by some miracle her parents gave her a luminous childhood, or, yes, the illusion of a luminous childhood, but aren’t they the same thing, since it’s all about memory?
As far as I know, her brothers and sisters never talked about those days.
They were reserved people, uncomfortable opening up, and in any case they wouldn’t have dared take a position different from the Cheffe’s, she was the only one who’d succeeded, the only one who’d made money.
They were all younger, but they all died before her (Ingrid excepted), two of them apparently by suicide, the Cheffe never spoke their names; what could she have done?
What could she do, with the hardworking life she’d chosen, the almost total lack of time off, the worries that don’t punctuate a cook’s life, don’t accompany it, but are the very stuff of it once you’ve climbed as high as she had, what could she do for them but get in touch once or twice a year and, when they came asking, lend or give them various sums of money, always keeping her geographical and emotional distance, since for all those reasons and no doubt still others she couldn’t possibly look into the exact nature of the problems pushing them to ask for her help, problems the two youngest chose to escape, one by throwing himself under a train, the other, I believe, by hanging?
She never turned them away. She never abandoned them or anyone else.
But what more could she do for them?
Wasn’t that already a lot, signing those generous checks?
Never demanding they justify it, never asking any questions at all, and even if her tact was inspired by a determination to keep clear of endless, depressing, unsolvable problems, her brothers and sisters didn’t know it, they could only be glad she was at once so discreet and so generous.
They at least never complained. Certainly not, that would have been very foolish.
You’ve heard the Cheffe’s daughter’s claims, she who knows next to nothing about it, and as is so often the case you’d rather believe the slanderer than try to hear, in her very silence, the one being wronged.
I’ll tell you about that in due course.
The Cheffe would never have boasted of the money she gave, or hold it up as evidence in her defense, in the end she thought it better or less painful for no one to know, for people to think her an unfeeling person, devoid of sisterly sentiment.
She didn’t mind being misjudged, never being asked her side of the story, that was fine with her.
That it was her own daughter misleading everyone, in vengeance for who knows what wrong, that must have hurt her, yes, terribly, I think.
But what truly tormented the daughter was life itself, she was nothing but a victim, always and forever, of having been forced to be born.
She had no will. She was too absorbed in herself. I’ll tell you about all that later.
In any case, just as the Cheffe vehemently refused to revisit her house in Sainte-Bazeille so she wouldn’t run the risk of betraying her brave, worthy, carefree parents in her heart, I’m looking for a way to tell you about her childhood and not feel I’m betraying her in my heart, she who was so grateful to her parents for her happy upbringing.
She went to school on and off, when she had time.
To hear her tell it, school was a chore to get through, whereas the work she did for her parents, however monotonous and exhausting, always gave her the pleasure of feeling useful, and so of feeling alive.
Yes, very likely, sitting in a classroom, thinking of her parents having to do without her, having to work even harder and longer just so she could warm a chair in a school for a purpose she couldn’t imagine, since she was absent too often to see any coherence in the things she was taught, very likely, yes, being kept away from her parents under those conditions she might well have felt only impatience and repulsion for school, most of all because she was painfully aware of everything that made it impossible for the teachers to like her, despite laudable efforts from some of them: her hostile, bored, closed manner, her hardworking but absurdly cavalier parents, always satisfied with everything, neither arrogant nor humble but, shall we say, inexplicably carefree.
She wanted them to like her, and more than anything she wanted them to like her parents.
If they did, she would have thrown everything she had into her schoolwork, and more besides, both herself and someone inside her who hadn’t come out yet, whose secret, larval existence she would learn of only when she discovered cooking.
No, that’s true, she could have taken not being liked, it wouldn’t have saddened her in the least.
I agree with you there.
But I still say she couldn’t bear the lack of friendship or admiration for her parents, she couldn’t accept that the few times they’d consented to come to the school for a meeting their exceptional, flamboyant personalities didn’t immediately snuff out all the harsh words the teacher was planning to say to them, that he did say to them, as if they were bad parents, neglectful, crude, greedy, blind to their child’s capacities, or maybe simply indifferent.
And to make matters worse they never answered, they left in the same cheerful mood as when they came, having done their duty, docile but impenetrable, bucking the s
chool as they bucked all institutions, yes, submissive on the surface because they were fundamentally easygoing people but deep down immovable and obdurate and not even aware of it, like two little donkeys wrapped up in their own mysterious world.
And had just one teacher realized all the wonderful things those parents were hiding beneath their destitution, thought the Cheffe, then she would have approached her schoolwork with the same tenacity, the same tireless intelligence, the same ingenuity she devoted to helping her parents in the fields, where, even as a tiny girl, she’d come up with many perfectly respectable tactics to fight off the pain or fatigue that came from too much time in a stressful position.
But since no representative of the school ever congratulated her on her parents, or held back the unpleasant things he thought it only right that they hear (having to do with the Cheffe’s many absences and the outlandish parental excuses she wrote out and signed herself, not wanting to trouble them), she came to see herself as the enemy of the teachers, of the principal, of anyone, her classmates included, who took the world of the school for the world of truth and goodness, and who recognized neither the truth nor the goodness of her parents’ strange world.
It’s true: if the Cheffe were attending that school nowadays, her teachers would have received those mystifying parents with an open mind, without judgment or indignation, they would have seen the stoical coherence and decency with which, for all their many failings, the Cheffe’s parents were raising their children, they would have tried to relate to those parents’ stubborn, feral, but perfectly peaceable approach to getting along in society, they would have tried to understand all that and they would have been the better for it, they would have been edified, perhaps even inspired, and the Cheffe wouldn’t have thought she was being disloyal to her parents if she felt a fondness for school, if she simply consented to participate in it.
