The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

Later she could, of course, and she hated it, she would hate it for as long as she lived.

  What exactly? Oh, you know what I’m talking about.

  That way some dinner guests, men or women, have of treating the man or woman who cooks for them like a lover or mistress, since they lack the imagination to dream up any other image of the person who so lavishly catered to their pleasure and happiness.

  And with that there come poses, gazes, even words, that—spoken with no ulterior motive or hidden meaning, almost innocently, shall we say—so overtly evoke sexual pleasure that the Cheffe, who had a real loathing for invasiveness, came to dread any expression of gratitude or admiration, as I told you before, she didn’t like coming out into the dining room, didn’t like meeting the customers.

  She didn’t like feeling her body close to theirs, didn’t like seeing their tongues, their lips, their post-meal glow.

  You’re right, I called it a lack of imagination and I shouldn’t have.

  Not because it’s wrong or not what I really think, but because you’re going to ask how in that case the Cheffe would have liked to be thanked, in what register of ideas or feelings she wanted to be praised.

  That’s what you’re about to ask me, right?

  Because even for a woman as exceptional as the Cheffe, working and slaving and often suffering, and sacrificing any chance of rest or more or less anything like a private life, a family life, on the altar of extraordinary cooking, all that would have been hard to endure without thanks.

  As I told you, she wanted no part of worship with erotic overtones, real or perceived.

  She wanted it to be spiritual, she wanted the eater to fall into a state of quiet, modest contemplation, she wanted him to speak to her, if he so wished (but she would have rather he didn’t), as he would to the officiant of a ceremony at once simple in its presentation and elaborate in its conception, and then she, the Cheffe, the celebrant, could be complimented for having so skillfully organized the phases of that ritual, she could be thanked, she could be praised for her thoughtful and sensitive observance.

  That she could tolerate, it could sometimes be a pleasure, she could put up with it, yes.

  It was in that spirit that she practiced her art.

  Otherwise, she would have said, why bother?

  She didn’t want money or responsibilities, she wasn’t greedy, had no taste for luxury, wasn’t interested in her legacy.

  Cooking was sacred.

  Otherwise, why go to so much effort?

  No, of course, that’s not how she saw things in the days of Marmande and the Clapeaus, she didn’t see anything, she wasn’t really looking.

  But she was feeling, concentrating the rays with her tireless little magnifying glass, secretly absorbing and transforming everything offered by the part of her workday that she spent helping the cook, that woman who would never be her friend.

  Very simple tasks, yes, peeling, washing, slicing.

  One of the Clapeaus’ grandsons was kind enough to send me a copy of Madame Clapeau’s account book from those days, and the entries for meat, vegetables, groceries, and wine fit perfectly with the dishes the Cheffe remembered seeing the cook make, which she tried to describe in detail when I asked her about her informal education at the Clapeaus’, she loved remembering that sort of thing, how she later mocked the heaviness of those menus!

  For the Clapeaus, you couldn’t give your guests a decent or even, in a sense, a friendly reception without a first course of charcuterie and then another of fish in sauce, a main dish of roasted or braised meat with multiple vegetable sides, a generously crouton-topped salad, a huge cheese platter, a pie or a cake, all of that followed by fruits, chocolates, petits fours.

  They loved a platter of pork charcuterie, they loved pâté en croûte, meat pies, galantines, ham croissants, which they didn’t trust their cook to make but had delivered from a shop in Paris, I’ve forgotten the name, they claimed it was the place to find the best of all things pork.

  The Clapeaus had a serious passion for meat, and since, strangely, they seemed to find that passion as acceptable as their fondness for fine cuisine was shameful, they sometimes exclaimed, in a tone of exaggerated, faintly absurd pride, “Meat galore, that’s what we like!”—hoping to hide the fact that in truth they loved everything, creams and flans, roasted vegetables, warm goat cheese on toast, and that deep down what they really loved was eating, even if organizing their dinner parties, planning the menus, choosing the products, endless deliberations with the cook on the choice of a dish supposedly favored by some guest, all those falsely anxious, ostensibly fraught preliminaries (everyone was supposed to believe those many invitations were a duty and a chore the Clapeaus were shouldering) brought them enormous pleasure, a pleasure so ill-concealed that the Cheffe saw it almost immediately.

  Yes, it was the Clapeaus who first gave her an example of the pleasure the vocabulary of cooking can inspire, they pronounced the words carefully, repeated them needlessly, kept each one in their mouths as long as they could before going on to the next.

  They also gave her an example of what it is to be helpless and lost, not because good food was the only thing they ever thought about but because their own nature shocked and alarmed them, and they looked at themselves with the same stern, censorious gaze they would have given anyone whose life was ruled by an obsession.

  They hated that about themselves, they couldn’t even understand it, that was why they were lost, unworthy of respect, people mocked them behind their backs, sometimes hardly behind their backs at all.

  That was what taught the Cheffe you should let your obsessions show only if you’re proud of them.

  What did they look like?

  I couldn’t tell you. I never saw a photo.

  The Cheffe never described them, except to say they weren’t in any way unusual.

  I’m not sure she would have told me even if they were enormously fat, I can imagine her conscientiously keeping that to herself, out of politeness, compassion, esteem for those people who, in the end, treated her well.

  So it means nothing either way that she didn’t say if they were or were not grossly overweight.

  The Cheffe was the most loyal person I ever knew, and that’s what lay behind so many of her mysteries.

  She kept quiet or concealed the truth out of faithfulness to loyalty, if I can put it that way.

  I myself have to take care to be both loyal and accurate, to be faithful to both loyalty and accuracy, and it tortures me terribly, talking with you I’ve often found myself deeply discouraged, yes.

  I’d like to tell the Life of the Cheffe the way people write the Life of a Saint, but that’s impossible, and the Cheffe herself would have thought it ridiculous.

  So I try to make plain honesty my watchword, but sometimes I hear the clear, calm voice, slightly tinged with a terrifying threat, the threat of a withdrawal of her trust and affection, sometimes I hear the voice of the Cheffe saying, “Do you really think you have any right to talk about all this? If I never did, why should you?”

  Yes, it’s very hard for me to accept that one day, as I’m talking away, I may commit an infidelity to loyalty and not realize it or realize it too late, and I know that vanity, in this case the temptation to impress by revealing some secret, lies in wait for me with every sentence I speak, I know it well, it’s very hard.

  I’m feeling my way, I’m not sure of anything, I want the Cheffe to be thought an admirable woman.

  Horrified by that idea?

  Yes, she certainly would have been, but she would have been wrong, that’s the conviction I’ve come to.

  I can go on talking to you about the Cheffe as long as I feel certain that she would have been wrong to fight with her old resistance anyone taking an interest in her.

  Because I realized that had become a reflex for her, and I also r
ealized she didn’t dare ask herself if it was really so impossible to feel happy or curious about the many requests she got, at the end, from journalists eager to meet her.

  She’d long since convinced herself that she couldn’t.

  It was like a sin to her, that idea of meeting, of telling, but it was a sin she’d made up, and she didn’t know it.

  The Cheffe would have found that misstep far less grave if she’d realized no one else saw it, I’m almost sure.

  She was proud, but there was no vanity in her pride.

  She admitted her lapses in judgment, the illusions her untamed heart sometimes dreamt up, she knew she was strong-minded, too quick to accuse herself, punish herself, too quick to feel guilty.

  I myself make plain honesty my watchword, and I put my love for her after that, because I know the Cheffe valued honesty over love, she thought people could do terrible things in the name of love, but never in the name of honesty.

  The love between a man and a woman never interested her much.

  Long before I met her, cooking had commandeered all her capacity for loving, for giving of herself, for suffering, for hoping, both the act of cooking and especially the thinking behind it, and the little capacity for love that managed to slip free of cooking went to her daughter, the Cheffe’s daughter, you may already have met her, if you ask me she didn’t deserve that love.

  But it was a love heavy with despair, so maybe it wasn’t really love at all.

  I’ve often thought my feelings for the Cheffe kept me from becoming a great cook, but I don’t regret it.

  Every day I get something from what my love made of me, and if I can live my life on good terms with myself it’s only because my exclusive, absolute, imperishable love transformed the boy I was, conventionally eager to succeed, ordinary, pragmatic, into a young man capable of marveling and sacrificing.

  How could I regret becoming a far better man, morally and spiritually, than the man I would have been had that love not caught hold of me?

  I can’t regret that.

  Forget my dreams of becoming a chef, for me it will be enough to have practiced my trade decently, and made from it only what I need, which is very little.

  I can’t regret the swelling of my courage, the blossoming of my cramped heart, no one would regret that, man or woman, no one.

  Once you’ve seen that elevation of your consciousness, even at the expense of more concrete ambitions, then you can only be grateful, and you’ll set aside disappointment and frustration for all time.

  That’s why I can’t regret devoting my talents to loving and serving the Cheffe instead of myself, I can’t regret that.

  In Lloret de Mar, readying my terrace for this evening’s aperitif hour, thinking of other things, unfolding the metal chairs and wiping the table and sweeping the blue petals gently fallen from the old jacaranda that protects me from the sun, it occurs to me that the days go by so uneventfully and identically that my friends and I might almost have discovered some ingenious tactic for shielding ourselves from the withering passage of the years, sheltered from time in our harbor we see others growing old and we look at ourselves and we find that we never change, not even alcohol reddens our eternally tan faces, we think ourselves lucky and attractive, we never give doubt or anguish or existential chagrin a chance to sneak into our happy hearts, our carefree hearts, our hearts gone cold, and we all see ourselves in the flattering mirror of the others’ unchanged faces.

  As I was saying, the Clapeaus had come up with the odd idea that by parading their unbridled taste for meat they could hide their mania for food in general, which is why meat was the daily fare at the Clapeaus’, and why they even considered it a therapeutic necessity, they claimed meat protected them from various illnesses they never failed to catch when circumstances deprived them of pork or beef at every meal.

  The Cheffe would remember the dishes she saw the cook make, in a large, sunny, modern kitchen looking onto a little urban garden enclosed by high walls and abundantly planted with espaliered pear and peach trees, a kitchen the Clapeaus were so proud of that they showed it to all their guests, proclaiming “The most important room in the house!” with feigned sarcasm, trying to sound caustic, exasperated by it wasn’t quite clear whose laughable ambition to have the kitchen thought of like that, maybe the cook’s, but all their friends and relatives knew that in truth they alone seriously and solemnly saw the kitchen as the most important room in the house, the cook certainly didn’t care, it wasn’t her house, and nothing belonged to her—the Cheffe would remember those dishes as made up of nothing but meat, day after day, vegetables being added only for visual effect, and in a sense as penitence.

  There was brined pork and Lyonnais sausage accompanied by a few very thin leaves of white cabbage, there was breaded and pan-fried fillet of pork topped with anchovy butter, there were kidneys from all sorts of animals, inevitably sautéed in butter and glazed with Madeira sauce, there was rabbit with shallots and mushrooms, beef tongue au gratin, pigeons with peas, there was veal à l’escalope in peppery cream sauce, boudin noir studded with onions or offal served on slices of baked apple, fried chicken croquettes, lamb cutlets à la Villeroy, that last one was a great favorite of Monsieur Clapeau’s, he called them his little darlings, he liked them thickly breaded, crisp on the outside and just barely cooked inside, he wanted a faint taste of blood.

  The Clapeaus tired quickly even of dishes they loved, and their perpetual craving for new tastes grew stronger as they grew older, as if they were afraid they might die before they could explore every flavor, every combination of textures and appearances, every way of cooking and seasoning, every sensation the act of eating could offer their very imaginative minds.

  They pressed the cook to show them something they couldn’t name, and since they couldn’t name something they couldn’t describe, they didn’t mean to but they put her in a very difficult spot, called on to cook something they couldn’t begin to imagine.

  They brought her recipes they’d found in strange old books, written in a language she could scarcely understand, and told her to use them simply as inspiration, to reflect and meditate on them, and then, with those mysterious recipes in her mind, to open all the doors of her imagination, to open them as wide as she could.

  The cook scarcely pretended to glance at them.

  She never loathed the Clapeaus as much as when they came to her in that mood: astir, hopeful, but at the same time expecting a disappointment, and so at once pleading and dissatisfied, frustrated, furious, hating themselves.

  The Cheffe saw that, took note of it, shall we say, but she didn’t judge, didn’t think anything about it, because even then her powerful intuition was telling her, warning her, that she was too young and too ignorant of humanity’s ways to allow herself an opinion of people who, however naïve the Clapeaus sometimes seemed, had seen so much more of life than she had.

  And when she became an adult, it would still be the Cheffe’s way to withhold her judgment of the things people did.

  She wanted to understand all their motivations before she opened her mouth, for the sake not so much of justice as of accuracy, she feared she might not always see things as they are.

  Which is why people sometimes called her too cautious, afraid to offer a prompt, clear opinion, always holding back.

  They couldn’t have gotten her more wrong.

  The Cheffe was almost incomprehensibly indifferent to what people thought of her ideas.

  But the possibility that she might find herself in the dock of her little inner courtroom, where her rigorous integrity was always quick to summon her, facing charges of prejudice, incoherence, misinterpretation, and vanity, that possibility she found hard to bear.

  People must have been all the more surprised by that reticence, which in anyone else could easily have gone unnoticed, because the Cheffe had a quick, categorical opini
on on anything connected with cooking, and was never shy about questioning a dish or a product, even if it might earn her animosity or—almost worse, for her—excessive approval.

  The Clapeaus never watched themselves around her, they forgot she was there when they were talking to the cook.

  And when she saw them that way, intense and imploring, dubious but longing, she invariably wondered, puzzled: Why don’t they cook for themselves? Why grant that cook, whose mediocrity the Cheffe was coming to realize, the power to make them unhappy?

  They knew so much more about cuisine than that cold, morose woman, they’d developed an interest in gastronomy so much broader and better informed than hers, that they might well have come close to the undiscovered foods they were dreaming of if they’d taken on the task themselves, they could have experimented and striven and not had to explain and describe, not had to fruitlessly search for the words that might make something they themselves didn’t know understandable to a cook who was hostile and resistant before they even began. Why don’t they do that? the Cheffe wondered, deeply troubled by their pathetic, forced devotion to the cook, its shamelessness, its twistedness.

  She thought there was no good way to disentangle yourself from such a perverse relationship, she thought that for all her ill will the cook wasn’t wrong to balk at the Clapeaus’ demands, as vague as they were desperate or imperious, and neither was she wrong to feel she didn’t have to slavishly obey people so ashamed of their appetites.

  But the Clapeaus weren’t wrong either, she thought, to fault the lack of inventiveness of that bitter, sullen woman, who cooked with a truculent fervor and a scarcely concealed ambition never to give them quite what they wanted.

  The Cheffe long delayed telling me what she knew about the Clapeaus, how she understood their apparent conviction that they couldn’t possibly cook for themselves.

  She always stopped short of that, as if suddenly certain words eluded her.

  She was waiting to know me better.

  She already knew, when she told me of her education at the Clapeaus’, that I wouldn’t snicker at anything she might say, that I wasn’t the snickering sort, that I could in fact safely be judged capable of anything but snickering.