The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  And so, having called up in her mind a simple, idealized image of a peach tart, its amber color underscored by something she thought might be verbena, with the faintest gilding, subdued and matte, of caramelized sugar (the Marmande cook always plastered her tarts with a thick syrup of sugar and apricot jam, they glistened as they were set down on the table, as polished and glazed as gravestone ornaments, and the Clapeaus would exclaim, “Isn’t it beautiful! It’s too pretty to eat!” remembering which the Cheffe wondered unconcerned if the Clapeaus might find her tart too homely, too unenticing to touch, she imagined that unconcerned, with a touch of anticipatory disappointment, she hated waste, and she knew that she herself would go near her dessert only for a sample), she was pleased, when the tart came out of the oven, to see no disparity between the thing and her premonition of it, and so she forgot the idea and conferred on the real tart the status of a model for all her desserts to come.

  And that way she could like making and serving desserts, she could do it without feeling she was demeaning herself and pandering to the customer, she would bring integrity and self-respect to dessert.

  The dish that “draped” perfectly, yes?

  Other fashion expressions the Cheffe liked to use?

  None that I can think of. No, clothes didn’t really interest her, she thought fashion was trivial and pointless.

  What is it exactly you’re wondering?

  I imagine she was wearing one of her two cotton skirts in that house in the Landes, that summer when she was sixteen and the spirit of cooking danced before her brown eyes and then was suddenly inside her, one of them was pale gray and the other navy blue, high-waisted, gathered, calf length, and a beige short-sleeved blouse buttoned up to the neck, it was a neighbor in Sainte-Bazeille who’d made her those very simple, very unadorned clothes, the Cheffe was fiercely attached to them, they reminded her of Sainte-Bazeille and her cherished parents, and they also had something of the uniform in their impersonal rigor that the Cheffe liked because they revealed nothing, no vanity, no desire to please, and no grim determination not to please either, both the cut and the fabric were plain and forthright, innocent, they weren’t trying to say anything, they were trying to say nothing, and that’s just what they said.

  Those clothes were only what they were, good fabric well tailored, perfectly suited to what was asked of them: nothing more than the protection of a body that was equally innocent and mute and devoid of intention, the Cheffe’s little body in that house in the Landes, her compact sixteen-year-old body, sturdy and discreet, which the Cheffe treated with reasonable, modest care, like a tool needed for a task, something you wouldn’t want to damage but for which you felt neither fondness nor scorn, that body she never looked at, wasn’t jealous of, was never surprised by, couldn’t have said if it was breathtaking or badly flawed, that stolid body that would go on virtually unchanged as the years went by, as if preserved by the Cheffe’s very disinterest, held fast in an eternal, detached youthfulness.

  For cold days the Cheffe had two other skirts cut on that same pattern, one made of plaid wool, the other brown wool jersey, and two beige flannel blouses, her growth slowed when she was thirteen, the same clothes still fit her three years later and would for a long time to come, she vaguely imagined keeping them forever, since she wasn’t too hard on them, as she said, she liked to imagine herself wearing those Sainte-Bazeille clothes forever, cladding herself each morning and for all time in the memory of Sainte-Bazeille, covering herself with the purity of Sainte-Bazeille.

  Much later, when the Cheffe opened her restaurant, she bought several identical work outfits to wear under her big white apron, they were a little like those Sainte-Bazeille clothes except that the skirts were replaced by straight trousers, black or dark gray, also buttoned high on the waist, clasping the hem of a sand-colored blouse with a short, pointed collar, always buttoned up to the very top.

  The Cheffe seemed so perfectly made for those clothes, so uniquely made for that sobriety without pretention or ostentatious modesty, for that plainness deliberately stripped of meaning, that when I ran into her one Saturday afternoon on the Place de la Victoire, it took me a moment to realize it was she, this woman with the Cheffe’s face and dark, thoughtful, calm gaze, but who was dressed as I’d never seen the Cheffe, as I would never have dreamt I might see her, dressed in a way that would, I thought, have horrified her had someone suggested it, like pulling some stranger’s skin over your own, with all its secretions and humors.

  The Cheffe recognized me, she stopped walking, not happy.

  She said a few words in a sullen, distant voice, then her gaze turned away from mine and hovered somewhere beyond my shoulder, I realized she was embarrassed and irked to be seen this way, in the skin of a stranger she didn’t at all care for, a stranger who even disgusted her.

  She was on her way to the wedding of one of her nieces, and she’d thought it best, so as not to seem superior and disdainful to the family she loved loyally, unconditionally, and sadly, who wouldn’t have appreciated seeing her appear at the big event in a dark pantsuit and an ecru cotton blouse, they would have assumed she didn’t want to spend the money, thought too little of them for that (and I believe her family’s judgment was the only one she feared, even if she kept them at arm’s length, she feared it with a sad, desperate fatalism), she’d thought it best to dress as the other women at the wedding would be dressed, with a conspicuous, tragic attempt at elegance, and so she was wearing a fuchsia satin dress, somewhat short, slightly clinging, with a thin black leather band for a belt, a little black fitted jacket, black lace stockings, and open-toed high-heeled stilettos, the whole thing striving for sexiness in a graceless, labored way it deeply saddened me to see.

  The Cheffe was trying to please Sainte-Bazeille, but where was the clarity of Sainte-Bazeille?

  The timeless freshness of Sainte-Bazeille?

  She knew nothing was left of all that, now she was trying only to appease Sainte-Bazeille, to earn Sainte-Bazeille’s shallow approval, I was disheartened and overjoyed as her gaze shifted from one side of my shoulder to the other and she fingered the tassels on the fine leather belt wrapped around her ill-defined waist, ashamed and irritated at me for crossing the Place de la Victoire at the same time as she, she couldn’t look at me, and she offered herself up to my judgment and my shock with a gloomy stoicism, with a grim acceptance of the stunned or mocking thoughts that must, she was telling herself, be vying for space in my mind at that moment.

  And as the sun shone on her disarmed face, undefended by her gaze, now occupied elsewhere, I saw the odd orange tint of her makeup, the pale pink of a lip gloss applied with a clumsiness I thought laden with rage, as if the Cheffe had done all she could to display absolutely no skill in a domain she had no patience for.

  Why overjoyed?

  Oh, I can explain, I was fighting back the urge, the burning desire to kneel before the Cheffe and throw my arms around her black-lace-clad legs, yes, that’s just what I ached to do, right there on the Place de la Victoire with the cars rushing by, fall at the Cheffe’s feet and embrace her, thank her for letting me see her like this, I was shocked and absurdly grateful, because the Cheffe hadn’t wanted me to see her and because she thought it a stroke of bad luck that I had run into her that afternoon on her way to the church, her niece wanted a church wedding, the Cheffe couldn’t understand that affectation of religion, and maybe she secretly disapproved of it, her parents always acted as if they had no idea there were such things as religions even as everything they did demonstrated the most rigorous sort of morality, but the niece was getting married in the church and to the church the Cheffe was obediently going, just as she obeyed the tacit injunction to show up “nicely dressed” according to the code that governed her siblings, she obeyed that order to show that she loved and respected them even in what was least respectable about them, she submitted to them and them alone, out of impotence, o
ut of nostalgia.

  They were Sainte-Bazeille, she thought, but where in them was Sainte-Bazeille’s innocence?

  That satin dress, its hard, sharp sheen, the way that dress displayed the charms of a conventional femininity, crying out in a shrill fuchsia voice: “Get a load of what’s under here!”

  And what was under there was the Cheffe’s neat, solid body, her competent, powerful, well-maintained little body, which a man could imagine himself desiring and passionately loving, as I sometimes did in my Mériadeck studio, if the Cheffe meant more to him than anything in the world.

  Because that proud, skilled body had no reason to be exhibited in a crassly shimmering dress, it was beautiful and dignified in its vitality, its endurance, its animal perfection, and that tight satin showed none of those things, no, the clinging satin cruelly, stupidly showed that her body wasn’t pretty enough for it, that her stocky, hardworking body couldn’t live up to it, to that horrible glistening satin, flattering only to young, willowy figures unused to labor.

  I knew the Cheffe’s sisters and sisters-in-law would be wrapped in a similar satin or a fierce jersey, my own mother dressed like that on special occasions, her flesh was as dense and muscular as the Cheffe’s, and any light, flowing, shimmering fabric mocked her, any frivolous fabric, they mocked the hardworking musculature bulging mannishly under the silly glimmer, it mortified me and filled me with venomous pity to see my mother dressed up in those incongruous, heartrending clothes.

  So, you understand, where was the special splendor of Sainte-Bazeille in all that?

  The Cheffe’s parents were long dead the day I ran into her on the Place de la Victoire.

  Their children had carried on none of their parents’ untamed grandeur, which, I told myself, would have shielded the Cheffe’s mother from the merest idea of appearing at a wedding in a short pink satin dress, I told myself she would have gone in a dress tailored in her image by the seamstress of Sainte-Bazeille, perfect and unshowy, gravely majestic.

  Evidently the Cheffe’s brothers and sisters had inherited none of that spirit.

  It made me angry at her parents, they hadn’t managed to make themselves imitable, edifying.

  I often wondered why it was that the Cheffe alone seemed to be aware of her parents’ admirable oddity, a tearful and guilty awareness, because she was convinced that cooking had dragged her into compromises and calculations her parents never resorted to (perfectly happy in their poverty, remember), and because unlike her none of her five brothers and sisters had ever shown any desire more consuming than the desperate, sad, unproductive desire to escape Sainte-Bazeille forever, to escape Sainte-Bazeille’s tranquil, serene destitution.

  How could it be that those parents the Cheffe so adored appeared to the other children in the form of repellent, disturbing, pathetic examples to be avoided?

  And that they couldn’t prevent the church and the fuchsia dresses, any more than the suicide of their two youngest children?

  And I was angry at the Cheffe’s parents for, I assumed, dying before they could grasp their failure to transmit the clarity of Sainte-Bazeille, for, I believed, dying in the false certainty that they’d raised their children well, whereas the Cheffe’s body shockingly encased in satin and the others’ relentless insistence on living and behaving like the harshest critics of their parents’ ways offered sad proof, I thought, that they’d made enemies of their children, even if some trace of love lingered on in them, some fondness, an imperishable attachment, in the same distraught, hopeless form that those emotions took in the Cheffe’s relationship with her daughter.

  Because the Cheffe’s brothers and sisters must have both fondly remembered their parents and hated everything those parents were in their humble Sainte-Bazeille isolation, I told myself as I watched the Cheffe walk away on her unsteady heels, that afternoon when we met by chance and I saw myself, as clearly as if I’d actually done it, kneeling before the Cheffe, pressing my face to her thighs, telling her both that I was irrevocably in love with her and that I was happy to see her so vulnerable and so flustered in her satin disguise, almost as happy and moved as if I were taking in my arms her naked, trusting, hungry body, as I imagined doing every night in my Mériadeck studio (meaning that I wasn’t thinking about the restaurant or potential improvements to such and such a dish, I was thinking only about the Cheffe, who by some miracle loved me and desired me and would come join me in that studio, to which in reality she never came and never would have thought of coming, that’s why I couldn’t be a great cook, I was perpetually bedeviled by love, desire, and illusions).

  The Cheffe said a few words that I’ve forgotten and hurried off across the square, awkward in those pumps and that dress, hobbled, no doubt humiliated by my stare, and without quite meaning to she glanced back over her shoulder to see if I was still watching.

  And since I hadn’t fallen at her feet, since I hadn’t clasped her legs, I tried to fill my gaze with all the tenderness I felt for her, all the understanding and gratitude, which I desperately wanted her to see and be sure of before the flood of traffic separated us and before, in the kitchen that evening, discretion forbade us to speak of that moment when I’d seen her so unlike herself, so helpless and so docile.

  Her glance was troubled, possibly startled.

  Had she ever seen my love for her before that?

  No, it would never have entered her mind, it couldn’t have interested her, I meant far too little in her eyes.

  She liked me, yes, and she was happy with my work, but I was only a very diffident young employee whose private life and burdensome emotions had never attracted her attention, and that’s what shook her just then, realizing that I adored her just when she was feeling diminished and preposterous in her satin and lace, that was what shook her, even if I was no one who mattered, no one she would have been glad to be admired by, I was also too young, unremarkable in every way.

  But now she’d have to look at me with that knowledge in her eyes, I told myself as I watched her wavering back disappear into the crowd on the Place de la Victoire.

  My one hope, fervent and fearful, was that her astonished discovery of my love wouldn’t change the way she treated me in the kitchen, which shows very clearly how little I knew her at the time, since I later thought it self-evident that no such revelation could affect the Cheffe’s ways in the kitchen, her behavior was always attuned to the demands of the work, and she would never have let any emotion come between the exacting attention demanded by the work and the work itself, she would never have let any awkwardness, any pleasure or displeasure, alter the impeccable professional relationship we’d built up, not even if no one could see it, not even if it did no harm to the work. Only her daughter, as you may already know, had the power to undermine her career, I’ll tell you about that soon.

  We also love Lloret de Mar’s short winters, even if we pretend to long for the summer, the sunbaked terraces, the gold-tinged sunlit pool, and our constant high-spirited inebriation, we’re more sober in the winter at Lloret de Mar, we go for drives in the unremarkable house-strewn countryside, we take Spanish lessons, we reconvene the book club we’d abandoned in the sunny season. It’s just us French folk, and we’re spared the tiresome task of meeting strangers in a language we haven’t quite mastered, not that that bothers us, nothing bothers us, and we don’t bother anyone, we go for drives on the roads lined with ugly houses, we sing in Michèle’s or Christine’s or Martin’s car, forgotten by time, time that ravages everyone else’s faces and bodies, the gray rainy winter is so short in Lloret de Mar.

  You’re wondering how her parents died?

  I hadn’t yet met the Cheffe, I only heard about it.

  At the restaurant, from coworkers, discreetly.

  I don’t like telling that story, it makes it seem there’s some necessary connection between the Cheffe and those terrible deaths when in fact it was nothing but
chance, that’s how vicious rumors are born, the Cheffe must have been tortured enough by that horrible accident without people piling on, rooting around in a wound I imagine must still be raw today, wherever the Cheffe may be.

  Her parents died together in a car the father was driving, a car the Cheffe had bought them the week before.

  Inexplicably, the father ran a stop sign. A car on the main road hit them from the side at full speed.

  The father got a driver’s license during his military service, but he’d never owned a car before that brand-new Fiat the Cheffe gave them, she’d tried to give them so many things, most particularly a house so they wouldn’t have to live in that Sainte-Bazeille shack, but the parents turned it all down, the house, the furniture, the appliances, they turned it all down with, I imagine, the same affable, courtly, steady, uninterested look that once came over their faces when a teacher asked to meet with them, and like that long-ago teacher the Cheffe understood she couldn’t fight that very gentle, unspoken, limpid refusal, couldn’t insult that incorruptible resistance with cheap trickery: she would never have dreamt of backing them into a corner with a gift brought or delivered in the guise of an impulse buy.

  I know their hardheadedness tortured the Cheffe, even if that almost irrational side of them was one reason why she adored them.

  But she found that side of them frightening and unjust when it made no distinction between her—their daughter, with her immense, respectful love—and everyone else who’d ever tried to bend them to their will.

  Because she didn’t want anything from them, she only wanted them to accept the idea of a comfortable old age, an undramatic poverty, and maybe she also wanted, but very modestly and fleetingly, to feel loved back, and that would have been a way for them to show their love, she thought, skipping, just once, the sovereign dismissiveness that was their quiet, inevitable answer to adversity—and wasn’t she their friend, very likely their best and truest friend?