The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  Yes, yes, it’s not nearly enough to say they liked the soup and the chicken.

  But in their stunned enchantment they couldn’t entirely judge and reflect on their dinner, their powers had deserted them, their concentration had dissolved, they’d eaten as they hated to eat, swept along on a pleasure their intoxicated minds couldn’t guide and control, whence the remorse they always felt afterward, sometimes they wished they could be done with food forever.

  The peach tart let them recapture just a little freedom in their cage, which is why the Cheffe quite genuinely didn’t remember her peach tart as a failure, she’d sensed the Clapeaus’ visceral need to move freely again, even if it was in a confined space and under the girl’s superior eye, and she didn’t mind if they found that in the peach tart, that was acceptable, unimportant, it was only a dessert.

  And so she let the Clapeaus treat that almost unsugared peach-and-verbena tart as a bizarre joke.

  They would take a special, overheated delight in telling their circle of friends of their bafflement before that ridiculous tart, making something comical of what they depicted as their dismay, thinking they were hiding the thing that had seized hold of them at that moment, the girl’s power, the thing that had enslaved them.

  But their laughter would ring false, no one would chuckle along, deep down the Clapeaus were only innocent people, fairly good people, bad liars, their laughter would ring false.

  Nothing came through but their incomprehension at what had become of them, their inability to find themselves in what they were, even as they consented to be just that.

  After expressing open surprise at the peach tart’s appearance, they swallowed a few dubious mouthfuls, then, when the Cheffe came back to the table, they forced an indulgent smile and pushed away their plates, so relieved to find themselves no longer dazed and afraid that they suddenly seemed almost euphoric, though timidly so, ready to retreat into their anxious silence should their reaction offend the Cheffe (so deeply did they already fear she wouldn’t want to go on cooking for them), and that moved the Cheffe, she wanted to press them to her bosom.

  “Odd dessert you’ve made,” said Monsieur Clapeau, feeling more confident.

  He laughed to make it clear that wasn’t a rebuke, and laughed again to show the girl nothing remotely like a rebuke would ever cross his lips.

  Whatever she was trying to do with her inedible peach tart, he wouldn’t allow himself to criticize it, and if he gave himself permission to laugh it was on the assumption that this was all a peculiar joke, in any case he would go no further than that in the expression of his bafflement, and even his disappointment, when it turned out there wasn’t going to be any other dessert.

  And so the Cheffe laughed too, she wanted them to know she was fond of them, felt no scorn for them, didn’t side with the dark, secretive pines, sometimes she almost tenderly loved the Clapeaus, in their weakness.

  And so she laughed with them.

  She tasted the peach tart, thought it was perfect, claimed it still needed work.

  She laughed, her mouth full, knowing that outside the pines were disapproving of her, they who weren’t so forgiving.

  Yes, I asked her that, and apart from a few minor changes it’s the very same peach tart, as famous among the Cheffe’s dishes as green-robed leg of lamb or foie gras on a bed of black radishes and red beets, and the Cheffe always especially liked making that tart, and knowing people wanted it, the same tart that, at the house in the Landes, had set off a very welcome burst of levity in the Clapeaus, she was even grateful to that peach tart for granting the Clapeaus the modest freedom they would have needed to fight off their dependence on the girl as the years went by, yes, it’s that same famed peach tart, oh the Clapeaus might have gone completely over the edge, the Cheffe didn’t entirely realize it.

  The peach tart we’d later come to know would be enhanced by thin slices of cold honeydew and a switch to puff pastry, but to the Cheffe it was still the tart from that house in the Landes, the only dessert I ever saw her eat with any appetite, though apart from that the Cheffe was never one for nostalgia.

  With that tart she could privately, secretly send the Clapeaus a fond greeting over the barrier of death that separated them, she could give them a wave, whereas she never lifted her hand toward her parents, never gently shook it back and forth before her parents’ two little joined souls, it was too painful, that’s right.

  The Cheffe spent those two summer months at the house in the Landes cooking as well as she possibly could, striving, she thought, to cement her standing with the Clapeaus, though there was really no need, and the Clapeaus spent them driving the girl to every shopkeeper and farm in the area, then waiting in that house whose heart beat in the kitchen alone, that silent, useless, forgotten house, waiting for the girl to call them to dinner.

  And while in previous summers the Clapeaus had always found vague pastimes to occupy them and insisted on their children coming to visit for a few weeks, their new devotion to the girl seemed to have traced a circle of fire around the house, they only crossed the threshold to climb into the car with the girl, and in fact when their children told them they were coming a strange panic gripped the Clapeaus, an insurmountable weariness, they continually postponed any visit on the pretext of imaginary water damage in the bedrooms, they wanted passionately to be alone and to throw themselves passionately into the task of knowing and understanding the cuisine the girl was inventing for them, so unlike anything they were used to.

  Whenever we talked about it, the Cheffe confessed that all three of them were caught up—a little less so in her case, since her work kept her grounded—in an ecstatic whirlwind that without their even noticing hoisted them out of themselves and never set them down again, exhausting them without their even feeling it, and the awareness of the incredible responsibilities of her work, like the Clapeaus’ awareness of the reverence they owed her, would, the Cheffe admitted, eventually have destroyed them if that stay in the Landes had gone on any longer, if they’d remained in that violent, fanatical solitude à trois, their hearts devoured by the house’s heart, which beat in the kitchen alone.

  Though swept along at a more moderate level of the turbulence, the Cheffe realized as she lay in her bed at night that her efforts to each day serve the Clapeaus dishes that outdid the day before’s in inspiration and taste were enough to temporarily rob her of her sanity, was she sane even now, now that her dreams were invaded by visions of foods and cookware, now that she could be wrenched from her sleep by a trusted voice whispering that the garlic, cream, and egg yolk sauce was boiling?

  But the next morning she got up in a state of tranquil impatience, a quiet joy at the thought of going back to work, the cement tiles were warm and rough under her bare feet and the now familiar pines weren’t unhappy to see her, she spoke in low tones, she was happy, and the pines were happy too.

  It was in the hours that followed, when the Clapeaus got up and she brought them coffee and all the rest from the little kitchen they didn’t dare enter, that she felt the cyclone gradually picking her up again, and she had to resist the intense, unwholesome excitement the feverish Clapeaus were innocently radiating, at times they were just like children she had to look after, she thought, which seemed only right, since they’d given themselves up to her, she was responsible for the Clapeaus as you’re responsible for animals you’re the master of, children placed in your care, she’d be accountable for their misbehaviors and mistakes, their sorrows, their furors, since they were no longer fully in possession of themselves.

  She soon realized how silly she’d been to think she had to cement her standing with the Clapeaus. Wasn’t it the Clapeaus who should be cementing their standing with her, taking every pain not to displease her, weren’t they the ones who felt the greatest need, who lived in a state of permanent, insatiable anticipation?

  Alone with the Cheffe in the freshl
y cleaned kitchen, well after midnight, my head spinning with happy exhaustion, I liked to ask her to tell me the dishes she made in that house in the Landes, and I took their names and descriptions back with me to my Mériadeck studio, where they offered me friendly consolation in the always downhearted minutes after I turned out the light.

  Which the Cheffe clearly knew, because she ran through the list in a softer, lower, almost singsong voice, as if she wanted me to hold in my memory not just the names but the soothing power of her voice, so I’d hear her there at my bedside, lulling me to sleep, she was so good to me that I was often tempted to think it was love, the love between a man and a woman, not a mother’s love for her young son, and then I stopped thinking it or wondering about it and simply hoped for it, waiting, with patience and loyalty in my heart, for the day when she would send me an unmistakable sign, it never came, or maybe it did but only when my loyalty had faltered, for which I still can’t forgive myself, and it couldn’t get through to me.

  But when the Cheffe saw my curious, harmless gaze in that idle kitchen she gladly granted my wish, and in a different order each time she told me she’d made the Clapeaus roast duck with blueberry jus, fresh salmon ravioli, confit of rabbit, fricassee of fennel and carrots with lavender honey, eggplant-and-pistachio-stuffed sea bream, cauliflower fritters in sauce piquante, pigeon with apples and red cabbage, mackerel with garlic, escalope of foie gras on white-fig compote, beef-jowl-stuffed mushrooms, lamb sweetbreads with sorrel, shrimp sautéed in pepper and ginger, salad of purslane and chicken livers, cream of bitter almonds, goat milk custard, using the dinner leftovers for the following lunch, having agreed with the Clapeaus that she wouldn’t have to come up with two meals a day.

  That arrangement was meant to let Cheffe catch her breath, said the Clapeaus, but the fact is she never did, she confessed to me with a little laugh, she worked so hard to transform those leftovers into surprising new dishes, to make them seem they’d just been made as what they’d become, like mackerel transformed into a terrine with fines herbes, pigeon reappearing in a feuilleté, rabbit recast as an aspic with peas, and those morning labors gave her no rest, no, in fact they demanded even greater feats of creativity, the Cheffe told me, still in awe of that sixteen-year-old girl’s tireless inventiveness decades after, in the kitchen now at rest for the night, the two of us in quiet conversation, her mind like mine half in the little kitchen in the Landes I would later come to know, that kitchen I would later enter otherwise than in my thoughts, I never told her about that.

  My Lloret de Mar friends spend a good part of their boundless free time cooking complicated dishes, and since I made sure to tell no one how I once earned my living they take me for one of those men who couldn’t cook a meal to save his life, who’s happy eating anything set before him, I think I hinted I was a book dealer, I don’t quite remember. They watch me taste their elaborate concoctions with patronizing interest, confident that my palate isn’t subtle enough to appreciate their dishes as they think they deserve, so I limit myself to a few happy “mmm”s, I never comment, I’d find it too painful to talk about cooking in Lloret de Mar, my friends don’t know me.

  Because, that day when I drove to Sainte-Bazeille in search of the house where the Cheffe had once lived, I went on through the summer afternoon to the Landes, and I parked by the side of the road, at the start of a long sandy lane that led toward the house between the flaking trunks of towering pine trees, the same pines, I told myself, moved, that saw the Cheffe’s birth into the world of cooking, those fearsome pines.

  I walked to the house, and then, forbidding myself to think so I wouldn’t rob myself of the boldness I needed, I turned the knob, the door opened, and I went in, not knowing if the (most likely) vacationers who lived there were home, I made for the little kitchen, my footsteps as sure as if I’d been there before, which in a way I had, I knew that house so well I’d made drawings of it in my notebook of recipes, and now that I was finally seeing my model, nothing came as a surprise.

  Sand covered the kitchen’s tile floor, the old table was grimy and dust coated. The huge pine outside the window let through only an ashen light, and then the pine spoke to me and I realized, looking around in panic at the shelfless walls, at a broken lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, that no one had cooked here for a very long time, the house was dead, as the pine told me in a whisper with nothing kindly about it, suggesting in the same breath that I vacate the premises at once.

  I ran out the door, raced down the lane, now all the pines were whispering, but I forced myself not to try to understand what they were saying because they didn’t wish me well, that I knew, which I explained by my sudden certainty that I’d committed a betrayal, as in truth I’d already felt the day before as I planned that covert excursion, I’d pushed that feeling aside and now it came back as I ran toward my car, I could have wept with shame.

  The Cheffe would have been horrified to learn I was out prowling around the scenes of her life, I knew it all along, that’s why I hadn’t told her, but the pines were right to accuse me, how can you claim to love someone and then betray them with your intrusiveness, wasn’t I a man she thought she could trust?

  Back in the safety of my car, I thought the pines had gone easy on me, I could have found the door incorruptibly locked when I tried to leave, with wrathful pines blocking off every window: “All right then, so cook!”

  And then the fun would be over, and that would be the end of my little detective act, I told myself as I turned back onto the road, still shaking with a fear so powerful it made me even more sorry and ashamed, but still I sensed, as the pines retreated and then disappeared in my rearview mirror, that when my tranquility came back it would quickly revive my consuming, exhausting desire to know every detail and every setting of the Cheffe’s life, to know more about her, and to know it better, than she did herself, I studied my feelings to be sure of the perfect integrity of that desire that took up so much of my thought, I wanted to appear before the Cheffe with all my decency intact, unavoidable little secrets notwithstanding, it was hard, it was torture—before the Cheffe with all the trueness of my being intact, yes.

  The return to Marmande, in September, put an end to that imprisonment in the little Landes house and in culinary obsession, and the Cheffe was glad it was over, not because she was tired, she paid no attention to weariness, but because she’d been starting to sense, with repulsion, something she always tried to avoid: the threat of a sensual atmosphere taking shape around a rich, succulent cuisine, it hung over the Clapeaus without their knowing it or being responsible for it, just as a cloud of desires hangs over the head of a child or a young animal, ambiguous desires, inescapable, uncomfortable, though irreproachable and profoundly innocent.

  The Cheffe felt like the oxygen in that little house was slowly being driven out by the erotic emanations her work aroused and sustained in spite of her, which excited and demoralized her, she couldn’t wait to be free of it, the Clapeaus’ minds were clouded, they weren’t themselves, she couldn’t wait to be free of their weakness.

  The Clapeaus’ handful of social obligations in Marmande woke them from their spell but didn’t make them forget how much they owed the girl, or how indispensable her presence had become to them.

  And although it tested them terribly, they suggested she go off for a few days’ rest at her parents’ house, in preparation for which the Cheffe made the Clapeaus several full meals to reheat, and they encouraged her to triple the recipes so she could take some of each dish to Sainte-Bazeille, where Monsieur Clapeau drove her with the saucepans and casseroles carefully sealed away in the trunk, the Clapeaus were as proud of her as if she were their own daughter, they wanted others to marvel at her talents, the parents in Sainte-Bazeille most of all.

  The Cheffe brought beef roulades with leeks and spinach, duck-and-almond terrine, chicken bouillon with dumplings, half guinea fowl and half cheese, along with three dozen smoke
d mackerel fritters for her young brothers and sisters—“quite a feast,” as I called it, a stupid thing to say, unintentionally condescending, and the Cheffe gave me her oblique little smile, hesitated, then finally told me she didn’t find the success she was hoping for in Sainte-Bazeille, that although they didn’t say so her parents would have rather she come empty-handed, not loaded down with dishes they must have found excessively refined, and in some obscure way disturbing.

  In honor of her visit, they themselves had cooked the kind of simple foods she once loved and still did, vegetable soup, couscous with raisins, jugged rabbit with lardoons in blood sauce, they were disconcerted by the elegant eccentricity now coming into their house, the effort expended on those dishes seemed wasted, extravagant, their daughter’s work deeply pointless.

  They said nothing unkind, but their muted reactions, or else their excessive enthusiasm over minor details, like the Marmande pots’ polished enamel, clearly expressed their uncomfortable disapproval, I don’t know if they disapproved exactly, that wasn’t like them, but they couldn’t approve of or understand such empty feats, and that bothered them.

  And the Cheffe, who a few months before, on the road to Marmande, had felt she was dishonoring her parents’ hearts simply by the sophistication of her thoughts, never imagined she might feel subtly tainted when she came home to show them the best part of her, that was how she saw it, the most sincere, the most fertile, the most generous.

  It was a terrible shock. What a strange, what a deformed reflection of herself in her parents’ quietly evasive gaze!

  Her brothers and sisters didn’t like the smoked mackerel fritters, all her dishes were duly tasted and then ignored in an atmosphere of pained bewilderment, and two days later they went back into Monsieur Clapeau’s trunk almost untouched, and the Cheffe was relieved to be leaving, sad, yes, but not defeated, she knew the mistake was to think she’d been corrupted, the mistake wasn’t hers.