The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  I see a sign of the Cheffe’s new maturity in her silent confidence before her mother and father, who in those days and in other contexts could still devastate her with a single surprised or dubious glance, their perplexity at her cooking couldn’t get to her now, and neither could their incomparable innocence seem the only way to lead an honorable life.

  Not thinking any the less of them, she believed she was entirely their equal, and that discovery first stung her eyes, then entered into her, gently illuminating her from inside.

  The Clapeaus told her that while she was away the old cook had reappeared as if nothing had happened, intending to go back to work, and they’d had to let her know where things stood, so astonished to see her again that at first they stumbled over their explanations, but very soon the solidity of their relationship with the Cheffe brought categorical words to their lips, they stopped explaining, they said only that the job was the girl’s now, and for them that sentence had the force of a diktat, they believed they’d be diminishing the girl, making her ordinary, if they tried to justify that new state of affairs, the job was the girl’s now.

  The cook took offense, she didn’t dare insult the Clapeaus, but she called down a furious curse on the girl, which did nothing to shake them.

  But it did trouble the Cheffe, who’d never been cursed before, and she turned ever so slightly harder, she said, as if to protect herself from the imprecation’s potential effects, so every word aimed against her would crash against the thin stony shell that would henceforth shield her courage and her will, something hardheaded and gruff came to life in her, she hunched her dense, opaque, resolute body like a little bull.

  And so began the second phase of her life in Marmande.

  The Clapeaus hired an aged relative of theirs to help out in the kitchen, a woman with a mild mental impairment, but she neatly handled the jobs the Cheffe once did for the former cook—washing, peeling, and slicing vegetables, cutting meat, scaling and cleaning fish, washing and drying the cookware as it was used—and obeyed the Cheffe’s instructions with touching seriousness, immediately enveloping the Cheffe in all her piety, the boundless, burning piety of a lonely, backward woman, and the Cheffe learned to give orders and to speak very clearly, because the woman had to work to understand, the Cheffe took that in and never forgot it: make every order unambiguous, never shout or bully, blame only yourself when instructions are misunderstood, the woman had too simple a mind to show initiative, so ask of people only what’s within their grasp, and the Cheffe learned that lesson in her kitchen in Marmande and never disobeyed it, she could be curt but she was never furious, she never raged.

  One of her great pleasures was going into town to seek out the best products, and she quickly developed a keen eye for the nature and the value of the things she needed, she learned how to ask the butcher for just what she wanted, first by describing the shape, the texture, and the taste, and then by remembering the names, she learned quickly and forgot little, and so she taught herself through her work, her experiments, which sometimes failed, for which the mesmerized Clapeaus never criticized her, when they even noticed it, nor did they voice any weariness or impatience when they found the same dish on the menu several days in a row because the Cheffe wanted to get it right, she reacted to failure or partial success with no visible dismay, but in truth she refused to give up, she was coolly and fanatically determined, even if in some cases it would have been more sensible to set the recalcitrant recipe aside and then either come back to it with a slightly different intention, catching her stymied intelligence off guard, or else, in time, understand that it was an ill-conceived idea from the start, the Cheffe wasn’t good at that game.

  Sometimes, once I thought I could see us as friends, seeing the Cheffe so insistent on perfecting a recipe she’d imagined but wasn’t happy with, I suggested it might be better to give up than labor to subdue such uncooperative ingredients (because I thought their refusal to obey held the answer to the question of a recipe’s soundness), but the Cheffe didn’t take any notice, she listened without a word, determined to go on, to begin again as many times as it took, forever if need be, until she could prove to herself she was right.

  In her one concession to my opinion, she granted that the dishes she’d mastered only through obstinacy and dogmatism and sheer insistence weren’t her best, in fact she still felt a sort of strange rancor toward them and didn’t like making them, but she would have liked even less remembering that she’d failed to overcome their resistance, that’s how the Cheffe was, she never looked for a fight but if there had to be combat she never backed down.

  She served the Clapeaus pig feet gratin three times before she was happy with the sauce her theory told her would be perfect, a reduction of sweet white wine and cream blended with fresh bay leaves, after which that sauce never appeared again, and pig’s feet rarely, except when Monsieur Clapeau, who’d loved that dish, sometimes asked for them.

  The Cheffe preferred to cook from her own ideas but didn’t say no to the Clapeaus’ timidly expressed wishes, she liked pleasing them, she liked them to drift happily off to sleep while in her little room above theirs she thought over her work, sometimes so excited that she got out of bed, went down to the kitchen, and paced through the room visualizing what she’d do the next day, and then, more hazily, what she’d do in all the days to come, and all the years, thinking with almost painful euphoria that a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to create the infinitely varied, enigmatic, fertile cuisine she had in her mind, and there were so many ingredients she didn’t yet know, and her swarming thoughts invented beautiful, abstract images of finished structures that she wanted her cooking to resemble, she felt that but didn’t understand what it meant, it was too soon, she had too little life and experience behind her to pin it all down, she thought about it endlessly but still it was too soon, and she hated being so young, such a novice, she had no reason to fear but she feared it would be too soon forever.

  “I was afraid I might never find the way to make the things I was seeing,” she told me one day.

  And when I asked what they looked like her hands sketched out sibylline forms in space, and she explained, none too clearly, that she was looking for perfect shapes that would amaze even her, as if someone else had created them, someone more talented and better in every way, and all she could say would be, “That’s it exactly,” without being able to specify what the “it” might be, because even the word perfect would seem to shrink the emotion she felt, that’s what the Cheffe was aiming for, so intently that she sometimes found herself breathless with impatience, hope, and fear in that Marmande kitchen, and that’s what the Cheffe was still aiming for much later, still and always, in the kitchen of her restaurant, much later, when with her confident hands she mimed those impenetrable spheres, no longer breathless but with sadness in her eyes, I wanted to touch her, I didn’t, and then I did, only because, no matter what anyone said, no matter what sorrow I felt myself, she’d found what she’d been pursuing all her life, and so I could gently lay my hand on her shoulder without it seeming I was stupidly trying to console her.

  Her pain wasn’t the consolable kind, but the Cheffe was happy to talk to me about what she’d been seeking for so long, even as she was silent or deeply evasive on subjects that involved simple, everyday information.

  For instance, I would never know just how old she was when she left the Clapeaus’ house for a little apartment in Marmande, or if she was married to the man she had her daughter by, or what sort of man he was, although I have an idea, it’s only conjecture, and as you see I don’t jump to conclusions, but my conviction is firm.

  The Cheffe simply shrugged when I asked if she’d found it hard to leave the Clapeaus’.

  “I was getting tired of my little room, you know,” she answered.

  I found the courage to ask if it wasn’t a little complicated all the same, back at the end of the sixties, giving bir
th to a child with no official father, I could see I was annoying her, and before she launched into her tedious, dishonest routine about her joys as a mother, how lucky she was to have such an exceptional person for a daughter, she shot back, “How do you know whether I was married or not?”

  Knowing the Cheffe’s disregard for other people’s opinions, I’ve always thought she wasn’t trying to tell me she was married, wasn’t trying to create an image of respectability she couldn’t possibly have cared about, no, she was trying to hide it, or at least to obscure the unbecoming weakness she’d shown in marrying her child’s father, a man she’d never loved, never admired, the Clapeaus’ gardener, yes, she must have found it so humiliating to think she’d let that trash touch her and penetrate her, had maybe even wanted it and encouraged it, that she couldn’t admit it to anyone, not even someone like me who knew nothing about the man and so had no reason to be disgusted or shocked.

  Those omissions and that unease of hers led me to suspect the gardener, so I wrote to a relative of the Clapeaus, who told me he remembered the gardener marrying the year of the Cheffe’s daughter’s birth, but he couldn’t guarantee that his bride was the Cheffe.

  The daughter always claims she was born of an unknown father, but that means nothing coming from someone with such an appetite for legends, such a need to be thought a child whose mother never stopped hurting her from the moment she was born, it means nothing, and I think I’m more to be trusted with my reasoned speculations and discreet, thoughtful inquiries than that crackpot who supposedly knows her own life better than I do, I’m far more to be trusted than that woman who could easily know just who her father is and claim her mother forced her to grow up without that essential information, because she hates her and envies her even today, more than you can imagine.

  Why am I revealing all this? Why, when the Cheffe wouldn’t tell me about the gardener or her possible marriage, why deliberately go against her wishes, particularly since in this case I can’t hide behind the conviction that it was wrong of the Cheffe to cover that up, since it wasn’t right or wrong, but simply her prerogative? And how, with these revelations that do nothing to improve my own image, could I possibly be improving the Cheffe’s?

  I don’t know.

  I’m telling you all this after I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t, and now it’s said and I can’t erase it, and it didn’t just slip out, it came from my mouth with my full consent and in the presumptuous belief that I’m right to say it, not for my sake but for hers, people might call me pathetic and two-faced but they won’t think any less of the Cheffe just because she might have married the Clapeaus’ gardener and had a child with him, might have held him in her arms without love but with pleasure, no one will think ill of her simply because her young, healthy body hungrily, curiously pressed itself to the body of the first man, perhaps, who took that sort of interest in her, who happened to be there just when her flesh was demanding to be taught by and known to someone else, when her body was begging to be told about itself, to be initiated into its own mysterious abilities, no one will find fault with the Cheffe for going through what we all go through, and in fact I hope it will make her seem more like one of us, more worthy of love, too bad if I come off as a villain.

  I’m not convinced those are fine reasons.

  I doubt myself, a certain torment is always with me, sometimes I’m not sure of anything, nothing but my unforgivable disloyalty to the Cheffe’s memory, and so I argue it out with her all night long, night after night, asking not for her forgiveness but for a sign of her approval.

  I try to remember her exactly as she was in our long nighttime talks, and once I’ve made my case I try to extract the most true-to-life answer from that image of her, not the answer I’d like to hear but the one the Cheffe would most likely have given me, with the small, childlike smile that gave a little bend to her mouth or the morose, dour, cold look that expressed her displeasure, and it’s only because I thought I glimpsed a shy child’s smile twisting my beloved apparition’s lips that I don’t regret bringing up the gardener.

  I also think it’s important to counter the daughter’s lies, the way she proclaims far and wide that she has no idea who her father is, that her mother wouldn’t tell her the first thing about him, so everyone will think the Cheffe was a hurtful, unstable mother, oh that’s so unfair, I can never do enough to combat that woman’s warped ingratitude, and what will she have left when she can’t defame the Cheffe anymore, when she can’t make anyone sympathize with her made-up miseries, what will she have left when she finds herself alone with her putrid soul, who will take pity on her, no one, no one, then she’ll know how terrible the absence of true pity is, and she’ll be sorry she spent all that time seeking sympathy.

  So the Cheffe moved into a little apartment in Marmande and gave birth to her child with what I assume was a mixture of pride, surprise, and discouragement, since her ambition never foresaw the coming of such a demanding little creature, with so many needs you can’t say no to, her ambition never foresaw anyone intruding on its existence, which was in fact growing, expanding with each passing day and every new meal, every deeper understanding, every exercise more expertly mastered, every thought more inventively guided.

  I don’t know if the gardener moved in with her, but I do know she fell into a loneliness all the more cruel in that she was never really alone.

  She had the child with her, she had other mothers around her, relatives or acquaintances from Sainte-Bazeille who sweetly stopped by to say hello and make sure all was well, and although they thought they were doing her a favor they were entangling her in a net of relationships, duties, and discussions, every one of them about motherhood, in which cooking never figured as the aim of a quest, of a thought, of a morality, of a hope, or as something you could simply talk about, endlessly and from every angle, or which, once the word was spoken, you could drape in a silence filled with that precious word’s rich resonances, but only as yet another wearisome duty of days weighed down with chores, which saddened the Cheffe more than anything else.

  How she missed the solitary hours in her little room at the Clapeaus’, the moments of transport and intense, fruitful meditation that let her drift off to sleep in the impatient certainty that the next day she’d go further, learn more, maybe even discover or invent some new way of putting foods together, she often saw herself in that room in her dreams, and the next morning she hesitated before she went back to real life, before she put her feet on the floor of a room never visited by creative fervor, a room that was only what it was, not a vast, living, encouraging vessel for her untrammeled mind, her blossoming intuition.

  She still tried every night to devise new combinations of spices and fish, fruits and meats, harmonious or jarring mixes of colors on a plate, but, knowing she’d have no chance to do anything with them the next day, she began to think the spirit of cooking had grown tired of her, was little by little slipping away from her, that she’d let it down by manifestly preferring the child, depriving that spirit of so many of her thoughts, and now maybe it was going off to find a more deserving heart to lodge and prosper in, manlier, tougher, she felt depleted, unreal, all her grace gone, but she wasn’t sorry she’d had the child, she always insisted, and I don’t know if that was true, I don’t know if she’d convinced herself she had to say that and feel that, that the child meant more to her than anything, there and there alone she showed a sort of cowardice, a fearful or superstitious obedience to the way things are supposed to be, which didn’t stop her from feeling utterly pointless.

  The Clapeaus came to see her, bringing the present of a little black woolen dog that the Cheffe lovingly preserved, she showed it to me one day, it had a red satin ribbon around its neck.

  The Clapeaus admired the baby, very amiably and at great length, and the Cheffe sadly realized they were hoping that if they stayed bent over the cradle mouthing platitudes they could hide their dism
ay at the new feelings the Cheffe was arousing in them, now that she was a young mother, estranged from her kitchen and its thrumming solitude, sitting with arms folded next to her daughter, on the alert for any appeal the child might make, slightly lost, with nothing to say, and the Clapeaus couldn’t have sworn they’d ever had a conversation with the Cheffe before but they were certain that when she was with them her lively, jubilant body radiated such lyrical vitality that they never noticed her silence, only her vast, intense calm, and to be sure the Clapeaus didn’t disavow the thing in them that had humbly bowed down to the Cheffe, that had submitted itself to her force and her grasp of their devotion to good food, but when they looked at this phlegmatic young woman they didn’t recognize their celebrant, the girl they’d granted such power, whose devouring influence had wholly monopolized the kitchen, forbidding them to cross the threshold, and with what ardent modesty they’d acquiesced!

  No, the Clapeaus disavowed nothing.

  But the Cheffe saw their confusion, maybe even their sorrow, she saw how they glanced at her body slumped in a chair, banal, passive, ponderous, and she saw the indomitable spirit slipping free of that useless body, the spirit that for a time had honored her with its presence and love, she was sure the Clapeaus also saw it dancing through the apartment, whose air the infant’s despotic existence seemed to thin and whose every corner it seemed to colonize, and then there was no sign of the spirit’s scintillations, it was gone, and the Cheffe felt such shame that she let out a sudden, sharp sob.

  And since she’d never learned how to talk to the Clapeaus, her distress took the form of a dull, bored, almost rude taciturnity.