The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  There was no charm left in her as she silently, gracelessly went through the motions required for her daughter’s care, seeming to have forgotten the Clapeaus were there but in fact terribly aware of their dismay and their helplessness, she’d once been inside them, she still was, their blood flowed through her heart more naturally than her own blood had flowed to the heart of her child.

  The Clapeaus told her they’d hired a cook, wanting to give the Cheffe some time to tend to her baby and then find someone to watch her during the day, assuming she was willing to come back to them. They scarcely spoke of the new woman, telling her with a gesture that there was no comparing her to the Cheffe, and, not wanting to pressure her, maybe uncomfortable to be urging her to entrust her child to another, they kept their despair to themselves.

  But the Cheffe knew perfectly well how they missed her, she could see it in a strange restlessness that made their legs twitch as they sat, or put a damp gleam in their eyes, as if they were exhausted and feverish at the same time, and they waited for her answer, hoping they wouldn’t seem to be, they waited for her to tell them she’d be back, to tell them a date, that glum, torpid girl they felt as if they’d never had in their house, whom they clung to all the same, not knowing what else to do, not yet ready to face the possibility that they might have lost their Cheffe.

  She didn’t answer. She put the child back in her cradle and sat down, inert, unreachable.

  With a brief grimace of anguish, the Cheffe told me she was certain they’d seen the one justification for her authority and sovereignty in the kitchen undulating away from her, and she thought it pointless and cruel of them to act as if they hadn’t, to pretend the situation was less desperate than they all knew it was, she was exhausted and she only wanted for them to go away, let her sleep, she was empty and insignificant and never again, she was sure, would she dare show herself to the Clapeaus.

  At long last they left, as downcast as she was, trying to convince each other she’d been thrown off by the child’s coming and would soon get a grip on herself, but clearly sensing, since in their way they knew the Cheffe intimately, that something vital had turned its back on her, something that wasn’t directly connected to the child, something that once let the Cheffe be the perfect intermediary between the Clapeaus and magnificence, that let them stop hating what they were.

  The Cheffe’s cooking, the joyous gift she’d made of her entire soul, had cured them of their tortured hypocrisy, they’d become better people, and every day they’d striven to prove worthy of her, every day they’d tried to do no wrong and to think fine thoughts, and their nagging shame had abandoned them.

  Now it was with a sort of grim resolve that they ate the unexceptional food cooked by the replacement, they ate a great deal, with an ordinary pleasure that diminished them in their own minds, they could see themselves slipping, limp and horrified, without the Cheffe there they lacked the strength to stay on the plane of spirituality she’d unassumingly led them to, a plane of joyful, accepted mystery.

  She pitied the Clapeaus, the Cheffe confessed to me.

  Because the thing that had turned away from her, leaving her so sad, so tired, so drained of any desire to live, had also sent the Clapeaus back to a place where they no longer wanted to live, back to the pragmatic, demoralizing universe of their old, untransfigured obsession.

  I’m trying to tell you of that time as precisely as I can, but the Cheffe’s account was heavy with equivocations and an obvious hope that I wouldn’t draw certain conclusions she would have found troublesome, again and again she told me how she loved the baby from the moment of her birth, what joy she found in looking after her, etc., which I don’t dispute, how could I, but which I must nonetheless hold up against the lethargic despair she slumped into after the Clapeaus’ visit, a despair whose every symptom the Cheffe couldn’t stop herself from describing, she didn’t really want to and she did all the same, with a pained astonishment and an emotion that thirty years after the fact seemed to expect from my friendship an unguarded expression of sympathy, as if my friendship owed that to the very young woman who felt so alone, so adrift in her Marmande apartment, even though she was never really alone and had to endure that punishment as well, the punishment of never being visited by the one principle she cared about but only by people she had nothing to say to.

  I didn’t refuse the Cheffe my understanding, I used it to implicitly tell her, with a squeeze of my fingers on her wrist, with a prolonged gaze, that it wasn’t my friendship she could ask anything of, it was my love, and the Cheffe must have seen that, and I was sure a patient, persistent love would eventually overcome any trivial reason for rejecting it, the age difference, a lack of time and desire, in any case she knew my love demanded no sacrifice, and especially not the sacrifice of a diminished devotion to cooking.

  There I think I can say I succeeded in a way, the Cheffe welcomed my love, accepted it, and returned it when she could transform it into something bigger than the two of us, when in short she felt that the spirit of love had invaded her.

  I’m the only one in our little Lloret de Mar crowd who hasn’t had relatives visit from France. My friends regularly receive their children, their grandchildren, a brother or sister, and then the parties on the terraces aren’t so relaxed, so casual, so spontaneous, and in a strange reversal it’s as if wild youth were playing host to sober maturity and didn’t dare show itself in all its unbridled license, and afterward we laugh about that, their children would be shocked to see us as we are in Lloret de Mar. I told my friends that my daughter was coming to see me. They clapped and whooped, which is how we express our elation in Lloret de Mar. I feel anxious, I don’t want her to come but I can’t keep her away; on what grounds? But I really don’t want her to see Lloret de Mar.

  She told me she went out ever more rarely to walk in the streets of Marmande with the child, and then gave it up entirely, in the end she developed an absurd but unconquerable horror at the thought of leaving her apartment, even though she was sure it didn’t like her, didn’t wish her well, was in fact plotting with the world around it to make her feel even sadder and more out of place.

  When I asked her who, in that case, did the shopping, she tersely answered that the child’s father brought them more or less everything they needed, though I didn’t know if that meant he was living with her or came to visit and then went away.

  She spent her days in a chair by the crib, only getting up to feed and change the baby, and although she assured me she was still lucid enough to look after her daughter, I thought she clearly didn’t have it in her to play with and smile at the girl, to press her to herself for reasons other than logistical, in a word to love her in a way that the child could actually feel, because the modicum of energy required for tenderness had wholly abandoned her.

  I know what you’re thinking: the secret uninterest the Cheffe had walled herself up in must have affected the child’s personality, so we should see the animosity she would later inflict on her mother, her tireless, whining insistence on sabotaging her, as simply a consequence of what she’d endured in her first months of life, when her mother sitting beside her wasn’t really there at all, when her mother’s hands touched her skin but didn’t seem to remember that skin, when her mother’s eyes turned away, impersonal and distant, from the face anxiously looking up at her, or stared back without seeing her, with no emotion but a vague, cold perplexity, until the child began to wail and, mechanically recalling that sounds coming from the object before her meant her mother had to do something or other, she gave her a bottle, or maybe her breast, she didn’t tell me, or changed the diaper she’d just changed, that didn’t need changing, she’d lost all ability to see what had to be done, but she did something, clinging, unmoored though she was, to a very tenuous, mechanical sense of her responsibilities.

  I know that’s what you’re thinking, and the Cheffe herself wasn’t immune to that simplistic id
ea of personality as a mere matter of causes and effects, for as long as she lived she accused herself of shirking motherly love for a few weeks or months, I’m not quite sure, and if you ask me her mistake was that she never hid her guilty ideas from her daughter, never hid the awful thought that she’d failed her terribly, even if she never told her just how, I don’t believe she ever breathed a word of that to anyone but me.

  But she filled her daughter’s head with the thought that she hadn’t always been an ideal mother when she was very young, and although after that everything she did fervently, selflessly sought to make up for that failure, more out of love than in hopes of washing away her misdeed (she could live, however unhappily, with her misdeed, but she couldn’t live without proving her love to her daughter), although she did infinitely more for her than many parents whose children would never dream of reproaching them for anything, her daughter clung to that semi-confession for all she was worth, she saw it as a rationale for her self-centeredness and lack of enterprise, and with a sour contentment she nestled into the stinking folds of self-pity, no doubt she would have shown more drive if the Cheffe had simply loved her and forgotten to feel guilty, and there she was wrong, alas, she was gravely wrong.

  So yes, that thing she couldn’t possibly remember, that dark time in both their lives, must have had some effect on the daughter, but why a bigger or more decisive effect than the care the Cheffe devoted to her for most of her existence?

  “You shouldn’t think that way,” I told her. “Whatever trifling damage you might have quite involuntarily done to that child when you yourself were barely an adult, you should set it aside and remember all the good you tried to do for her, more than you had to, and what came of it, your own exceptional self erased simply to prop up that insignificant woman.”

  I was angry then, things were going downhill at the restaurant, I came to work angry and left the same way, that’s what I told the Cheffe as she continually accused herself of hampering her daughter’s development thirty years earlier, not wanting to understand that her mind had more urgent things to be troubled about.

  My friends press me to tell them exactly when my daughter will be coming to Lloret de Mar, and although I always do my best not to seem like a weirdo I find I can’t answer, I force a quick smile, I’m sure my daughter is very nice and I’m not proud of myself. But the prospect of her disturbing my precious, secret tranquility in Lloret de Mar, even a little, almost makes me nonsensically want to flee Lloret de Mar, to wash my hands of it all.

  The Cheffe pulled through those hard days in Marmande all on her own.

  Late one springtime afternoon she opened the window to hang baby clothes on the line, in the emotional numbness she now vaguely thought of as normal, even more or less pleasant, and the light, breeze-swept air brought the smell of baking meatloaf to her nostrils, the Cheffe recognized it, greedily breathed it in.

  A violent sensation clutched her stomach, not hunger but a sudden longing, forgotten and now suddenly rediscovered in that enticing scent, to make the most aromatic and most tender of all terrines with her own hands, or more precisely to once again be the young woman whose memory now came flooding back, the young woman she could see in the Clapeaus’ kitchen, bent over a bowlful of pork, veal, onions, and a generous dash of fines herbes, and the motions of that young woman who was once her filled her with an odd jealousy, she yearned to slip into that body and go back to those motions, recover the thoughts animating those skilled hands, those industrious, precise hands that had forgotten nothing, she wanted to retake possession of what was once hers, what she’d earned, deserved, the immense, quiet pleasure of those motions, the intelligence of those careful hands, that delightful, enviable image of herself as a young woman who needed no one but herself, a worker forging her own joy, her own tranquil pride.

  And she felt an anger at the body she was living in, heavy and shapeless, its hands blinkered, she was violently sorry that she’d permitted the dulling and disappearance of the faithful instrument she now so clearly saw again, and she cruelly missed the company of her passion, her own little soul, liberated, lightened, alert, and the deep, sweet solitude she could find even when she wasn’t alone in the kitchen, now forbidden her whether the child was there or not, imprisoned in a stupor that barred her from looking into herself, she felt sadness as well.

  Again she inhaled the scent of meatloaf, with a starved woman’s longing. She closed the window, collapsed onto a chair, and began to weep, frightening the baby with her sobs.

  “Oh, you wept,” I stupidly repeated when the Cheffe paused, the words just slipped out, I’d never seen the Cheffe weep, not even in the bleakest depths of her difficulties.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, with the quiet, suddenly distant impatience I always heard in her voice when I said something stupid, and she looked at me with a dubious stare, as if she were wondering how far she could trust such a half-wit, and although that stare made me deeply ashamed I didn’t hate it when she looked at me like that, I felt a gruff intimacy between us, and it didn’t displease me.

  The day after she wept, the Cheffe felt herself coming back to life—back, that is, to herself.

  That resurrection took the form of a restlessness so powerful that the Cheffe feared she might be consumed by exhausting, sterile rapture and wondered if she’d ever regain the dense serenity that in the Clapeaus’ kitchen enveloped and eased the fever that came with her work.

  For the first time in ages she went out for a walk with the child, and she was astonished by springtime, she felt her bare forearms faintly shivering, she felt their pale down standing on end, she was astonished by springtime, she had tears in her eyes and her body was awakening, determined to be hers again, her hands quivered with repressed vitality on the handle of the baby carriage.

  Over the next few days she packed up their things, hers and the baby’s, gave the little apartment a thorough cleaning, then demanded to be driven to Sainte-Bazeille by the child’s father, possibly her husband, that man I haven’t been able to form a clear image of, except—because this is how the Cheffe chose to portray him, the few times she spoke of him—that of a sometime companion, who came back into her life only to do her various favors, evidently with no sign of gratitude from the Cheffe, which only confirms my idea that she didn’t love him, felt little respect for him, and quietly blamed him for a situation she never wanted.

  She left the child with her parents. Yes, yes, she left her in Sainte-Bazeille, firmly intending to take her back as soon as she could.

  Then she got on the train for Bordeaux, where she’d never been in her life.

  When I asked why she didn’t simply go back to the Clapeaus’ she said nothing for some time, not because she didn’t know how to answer but because she was trying to find the words, I could see her attention turn away from my face and descend into herself, cautiously, as if it was afraid it might startle the truth that was hiding there, still loath to be flushed out.

  Finally she looked back toward me, gave me a strange, insistent stare (and as I shivered with fatigue in the just-cleaned kitchen I found myself wishing, absurdly, that I could lose consciousness and so escape the tyranny of her gaze, and so run no risk of disappointing her with a yawn or a shocked look, she who so rarely felt the need for sleep, and never the desire) and told me the sacrifice she’d resigned herself to when she left the child with her parents obliged her to undertake something far more ambitious than a return to the Clapeaus’ kitchen, she told me her only hope of enduring what she saw as a desertion, however temporary, and the thought of the child’s unhappiness, even if that too was short-lived, was to risk her own security, her own comfort, because it would have been unthinkable that the only price she had to pay for abandoning her child was running to the shelter of the Clapeaus’.

  “Don’t exaggerate, you weren’t abandoning her,” I stopped myself from saying, crossly, and as if she’d read my min
d the Cheffe added, “The baby and I had never been apart, you understand.”

  But no, I didn’t want to understand.

  I was deeply put out to hear the Cheffe explain the decision to go to Bordeaux not by her entirely legitimate ambition but by some amorphous need to suffer, to have it as bad as the child would supposedly have it in Sainte-Bazeille, where I’m sure she very soon felt perfectly at home, I didn’t like seeing the Cheffe flatter herself like that, or disparage herself, I wasn’t sure which, in any case I didn’t like seeing that stubborn, unyielding will to become a real cook, an artist of the kitchen, whose aspirations demanded a clientele less limited than the Clapeaus, reduced by her own words to a dim, banal feeling of guilt over her child, I didn’t like it that thirty years later she still couldn’t admit she wouldn’t have let anything or anyone keep her from the city, from exploring and learning her talents, once the breath of cooking consented to visit her again.

  Yes, the Cheffe was always like that, she didn’t exactly minimize the scale of her intentions or the steadiness of her resolve but she kept them quiet, maybe she didn’t know how to make it clear she wasn’t looking for money or fame.

  She was trying to answer, as meritoriously and melodiously as she could, a call that honored her, a call that had to be heard and respected, she was trying to bring about the fruition of the thing put inside her like a seed, which was a gift of good fortune, and an enviable fate.

  Yes, I’m trying to say it for her.

  That’s why she claimed she went up to Bordeaux only so she could bear the thought of her need to get away from the child, but I didn’t understand that when she told me, and it irritated me.

  That child took up too much room in the reasons she gave me, just as the thirty-year-old daughter was beginning to occupy too many of our thoughts in those days when the Cheffe talked to me in the slumbering kitchen, she still brimming over with her tireless energy and me wobbly with exhaustion but still dreading the moment when I’d find myself outside, heading home to my Mériadeck studio, only in the Cheffe’s company did I ever feel comfortable, interesting, and smart, only there was my existence as good as another’s, as coherent, as complete.