by Marie Ndiaye
He stood behind the Cheffe and read the name of the first starter, and was about to go on when she broke in, wanting to hear more about those crab croquettes in hollandaise sauce, and when he didn’t understand she added that she’d like an idea of their appearance, and how many on the plate, and of course what was in them, but on that last point Declaerk knew next to nothing, for which the Cheffe mentally faulted him.
She often told me it was a conscientious restaurateur’s duty to know every ingredient in a dish, it wasn’t enough to taste and to judge, you had to be able to answer the customer’s most unlikely questions with precision, and for that you had to know every bit as much as the cook.
He told her what little he knew, that it was crabmeat with some sort of binding agent, breaded and fried and served with a sauce that was, well, what we call a hollandaise, he couldn’t think what more there was to say, so he went on to croustade Île-de-France, ham charlotte, gratinéed asparagus, shellfish vol-au-vents, quickly and tersely so the Cheffe wouldn’t ask questions, which she was no longer tempted to do, realizing he didn’t have what it would take to fill her with the rich, limpid visions that would fertilize her imagination, and so she simply listened, eyes wide open so he couldn’t suspect she’d rather have them half closed, monkfish-liver terrine, wild boar à la Bordelaise, leg of lamb Cabrières, fillet of veal Riviera, how she loved that language!—it was almost painful, as if Declaerk’s voice were pressing too insistently on a very subtly receptive spot of her brain.
When Declaerk was done, the Cheffe had the feeling he was faintly embarrassed, was vaguely wondering if such a situation, him bent over this mysterious stranger and reading to her over her shoulder, might make him seem ridiculous, he stood up straight, cold and brusque, curtly told her he’d take her on a trial basis, and that sudden severity reassured her, she felt at home with plainness and austerity and didn’t want to feel his unease for one moment longer.
For my part, when she was near, I always worked to rein in my emotions, my tendency to underscore perfectly intelligible sentences with dramatic faces or broad gestures, and above all I tried to be sure, often in vain, that my skin, my scent, the invisible emanations of my being didn’t confront the Cheffe with a moist warm wave of emotions she had no time for, and I was sorry I wasn’t naturally and effortlessly tight-lipped, puritanical, and radiant, yes, I regretted that even as I consoled myself with the thought that what seeped out wasn’t the worst part of me.
In Millard’s kitchen the Cheffe found herself faced with a thing she despised, she discovered that she despised it, because she’d never been exposed to such an environment, neither in Sainte-Bazeille nor at the Clapeaus’, where a certain gentility of tone and manner always reigned.
That thing was the obligation, as she worked with Millard, to endure an unending chatter, inelegant, snickering, and slimy, as much from Millard as from the apprentice, a skinny, giggling, obsequious boy, that in the early days so tortured the Cheffe’s ears that it made her dizzy, her head relentlessly spinning and buzzing.
About the same age as Declaerk, Millard looked at the world around him with a gaze at once indignant and japing, given voice all day long by a directionless string of double-entendre complaints and imprecations, without which, said Millard, he would suffocate, he would go off and hang himself, so it had to come out, whatever he thought about absolutely anything, no matter how moronic, he went on to say proudly, he had to throw it out for the judgment of his fellows, which is to say the apprentice, who served as a chorus with his interminable tittering, and the withdrawn old waiter, and, when he visited the kitchen, Declaerk, who didn’t even pretend to listen and felt no obligation to answer, and the Cheffe, whose pained silence spurred on rather than quelled Millard’s eloquence, so she took to murmuring an occasional “hm,” which didn’t encourage him but didn’t offend him, she was ashamed for them and herself, she kept her head down, focused on her work, blank, dismayed, she was ashamed and didn’t quite see why.
She grew to hate Millard’s vitriolic reflections on the state of the world, on French politics, on the Bordeaux city government, so much that she started to fear them, alarmed at the force of her hatred, realizing she didn’t know much about anything he was talking about and nonetheless sensing that she had to fight off Millard’s influence, that there was something ugly in the way he furiously mocked everyone on all sides, the way he delighted in the ugliness or illness of an elected official, of a customer, the way he howled in malignant joy at the bankruptcy of another restaurant, and Millard seemed to her fearsome and very small, monstrously powerful in her life and tiny outside his kitchen, and that disparity worried her, shook her; wasn’t that a sign of her own weakness, her own insignificance? That she was so disturbed by Millard, that she hated and feared him and so let herself be distracted from the undivided emotions she wanted to feel for cooking?
It became so bad that her ear was almost relieved when it heard him launch into one of his favorite routines: vile remarks aimed at her.
She could tell they were coming from the way he theatrically turned his back to her and sidled toward the apprentice, whereupon, in a voice loud enough for her to hear but pretending to be a whisper, he threw out a preliminary joke about women in general, followed by observations on the presumption of women who had the gall to work in a kitchen, and beneath the boorishness and impertinence the Cheffe glimpsed something serious, upset, sincerely aggrieved, that in a way reassured her, as did the very care Millard took to disguise his genuine distress beneath that clownish insolence.
She understood him then, she stopped fearing him, and she hated him less.
Disturbed by the prospect of women entering his profession, the potential of their alien, abstruse, humorless ways hampering the carefree exchange of manly banter and confidences, he thought he had to say so out aloud, and had also to hide his real anxiety, he wanted to be only obscene and irreverent and unintimidated by anything, and so he joked even more disagreeably, in a mean, bloodthirsty, all-consuming need to make his opinion known to the world without coming off as a man whose cocksureness could be shaken by that very thing, and the Cheffe wasn’t far from recognizing, in that obsession, a tenacity not unlike her own, Millard’s provocations stopped bothering her.
When I asked, not entirely convinced, if she didn’t find it intolerable all the same, hearing him call her “the gash” or address her as “chickie” or “babe,” she answered with an apathetic shrug, saying that to her that was more or less the natural order of things, an acceptable price to pay for her admission to Declaerk’s, where she did, after all, learn the ins and outs of her trade.
I put that detachment down to the Cheffe’s usual refusal to feel sorry for herself, which sometimes led her to sugarcoat the truth of things, or remember them less precisely than I demanded, but I managed to locate the apprentice who worked in Millard’s kitchen back then, I went to see the old man in his retirement home in Toulouse.
We had a cup of coffee in the dining hall and I must admit it moved me to lay my eyes on the long, bony face of that man who’d known the twenty-year-old Cheffe, the Cheffe I’ve never seen a picture of, the Cheffe no one has ever been able to describe for me with the kind of detail that makes a portrait useful and true, not even her sister Ingrid, she couldn’t remember anything of any importance, nothing I hadn’t already imagined.
I began by asking the apprentice what the Cheffe looked like, I wasn’t prepared for what he immediately named as the most memorable thing about that young woman, and although I didn’t doubt his word I put on a skeptical air to give myself time to take it in.
The Cheffe, he told me in his profoundly indifferent old-man voice, had eczema all over the back of her neck, or more precisely red, rough patches he assumed to be eczema, and evidently they itched, because when she occasionally left her post in the course of a day he’d noticed she headed not for the bathroom but out to the courtyard the kit
chen gave onto, where she took off the scarf she always wore and vigorously rubbed or patted her neck, clearly not letting herself scratch so she wouldn’t inflame or bloody the lesions.
When I asked how he could have known what the Cheffe was doing in the courtyard, my feebly dubious tone trying in vain to shake his blasé, vaguely bored certainty (he didn’t care if I believed him or not), he answered that from March onward the door to the courtyard was almost always left open, because the narrow, low-ceilinged kitchen was stiflingly hot, and since the courtyard wasn’t large either it wasn’t hard to see what went on there.
He didn’t think anyone ever had mentioned it in front of the Cheffe, no, but he and Millard sometimes talked about it with sneering disgust, pretending to be afraid she had leprosy, deep down they pitied her a little, because they couldn’t imagine even the ugliest, loneliest man ever wanting to touch that scaly skin, they imagined her rejected, humiliated, they weren’t without feeling, they pitied her a little, even if they didn’t much like her.
Why not?
Oh, he didn’t really know, no particular reason, but it annoyed them having a woman in the kitchen, they sort of held that against her, and besides she had no taste for jokes, she never smiled, and he, the apprentice, didn’t care for standoffish girls when they weren’t beautiful, only the pretty ones had the right to be aloof.
And in what way, I then asked, with an emotion I’d stopped trying to hide, was she not beautiful?
He stiffly spread his bony old arms and sighed, his way of saying he had nothing more to tell me, and in any case he was tired of all this, so I left him a little brusquely, I couldn’t decide if I was shaken by what he’d told me, something I never suspected and came within a hair’s breadth of never knowing, or if it was above all his dull, closed-off uninterest that got to me, just as I’m irritated sometimes—not often, fortunately—to my own surprise and my sharp displeasure, at my Lloret de Mar friends’ complacent incuriosity, even though that’s the very foundation of my pleasure at being with them, I would never have tried to work my way into their little circle if I suspected they’d ask about my old life, and consequently about the Cheffe. Happily, those fits of pique soon subside, calmed by a drink or two, alcohol keeps me quiet and friendly and strengthens my very grateful affection for Antoine, Jean-Pierre, Virginie, my Lloret de Mar friends who don’t care who I am outside Lloret de Mar any more than I’d care about them, like children we don’t even know or bother to remember each other’s last names.
What I concluded from the apprentice’s account was that the Cheffe must have had a case of psoriasis severe enough for the itching to often force her outside, however briefly, but knowing that the Cheffe hated leaving her work, and that furthermore she must have wanted at all costs to give Millard and Declaerk the highest possible opinion of her conscientiousness and devotion, I thought her suffering must have been far worse than they assumed from those occasional retreats to the courtyard, that she could bring herself to walk away only when the burning became too much to bear.
I wasn’t surprised she never spoke of that to me.
But I was surprised—no, more than surprised, deeply disappointed and angry with myself—that beneath the Cheffe’s stories I’d failed to detect a possible secret of a very different sort from the ones I’d imagined, like her physical desire for Declaerk or her probable marital history with the Clapeaus’ gardener, and I kicked myself, with the torment of a thing come too late, for my lack of attention and sensitivity, and I found no consolation in the unlikely hypothesis that no word, no expression on the Cheffe’s face, in the hard white glow of the newly cleaned kitchen’s fluorescent lights, had ever revealed a trace of the illness that must have poisoned her existence, that thought didn’t console me, I didn’t believe it.
No doubt vaguely urged on by a magical hope of curing the Cheffe across the divide of the years, or at least of imaginarily spreading a balm of tenderness over her ravaged skin, I set out to learn all I could about psoriasis, I consulted dermatologists for a full description of its characteristics and origins, a habit now so thoroughly ingrained that I questioned Bertrand or Bernard when I heard him tell a hospital joke while we were picnicking on Santa Cristina beach, even though I never ask anyone anything in Lloret de Mar, he admitted he used to be a doctor, and I couldn’t help pushing him to tell me all he knew about psoriasis, I pay my debt to the Cheffe by convincing myself that today I would know how to care for her, soothe her, I gently touch my lips to her poor inflamed neck. I almost asked Bernard or Bertrand, “Do you think, knowing what I now know, I could have helped the Cheffe if I’d been with her when she was twenty and had that terrible disease?” I almost asked him, “Do you think I could change a past I had no part of, do you think I could make the Cheffe never have been stricken by psoriasis? Suppose in my thoughts I pressed my loving lips to her burning skin: Could that help?”
And I obviously looked into the ailment’s psychological causes, I was tempted to connect it with what the Cheffe told me of the hardships she had faced trying to keep her daughter beside her, or at least what I could worm out of her, the Cheffe clearly having little wish to remember that painful side of a time—her apprenticeship at Declaerk’s—that in other ways exhilarated her, a time she was always happy to hold forth about, on the subject of cooking and cooking alone, she wanted to remember only what went on within the walls of the restaurant, and nothing that happened on the outside.
But hadn’t she brought her complicated outside life into Millard’s kitchen all the same, in the eloquent, humiliating, stinging form of a skin attacked by an illness that disgusted the others?
As soon as the Cheffe saw that her work was acceptable and she’d be staying on at Declaerk’s, she went off to bring her daughter back from Sainte-Bazeille. The child might have been one year old.
The Cheffe didn’t quite know how she was going to manage, she only knew she had to take back her daughter as she’d vowed, but without weakening in her resolve to advance quickly in her work, she was so anxious to make those two obligations fit together that she raced to Sainte-Bazeille to stop herself, I imagine, from wondering if she wouldn’t do better to leave the child where she was, as I said she felt guilty.
She brought the little girl back to the hotel where she was still living, then the next morning took her across the street to a neighbor’s, a woman raising two or three children alone, who’d agreed to watch the Cheffe’s daughter while she was at work.
And the Cheffe worked late into the night, and then she was with the child when she went home, and then she took her to the neighbor’s the next day, and so on for several weeks, no one at Declaerk’s knew she had a child and she meant to keep it that way.
With all that arranged, what stopped working for her, why did she take the child back to Sainte-Bazeille before the end of the year? That was my question when she very matter-of-factly told me the story, knowing this wasn’t the first I’d heard of it, since by then the daughter had begun speaking out, airing her grievances, her litany of recriminations against the Cheffe, particularly the vicious, recurring accusation that the Cheffe couldn’t stand having her around once she got her first job.
The truth, she told me, was that she soon learned the neighbor was a woman of low morals and bad hygiene, and the Cheffe feared for her daughter’s health as well as her language, so she had no choice but to take her back to her grandparents, however hard she found it to admit that she’d failed.
And, brushing away the air before her with an irritable little flick of the wrist, she exclaimed, “I didn’t even know there were such things!” when I expressed my surprise that she hadn’t tried to find a day care for her daughter, or another neighbor to watch her, and I let the matter drop there, pleased, secretly convinced that she’d realized she couldn’t devote her every thought, her every moment, every moment of her thought to cooking while at the same time tending, in a tiny hotel room, to a chil
d just learning to walk and talk, and so she’d resigned herself to the only choice possible and took her back to Sainte-Bazeille, where her grandparents looked after her properly, as they did everything, I was convinced and pleased, I didn’t know about the psoriasis.
But surely I wasn’t wrong to suspect that the Cheffe couldn’t bear the child’s babbling or wails invading her thoughts, couldn’t endure the terrible impossibility of reflection that came with a baby’s presence in a cramped space, or that she was afraid the stupor of Marmande might fall over her again, from which Sainte-Bazeille was supposed to protect her and the child alike, she didn’t say anything about it, there was no need.
If the Cheffe wanted only to learn her trade at Declaerk’s, make a start in her career like the tittering apprentice, then she could have done her job and looked after the child at the same time, but she had another goal, not just higher but of an entirely different order, and when night came she desperately needed a solitude with a silent heart, a place to commune with the thing that had recruited her, the thing that had summoned her.
But I was wrong to think that the Cheffe had retrospectively inflated her sadness and shame at having to part with the child again, yes, I was wrong to think she’d artificially reconstituted that grief from what she’d seen in her grown daughter, the vain disaster her daughter had become, because I didn’t know about the psoriasis and I’d pictured a far more unflappable, independent, and resolved twenty-year-old Cheffe, who loved the child as much as she could, to be sure, who loved no one more, but who was also capable of forgetting the child the moment she found herself in Millard’s kitchen.
