The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  I remember my first months in La Bonne Heure’s kitchen as the hardest time of my life, which doesn’t mean the most unpleasant or the unhappiest, but I worked so hard, I took such care to watch what I said and did so not even the most trivial detail could displease the Cheffe (not that I paid any mind to whether she was listening or watching, even alone in my studio I was always trying not to displease the Cheffe’s gentle, uncompromising face), that I saw every new day as an arduous uphill climb, and the reward wasn’t to glide down the slope when day was done, because there wasn’t any slope to glide down in a euphoric rush of freedom, there was only the knowledge of another climb to come the next day and every day after, which is why I didn’t sleep much back then, even though I wasn’t yet, far from it, the friend the Cheffe so freely confided in, I didn’t get much sleep, I tried to come up with ways to prove myself the next day, ways to show I was hardworking and perceptive, I wondered how I might become, without artifice or deceit, the man the Cheffe would have to prefer to all others, oh how little I slept in those days!

  And in so doing, and at almost the same age, I was unknowingly creating myself just as the Cheffe created herself in her little room at the Clapeaus’, inventing or improving recipes deep into the night—in my case, I was trying to inventory every aspect of my behavior and compare it with what I thought I knew the Cheffe wanted, there were four of us working in her kitchen, I was the youngest, and the most desperate to be noticed.

  I tried to do the simple tasks I was assigned so swiftly and flawlessly that it couldn’t go unnoticed, even if nothing was said of it.

  I saw the Cheffe sometimes glancing intently my way.

  It’s true that she was hard on me. She didn’t care about the things they’d drilled into me at school, my talent for carving potatoes or mushroom caps, for tying green beans into elegant bundles with thin slices of bacon, all those techniques I was so good at disgusted the Cheffe, and it wasn’t because she was jealous, as her daughter insinuates, it wasn’t because the Cheffe never had the benefit of such teachings, it was simply because she had no time for tricks aimed at prettifying the food, aimed at dressing it up even if that means stripping it of its basic qualities, she didn’t think food had any need to be adorned or remade if it had nothing to be ashamed of.

  The Cheffe made it clear to me that fripperies were not welcome in her kitchen, that displays of virtuosity would get me nowhere, she knew what I’d been taught and was quietly, patiently waiting for me to quit looking back at it, to quit thinking I had to pull out all the stops to justify my presence at La Bonne Heure, I wasn’t competing with anyone here, she was quietly, patiently waiting for me to see that.

  My coworkers looked on me with the detached, smirking but tactful indulgence of people who’d gone through the very same thing and knew there was nothing they could tell me: like them, I had to go on to the end of the road I’d been started down by my anxiousness, my eagerness to make a good impression, my very young man’s vanity, I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything they would have no doubt clumsily told me, I would have seen any suggestion that I hold back as a sign that they feared for their own standing and were trying to lead me astray.

  And so I insisted on showing that I could sculpt a turnip into a rose, deftly scoop perfect balls of potato or melon, the Cheffe was hard on me, even if she never said much, she was hard on me, yes.

  With a flick of her finger she sent my turnip rose flying into the trash can, told me she’d never asked me to carve the potatoes in that ridiculous way or waste so much melon to make little balls nobody cared about, and she finished by smiling, without warmth, to let me know it wasn’t serious, that smile skewered me with shame and despair.

  Much later, when I asked why she’d been so hard on me in my early days, why she hadn’t simply told me just what she wanted, which I would have tried to give her with all the fire and devotion she knew was in me, why, in short, she’d left me to find the way into her thinking, her morality, failing which I couldn’t possibly work with her, when it would have taken only a few detailed sentences to guide my hungry, groping ambition, when I asked her why she’d been so hard on me the Cheffe answered in surprise that she had indeed hoped I’d discover on my own what I had to do, and almost who I had to become, if I wanted—not to deserve my place at La Bonne Heure, that’s not how she saw her restaurant, but to decide whether, given those conditions, I’d be happy there, and she couldn’t very well have said that in just a few sentences, she was surprised at my question.

  And at the same time she admitted she was irritated by my visible ambition to please her, to be the only one who pleased her, and she must have been trying to get that across to me.

  “And I ended up becoming your favorite all the same,” I answered, with what I hoped would be a very playful affection. And the Cheffe gravely answered: “Yes, you got me after all.”

  Coming from her, was that a declaration of love?

  But I did become the Cheffe’s favorite, through persistence and sacrifice and because my coworkers, who were in truth every bit as talented as I was, had no such goal in their hearts, I succeeded because there was nothing I longed for so much, and because that ambition was within the reach of the methodical, observant, passionate boy I then was.

  That “you got me” hurt, particularly because the great sorrow of my life, when she said those words, was precisely that I sometimes felt I didn’t have her at all, or had no more of her than one of her indifferent, faraway brothers or sisters, who seemed to keep up a relationship with the Cheffe only so they could go on asking for money now and then.

  I’d never “got” the Cheffe, I’d never had her, I sometimes told myself, she was misleading us both by saying such things—but on her thin lips those words might have been words of love.

  No sooner have we reached my apartment than I take Cora to Anne-Marie’s terrace two floors up, that’s how we do things in Lloret de Mar and I see no reason to change just because I’m being visited by my daughter, my one child on this earth, and in any case I don’t think she’s longing any more than I am for a tête-à-tête this first evening, it would be awkward, although Cora seems so serene, so assured that she could probably get through a mediocre dinner (everything I put in my mouth has been processed and inevitably tainted and ruined by the food industry) in the sad little kitchen of an apartment complex for middle-class retirees. Cora seems relaxed, outgoing, I see her mingling with my Lloret de Mar friends on Anne-Marie’s terrace, on which she’s complimented her, just like you’re supposed to (what a beautiful terrace, what a beautiful view of the pool, what a beautiful life, what a beautiful long wait to die), standing out in her long hippie dress among the other women, far older, almost naked in their short, clinging beach outfits, Cora’s here, I sip my sangria, slightly numbed and self-conscious. And Bertrand or Bernard tells me, “She looks just like you,” which so shocks me that I drop my glass on the artificial stone floor of Anne-Marie’s terrace, I wasn’t expecting that, that my daughter might look like me, this tall, solid Cora who owes me nothing and whom I’ve given so little. “She has your eyes, your mouth, your nose,” he goes on, and I hurriedly bend down to pick up the broken glass to hide my embarrassment, my shame, and my panic; what is someone who so looks like me going to want from me?

  The Cheffe’s daughter? No, she wasn’t living with her mother when I came to La Bonne Heure, somehow she’d managed to pass the baccalauréat and was supposedly taking some kind of business course in Québec, where she had insisted on transplanting herself with every possible comfort, my coworkers told me, and where the Cheffe did indeed house her luxuriously from afar, by which I mean she never made the trip herself but spent so much money on her daughter that the photos she sent her mother to grudgingly admit that her living conditions weren’t too appalling told all the strangely numerous people the Cheffe showed them to (her employees, long-standing customers) that that perpetually disgruntled a
nd dissatisfied girl actually lived in outrageous luxury, little justified by the inevitably mediocre or even disgraceful grades she occasionally passed on to the Cheffe, for which the Cheffe’s daughter always had an airtight explanation, there was no logical connection between herself, her work, her attendance, her abilities, and those disappointing grades she owed solely to the obtuseness or irrationality of incomprehensible teachers, and the Cheffe believed her, pretended to believe her, sensing she had neither the ability nor the courage to question claims founded in an experience so entirely unknown to her.

  I soon realized that the Cheffe never spoke of her daughter without cloaking her in a legend, a legend she tirelessly wove by telling everyone over and over what a smart girl she was, as if she knew her handiwork was being almost as insistently covered up by a very different legend, one constructed without cruelty or ill will by her employees who actually knew the girl.

  They drew me so dreadful a portrait of her that I doubted it could be true, I thought the Cheffe’s vociferous praise and pride more believable, particularly because my youthful naïveté refused to let me see how someone as wonderful as the Cheffe could give birth to the horrible person my coworkers described.

  But when I did meet her daughter it cast a new light on the Cheffe’s joyful, unshakable, creative, almost whimsical mood in my first years at La Bonne Heure—she was happy because her daughter was far away, splendidly poised, the Cheffe pretended to believe, on the cusp of a glittering career that would never bring her back to Bordeaux, it was only because she finally felt free of intimidation and blame that she radiated that quiet, burning, tenacious joy, not exactly happiness, I wouldn’t have called the Cheffe happy, I didn’t know, but something somehow bigger and better than happiness, a joy that didn’t confine itself to her but touched all of us, enveloped all of us, and by way of us grew all the greater.

  Because the Cheffe’s joy planted in each of us who worked beside her each day something that wouldn’t easily be rooted out, something perhaps not even life’s daily parade of trials and sadness and frustrations could overcome.

  Once I finally understood that there was no point in showing the Cheffe all the gimmicks and flourishes they’d taught me in school, once I dared let her see me as someone who’d learned nothing and would thus let his fervor, his tirelessness, and his perfect receptivity teach him all he needed to know, and only the best of it, then I saw my coworkers breathe a sigh of relief and I realized, looking back, how tiresome they’d found the spectacle of my blindness, anxiousness, and presumption, and I saw the change in the way the Cheffe treated me, I was a new person, one she liked far better than the old, who was immediately forgotten, it was so foreign to the Cheffe’s nature to remind anyone of old ways and past failings, to wave the skin you’d shed under your nose, even as a joke, once the molting was complete.

  She’d never lost her temper with me, but her patience was so enormous, and sometimes so undeserved, that it could bring tears to my eyes, no one had ever shown me such kindness, not even my mother, who gave me a feeble, lazy, halfhearted upbringing, eager to put it behind her, the very opposite of the Cheffe, who never seemed to weary of teaching me, never wished she could be done with it.

  She never tired of showing me how she made her cooking as simple as she could while creating an impression of tremendous elaboration, of an idea long and deeply reflected on, the result being the product offered up in a state not far from naked.

  The stark-naked product was unacceptable, neither pleasing to the eye nor enticing to the tongue, so the Cheffe’s art consisted in doing just enough to it to make it seem resplendent and delicious but still perfectly recognizable, incorruptible, proudly and serenely displaying its sometimes odd appearance.

  “I hardly touch it,” the Cheffe liked to say, with no trace of coyness, and all her finesse, all her intelligence was in that “hardly,” the very essence of her work.

  For example, the green-robed leg of lamb came from her wanting people to taste exquisite Pauillac lamb and Belleville sorrel in their most honest form, refusing to hide the sorrel’s roughness behind cream and butter. To that she added spinach, she liked a trinity of ingredients, then slow-braised the lamb in its wrapping of bitter greens so the meat’s fatty juices mellowed the sorrel and the lamb turned out at once supernaturally tender and so strongly flavored that the contrast—a young, dark-tasting meat—disconcerted the eater’s first mouthfuls, the Cheffe thought that was funny.

  As the years went by, I saw her invent all the dishes that made La Bonne Heure famous.

  That was the sunniest, most absorbing time of my life, and I think it was the same for the Cheffe—she was free, she serenely, passionately followed the path blazed for her by her fearlessness, and the very young man that I was padded after, knowing just how far behind her to stay, marveling, critical, grateful.

  One night, unable to sleep, I found my feet taking me back to the restaurant, where I saw a light on in a street-facing kitchen window.

  I thought the Cheffe must be working inside, I tapped on the pane, she let me in as if there were nothing odd about it, and I just as casually sat down to watch her, trying to make out what she was thinking and hand her some dish or utensil before she could reach for it.

  We didn’t speak, and even if, much later, the whole nights I spent in the kitchen listening to the Cheffe’s stories would satisfy my need for friendship, trust, and forgiveness far more than I could have hoped, more than I thought I deserved, I would still feel an irreparable nostalgia for those hours when time stood still and silent amid the clicks, clanks, and rustles of the work, my exhaustion held at bay by the minute attention I paid to the Cheffe’s every glance, every move, and dawn appeared in the window without our noticing it at first—the Cheffe would murmur regretfully, “Already!” and then my eyelids could droop and twitch, I felt fulfilled, heroic, and modest, and the Cheffe looked up at me with the face of a sweet, happy child, a lock of hair slipping over her forehead, no one else ever saw her like that.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked me once, handing me a piece of crabmeat she’d poached in absinthe.

  I thought it would be even better if it weren’t cooked quite so long, the Cheffe agreed, her crab with glacier wormwood was born in the course of one of those nights when I came to join her in the kitchen, maybe a year after I started at La Bonne Heure, we kept that up for several years and tacitly agreed not to tell anyone about it, and as a matter of fact when I tapped at the window we pretended to find it all so ordinary and uncomplicated there was no reason even to say anything to each other, sometimes I’m afraid it might all have been a dream, which would be a heartbreaking, sterile thing, since those nights in that fragrant kitchen, that kitchen throbbing like an enthralled, impatient heart, those nights when the Cheffe created before my eyes, those were real, they existed, I think my deep emotion at the memory is proof enough.

  Giving me a taste, she would ask for my thoughts on her walnut-crusted young rabbit, artichoke heart fritters, broccoli stem fries, black-tomato ravioli, sardines gratinéed with wild garlic, I was present, yes, at the conception and refinement of those celebrated dishes forever associated with the name of La Bonne Heure, in those sleepless nights when, drunk on fatigue and, if I may, the ever more inescapable love I was feeling for the Cheffe, I sometimes thought I’d never sleep again, which was a good thing, a necessary thing, the annals of cooking and partisans of love would bear me out: How can you go home and sleep when the ethereal, intent, silent, lyrical Cheffe made of the kitchen a place where her nightly dreams unfolded under her control, took shape in her hands, with no need to spend hours lying down, with no danger that the dream’s benign visions might metamorphose into something horrific or burdensome?

  Because the Cheffe did spend her nights dreaming, but her dreams were concrete, productive, she was awake and aware, but still those were dreams taking shape in her hands in those undulating
nights, as different from other people’s nights as a parallel world from the everyday universe.

  I tell myself I’ll take Cora for drives in the country around Lloret de Mar, show her the scenery like any other houseguest, and then the days will go by and Cora will get back on the train and nothing ambiguous or dangerous will have had time to happen between us. But Cora has no interest in sightseeing. I tell her my plans, she smiles, lets me talk, “That’s not really my kind of thing,” she says quietly, her voice apologetic but firm, polite, my daughter has manners; by what miracle did that happen? I don’t dare ask why in that case she came here to Lloret de Mar, I’m feeling agitated, I walk from the kitchen to the living room, Cora’s presence stops me from pouring myself a ten a.m. glass of wine, I’m agitated, anxious, and tired; what does she want from me, this tall woman who doesn’t want to go out for a walk? Do I? Absolutely not, I can’t stand those slow ambles through Lloret de Mar’s dull little streets. But then what will we do?