The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  “Very good news,” I told her, with all the conviction I could muster.

  The Cheffe seemed ever so slightly relieved, and almost grateful to my answer for extricating her, at least for a moment, from her confusion and guilty misgivings, from her thoughts forever circling, alone, forlorn, far removed from any wholesome good sense, around the question of whether the sorrowfully loving mother she was had the right not to rejoice with all her heart at such news, whether the fine mother she claimed to be could allow herself to think of that imminent return and tremble.

  Not long after, one of our waitresses came into the kitchen, went to the Cheffe, and murmured something close by her face, whereupon the Cheffe put on her vacant little smile, which lingered on her lips even though her eyes showed only dread when she understood what the waitress was saying, and that inert smile seemed to replicate itself, to spread, to hang like an echo on the girl’s hesitant lips, none of us liked to upset the Cheffe, and now the waitress was realizing her words had sent her into a panic.

  Then a stranger came into the kitchen, and I immediately thought she was the most beautiful, most extraordinary person I’d ever seen.

  I’m still mystified, still dumbfounded by the memory, so soon would I find the Cheffe’s daughter a person entirely without charm, beauty, originality, that’s why I still can’t understand what she was radiating in that one single moment that fooled my gaze, that anesthetized my intuition, unless it was her cool determination to charm, the mobilization of her cruelest, most dishonest, most aggressive faculties for the purpose of subjugating us all.

  She was dressed in a strange motley of fabrics and styles, a mismatched jumble of ideas, tastes, and seasons that became just the opposite, perfect coherence, when you realized that every one of those fabrics, rough or silky, thick or transparent, shimmered in one way or another: the long red satin skirt, the sweater of coarse wool woven with silver threads, the thick tights of a shiny dark green, the pink plastic belt, even the little-girl red velvet hairband in her permed hair, everything sparkled in a tasteless, childish, almost disorienting way, since, in spite of the youth clearly visible on her smooth, fresh face, she was dressed like a middle-aged lady trying to pass for a teenager, whose look’s idiosyncratic logic vaguely evoked an obsessive, off-kilter mind.

  My memory of her first appearance in our kitchen is the memory of an illusion.

  Here she was at last, the Cheffe’s daughter I’d heard so much about, she was splendid and stunning, my love for her mother leapt toward her, immediately wrapped itself around her.

  However deceptive, even monstrous, that first impression is something I’ll never forget, even if two days later I cast it off completely, because the lie was there first, and the truth took its place but didn’t erase it.

  That’s why I later hated her all the more.

  She came toward the Cheffe in a shriek of joy and a crackle of fabrics, I saw she had shoes like a little girl’s, silvery Mary Janes with steel soles that clattered metallically over the tile, she bent down to put her arms around the Cheffe, she wasn’t actually taller but she pretended she had to stoop so you’d think she was, and so, deceptively, she seemed—illusorily tall, in truth bulky and wide—to swallow up the Cheffe, to smother her in the pink mohair of her enormous sweater, in her hair, which, now freed from the band that had fallen to the floor, slipped over the Cheffe’s face, perfumed, chemical, asphyxiating.

  And the Cheffe stood motionless, locked in her daughter’s arms, for many long seconds before she extricated herself with a gentle push, still silent but now looking into the strange, full, heavily made-up face hovering over hers, and I saw in the Cheffe’s eyes an expression I never could have imagined: adoring and vanquished, tender and defeated, timid, ill at ease, but still, it must be said, vaguely happy (though tinged with a very clear “in spite of it all” that to me made it tragic).

  What dumbfounded me was not that I’d never seen the Cheffe look like that, but simply that she could look like that, I’d always seen her in perfect control of the face she showed the world.

  Not wanting to embarrass her, and anxious to hide my own turmoil, I quickly looked away.

  The Cheffe’s daughter liked to claim I was jealous of her, and as she told it that jealousy infected me from the very first day, from the moment she embraced her mother in front of me, since that simple gesture was forbidden me, despite all the many liberties I’d insidiously permitted myself.

  I’ve always refused to answer that woman’s sordid allegations.

  But, on the subject of jealousy, and since that emotion might, why not, have gripped the impassioned young man that I was, I can in all humility tell you I never felt any such thing toward the daughter, and what actually tightened my throat at the time, as I looked back at my knife and the red peppers I was slicing, was something very different, something entirely new for me, it was a sense of impending disaster.

  Those coming miseries were written in the Cheffe’s loving, downtrodden eyes, those eyes had already seen them, and maybe the Cheffe already knew of them too, the steel soles of those ridiculous Mary Janes couldn’t pound the tile floor without meaning something, foretelling something, and it would have been cowardly or stupid to refuse to understand that prelude, and the Cheffe wasn’t cowardly or stupid, she was wise, perceptive, and in her way fatalistic.

  Because already everything had changed, and the Cheffe, who as the irreproachable boss of La Bonne Heure had never walked out on any of us, her assistants, her employees (she left us to ourselves when she thought or sensed that’s what we wanted), the Cheffe who was always there when we came in and still there when we went home now followed her daughter out of the kitchen, slinking and docile in the spectacular wake of those rustling fabrics, she didn’t look back, didn’t say a word, and we didn’t see her again until evening.

  And when we did she simply congratulated us on having so capably handled the lunch rush. She was distant, unsettled, pensive, sadly smiling and gentle, and when my eyes questioned her she looked away with neither a moment’s pause nor, it seemed to me, any trace of regret, as if our bond were a dream I alone had dreamt, or as if—now that thanks to her daughter she was herself again—she were extracting herself from it as she would from an unseemly or immoral liaison.

  My colleagues pretended they’d seen nothing, and maybe there was nothing to see when you didn’t live in the heart of the Cheffe’s heart as I had for years, but I couldn’t help thinking her attitude toward them had changed, the Cheffe seemed to be weakly and hopelessly struggling against an indifference, a detachment that tinged her most everyday words with weariness, her orders, her thanks.

  “I’m going to show you something,” Cora tells me. She takes a big dark blue box from her bags, delicately sets it on the table, and I want to turn away, because I know what it is, I know that kind of box, and even as I’m thinking it Cora tells me just that: “You know this kind of box.” And they’re magnificent steel-handled knives, I can’t help but caress them with my fingertips, I give Cora a questioning look, she picks up her knives one by one and holds them toward me so I can feel their weight.

  The daughter didn’t put in an appearance that first evening. I could hear her walking back and forth over my head, in the apartment, hammering the floor with her steel-soled Mary Janes as frantically as a penned, frightened mare, but nothing was holding that girl captive, in her obstinacy, egotism, and hardness she was in fact a creature freer than most.

  Late that night I went out to nose around the kitchen windows as usual, and just as I feared I found them dark.

  But the apartment windows were blazing, the casements open wide, though no hum of voices drifted out, in fact the silence seemed so deep, so solid that I could picture them up there, the mother consumed, the daughter at rest and on guard, the girl soundlessly breathing, staring and plotting, the two of them perhaps sitting face-to-face with nothing to say bu
t perversely united as they waited for two very different things.

  I wanted to call out to the Cheffe, take her off to my studio in Mériadeck, away from that girl from Canada who neither resembled nor, I was sure, understood her in any way.

  I lingered awhile under the windows, paralyzed by the knowledge of my powerlessness, my pointless youth, my irrefutable absence from any familial connection with the Cheffe.

  And evening after evening I kept coming back (as if my perseverance, founded solely on hope, might somehow gain the power to change reality) to see which of the Cheffe’s windows were lit, and to my dismay the kitchen’s never were, whereas from the three rooms of the apartment above poured a light so pale and bright that the street was coldly ablaze with it, and I thought the windows were open only to spare the Cheffe an immediate, total, white-hot incineration of her freedom and genius, in silence, in the vast watchful silence that convinced me someone was up there.

  Never again, after that, would I go back to my cherished place late at night in the kitchen alongside the Cheffe.

  Because when I did once again spend whole nights in the kitchen, it would be to hear the Cheffe talk, not to watch her work, that trust would never be granted me again, that openness, and I’ve always bitterly regretted it: no caution or calculation ever showed on the Cheffe’s face in those nights when she spoke only to herself, and I’d seen that, and she’d loved me enough to let me.

  As for what lay behind her daughter’s sudden return to Bordeaux, for truth’s sake I must confess that a time came, much later, when the daughter told me about it with what seemed a sincerity beyond question, when I was tempted to believe her word over the Cheffe’s, the daughter claiming, in that very brief time when we were more or less friends, that her mother called her home on winning the star, whereas the Cheffe would later tell me that her daughter came back without being asked, and with no other goal than to shatter her confidence.

  I knew having her daughter far away was a comfort to the Cheffe, and I knew about the money she sent to Québec to keep here there, as if to bury her under the weight of riches she literally couldn’t dig herself out of, so I never should have trusted the daughter’s claims, but how to describe the sort of innocence or objectivity that briefly illuminated her dull eyes when she told me, with no ulterior motive I could make out, that her mother had asked her to come back when she was recognized in Le Guide, so I believed her immediately and in spite of myself and later had to struggle, reconsidering my first impression, to question those words that didn’t fit with the rest, with what I knew of the Cheffe and what she herself had told me, that she’d never suggested her daughter come join her.

  And when, not for the moment her overt enemy, I asked the daughter why her mother wanted her home again, she answered very plainly, with that openness I couldn’t manage to find feigned, that the Cheffe thought it would be sensible to make use of her daughter’s knowledge in marketing and business consulting, the skills she’d acquired at an expensive school in Québec, she’d earned a diploma, she showed it to me with some pride.

  I didn’t let myself laugh at her, stopped by the exceptional sweetness I saw on her often hard, bitter face.

  But I didn’t believe for a moment that the Cheffe was hoping to improve or expand La Bonne Heure’s profile, with the help of her daughter or anyone else, and although I knew perfectly well how we can sometimes be disconcerted by some aspect, unsuspected for lack of opportunity, of the character of someone close to us, close in life and even closer in dreams, I found it simply impossible to picture the Cheffe as a businesswoman determined to capitalize on flattering and promising circumstances such as recognition by Le Guide—particularly because she was ashamed of that honor.

  No, that I absolutely could not believe.

  Besides, the fact that the daughter assured me she’d come back to put her marketing skills to use for La Bonne Heure, the fact that she made that claim with such serene, open vanity (she who was ordinarily neither serene nor open) will show you just how irrational and shockingly shameless she was, her illusions were so powerful that they could be disarming, even convincing, in spite of everything and in spite of myself, back in those days when the enmity had subsided, when she and I were seeking the warmth of a temporary peace, a truce.

  Once we parted ways forever I realized nothing she’d said could be trusted, even if she was perfectly sincere, even if she was trying to stick as close as she could to reality in the most commonly understood sense.

  But there survived in me the ineradicable memory of that moment when I’d been convinced by the look on her face, so I could never entirely shake the idea, the ridiculous suspicion, that the Cheffe had indeed asked her to come back to Bordeaux, had even, in a way, cried out for her help.

  We next saw her, the daughter, two days after her return.

  Her second entrance in the kitchen was so unlike the first that I almost didn’t recognize the slow, heavy young woman scuffing her gigantic tennis shoes over the tile, with no trace of a shimmer in her dress or her aura, as if for the crucial moment of her arrival two days before she’d expended all her resources of flamboyance, bravado, and intimidation, or as if she’d decided there was no need for such stratagems now that her mother had been caught.

  The Cheffe gave her a businesslike greeting, weighed down by a term of endearment that jarred in this working kitchen, something like, “Hello, my darling, how are you?,” which she seemed to have to work hard to say, and which she said cautiously, hesitantly, with the deep discomfort of someone forcing herself to violate her natural reserve but who, to protect her own tranquility, to avoid giving offense and suffering the punishment, had no choice but to speak those words.

  The daughter grunted a vague reply. Her cold little eyes scoured every corner of the kitchen, looking for something to fault, something to criticize, even some reason for outrage, and though at first I didn’t understand what that meant it was soon made clear by a laconic “Lot of stuff’s going to have to change around here,” murmured with a glance in my direction, looking for my approval, seeking the unity of two like-minded young people (we’re exactly the same age), which I wouldn’t give her—I immediately looked away, appalled by that arrogance and also badly shaken to see the Cheffe’s dazzling daughter, whom I had spontaneously enveloped in my love and admiration, now showing her true face, true in the literal sense, stripped of the artifices that let her make such a resplendent entrance the first day.

  A poisonous atmosphere of menace and fear hung over the forty-five minutes she spent in the kitchen.

  The Cheffe’s nervous, humble, deferential demeanor influenced my coworkers, who answered the daughter’s ignorant questions quickly and anxiously, and although she asked me nothing, perhaps wanting to keep me on her side, I felt as wound up and angry as if she were putting those idiotic questions to me, the questions of a woman with no idea what she was talking about who thought she could hide her ignorance by snidely taking people to task over insignificant details, looking at them with a smug, disdainful, or sardonic smile, pushing up a lock of hair that had fallen over her ear, with the same gesture as the Cheffe’s, then slowly exhaling through her nostrils, so common, so bereft of elegance that I found her revolting.

  When she was gone the Cheffe’s shoulders relaxed, she stood up straight again. But the look she gave us seemed different, veiled with insincerity, sadness, and resignation.

  I alone dared to look back, she lowered her eyes, smiling mechanically, the smile drifted away from her lips, floated out of reach of her mouth, her quivering chin.

  Nothing made sense to me anymore.

  How could she give birth to a daughter like that, why did the Cheffe obey her in a way I thought couldn’t be explained by motherly love, and hadn’t she made up for the terrible mistake of bearing such a daughter by sending virtually everything she earned to Québec, hadn’t she paid enough to be free of that to
rture?

  And if the Cheffe was now being made to endure the consequences of some act or attitude I knew nothing of, why did that obligation take the ignoble, sneering, ambitious form of a daughter who had nothing to teach her?

  For all her visible distress, I thought the Cheffe wasn’t being honest, I couldn’t understand her, I could feel my youth, and I hated that I was so young, and that I understood nothing.

  From one day to the next, the Cheffe entrusted her daughter with the outrageous authority to make any changes she liked to La Bonne Heure, even though that daughter’s only experience was class projects, purely theoretical, in which she had shown no great talent (she had to take the final exam three times), involving businesses of an entirely different nature—lending banks, a correspondence foreign-language school, a consortium of dental offices—and even though that daughter had no interest in cooking, even loathed cooking, as she admitted to me one day, seeing it as nothing more than an odious chore, redeemable only if it was dressed up with luxuries, she said herself she ate only in big restaurants and prided herself on never cooking, never wasting her time with that crap.

  Hearing the judgments she handed down like the precious illuminations of a dazzlingly inventive mind, I soon realized she was willing to enjoy a dish only so long as she didn’t know what she was eating, didn’t recognize or think she recognized a shape, taste, or smell, only so long as its very name said as vaguely as possible what it was made of, which is why she immediately resolved to rechristen all the Cheffe’s dishes with periphrases she considered infinitely more enticing, to stop confronting the customer with words like tuna, chicken, or tomato, preferring phrases I can barely bring myself to repeat here, phrases some of you might have the misfortune of remembering, and that, to the surprise of many who assumed it was the Cheffe’s idea, soon invaded the menu of La Bonne Heure: November Germon, Prince of Bresse, Tomatina Carpaccio…