by Marie Ndiaye
No, certainly, it wasn’t the same at all, and I knew a little about that myself, but didn’t it mean something, I wondered, that the Cheffe had forged such fragile bonds, and with so few people, that she could disappear without their even knowing it, and particularly, once they did know, without their feeling any particular concern?
Because they’d heard about the loss of the star, and they more or less knew La Bonne Heure was closing, but none of them had raced to the Cheffe’s side to pledge their friendship and support, no one leapt up in alarm from their armchair when I told them the Cheffe, if she was home at all, seemed to be living in the dark and not opening her door to anyone, no one found it unthinkable that the Cheffe could leave town and not tell them, I realized the Cheffe had no real friends, no one who worried about her but me, and in my vanity and my cowardice, I’d left her.
And I thought that was a terrible mistake on the Cheffe’s part, not valuing friendship, not cultivating it, but was it, since solitude was exactly the life she wanted?
Ten times, twenty times I went to the Cheffe’s, I called out and waited, I paced on the sidewalk, but I never once glimpsed her, never saw the curtains shift or the faintest light filter out, so I finally convinced myself she’d gone away, and perhaps she’d told no one, and never wondered if I might be devastated, worried, and hurt, maybe she thought I’d lost all interest in her since I’d never once come to see her after I left La Bonne Heure, and since, as she might have heard, I’d married Sophie Pujol, or maybe by worrying me she was trying to punish and hurt me.
I liked that idea better than her thinking I’d stopped caring about her, thinking I was leading a life broken free from her own, thinking I’d loved her only for a time.
“My thoughts were never free of you, I haven’t felt like my own man for as long as I’ve known you,” I would later tell her, in the kitchen where her steady, tranquil voice would keep me up for much of the night.
And then, with the boldness bestowed by exhaustion, I would go on, “My ex-wife, Sophie Pujol, always thought you were what put an end to our marriage, I don’t know, but she’s sure of it.”
“They have good food at Le Pujol,” the Cheffe would answer, with enthusiastic conviction, “isn’t that what matters most? Next to that, a marriage is nothing.”
“Very true,” I would answer, relieved, and we’d laugh together, I’ve never laughed with anyone as heartily, and with so pure a heart, as I did with the Cheffe.
Hopeless, deeply depressed, I gave my notice at Le Select.
I used my savings, which were fairly substantial since I had no real life outside of work, to finance the kind of travels I once looked at with the same dubious incomprehension as the Cheffe generally gave outings and amusements, I flew to Vietnam, to India and Italy, to Japan, I signed up for organized tours, each time hoping against hope I might spot, among my travel companions or suddenly appearing across the lobby of an international hotel, the Cheffe’s face.
I didn’t admit it to myself, but I always chose countries known for their cuisine, I vaguely thought that if the Cheffe had made the very unlikely decision to travel it could be only to lands where she’d find ideas to further embolden her inventiveness, unknown ingredients to bring back, rare spices, plants that don’t grow on our shores, never for a moment did I consider the possibility that she might give up cooking, no matter what happened to the restaurant.
Back home in Bordeaux after my last trip, I agreed to seek treatment for severe depression.
My money was gone, I had to go to work, I was finding it all hard to face.
I went to see Sophie Pujol, she consented to give me a job, and we got along as well as could be expected. I was taking all sorts of pills at the time, I moved slowly, my work lacked precision, but Sophie Pujol was kind enough never to take me to task, and besides her restaurant was unfailingly packed.
Then, in a bar, I ran into the Cheffe’s daughter.
Seeing my expressionless eyes, my gray, drooping face, she asked how I was and told me she was going through a hard time herself, though I saw no sign of it, she was rosy and plump, not cheery but more alive and more animated than in the days of La Bonne Heure.
She answered my urgent, avid, pointed questions about her mother by telling me she didn’t know anything, the Cheffe had disappeared, leaving her a good deal of money that she, the daughter, had almost completely run through, living within her means wasn’t her style, she confessed with a certain roguish charm, it was her mother’s fault, she didn’t know how to raise a child.
She bought me a drink, I paid for the next two, and, staggering and stammering from the alcohol and the pills, I heard myself offer to put her up, since, she’d just assured me, she had nowhere to go, she’d been thrown out of some sort of communal apartment where she’d found refuge, the story was confused and completely uninteresting.
I understood only that the Cheffe had taken the keys to her apartment, which gave me a short jolt of pleasure, and maybe it was in penance for that, and also because I felt vaguely sorry for the daughter, lost, indecisive, less disagreeable than before, that I offered to put her up until she could get back on her feet.
I must also have been hoping she’d tell me of her last months with her mother, and thinking some minor detail of that story might give me a clue to what the Cheffe could be doing now, and where and why, and apart from all that being with the daughter brought me closer to the Cheffe, in however warped, pitiable, and degraded a way.
In my drugged stupor, and in the deep indifference the daughter inspired in me, I didn’t suspect at the time that she accepted the invitation less because she truly had no roof for the night (she had other ways out, she still had more than a little money) than because she wanted to see, with a twisted, hard, unwholesome delight, how I would use her, as she later put it, and how the memory of the Cheffe tormented me, and on that latter point she was right, but why did that narcissistic girl need to put herself in precisely the situation that would confirm her suspicion that I didn’t care about her, that I cared only about the Cheffe, her soul and her cooking, the soul of her cooking?
Numb though I was, we soon grew thoroughly sick of each other.
Everything she did, said, or suggested filled me with resentment or shame, just as a veritable loathing for me soon took shape in her narrow, self-obsessed heart.
The story of our relationship is the pitifully banal story of two people who come together for a while because they’re broke and alone and don’t know what else to do, and once the few good times of the early days are over they find themselves standing, stunned, bitter, and vindictive, before someone they can’t possibly love or admire, I’ll take my share of the blame, I was closemouthed and distant, roughly indiscreet when I wanted to learn more about the Cheffe, very rarely pleasant in a general sense, and utterly devoid of ambition, plans, or good cheer, not to mention genuine warmth.
As for the daughter, she was listless and bored, she spent her time staring at the television she’d bought herself, talking of going back to Canada but never doing anything about it, sourly happy to be forcing her company on me.
The only question she would agree to answer was my question about the loss of the star: Had that devastated the Cheffe? “Not at all,” the daughter said with a disdainful sniff, “I got the feeling she wasn’t sorry at all.”
“Maybe not,” I shot back, “but still, having to close La Bonne Heure, what a defeat, it’s devastating! And it’s all your fault.”
The daughter gave me a glance of genuine astonishment. “I never forced her to listen to me, and I wasn’t making her keep me around,” she said, with her flat-footed logic. “And she didn’t have to close the restaurant if she didn’t want to.”
“That was the only way she could find to get rid of you,” I said quietly, the daughter let out a mean little laugh, and then, as usual, we sat for hours in silence, exaspera
ted by each other for no precise reason, the daughter turned up the television to annoy me even more as, simply to irritate her, I walked back and forth in front of the set on the pretense of tidying the apartment.
Once I’d wormed out of her what little she could tell me of the Cheffe, not a day went by that I didn’t bring up the subject of her going away, offensively insistent about it, never seeking a tactful phrase to hide the fact that I wanted her gone without further delay.
But before long evicting her was out of the question.
Cora tells me she wants to open a French restaurant in Lloret de Mar, she’s learned to cook, and that’s what she’s wanted to do all her life, that’s why she’s come to Lloret de Mar. She’s counting on me to help her find a place and give her all the most useful advice. Smiling, staring at me with a faintly challenging gaze, she tells me a man who worked as long as I did with the Cheffe has to have lots of good ideas. I’m speechless, uncomfortable, the heat is appalling, what will my Lloret de Mar friends think, I want to run away and have nothing more to do with Cora, nothing more to do with Martine or Jean-Marc or Thierry, why can’t I be left alone in Lloret de Mar, so I go out for a vigorous walk on the beach, and little by little my thoughts grow more peaceful and the idea no longer seems so unimaginable. I remember the pleasure I felt picking up Cora’s knives, the little jolt it gave my heart.
We were living in a state of hostility so intense that she didn’t send for me at Le Pujol when her time came to go to the hospital, she gave birth to our child with no friendly or familiar presence beside her, she alone chose the baby’s first name, and she gave her her own surname, the same as the Cheffe’s.
And when I finally heard and ran to the maternity ward, when I took little Cora in my arms, her mother turned her face to the wall, refusing to come together with me in any sort of happiness, however briefly, so I felt precious little to be happy about and in fact realized I was ashamed, I put the child down in her cradle, I felt unworthy of that sacred moment.
Even when the daughter came home to our apartment, I rarely had a chance to look after Cora or hold her in my arms, her mother didn’t want me having anything to do with the girl, which in a strange way I could understand, since she hated me.
And then she took steps to finally do what she’d idly talked about long before, she flew off to Canada two or three months after Cora’s birth, taking the child with her, leaving me more alone than I’d ever been.
She’d vaguely promised to send me an address where she could be reached, and having guessed from her tone that she never would I wasn’t surprised not to hear from her, and yet I waited, hoping she’d call to ask me for money, but her greed was no match for her towering hatred, and I lost them both—forever, I thought at the time.
I opened a bank account in Cora’s name, set aside some money for her.
So I too had my young elephant in a faraway land, I wanted her draped one day in the gold I’d worked to give her, even if I never saw her again.
That was the saddest time of my life, without question.
But I have to say I’d grown so dependent on my pills that I came to the end of each day with no particular awareness that I’d lived it, and in the evening I couldn’t clearly remember what I’d done just that morning, or in what order I’d performed the various tasks whose undeniable result my uncaring eyes sometimes landed on, until finally Sophie Pujol urged me to take a medical leave and, since she had little time and no doubt little desire to come calling (the slightest conversation bored me to exhaustion), I found myself with absolutely nothing to do, alone, and in a sense almost happy with so much emptiness.
One springtime evening, it was in that state of mental and emotional blankness that I walked with tiny, shambling steps to La Bonne Heure, my senses registering only the cold basement-like smell drifting from the entryways of apartment buildings whose doors were left open onto the street, I loved that smell when I was a child, I inhaled it deep until my head spun, that cold saltpeter breeze.
I spotted a light behind the kitchen’s grimy windows.
Derelict and befogged, I looked at that light and told myself there was no light there at all, only a projection of my grieving, regretful memory, and walked on.
Then I turned back, not under the impetus of some second, more rational thought but mechanically, like the zombie I’d become, I put my face as close as I could to the barred window, and after many long minutes, little by little, I convinced myself that the lights were indeed on in La Bonne Heure’s kitchen.
Suddenly trembling all over, my forehead knocking the bars, I rapped at the glass, several times, harder and harder.
I stood up straight, I hurried to the restaurant door, I was afraid those truths would become dreams if I wasn’t quick enough, the lights would go out, I had to catch reality off guard to keep it from mutating, such was my frantic, desperate reasoning—hurry, get to the door of La Bonne Heure before the Cheffe, if that really was her, could disappear.
And the door opened, the Cheffe pulling it toward her as she backed into the dimly lit dining room.
“It’s you,” she said quietly, sweetly, in the grave, clear voice I hadn’t heard for more than two years, and it hit me just where I’d long since stopped feeling anything alive, simple, spontaneous, and I felt my shrunken lungs opening up, a searing pain ripped my chest as a feeble, forced smile deformed my mouth, and I walked in without a word, powerless to speak, my hands clenched over my left breast—how cold and constrained I must have seemed, how wooden and emotionless, I told myself, overcome, unable to speak a word, only aware of the dull stiffness, so contrary to what I was feeling, that was paralyzing my features just when I longed for the Cheffe to recognize me as the love of her life, nothing less, because I’d so often imagined this scene that the most unlikely scenarios had taken on the texture of possibilities, and then likelihoods, so when I imagined what would happen if someday I saw the Cheffe again my daydream began at the moment when she laid her eyes on me and realized at last that I was the one man she could love, since I alone loved her blindly.
And now I was standing before her and my face was frozen, desperate, my eyes veiled, my silence imbecilic, oh I almost cursed myself for knocking at that window, I would have run away if my legs had the strength.
“You don’t look well,” said the Cheffe, very gently.
To my deep embarrassment I began to weep, uncontrollably, as I hadn’t since childhood, and even though I’d never so urgently wanted the Cheffe to see me as a man in the full desirable bloom of his maturity.
And I waved my arms every which way, trying to tell her: “Please, don’t pay attention, let my arms wipe these ridiculous minutes from your memory!”
Standing on tiptoe, the Cheffe gave me a hug, and for the first, for the only time in my life I was in her arms, my face pressed to her hair, which she still wore pulled back in that strict chignon, as if to forget and make others forget she had hair at all.
I bent forward, at one corner of my mouth I felt the faint graze of a kiss.
I turned my head a little to let the Cheffe find my lips if she wanted to kiss me again, but she gently pulled away, wiped my cheeks with the back of her hand.
Now she was studying me with concern in her eyes, a concern not without tenderness, I thought, which immediately brought me to life again, gave me the courage to look straight back at her, trying to make my mouth and eyes express everything I was feeling—an exhausted delight, a shivering joy, uncertain but so huge that it bordered on despair.
In the dimness of the dining room, the Cheffe’s pale, shining, alert, polished face seemed to float above the dark patch of her apron, a darkness glistening here and there with damp spots, and I felt a violent longing to follow her into the kitchen and watch her imagine as I used to do, watch her try out procedures and combinations, watch her create, in that liberating nocturnal solitude, before my discreet, d
evoted eyes, recipes whose number and absolute originality were, she said, the only reason a person could have to go on with their humdrum life.
But though she went on looking at me with the greatest affection, the Cheffe didn’t invite me to keep her company in the kitchen.
She looked exactly the same as two years before, I noticed, and I felt all the more aware of my own dilapidation.
I tried to quell the hunger in my gaze as I looked her up and down, compact and self-assured, her beautiful, solid hands on either side of her apron, her smooth, shining forehead, her dark, calm, appraising eyes, the perfect, androgynous oval of her face, unframed by any lush mane of hair, she was the same, yes, you would never have thought she’d suffered a failure, never have thought she’d run away and hidden, whereas my own face clearly expressed the scale of my many disasters—professional, moral, emotional.
How shameful, how shameful to have her see me this way, I said to myself over and over, wishing I could hide my burning face.
The Cheffe saw my distress, my humiliation and misery, so she took my hand, pressed it between her cool, soft hands, and said to me with a smile, “You’re going to have to snap out of this, my boy. You do know I’m planning to reopen next month?”
I stammered out something or other, she was barely paying attention. With one arm she gestured broadly around the dusty dining room and in a gaily eager voice asked me to name a date when I thought I’d be able to come back to work with her.
Yes, it was the Cheffe who by her long, unexplained absence had cast me into the depths of hopelessness and grief, but it was also the Cheffe who pulled me out, who literally saved my life.
She later told me she was deeply shaken by my wretched appearance when she first saw me in the doorway, she’d done her best to hide her pity and her shock, all she could think of was the urgent need to come to my aid, through the only remedy she had any faith in: work.
