by Marie Ndiaye
“Does that mean,” I asked, horrified in advance by the implications of what she might answer, “that you wouldn’t have called me back to you if I was doing fine?”
“Oh, I don’t know, don’t fret, my boy,” she said, evading the question, easygoing and reassuring, but also determined not to lie to me with assurances that she would have asked me back if the circumstances were different.
And then I realized: the Cheffe hadn’t thought of me for the team she was putting together, I realized that, crushed.
I wondered if that rejection had something to do with Cora, if the Cheffe had heard I was the father and so wanted nothing more to do with me, wanted no part of anything or anyone connected with her daughter—or was it simply that like me she was still thinking I’d betrayed her when I quit La Bonne Heure?
I couldn’t possibly ask her that. But when, one day, as if in passing, she told me her daughter was living with a Canadian in Montréal and they had a little girl named Cora, I realized she didn’t know the truth, and I was relieved and at the same time stung by a cruel jealousy of that stranger treating as his own the child stolen away from me, my little elephant, as all the while I diligently amassed her future finery, the mountain of gold I was hoping to heap on her.
I was relieved, but I would have liked to set the Cheffe straight, to proudly tell her, “I’m your granddaughter’s father”—thereby making official another bond between us, indestructible, innocent, and irrefutable, how long the lack of any such unquestionable link had tormented me, how I’d envied her brothers and sisters for being united with her by blood!
But I didn’t, and I vowed I never would.
If the Cheffe ever did find out it wouldn’t be from me, and I didn’t know if with that decision I was protecting or immolating myself, if I was protecting the Cheffe or heartlessly immolating something that was rightfully hers.
The Cheffe ordered me to come work with her every day in preparation for the reopening. Sophie Pujol let me go without regret, and what she hadn’t managed to bring about with all her patient friendship the Cheffe accomplished in three weeks of vigilance and affectionate severity: I stopped taking the pills.
Every morning, opening the door to let me in, she studied me with a cold, penetrating stare.
I set about refreshing the dining room, I painted the walls, waxed the woodwork, scrubbed the floor tiles with black soap, first finding in those tasks, unlike any I’d ever engaged in, a sort of furious sensual pleasure, and then a peaceful satisfaction, which, focused on the smallest detail, on the “job well and thoroughly done,” opportunely reminded me that I was now clean.
Meanwhile, the Cheffe worked in the kitchen, and I hoped that as a reward for my efforts, in recognition of my new mastery over my unhealthy habits, she would invite me to join her there before the rest of the employees came along, but it wasn’t to be, and when it came time for her to introduce her new dishes I found myself looking on with four coworkers, and inside myself I consented to that, I inwardly bowed down, I accepted that I’d still shown too little zeal and modesty to hope I might so soon recapture—even if that day would come—the profound intimacy we’d built up in our work, that almost silent communion, stamped with a trust she’d never felt for anyone else, of that I was sure.
And so the Cheffe showed us the new menu she’d come up with. I liked it, yes, I liked it.
So I can’t say how it was that a small foreboding came to me, a feeling that something wasn’t right, or rather that there was too much of something I couldn’t name in what the Cheffe was doing.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I shooed that premonition away and admired the Cheffe’s inventions as they deserved to be admired, no longer telling myself I was witnessing the beginning of her downfall.
The most recent dishes pushed her rigorism to the limit.
Young people who, like my new coworkers, didn’t know the Cheffe might have described her style as very spare.
I myself saw an asceticism I’d never glimpsed in her work, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t far from hatred, although that was so foreign to the Cheffe’s nature that it left me at a loss.
But in her, I must make this clear, nothing showed, so it was with an unmixed, serene enthusiasm she introduced, described, and explained her capon slow-cooked in borage broth, zander lightly browned in a chestnut leaf, yellow-beet compote, roasted porcini stuffed with walnut confit, carpaccio of hare with peppery mint cream, all of them dishes that, along with the few others she went on to describe for us, quickly attracted a curious clientele when Gabrielle opened, inspiring reviews and word of mouth that with one voice all said the Cheffe could still astonish and delight as she always had, and two years later those dishes earned her back her star, and this time the Cheffe showed neither shame nor unease nor, I think, any emotion at all, she was unmoored and uninterested, consumed by a cold, personal, pugnacious hostility to cuisine.
She would never have been able to work bored, or disillusioned, or weary, she would have closed the restaurant forever if she ever felt such feelings taking hold.
But she had no objection to doing battle.
She never told me anything of the sort when she kept me up all night in the freshly cleaned kitchen, I always found her serene and straightforward, intense and calm, she spoke to me as she would to the only friend she had, to be sure, but also neutrally, with no interest in me specifically, seeing me as the one person who, with his love and his loyalty, might know what to pass on and what might best be kept quiet, if anything had to be.
She didn’t tell me about her new hatred of cuisine, or the way she was imperceptibly cutting ingredient after ingredient from her dishes, keeping within the boundaries of an exquisite simplicity but just on the brink, I anxiously told myself, of tumbling into fruitlessness, so she said nothing of what was troubling her, tormenting her, what had abandoned her.
I saw it only because I loved her as I’d never loved and never would love anyone else.
And yet she thought she could keep that from me.
As one of those nights was coming to an end, I asked where she’d gone when she disappeared, I jokingly told her I’d looked for her all over the world, or at least all over Bordeaux.
She raised one eyebrow, first in surprise, then in amusement. “I wasn’t far away, you know,” she answered. Then she was silent. Finally she added, “I’ve also searched desperately for something I lost.”
The years went by, each like the last, Gabrielle flourished and was praised to the heavens, but nothing reminded me of the joy, the goodness, and the accomplishment of the old days, even if nothing seemed to have changed in the Cheffe’s face or her ways.
I was certain she was lost, I was certain she’d lost everything.
I have a memory from those years, just one, of a moment when I saw the Cheffe’s face as if sculpted from the pure gold of an untainted happiness, it was an evening in winter, during the few weeks, from January to February, when the restaurant was closed.
I stopped by to say hello to the Cheffe as I’d been doing two or three times a week, oh I would have gone to visit her every day if I hadn’t been afraid I might be a bother.
She opened the door to her apartment, I immediately noticed her beaming, muted air and her bright blue blouse, its halo encircling her with a lunar glow. “I have company for a few days,” she told me.
A little girl appeared behind her, tall and sturdy, with long brown hair and sharp, interested eyes that stared into mine but saw no sign of anything, I immediately thought, suddenly defenseless and powerless.
The Cheffe told her my first name and the child held out her hand. I kept it in mine for a moment. “Hello, Cora, pleased to meet you,” I said quietly. She gave me a little nod of her pretty, thoughtful head.
Claiming I didn’t want to intrude, I hurried out, my legs rubbery, hating and pitying myself at the
same time, feeble and faint of heart, unable to bear with the same cheerful endurance what had been forced on me and what I’d chosen of my own free will.
A few days before her death, for some people so unexpected that they felt the need to invent a brain tumor she supposedly kept secret or decided not to have taken out (but what good does it do to ask why?), the Cheffe called to invite me to Sainte-Bazeille the next Sunday, at lunchtime.
She would close Gabrielle for the day, she told me in an exaggeratedly mysterious tone that wasn’t like her, and we’d be joined by a number of her friends who, she was sure, would also enjoy an impromptu day in the country.
She explained how to get to the inn she’d reserved for the occasion, just at the edge of Sainte-Bazeille on the Marmande side, and her artificially exuberant voice gave me an uneasy feeling, like the fact that she’d called instead of talking to me face-to-face in the restaurant.
When I got to the inn, just off the national highway, they told me the Cheffe was waiting in the garden.
I walked through the empty dining room, with its hard beige tile, its polished wood furniture, and I found myself in an enchanted garden, oh, those are exactly the words that came to my mind.
The Cheffe was sitting at a little table in the grass, with black and white chickens wandering freely among the fruit-covered cherry trees. Between those trees, as if by chance, grew carrots, rocket, peas, and beans, which those round, tidy chickens pecked at here and there, strangely perfunctory, as if they had everything they wanted and were doing all this purely for show, for the sake of the tableau.
The Cheffe heard me, stood up, luminous, pure, and crisp in a white cotton dress I’d never seen on her before, with her open, unadorned face that in its perfection was nothing other than what it was, I couldn’t help taking that face in my hands for a moment, and the Cheffe didn’t pull back or protest, my heart was gripped by a sharp, limpid sadness that caused me no real pain.
The Cheffe invited me to sit down, then she called toward the inn, and almost immediately we were brought two glasses and a bottle of Graves in an ice bucket.
I asked the Cheffe where her friends were. “What friends? There’s only you,” she answered with a smile.
She poured the wine, tilted her head back to feel the sun on her skin.
Then I decided to chase away the unease and anxiety that were stupidly keeping me from enjoying the moment, and I offered my face to the sun along with her.
When I quietly, happily told her how hungry I was, the Cheffe sat up, stretched out her arm, and pointed toward the chickens, the young vegetables, the ripe cherries.
She told me the meal was there, spare, magnificent, and perfect.
We could imagine the taste of each element, and the taste of them put together. She would never invent anything simpler or more beautiful, and so our wine, that excellent Graves, was all we would need for our lunch, the culmination, she said with a painful seriousness, of the long ceremony that was her career.
Three days later, on Wednesday, the Cheffe died in her bed, with no sign of a fight.
I ask Cora if she’s found a name for the restaurant she wants to open in Lloret de Mar. She tells me it will be just a first name, maybe preceded by chez. She then tells me her grandmother’s name, Gabrielle. “What a fine idea,” I murmur, doing my best, for discretion’s sake, to conceal at least some of my joy.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
her impish picture in Sud-Ouest: Sud-Ouest is a newspaper that covers the southwestern corner of France.
assuming I don’t get the reference, you’re convinced I don’t have much of an education: The allusion is to Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story “L’enfance d’un chef,” usually translated into English as “The Childhood of a Leader.”
my apartment in Lloret de Mar has more visitors in a week than my Mériadeck studio saw in several years: Lloret de Mar is a resort town on the Spanish Mediterranean; Mériadeck is a modern, planned business district in Bordeaux.
when she talked about Sainte-Bazeille: Sainte-Bazeille is a small town southeast of Bordeaux.
a family in Marmande: Marmande is a modest city a few kilometers southeast of Sainte-Bazeille.
as polished and glazed as gravestone ornaments: The large slabs of stone covering graves in French cemeteries often bear tributes or remembrances in the form of thickly laminated plaques.
“one big cromesquis!”: A cromesquis is a croquette made of chopped meat in cream sauce, breaded and fried.
she called her restaurant La Bonne Heure: The name of the restaurant echoes the expression à la bonne heure, which has a variety of meanings ranging from “it’s about time” or “just in time” to a more general expression of pleasure, not all that different from a simple “Hooray!” There are English equivalents, but none of them fits the context: the name La Bonne Heure is an entirely plausible name for a restaurant in France, which—to my ear, at least—is not true of that phrase’s counterparts in our language.
went off to the Marché des Capucins: A large covered food market in central Bordeaux.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She was only seventeen when her first work was published. She was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina for her novel Rosie Carpe, the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women, and the Gold Medal in the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. She lives in Berlin.
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