The moment I bit into the slice of toast, utterly sated for having honored my bountiful plate up to the very last morsel, I was overcome with an inexpressible sense of well-being. Why is it that in France we obstinately refrain from buttering our bread until after it has been toasted? The reason the two entities should be subjected together to the flickering flame is that in this intimate moment of burning they attain an unequalled complicity. The butter loses some of its creamy consistency, but nevertheless is not as liquid as when it is melted on its own, in a bain-marie or a saucepan. Likewise, the toast is spared a somewhat dreary dryness, and becomes a moist, warm substance, neither sponge nor bread but something in between, ready to tantalize one’s taste buds with its contemplative delicacy.
It is terrible how close I feel. Bread, brioche . . . it seems that at last I am headed down the right path, the one which will lead to my truth. Or have I been induced in error yet again—the wrong track leading me astray, convincing me all the better to disappoint me, to laugh sarcastically at my undoing? I shall try other alternatives. Time to take a gamble.
(Rick)
Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom
So here I am, basking in my basket, or sprawled on the sofa feeling feline—have you ever seen such purrfect style?!
My name is Rick. My master is generally inclined to assign names from the movies to his pets, but I will hasten to point out that I am his favorite. Indeed I am. There have been many cats here over the years: a few of them unfortunately were not robust enough and they quickly disappeared, others were victims of tragic accidents (like the year they had to replace the drainpipe that gave way under the weight of a very sweet little white cat called Scarlett), and there were others with greater longevity, but now I am the only one left, and here I am, nineteen years I’ve knocked about as head tomcat on the Persian rugs of my abode; just me, the favorite, the master’s alter ego, the one and only, to whom he declared his thoughtful, undying love one day when I was stretched out on the desk across his latest restaurant review, beneath the big warm lamp. “Rick,” he said, ruffling the fur at the base of my spine, “Rick, you’re my favorite, oh yes, what a fine cat you are, aren’t you, now . . . I’m not mad at you, you can even tear up this paper, I’ll never get mad at you . . . who’s a fine tom with his buccaneer’s whiskers . . . his silky fur . . . look at those Olympian muscles . . . that Herculean back . . . those iridescent opal eyes . . . yes, my fine kitty . . . my one and only . . . ”
Why Rick? you may ask. I myself often wondered, but as I have no words with which to formulate the question, it went unheeded until one December evening about ten years ago, when a little redheaded woman, who used to come to the house to have tea with the Maître, asked, as she gently stroked my neck, where my name had come from. (I liked her, that lady, she always had a slightly musky fumet about her, very unusual for a woman, as most of her sex are inevitably smeared with heavy, heady perfumes, lacking that little scent of venison in which a cat—a real cat—can find just what he’s looking for.) He replied, “It’s after the character Rick in Casablanca, he’s a man who knows how to give up a woman because he would rather have his freedom.” I could sense that she stiffened a little. But I could also appreciate that aura of manly seduction with which the Maître gratified me through his offhand reply.
Of course today none of that matters anymore. Today the Maître is going to die. I know he is, I heard Chabrot tell him so, and when he had left, the Maître took me on his lap, looked me in the eyes (they must really have been pitiful, my poor tired eyes, and it’s not because cats don’t cry that they don’t know how to show they are sad), and he said, sorrowfully, “Never listen to doctors, sweetheart.” But I can see that it’s the end. His, and mine, because I’ve always known we would have to die together. And so while his right hand is on my docile tail and I’ve got my pads planted on the plumped comforter, I can reminisce.
It was always like this. I could hear his quick steps on the tiles in the entrance, and very soon he’d be coming up the steps two by two. I would instantly jump up onto my velvet paws and make a beeline for the hall and there, on the somewhat ochre kilim, between the coat rack and the marble console, I would wait obediently.
He would open the door, remove his overcoat, hang it up with an abrupt gesture, see me at last and then lean over to caress me with a smile. Anna would arrive quickly thereafter, but he didn’t look at her, and he went on stroking me, gently petting me. “Has he lost weight, the cat, do you think, Anna?” he would ask, a touch of concern in his voice. “Of course not, dearest, of course not.” I would follow him into his study, then perform his favorite number (crouch down, leap and land noiselessly, as soft as leather, on the morocco-bound blotter). “Good boy, come over here, come and tell me everything that’s happened all this time . . . Nyes . . . I’ve got the devil’s own amount of work here . . . but you don’t care and you’re absolutely right . . . mmm, feel that silky little belly . . . there, stretch out over there so I can get some work done . . . ”
Never again will there be the scratching of his pen on the white sheet, never again those afternoons with the rain pounding on the windowpane, while next to him in the muffled comfort of his impenetrable study I would grow languid, faithfully accompanying the gestation of his grandiose oeuvre. Never again.
Whisky
Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom
My grandpa had been in the war with him. They hadn’t had much to say to each other since that memorable time, but it had sealed between them an indestructible friendship which would not cease even upon my grandfather’s death. Gaston Bienheureux—that was his name—would continue to visit his friend’s widow for as long as she was still alive, and went so far as to display the silent tact of dying a few weeks after she did, his task accomplished.
Sometimes he came to Paris on business and he never failed to stop off at his friend’s with a little crate of the latest vintage. But twice a year, at Easter and All Saint’s Day, it was grandpa who “went down” to Burgundy, alone, without his wife, for three days which we assumed were well-watered, and he was always taciturn upon his return, deigning only to articulate that they had “had a good talk.”
When I was fifteen he took me with him. Burgundy is reputed above all for its wines from the Côte, the narrow verdant strip of land which stretches from Dijon to Beaune through an impressive palette of prestigious names: Gevrey-Chambertin, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Aloxe-Corton, and, further south, Pommard, Monthélie, and Meursault, almost exiled to the border of the county. Gaston Bienheureux was not one to envy those well-off sorts. In Irancy he was born, in Irancy he lived, in Irancy he would die. In this little village in the Yonne region, nestled in a farandole of hills and entirely devoted to the grape which prospers in its generous soil, there is no envy of faraway neighbors, for the nectar lovingly produced there does not seek competition. It knows its strengths, it has its qualities: there is nothing more it needs in order to endure.
The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous. My father had taken me, several months earlier, to visit the cellars of the Château de Meursault: so much splendor! The arches and vaulted ceilings, the pomp of the labels, the coppered gleam of the racks, and the crystal glasses all spoke for the quality of the wine, but were hindrances to my pleasure upon tasting it. All these luxurious intrusions of décor and decorum were interferences, and I could not determine whether it was the liquid or the surroundings that were teasing my tongue with an extravagant stimulus. To be honest, I was not yet terribly sensitive to the charms of wine, but I was only too aware that a man of quality is obliged to appreciate tasting it on a daily basis, and so, in the hopes that things would eventually head down the right path, I confessed to no one that all I gleaned from the exercise was a very mediocre satisfaction. Since that time, naturally, I have been inducted into the brotherhood of wine, I have come to understand—and reveal to others—the power of a full-bodied vintage pulsating in one’s
mouth, flooding it with a bouquet of tannin where the flavor is increased tenfold. But at the time I was too immature to measure up to wine, and I drank it somewhat reticently, waiting impatiently for it to share with me the talents for which it is renowned. Therefore, what I looked forward to in my grandpa’s treat was not so much the alcoholic promises it concealed as the pleasure of his company and the discovery of an unfamiliar countryside.
From the start I liked the landscape, but also Gaston’s wine cellar, a place without frills, a simple large damp cellar with a beaten-earth floor and cob walls. Here there were neither vaults nor arches; nor was there a château to greet the customer, only a pretty Burgundian house blooming with courtesy and discreet by vocation; a few ordinary stem glasses placed on a barrel at the entrance to the cellar. That is where, no sooner had we stepped out of the car, we began our tasting.
How they talked, on and on. Glass after glass, as they went through the bottles the winemaker opened one after the other, with total disregard for the spittoons placed here and there in the room for those who wanted to taste without fear of getting drunk; they drank methodically, accompanying the purely phatic rehashing of clearly imaginary memories with impressive amounts of liquid. I was no longer feeling very robust myself when Gaston, who thus far had only acknowledged me somewhat absentmindedly, looked me over more sharply and said to my grandfather, “The lad doesn’t care for wine much, now, does he?” I was too tipsy to protest my innocence. What’s more, with his overalls, wide black suspenders, red plaid shirt as bright as his nose and cheeks, and his black beret, I really liked the man, and didn’t want to lie to him. So I did not contradict him.
Every man, in his way, is master of his castle. The coarsest peasant, the most uncultured winemaker, the most miserable employee, the shabbiest shopkeeper, the greatest pariah among all those who have been excluded from the consideration of society, rejected lock stock and barrel; the simplest of men, therefore, always have in their possession their very own genius, the one that will ensure them of their hour of glory. All the more so someone like Gaston, who was not a pariah. This simple worker, who may have been a prosperous tradesman but remained a peasant at heart, isolated on his few acres of vineyard, suddenly became for me a prince among princes, because in any activity, whether noble or reviled, there is always room for an all-powerful flash of realization.
“Shouldn’t you teach him something about life, Albert?” he asked. “Do you think the kid would be up for some DTH?” And my grandfather laughed quietly. “You see, lad,” continued Gaston, inspired by the imminent prospect of furthering my education, “everything you’ve tasted here today is good stuff, the real thing. But a winemaker doesn’t sell everything: as you might suspect, he keeps some stuff for himself, for his thirst, not for trade (his good-natured mug was split ear to ear by a smile worthy of a crafty fox). So he always keeps some DTH on hand, some ‘down the hatch.’ And when he has people round, friends, I should say, well, he dips into his DTH.” He suddenly interrupted the tippling that was already well in progress. “Come away here, come on then,” he said impatiently, as I rose unsteadily to my feet. Giving him a grim look, my tongue coated with the devious ways of drink, I followed him to the back of the cellar and, although I was greatly intrigued by this new concept, the DTH, which was bound to offer undreamt-of glimpses into the lifestyle of gentlemen of taste, I expected it to lead to still more glug-glugging of wine, a prospect that filled me with a certain amount of apprehension. “Since you’re still a bit on the young side for the serious things of life,” he continued, stopping in front of a massive cupboard armed with an enormous padlock, “and with the parents you have, you can’t expect too much either”—he slipped my grandfather a gaze that left no doubt about what he was implying, and Albert said not a word—“to my way of thinking it’s time to clean out your pipe with something a bit more astringent. What I’m going to dig out here for you from behind the firewood is something I’m sure you’ve never drunk. It’s good stuff. This will be your baptism. I’ll say it again: you’re in for a true education.”
Out of an unfathomably deep pocket he pulled a very heavy set of keys, put one of them into the enormous lock, and turned. My grandpa’s expression instantly became more serious. Warned by this sudden solemnity, I sniffed nervously, straightened my spine, which had become seriously impaired by our tippling, and waited with considerable apprehension while Gaston, with a meaningful gesture, took from the safe a bottle wrapped in black that most definitely was not wine, and a large, squat, unadorned glass.
This was the DTH. He ordered his whisky from Scotland, from one of the best distilleries in the country. The owner was a chap he’d known in Normandy, just after the war, and with whom he’d quickly discovered a shared affinity for liquids rated by degrees. Every year a crate of the precious whisky came to join the handful of bottles of wine he put aside for personal use. And from varietals to peat, from ruby to amber, and from alcohol to alcohol, he reconciled the two before and during meals that he himself qualified as profoundly European.
“I sell some good things, but the best go down my hatch.” The way he treated the few bottles set aside from the grape harvest, and his friend Mark’s whisky (to his regular guests he only served a very good whisky bought locally, which was to the Scotsman’s whisky what a tomato in a can is to its rival in the vegetable garden), caused him to rise all at once in my adolescent’s esteem, which already assumed that greatness and expertise are to be measured by exceptions and not by rules, even if they were rules made by kings. With his private little cellar Gaston Bienheureux had just become, in my eyes, a potential artist. Subsequently I never failed to suspect all the restaurateurs in whose establishments I dined of displaying on their tables no more than the minor works of their industry, and of keeping for themselves, in the intimacy of their culinary alcoves, victuals that were worthy of a pantheon and inaccessible to ordinary mortals. But for the moment I was hardly preoccupied by such philosophical consideration. I stared dumbly at the bronze liquid as he poured out a meager portion and, filled with misgivings, I sought in my deepest soul the courage to confront it.
To start with, the unfamiliar aroma unsettled me beyond anything I thought possible. Such formidable aggressiveness, such a muscular, abrupt explosion, dry and fruity at the same time, like a charge of adrenaline that has deserted the tissues where it ordinarily resides in order to evaporate upon the surface of the nose, a gaseous concentration of sensorial precipices . . . Stunned, I discovered that I liked this blunt whiff of incisive fermentation.
Like some ethereal marchioness, I cautiously ventured my lips into the peaty magma and . . . what a violent effect! An explosion of piquancy and seething elements suddenly detonates in my mouth; my organs no longer exist, no more palate or cheeks or saliva, only the ravaging sensation that some telluric warfare is raging inside me. In raptures, I allowed the first mouthful to linger for a moment on my tongue, while concentric undulations continued to engage it for a long while. That is the first way to drink whisky: absorb it ferociously, inhaling its pungent, unforgiving taste. The second swallow, on the other hand, was undertaken precipitously; as soon as it had gone down, it took a moment to warm my solar plexus—but what warmth it was! The stereotypical gesture of the man who drinks strong liquor—swallowing down the object of his desire in one gulp, then waiting, then closing his eyes from the shock and exhaling a sigh of mingled ease and commotion—offers a second manner of drinking whisky, where the taste buds are almost insensitive because the alcohol is merely passing through one’s throat, and the plexus, perfectly sensitive, is suddenly overwhelmed by heat as if a bomb of ethylic plasma had landed there. It heats, and heats again, it disconcerts and rouses. It feels good. It is a sun whose blessed rays assure the body of its beaming presence.
Thus it was in the heart of wine-growing Burgundy that I drank my first whisky and experienced for the first time the power it has to wake the dead. With this added irony: the fact that
Gaston himself led me to this discovery should have put me on the path of my true passion. Yet throughout my career I have never considered whisky to be anything more than a drink which, however delightful, is nevertheless of secondary importance: only the gold of wine could deserve my praise and the most significant prophecies of my oeuvre. Alas . . . it is only now that I understand: wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling glossy trinkets adored by little girls. I learned to love what was worthy but in doing so I neglected to entertain the sudden passion that had no need of education. I truly love only beer and whisky—even though I do acknowledge that wine is divine. And as it has been decreed that today will be little more than a long series of acts of contrition, here is yet another: oh, Mephistophelean whisky, I loved you from the first swig, and betrayed you from the second—but nowhere else did I ever find, amidst the tyranny of flavors imposed upon me by my position, such a nuclear expansion capable of blasting my jaw away with delight . . .
Desolation: I have been laying siege to my lost flavor in the wrong citadel . . . It is not to be found in the wind or heather of a desolate moor, nor in a deep loch or a dark stone wall. All of that is lacking in indulgence, in affability, in moderation. Ice, not fire: I find myself trapped at the wrong impasse.
(Laure)
Nice
On est bien peu de chose, et mon amie la rose me l’a dit ce matin . . . My God, what a sad song . . . I am sad myself . . . and weary, so weary . . .
I was born in an old French family where values still remain what they have always been. A family of granite rigidity. It would never have crossed my mind that these values might be questioned: an idiotic and old-fashioned youth—somewhat romantic, somewhat diaphanous—spent waiting for Prince Charming and exhibiting my cameo profile whenever a worldly occasion arose. And then I got married, and quite naturally it meant the passage from the protection of my parents to that of my husband, and the dashing of my hopes, and the insignificance of life as a woman kept back in childhood, a life devoted to bridge parties and receptions for want of anything better to do, utterly unaware that there might actually be something better to do.
Gourmet Rhapsody Page 8
