Dirt

by Bill Buford

  David had told me about such moments. When Richard tells stories, he forgets that he is driving. He is the only person I know who has been ticketed, often, for going too slow. Once, he and David drove to New York from Washington. As they talked, Richard drove more and more slowly, until they both became worried about the time. “We should have arrived by now,” Richard said. At last, the city came into view, but when they reached it they discovered it wasn’t New York. It was Philadelphia. “Oh là là!” Richard said, laughing at himself. They carried on. Talking, talking. After another two hours, they finally reached New York. Except it wasn’t New York. It was again Philadelphia. “For two hours,” David said, “we had been driving in circles.”

  It was now nine-fifteen. What was that pinging?

  “Michel,” I said, “what is that noise?”

  “What is that noise? Oh, it’s my gas. That’s the noise the car makes when my gas is low. Oh. I didn’t know it was that low. What time is your train?”

  I told him again.

  We stopped for gas.

  It was nine-twenty-one.

  “You know, I really have to pee-pee,” he said.

  He went off to pee-pee.

  I rehearsed the two scenarios. In one, I exit Richard’s car—bag ready, ticket in hand, fly—and I make the train. In the other, I don’t.

  I contemplated the consequences. What does a babysitter do when the derelict father doesn’t come home?

  Richard returned to the car. It was nine-twenty-three.

  We pulled up to the station. I kissed Michel, I said goodbye. I had sixty seconds. I made it.

  It was after midnight when I got home.

  The next day, Friday, was our last day in New York.

  * * *

  —

  I woke early, wondering: How do you pack for forever? How many socks?

  I used every container with a handle or a strap—every Rollaboard, carry-on rucksack, duffel, even a nylon sleeping-bag storage bag—and thought: I’m going to get killed on the extra-baggage charges. In the event, the high cost wasn’t the luggage. It was that, by the time we reached the airport, our plane had taken off, and the three seats that we had purchased on it had left New York City unoccupied.

  I leaned heavily atop the check-in desk, having confirmed that our airplane was somewhere in the vicinity of Newfoundland and that, no, its being the Christmas season, there were no other flights tonight or tomorrow. The first available one was Sunday. My two children hung limply onto my knees; Frederick had just been horribly carsick. I had to accept that we were returning to our New York City apartment. I summoned the courage to phone Jessica, waiting for us in Lyon, to inform her that, well, there had been a delay. “Actually, not a delay. We missed the flight.”

  Once again, the empty sounds of an empty apartment, except that this time it seemed especially empty, a loud echo chamber of emptinesses, the hollowness of a heart in pain. My wife’s voice was different. Something in it I hadn’t heard before. Fear. The fear was basic. It was her husband. She was in Lyon, alone, because of him. She was there, without her children, because of him. She was in this—how to describe?—unplanned, dysfunctional, erratically impulsive, obstacle course of a life: because of him. What I was hearing, there amid higher ethereal notes of mounting panic, was that the real mistake, the very basic mistake, was her marriage.

  The phone call was, for both of us, a big moment.

  We had, only six months before, experienced another big moment, a very positive one, the aforementioned most profound and consequential exchange in our married life. This one was not positive, and would never be positive, and could not retrospectively be reconfigured in our nostalgic imaginations as positive “in its way” or “not so bad, really,” or even “funny.” This was the nadir of our married life.

  Nadir: I’d never used the word before. But here I was. At the nadir.

  In fact, we weren’t.

  II

  Lyon with Twin Toddlers

  “How can you love Lyon?”

  Ungracious question!

  It is true that our town is not easy to love. It is an acquired taste. Almost a vice. No place in the world is less accommodating to tourists. The visitor finds nothing to look at and nothing to do. Like others, we have admirable and worthy monuments. But it must be conceded that the Lyonnais soul feels only a weak attachment to them. And the “views” themselves—the dome of the Hôtel-Dieu, reigning in all its dreary grandeur over the eternal Rhône; the Saône near Bellecour, its footbridges drawn in ink over the green-gold water; the whole pale silver city that peeks through the smoke—leave us indifferent, a banal daily décor, and we pay no more attention to them than to the immense industrial noise.

  HENRI BÉRAUD, VOUS NE CONNAISSEZ PAS MON PAYS (YOU DON’T KNOW MY COUNTRY), 1944, TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  We arrived on Monday. Frederick had a stomach virus, George had a fever, and their father wasn’t in particularly top form. Jessica’s plans—a family lunch out, Saturday and Sunday at the market on the quai, shopping for a Christmas tree (she had even arranged an English-speaking babysitter, a robust, strapping Lyonnais named Stephen, so that we might slip out for a romantic evening)—were for naught, because, she informed us, most of Lyon closes on Mondays. We ate a sandwich bought at a Casino, a chain food store, and napped, and woke too late to check in with the school. There was never a chance of getting to la mairie with the boys’ passports. Besides, we had an early morning flight to Rome. We didn’t miss it. We arrived five minutes before the gate closed. We sprinted.

  Our return flight, the Friday before Christmas, left in the morning so we had a chance of getting back while the school was still open. There was a snowstorm. We arrived, late, just before the airport closed, and Lyon, a historically Catholic metropolis, observed the holidays by a nearly three-week-long, universally observed celebration, in which it did nothing. It was already locked up: restaurants (where I might have introduced myself to chefs), government offices (like la mairie, the mayor’s office), and of course the schools.

  The apartment was cold, at least to us, New Yorkers obviously too long acclimated to being overheated.

  Frederick, who looked frail and pale, was in remarkably good cheer, sitting on our new IKEA sofa in front of the black unconnected television (the cable company was also closed). He took in the dimensions of our new IKEA living room and, sensing our new isolation, innocently asked, “Where are all the friends?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The next morning, I took the boys to a café for a Lyonnais version of what had been our custom in New York City, a Saturday breakfast. The boys ordered hot chocolate, their habit, and asked for extra sugar, also their habit. The waiter snorted and returned with a pair of cubes that looked distinctly secondhand. They had been gathered up from the ones left behind on coffee saucers and reassembled into a used wrapper to form a pair.

  Afterward, I proposed that we visit the indoor market, Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, on the other side of the Rhône River.

  We took a taxi. The boys and I climbed into the back seat. The drive was five minutes. The fare was seven euros. I had a ten-euro note. The driver took it and made change, and just as I was about to tell him to keep it, he hit Frederick.

  Frederick had put his dinky Velcro-secured footwear on the seat—short, pudgy three-year-old legs, tiny feet, little rolled-up white socks.

  “Don’t put your feet on my seat,” the driver said, and thwacked the boy, twice: once on each shin, with the back of his hand (the one bearing a wedding ring).

  I stepped out and took in what I’d just seen: a man, this stranger, pausing before completing a financial transaction in order to hit my child.

  I searched for words, while securing my children on the sidewalk, and put my head back into the car to tell the driver, in my best possible French, that he must never (jamais!
), ever touch (toucher) my child (mon fils) or I would rip the eyeballs out of his fat sockets and eat them.

  Actually, I have no idea what I said.

  “Merci, monsieur. Merci beaucoup!” He smiled and drove off.

  * * *

  —

  I got a Christmas tree, a straggler (a brittle-needled, crisply dehydrated, abandoned loser-stump), Jessica bought candles, and I set out to procure a festive bird. I found nothing. No goose or turkey or duck. Every fowl had been bought. I settled on what I concluded was the city’s last capon, a massive twenty-plus-pound neutered rooster, my first food transaction, a brutal piece of business with a butcher, in which he kept saying “Quand?”—“When?”—an utterly basic word that, in the urgency of the exchange, I kept failing to understand. (“Quand?” “Quoi?” “Quand?” “Pardon?” “Quand, pour quand?” “Oh, I get it. Pour quand! Now?”)

  On Christmas Eve, the four of us gathered around a small table in the kitchen, the only warm room in the apartment—a gusty black night, with candles that wouldn’t stay lit—and I carved a bird that could have fed twenty-five people.

  George, having become fascinated by the head—the first time that he had seen a bird with one attached—ate it and nothing else. I have an image, of his working his teeth around the beak and chewing on the wattle, his eyes dark with sleepless circles.

  It got colder. We turned up the thermostat.

  It was broken, we realized, which was immaterial, since the plumbers weren’t working.

  We isolated a hissing gale sound—not through the beautiful fireplaces (where we were forbidden by law from lighting fires), but via a crack between two large doorlike windows—easy enough to repair if we had a repairman to call.

  Christmas morning happened. (No memory.) New Year’s Eve happened. (No memory.) New Year’s Day happened. (No memory.)

  I got ill. Lungs. Phlegm. An infection.

  Jessica got ill. Lungs. Worse. Pneumonia.

  We summoned SOS Médecins, a house-call doctor service. It cost 120 euros, because we had no health coverage in France. Until we registered with the prefecture, we didn’t exist in the eyes of the government. (The prefecture was also closed.) It was a long Christmas vacation. We fought. We were waiting for Thursday, January 8, the day when the schools reopened. We were waiting to learn if it was their school.

  And if it was no longer their school? I asked. They were three months late.

  Jessica was unusually confident. She’d had a bonding moment with the principal. Could you really enroll children on a feeling? Their places were being held (if they were being held) on nothing more than their first names. (First names and a feeling?) At a playground on the quai, I met parents, also newcomers to Lyon, who had tried to enroll their child in the same school and been rejected because there was no more room. Had a child been turned away owing to our no-show toddlers?

  * * *

  —

  On the day of the school’s reopening, we set out nervously. The principal, Brigitte, was at the top of the steps. She recognized Jessica instantly. “Voilà les garçons!” she declared.

  The mutual relief—hers, ours, but especially ours—felt like an enormous exhale. We felt airborne. We could have been balloons. Brigitte led the boys to their cubbyholes. She was very excited. No one in the school had met a New Yorker before. (The effect would eventually make the boys celebrities. They were les New-Yorkais.)

  Brigitte mentioned the canteen.

  (Yes!)

  But not yet, she said.

  (What?)

  It is raucous. It is noisy. Too much for now. “It would be better if les garçons ate at home.”

  (Me: I love the idea of a raucous canteen. Why would we want to interrupt our day to feed our children?)

  This was terrible news.

  The weekday home lunch is an honorable practice, a testament to the importance that France attaches to mealtime, and in our building, all families with children prepared lunch: The mother (usually) picked up the children, and the father (often) came home from work, stopping first at the local boulangerie for baguettes. At one-forty-five, the children returned. Ours refused. Every day, they refused. Demonstrably, tearfully, implacably.

  They liked home. They liked speaking English. They didn’t understand French. (Agnès, their teacher, asked Jessica: “Qu’est-ce que c’est le mot ‘potty’? Every day your boys say, ‘Excuse me, I need to potty.’ What is potty?”)

  It became my task, the indifferent patriarch, to take both boys under my arms, and march them back.

  “The lunches,” Jessica said, “aren’t working.”

  “They suck.”

  “But it’s what good French mothers do.”

  “You’re not French.”

  “I’ve got to get them into the canteen.”

  Jessica met with Brigitte and, like that, the boys were enrolled. And, like that, our lives began.

  We had been in Lyon for a month. Finally, I could address why I’d come: to find a kitchen to work in.

  WORK

  One might ask how to reconcile the Lyonnais cult of good eating with their aversion to spending? Because finally nothing is more onerous than being a gourmand, if one is constant in the pursuit.

  The answer lies in the common Lyonnais sayings: “skimping on the roast is a fool’s savings,” “the mouth comes before all else,” or “the bottom of the bottle is for quitters.”

  HENRI BÉRAUD, VOUS NE CONNAISSEZ PAS MON PAYS (YOU DON’T KNOW MY COUNTRY), 1944, TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  La Mère Brazier was the place. I knew it ever since Boulud had mentioned it, in the very tradition of nineteenth-century mère chefs that Jean-Georges had referred to—nos saintes mères. They had all started as cooks in the grand homes of local industrialists, preparing cuisine bourgeoise—in effect, home cooking for a family with pretensions—become famous in their own right, and then struck out on their own.

  Eugénie Brazier was, in many respects, a prototype mère. She was one of nine children, born in 1895 in the Dombes, the flat wetlands between Lyon and the Alps, and on a swampy peasant farm not far from Bourg-en-Bresse (where the famous chickens come from). At the age of five, Brazier looked after the animals—pigs first, then graduated to cows. When she was ten, her mother died (childbirth). At nineteen, Brazier was pregnant by a married man in the village; bore a son, Gaston; was banished by her father; and found employment in Lyon as a nourrice (wet nurse) in a bourgeois family called the Milliats and, in time, as their cook. The Milliats were wealthy—they ran a pasta factory—and their wealth made them gastronomes (because an appreciation of food was how wealthy Lyonnais expressed high culture) and regulars of the greatest of all the mères, Mère Fillioux. When Fillioux later asked the Milliats if they could recommend a cook to help in her increasingly busy restaurant, they proposed their own Eugénie.

  There is no record of Brazier’s contribution to the restaurant (she was too embarrassed by her spelling ever to write), except that it is said Fillioux grew jealous of her talent (when Brazier made the traditional Sunday lunch for the staff, “un civet de lapin,” a rich rabbit stew, Fillioux made the mistake of asking whose was better—hers or Brazier’s), and they parted company. Brazier never married but had a companion, Le Père, a chauffeur for one of the bourgeois families, and with his help secured a ground-floor corner space of what had originally been an eighteenth-century town house on the rue Royale. She opened for business on April 19, 1921. In 1928, she opened a second restaurant, without water, electricity, or gas, in Luère, in the woods west of Lyon.

  Brazier—in her prime, a hefty woman with exceptionally strong shoulders and powerful forearms, famously photographed in front of a steaming pot—had a reputation for being formidable and fearsome. There are stories, which everyone enjoys repeating, of her intolerance of mistakes and how she humiliated those who mad
e them, especially Gaston, her illegitimate son, who had the misfortune of always having to be by her side in a kitchen from before he could walk. In 1933, she became not only the first female chef to be awarded three Michelin stars but also the first chef, male or female, to get three Michelin stars for two restaurants at the same time, a feat that wouldn’t be repeated for decades. La Mère Brazier was the city’s greatest restaurant—it said “Lyon” like no other eating establishment—and then it closed, in 2007, and the city went into culinary mourning.

  Mathieu Viannay’s reopening it was a big deal. Viannay himself was probably a big deal—I didn’t know (Boulud called him “the future of Lyon”)—and it was an urgent first piece of business for me to get over there (the restaurant was on the other side of the Presqu’île from our apartment, the Rhône side, a ten-minute walk). I wasn’t the only one: By then, everyone wanted to eat his food, because, one month after we arrived in Lyon, the Michelin Guide had (exceptionally, flamboyantly) awarded him two stars. The normal practice was to make chefs climb the Michelin ladder. Even Paul Bocuse began with one star. It wasn’t unprecedented, to start with two, but it was rare and, in the institutional parlance of the guide, an expression of high flattery.

  I brought along a French edition of the book I had written about the Italian kitchen. We met him at the door. He asked if he could give us a tour.