Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Lyon is beautiful, and rare, but it is not this, it is not nature. In Lyon, the rivers make everything built near them—bridges, quais, pastel-painted sixteenth-century homes, random Roman ruins—into performances of light and darkness and reflection. But Lyon is also a throwback city—wiseguys, corrupt cops, unbathed operators working a chance, the women, mainly Eastern European, working their trade. Friday nights are rough: The after-hours clubs across the Saône from our home open at 11:00 p.m. and close whenever—Elody’s Pub, Fiesta, Bootlegger, New Ibiza. Saturday nights, remarkably, are rougher than Fridays. You wake on Sunday and there is a drunk guy leaning against your door. A vehicle that had been parked in front of the apartment has been torched. Farmers arrive early at the market to hose away vomit.

  At school, George got into fights. During recess, boys from a Gypsy family—the “Roms,” migrant Romanians and Bulgarians who lived in plastic tents on a vacant block on the outskirts of the city—pinned down a child and cut off his eyelashes with scissors. A babysitter twisted Frederick’s ear until it changed color and he cried. During the vacation in April, at a day-care facility run by the city, young George got a backhand across the face because he wasn’t standing in a straight line. Everybody seems to hit their children. They spank them on subways, in streets, at a playground, in restaurants, and at Sunday school. They smack boys on their ears and slap them across the forehead, one-two-three, pow-pow-pow (because little Sébastien is slow getting off a bus). A substitute teacher got so frustrated by one of the boys’ friends that she lifted him out of his chair by his ear, and strangled him. (This was a mistake on many levels, especially because the boy’s mother was a lawyer, and, to give the school its due, the teacher was dismissed.)

  I had come to Lyon to learn how to cook French food, but I hadn’t come on my own. This changed the enterprise. The family stuff mattered. During our first six months, each member of our small family had come to doubt the wisdom of the project. Ours clearly wasn’t a pastoral pilgrimage. It wasn’t a cultural one. We still hadn’t been to Paris. L’Orangerie and the Impressionist painters weren’t on our to-do list.

  We reached the bottom of the hill. Jessica’s legs erupted in hives. My ankles had a scattering of red dots, which I had been scratching unreflectingly and were now smears of blood. We looked back up the hill. It was much steeper-looking than it had been from the top. (Why do hills do that?) George asked if he could be carried, too.

  We started back up. The earth began collapsing under our feet. Mole tunnels? The dirt was crumbly. Jessica gave up on going barefoot and put her shoes back on. Frederick was holding on to my ears for support.

  This field, I said, tricked us. It had looked so enticing from afar. But close-up, varmint burrowings, stinging nettles, spiders, ticks—who knew what was crawling around underneath? It was menacingly alive, this wheat dirt, and seemed to have decided that we were edible.

  Our host, the farmer, was of the generation that never used pesticides, not for any ideological reason necessarily, but because pesticides were expensive. Boulud’s father, Julien, asked me: Why do we need them when we never needed them before? Their farms are organic because they always were. Boulud still resents having to weed the garlic field during the spring break, and being unable to play soccer with his nonfarming friends. Most farms in the Rhône Valley are smallholdings.

  I wondered: Is this the kind of wheat field that Bob’s flour is milled from? I hadn’t been to the Auvergne, but knew it by its reputation, the wild place, backward, with a rich lava dirt from the many volcanoes there.

  It would be a long time before we had another bucolic moment. But for now, owing to the nature of our being in nature—this pause—we found ourselves in a happy place. We were surprised by how right it felt to be exactly where we were. From the wintry end of autumn, to the summery end of spring. And then, on a Saturday afternoon in June, something unexpected occurred to us. We had arrived. We liked it here. We wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

  V

  Stagiaire

  “I am an illusionist with my hands full of truth. Put me in the middle of a dozen bored people, and you will see these sad folks awaken, break into smiles, and their eyes widen in anticipation of the marvels about to come from me. The most gnarled will recover, at the sight of my toque, childhood expressions of delight. This is why I always wear a fine toque of pressed cotton. I wear out as many as a bishop, but nothing in the world could make me wear an industrial paper toque, a throwaway toque like a Kleenex. It’s possible you can’t even tell the difference, to look at it, but me, I would know. I’d be afraid I’d lose half my magic power and so remove half the illusion for those watching me.”

  ALAIN CHAPEL QUOTED IN CROQUE-EN-BOUCHE BY HIS AUNT, FANNY DESCHAMPS (1976), TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  My new role—now that I, too, was an official stagiaire—was clarified for me by Frédéric. Frédéric and Ansel worked the fish station. Frédéric, the chef de partie, was in charge. He was tall and lean and stiff, with pale eyes and a rectangular, expressionless face that conveyed menace and danger almost all of the time. Ansel was squat and sturdy, with strong arms that seemed disproportionately long for his trunk (they swung), and, covered with body hair, had one of those five o’clock shadows that kick in just after breakfast. Quite apart from the take-no-prisoners attitude that they both shared, Frédéric and Ansel made a formidable team: something like Frankenstein’s monster and an ape.

  I had been sweeping the floor before the service—one of my new duties—and knocked my broom against Frédéric’s kitchen clogs. They were as long as skateboards. I apologized and made a joke out of my clumsiness.

  “You think you are a fancy writer.”

  “No, no, no, no.” (Perhaps Lurch, I thought, studying his face, more than the monster.)

  “You think you are funny. You are not funny. You are not a fancy writer. You are here to suck my dick.” He waited. The intensity of his gaze was impressively hostile.

  “Oui, Chef. I am not funny. I am here to suck your dick.”

  He relaxed and seemed satisfied. (I thought: At least we’ve got that sorted out.)

  The next day, a new stagiaire appeared, a woman. There were no women in the kitchen. Since the restaurant had reopened, there hadn’t been a woman (a situation that the ghost of Mère Brazier might have been looking upon with a less-than-amused sense of historical irony). There were also very few women anywhere else: Viannay’s assistant, in a small office on the second floor, which she never left and whom we never saw, and two waitresses, who, unknown to me, were both about to hand in their notice. They would be replaced by two other women—I never got their names, because they, too, quit before I learned them. Afterward, in what must have been an oh-fuck-it decision, Viannay replaced them with men.

  Sylvain brought the new stagiaire to garde-manger to introduce her. This was where she would be working, he said.

  “Hortense?” I blurted out loudly.

  Hortense was the pale, slight, straw-blonde, adolescent-looking, mute-seeming twenty-year-old from my first week at Saisons. What was she doing here? It seemed radical of Viannay to take her on and of Hortense to be taken on. She hadn’t changed—she was as self-erasing as ever. But what did I know? She was obviously timid, but not intimidated. She was here.

  There were now four in garde-manger: Florian, Michael, me, and Hortense.

  The station probably didn’t need more people. It just needed one who was in charge. That was a fundamental of the Escoffier brigade system: a clear hierarchy. Even a small station, like fish, with two people, had one head person, a chef de partie. I realized the problem with garde-manger when a consultant appeared one morning during our prep. He stood on the step, out of the way and, with a view of everything and, like God, with a clipboard, watched the “team” at work. He never introduced himself or confirmed his role. He never said, “Hello, your boss is paying me to find out why you are all so dys
functional.”

  I found myself seeing us as we must have appeared to him: a hyperventilating Florian, a sullen Michael, an older balding American never quite sure what he should be doing next, and a mute Hortense, trying hard to hide her unease.

  She was, understandably, uncomfortable: a confined space, shoulder to shoulder with men, most with testosterone-excess issues. It was as if she had been the victim of a clerical error, and, rather than being dispatched to a famous French kitchen where she would witness the higher expressions of culinary culture, she had landed in an all-male penitentiary.

  The kitchen was also uncomfortable with her. For two weeks, she was addressed only as “Mademoiselle”—as in “Would Mademoiselle prepare the asparagus, s’il vous plaît?” or “Might Mademoiselle cut up some tomatoes?” The effect was to increase the spotlight. Every time members of the kitchen heard “Mademoiselle,” they thought, Alert, there’s a woman in the house! It made them giddy.

  The giddiness passed, and Hortense became invisible; the routines of the place—and the normal sexual banter, which had been briefly suspended in honor of her presence—resumed.

  I wonder if Frédéric then had a conversation with Hortense akin to the one that he had had with me, clarifying her role. He said something I didn’t hear, but she was immobilized by it and suddenly afraid. She once referred to him as a “Michelin type”—a tough-guy persona who worked only at grand restaurants, training for a Michelin-star future—and thereafter visibly tensed up in his presence. Frédéric, for his part, had developed a practice, whenever Hortense passed in front of him, of pretending to mount her from behind.

  Klaus returned to Amsterdam on a Friday. On the following Monday, Sylvain introduced me to Jackie Chan, another new intern. I recognized him, too: from L’Institut Bocuse, a third-year, about to graduate once he completed his last requirement: a stage, this stage. For Sylvain, what mattered was Jackie’s kitchen experience. He had worked on the line at a respected restaurant in Burgundy, and would therefore start at the meat station. Stagiaires don’t normally start on the line.

  He lasted two days.

  * * *

  —

  It was not entirely surprising. The three previous people who had tried to work there, including Florian, had failed and been kicked off. In Jackie’s case, he wasn’t kicked off permanently—it was more like a public rebuking—because there was no backup. (The restaurant—and there were other signs that money was tight—needed another cook, but didn’t want to hire one. It got lucky. It got a stagiaire with evident qualifications.)

  During his temporary demotion, Jackie popped peas with me in the back, as members of the brigade—Christophe, Viannay, Ansel, even Johann (the court jester Johann)—went out of their way to seek out Jackie and remind him of his disgrace. Sylvain told Jackie that he was a putain and had brought dishonor on the restaurant. “I hope you are thinking about what you did wrong,” Sylvain said.

  I asked Jackie what he had done.

  “I underseasoned the meat.”

  “Not enough salt and pepper?”

  “Not enough salt.”

  Christophe had said that Jackie wasn’t tasting the food. “But I was tasting. My palate is different from his.” Jackie paused. “I’m from Jakarta.”

  “Your name is not Jackie Chan, is it?”

  “No, Jackie Chan is a famous actor. He is Chinese. I’m Indonesian.” A droll pause. “We all look alike.” He smiled. “My name is Hwei Gan Chern,” he clarified. “You can call me Chern.”

  I’d got “Jackie Chan” so firmly in my head—it was the only name used in the kitchen—that it was an adjustment to think of using “Chern.”

  “You prefer to go by your real name?” I asked.

  “Well, yes. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course. I don’t know why I asked.”

  Chern was allowed to return to the meat station the following week.

  “Jackie Chan, this is my crate of carrots,” Ansel said. “This is your crate.” The day’s vegetables had just been delivered; each crate held five kilos.

  “Let’s race, Jackie Chan. Here is your peeler. Here is mine. Go!”

  Ansel hated everyone, mainly because everyone was slow.

  “Faster, Jackie Chan. Faster!” Ansel, as it happens, was very good at peeling carrots. “Jackie Chan, are you lazy?”

  Ansel finished his carrots. He walked over to Chern’s station, and stood over him. Chern had a lot of carrots still to do.

  “You are very, very slow, Jackie Chan.” Sweat had beaded up on Chern’s forehead. “Why are you so slow?” Ansel crouched lower, to get within Chern’s field of vision. “Why don’t you answer me, Jackie Chan? You’re a girl, Jackie Chan. You will never be a chef.”

  “Ansel is an asshole,” Chern told me during le personnel. Chern hated Ansel possibly more than Ansel hated the rest of the world.

  The next day it was potatoes.

  “You’re no good, Jackie Chan. Maybe you should look for a job as a waitress.”

  * * *

  —

  The day started at eight and finished around midnight, except Friday, which finished at 1:00 a.m., and the pace was always on the verge of what could be called “running.” Nothing was more important than speed.

  I was preparing red peppers—removing the skins and seeds, nothing fancy—for a bright-red savory sorbet that went with cured fillets of merlu. (Or “hake”? Is that right? Whatever it might be in English, it was now merlu.)

  “Have you finished yet?” Sylvain asked me. The service was about to start.

  Ten minutes later: “So—nearly done?”

  Moments later: “The peppers?” Sylvain stood over me to see what was going on.

  “Ah, I see now. It’s your hands.”

  I stared at my hands.

  “You must never cross them. Here,” he said, rearranging the items around my cutting board. “Put peppers on your left, knife on your right, trash bowl there, too, and the tray for your finished peppers, in the center.”

  (Was I the last person on the earth to discover that not crossing your hands made a difference?)

  Sylvain beamed his Sylvain smile. Then Christophe appeared.

  “What are you doing,” he said. Qu’est-ce que tu fais. There was no way to answer the question since it wasn’t one. (Christophe never swears. He never raises his voice. He says, “Qu’est-ce que tu fais.”)

  “I was teaching Bill,” Sylvain said, falling into the trap of replying and stuttering on my name. “A technique. For speed.” It was as if he had been caught out.

  Christophe swept his hand in the air, which seemed to indicate that this guy “Bill” was a fly. “You’re wanted at the pass, Sylvain, where, maybe, you’ll do something useful.”

  You didn’t waste time. You didn’t walk and change direction. You didn’t change your mind. You didn’t make two trips.

  In the morning, when the doors opened, you grabbed a cutting board from the cutting-board rack, and picked up every pot, pan, and utensil that you would need for the entire day. You didn’t return until the end of service, when you hauled everything back (stacked totteringly on your cutting board, cautiously making your way through garde-manger, because you couldn’t see your feet, and there was a step at the beginning and a step at the end). In between, you stayed put. You didn’t, for instance, suddenly realize: Oops, I forgot something and I’d better go back.

  Actually, you could return, but the passage was via a narrow alley with Ansel and Frédéric at fish, and then Michael and Florian in garde-manger, and Sylvain in the walk-in, and no one wanted to see you because your return meant you weren’t organized and deserved rebuking. Florian (befitting his lowly position on the proverbial totem pole) was the most aggressive and had a way of becoming exaggeratedly tall and lanky, and wasn’t about to get out of your way without bumping you, con
centrating his face into an expression of filth and scorn, and calling you a putain de merde.

  In the beginning, no one ever takes you aside and says, “Hey, let me tell you how this place works.” Instead, built into the culture of the kitchen is a pathological intolerance of the novice and a perverse bully’s pleasure in watching a novice’s failed efforts to figure out a kitchen that everyone else there already knew. For them, it must be very funny.

  * * *

  —

  Then Ansel announced he was quitting, which, in the small community of the kitchen, was a significant event. La Mère Brazier was a project—which we were all there to revive and all aware of what was at stake. Ansel was the first member of the original team to leave of his own volition.

  He appeared in the back on his last night. He was working out his shift and had been told to help me. I was popping peas. I popped. He popped. We said nothing.

  We finished and started on peeling potatoes. Ansel used a knife. I had a handheld slicer.

  We said nothing.

  We peeled.

  It seemed evident to me that, in Ansel’s eyes, I was a contemptible dog (which was probably fine, since, in my eyes, he was an ape).

  “Do you think Christophe is a good cook?” I asked. Suddenly I must have wanted to make conversation.

  “Christophe?” Ansel seemed startled, as if he had just discovered that the contemptible dog knew a trick involving human speech. “Why would you ask that?”

  “I was curious.”

  “Christophe, a good cook? He might be. I have no idea.”

  I started in on a new potato.

  “I hate him. Christophe.” Ansel pronounced the name like something he had just coughed up. “I don’t like being in the same room with him.”