Dirt

by Bill Buford

  Owing to Lucas, we didn’t miss Bob’s bread. We missed Bob. His joy, his wholly present-tense presence, his bighearted affection. We also missed learning what we had missed out on: his giving chase in the night, his injuries, the brother, the father, the details of his plight.

  Roberto’s food offerings continued, helpings of headcheese and lardo, small plates of pastas—cacio e pepe, homemade tagliatelle with white truffles. He was in high hospitality mode.

  Where do you get your ingredients? I managed to ask in Italian. Roberto insisted on speaking to us in Italian. Jessica’s was as fluent as ever. Mine was almost entirely eradicated. Jessica’s brain could hold several languages in it at once. Mine had only one foreign-language compartment, the equivalent of a narrow broom closet. There wasn’t enough room for Italian if I was going to stick French in there as well. (There was also the fact that Jessica was a lot smarter.)

  A plate of grilled octopus appeared, a platter of meat braised in red wine. The room, by now cheerfully crowded, every chair taken, people having to stand, felt surprisingly Lyonnais. The food was not, obviously, but the people eating it were, definitively. I surveyed the guests, every one of them French and seeming to enjoy the exotic truancy of a cuisine from the other side of the mountains. They respected handmade food, whatever its origins might be, and understood the wonderful thing that happened when you brought people together to eat it, even if you knew no one else there. And most people didn’t. Roberto’s had been each guest’s little secret. We were only now discovering how many people shared it.

  I was at ease with these strangers—there was a philosophy of food that we shared, one that I had first understood from the filles—and they had come to seem, somehow, like my people. When I then fell into a conversation with a man next to me and mentioned that I was American, another person, a woman, having overheard the exchange from across the room, said loudly that it wasn’t possible. “You are Lyonnais. Your face. Your eyes. Everything about you. You have to be Lyonnais.” She turned to the man next to her. “Look at him. He’s Lyonnais, isn’t he?” And he agreed, and the foreignness I had felt since we arrived in the city, like an unnecessarily heavy coat that I put on every morning before going out, seemed instantly to fall away.

  I pondered her observation. It was my look. Jessica—fair skin, red hair, a defined profile—didn’t have it. People didn’t stop her and ask for directions. But I was stopped regularly. Drivers, lost, would stop in mid-traffic when they spotted me. “Pardon, monsieur, je cherche…”

  Once, on a bus, I randomly studied the physiognomies of my fellow passengers. The women, all of them, all ages, were consciously self-presented—they had attended to their appearance. They were as attractive as every cliché about Frenchwomen would lead you to expect. But the men? I can’t be blunt enough. They were ugly fuckers. Even the ones who appeared to be partners of beautiful women: The disparity between the sexes was unequivocal. Every man was bald or balding, stocky (with big shoulders, a forthright torso, or just outright fat), and very hairy. And not just very hairy, but bald and very hairy, as if the body were a plant that had been pruned back just a little too savagely on top and had compensated with random but vigorously thrusting black outpourings below.

  Augustus Caesar, two thousand years ago, had observed that the locals, “these Allobroges,” were not so different to look at from Romans, except in one regard: They had abundant amounts of curly, very dark body hair everywhere, on their chests, their arms, their backs, their necks, their ears. They were like a species not quite evolved from the animal—they were people with fur.

  These blokes on the bus, these mecs, these Neanderthal cousins: I looked like them. We understood each other. I recognized the type on the first day, when Jessica and I arrived at the airport. In fact, if I had come across any of them at any time in history—fifty thousand years ago, say, all of us cautiously emerging out of our caves on the first warm spring morning—I am sure I would have recognized the affinity, and we would have instantly dropped our clubs and grunted in that understated, mumbled way that men of this kind regard as a sign of affection and solidarity.

  Jessica and I returned home late, light-headed and happy from Roberto’s red wine, feeling absolutely good about absolutely everything. I wouldn’t be cooking a meal for Bob this week. But I would cook it for him soon; my prep was frozen. The beginnings of the dish now seemed remote—getting the pastry wrong, the mushy filling, learning what I wanted the sauce to express, learning that the sauce should be expressing anything in the first place. The dish, and my relationship to it, put me in mind of Alain Chapel—and how cooking is much more than recipes. A dish is arrived at not by following a set of instructions but by discovering everything about it: the behavior of its ingredients, its history, and a quality that some chefs think of as its soul. (The Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson once described something similar to me—we were talking about the cooking of Michel Bras—as an essence that seems to radiate, almost spiritually, from a plate of certain foods.) My duck pie was now mine. Têtedoie might reject it for deviating too far from what had been prescribed. But it was what I wanted the dish to be. It was what I would serve Bob.

  Jessica mentioned that she had a coffee date planned the next day with our American friend Jenny Gilbert. She wanted to talk about her new venture, a restaurant that she and fellow musician Tamiko wanted to open: a noodle shop, the kind that you don’t see around Lyon, but one that both of them, frequent visitors to Tokyo, felt they understood. She had found a property on the Place Sathonay, in the heart of our quartier.

  In the morning—windy and now viciously cold—Jessica went off. I settled down at my desk. Twenty minutes later, she phoned.

  “I have bad news. Jenny just told me. Please sit down.” She paused. “Bob is dead.”

  * * *

  —

  He died while we were waiting for him. While we were drinking our wine and eating our bruschette, Bob was in trouble. He had been supine too long. A clot developed in the leg. In his being newly mobile, it came loose, rushed up an artery, and lodged in his lungs. He knew it was happening, Roberto told us later. Bob knew at once that he was in fatal trouble. Jacqueline called an ambulance. He was unconscious before it arrived.

  I rushed down to the boulangerie. I didn’t know what else to do. I opened the door, and the bell jingled, and Ailene, one of Bob’s helpers, came out from the back, because it was the routine to come out on the sound of the bell. She saw me and stopped, lower lip trembling, holding herself still. I stopped, too. I thought: Very few people know. I thought: If she carries on as though nothing has changed, if Lucas carries on as though nothing has changed, if he makes the bread at 4:00 a.m., as he did today, and she sells it, can we all pretend, for just a little bit longer, that Bob is still at home recuperating?

  The bell jingled, and one of the quartier’s restaurant people appeared, a waiter from the Restaurant Albert. He had always kept to himself. He was bald, quiet, thin, one of the five people (including the owner, chef, and dishwasher) who ran a purple-painted place decorated with chicken images, serving handmade food, never radical, utterly honest. The waiter was bearing a large empty bread sack that needed filling. He handed it over to Ailene, and said he’d pick it up later.

  “Bisous à Bob.”

  “Bob is dead.” Bob est mort.

  The waiter stopped. He stood, unmoving, taking in the simple declarative piece of news, which seemed to echo in the quiet, still bakery, not as a sound but as an idea. Bob est mort. I watched him. Ailene watched him. He continued standing and saying nothing, although it seemed that at any moment he would say something. He was silent so long that our watching him started to seem too intimate and invasive, except that the issue was death, and intimacy and privacy didn’t seem to matter in death. The longer the silence continued, the more I found myself admiring him. He didn’t ask Ailene to repeat herself. He didn’t ask “how” or
“when” or “where,” and there was an unexpected heroism in his not asking. The questions, any questions, would have been an evasion, an effort to fill this sudden void with noise.

  Bob est mort.

  “Putain de merde,” he said finally.

  Putain de merde. A nonsense phrase. Two bad words in one, as though it were the worst thing you could say. Or it was just what you say when you don’t have the words.

  Putain de merde.

  * * *

  —

  I hadn’t known that, when you live on a river, you are never not thinking about it. You see it on waking, hear it in nighttime barges that sluice through it, feel it in the dampness of the air. It’s never the same, rising, rushing, sinking, slow when foggy, thick in the summer, and is also always the same. It is so easily a metaphor that I find myself insisting that I will not allow it to be one. It’s a river. Bob used to throw his unsold baguettes into it. The sight wasn’t a metaphor. It was just melancholic, plain and simple. Only now does it occur to me that, with bread that he had single-handedly made, he couldn’t do the obvious and throw it away in a sack. He seemed to need to replicate the making of it in its unmaking, tossing each baguette, one by one, end over end, as if returning each one to nature for the birds and the fish. I will never see the sight again, and such a prospect is even more melancholic.

  Lyon, grayly falling into winter, has a slightly putrid, cloying smoke that comes from somewhere upriver and hangs in the air. Burning leaves, a faraway fireplace, damp wood, coal, pungent and sticky. In the late autumn, the city smells of mortality. The river is about to become dangerous, fast, Alpine cold. Bodies will be recovered from it—after New Year’s Eve (just about always), after the weekend (more often than I would have thought possible).

  I was standing on our balcony, in the cold.

  I wondered what you might have heard, standing here or on whatever had been here before, a chapel, a monk’s chamber, a potter’s storehouse. I have never lived so close to so many historic events. Would you have heard the report of a sniper’s rifle during the Nazi occupation? Our quartier bears plaques to fallen members of the Resistance. In 1943, students were removed from the boys’ school, L’École Robert Doisneau, including thirteen-year-old Rita Calef and her younger brother Léon, because they were Jewish. Would I have heard the wails of the mother when she turned up to take them home for lunch?

  The Place des Terreaux, the administrative open square of the city, is a three-minute walk. Would I have heard the jeering crowd that gathered there on warm summer nights in 1553? Their jeering would have echoed off buildings that are still standing. Protestants had been appearing in Lyon, proselytizing, and were seized and burned on a bonfire erected on the square. (Would I have smelled the flesh’s melting? It would have depended on the river and the wind.) When Protestants later returned, it was to take over the city, ransack churches, and drive out the Italians who had made Lyon home for three centuries. The cries of a riot: It happened just here.

  Lyon has historic reasons for treating outsiders with suspicion.

  In 177 A.D., Roman officials arrested a young Christian named Blandine for her refusal to renounce her faith, whipped her, and tied her to a post in the Amphitheatre of the Trois Gaules to be fed upon by animals. They didn’t touch her. There were other efforts—a chair of red-hot coals, a bull—but they were unsuccessful, too, so an official slit her throat. I wouldn’t have heard her, in her stoical silence, only the crowd’s baying voices, amplified in the round.

  A river, sometimes, is just a river.

  I never cooked my dish for Christian Têtedoie. I completely forgot.

  * * *

  —

  QUAI SAINT-VINCENT, LYON. The boulangerie was reopened by Bob’s wife, Jacqueline, an act of bravery and will and need. Her young daughter, Suzanne, sat on a stool in a corner, nibbling on a croissant, shy beyond talking.

  Jacqueline was going to make it work, she said. She had put in the hours, been behind the counter every Sunday, and had long lived by Bob’s clock, the ineluctable cycles of fermentation. Lucas agreed to help—by now he was working at another boulangerie but wasn’t the first Lyonnais to hold two jobs. Jacqueline’s first weekend was a success. It seemed to continue Bob’s legacy. It seemed to continue Bob. Once again, we had good bread.

  The weekdays were harder, with the burden of restaurant orders and delivering them, the day-in-day-out-ness of it all. One Friday, the boulangerie didn’t open. It was incomprehensible: A boulangerie never just doesn’t open. All day long, an endlessly replenishing queue of customers showed up and read the sign pasted to the locked door (“for reasons beyond our control…”), and shook their heads and were confused.

  Jacqueline brought in help. One weekend, she had three boulangers in the back, a talented crew, each member new to me. I didn’t know where or how she had found them, but their competence was manifest.

  “We’re going to make this work!” Jacqueline roared. The shop had its former busyness, it was loud again with Bob’s salsa soundtrack, she was excited and confident—I hadn’t seen such confidence before—and there were handfuls of cash.

  But she had made a miscalculation. The cash she brought in didn’t match the cash she had to pay out. It seems extremely unlikely that Bob had ever talked to Jacqueline about cash flow and how tight his margins must have been, and how much work he had to put in to keep the price of a baguette under a euro. The boulangers in the back went unpaid and never returned.

  In all this, what Bob had done was evident as though in silhouette. In the hours, in the grit, in his determination to do all the work himself. If you deviated from Bob’s do-it-by-yourself business model, then the business didn’t work. In fact, Bob had no business model. Bob’s boulangerie was Bob.

  “I hate Jacqueline,” Roberto said. “She ruined that space.” Roberto was being unfair. He missed Bob. We all did.

  Once again, the boulangerie closed. And then, toward the end of the month, it reopened again, but for only a few days. Maybe Jacqueline’s rent was due. Then it closed again—forever, I assumed—until, unexpectedly, it had something to celebrate: The city was going to put an image of Bob upon its famous wall.

  The city of Lyon had commissioned a painting and was going to find a space for it among the fresque of historic Lyonnais, the same fresque that included Emperor Claudius, Paul Bocuse, the Lumière brothers, Verrazzano, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, two saints, and twenty-three other figures essential to how the Lyonnais regard themselves. It was such a magnificent gesture, and the recognition that Bob deserved, and proof, yet again, that his bread was more than just bread.

  A poster went up announcing the “inauguration” at 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday, March 29, of “Yves ‘Bob’ Richard sur la Fresque des Lyonnais.”

  On the day, more than two hundred appeared. It was spring, it was warm, and Jacqueline set outdoor speakers and played very loud salsa music—Bob’s music, her music, and now our music, everyone dancing, everyone bumping into each other.

  “He hears us,” Jacqueline told me. “He is dancing, too.” She was passing out small pizzas, toasted slices of bread dressed with tomato sauce, and bottles of beer.

  The site on the fresque, however, was small, and around the corner from the main display, and the space was right there at the bottom, almost level with the pavement. You could kick it. A curtain (tiny, like a stage set for a kitten) was lifted. It was—what? I had to bend over and twist my head to take it in. The space, about eight by ten inches, had been rendered as a hardback book on a shelf of other books. Bob was the subject of the cover. Why put him among minor Lyonnais authors? He read, but not much—he didn’t have the time. In fact, what he mainly read was the local paper. The likeness was good, jowly, eyes with an impish twinkle, and a muted droll smile. The boys touched his painted cheeks. And we were all much happier that it was there than not there. B
ut it felt nevertheless that we—and Bob—had been just a little bit too much cheated.

  It was the last time I saw Jacqueline and Suzanne.

  IX

  The Gastronomic Capital of the World

  In this connection, we had dinner the other night with Curnonsky, who is 80, and at the party was a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind. They were talking about Beurre Blanc, and how it was a mystery, and only a few people could do it, and how it could only be made with white shallots from Lorraine and over a wood fire. Phoo. But that is so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things just to puff themselves up. I didn’t say anything as, being a foreigner, I don’t know anything anyway. This dogmatism in France is enraging (that is really about my only criticism, otherwise I adore them).

  JULIA CHILD, AS ALWAYS, JULIA: THE LETTERS OF JULIA CHILD AND AVIS DEVOTO

  BRON, RHÔNE-ALPES. Daniel Boulud phoned me early. He was in Brussels, with Jérôme Bocuse, having attended a fund-raiser for the Bocuse d’Or, and a wealthy patron had loaned him a jet to fly them to Lyon to see their families. Could I pick them up at the small airfield in Bron?

  It was an exotic request, the airfield was where Saint-Exupéry used to take off from, and of course I agreed. For a brief flicker of a thought, I wondered: Why doesn’t he take a taxi? But I dismissed the question—who knows why?—and, besides, I was flattered.

  I first dropped off Jérôme, who was staying in the Croix-Rousse with his mother, Raymone Carlut, his father’s mistress and travel companion.

  “Paul’s love life is complicated,” Boulud said as if by explanation.