The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

That’s right. She didn’t.

  At fourteen she left school forever, having learned to read but just barely to write, though she was good at arithmetic, she had a natural talent for numbers.

  On the suggestion of a farmer they sometimes did jobs for, the parents sent the Cheffe off to a family in Marmande, relatives of his, since it was winter and the parents were having trouble finding work, and as it happened those people in Marmande were looking for a maid, and so the Cheffe discovered city life, the oddly self-conscious authoritarianism of the newly met mistress of the house, the very unfamiliar and for her bewildering relationship she had with the two other employees, a woman who cooked and a man who tended the grounds.

  Of those two, the Cheffe couldn’t help but say, decades later, with a wry little smile, “Life with them was no bed of roses.”

  And then she’d say it again, she always repeated that sentence, but the second time the wry smile was gone and her lips turned down gravely: “Oh no, life was no bed of roses.”

  It was a long time before I learned just what sort of mistreatment the Clapeau couple’s cook and gardener inflicted on the Cheffe, and I must confess that, not knowing, my suspicious, melodramatic imagination showed me images of the Cheffe, a tiny creature not fifteen years old, in a setting where the outright rape of a child would have been told or remembered by the protagonists and the victim herself fatalistically, like a necessary step in the initiation into adulthood.

  Yes, I used to think, it would be just like her to have been raped at fourteen and a half and say her life was no bed of roses, and I was so furious with the Clapeaus’ gardener and cook that I would have gladly set out to hunt them down, to grasp them by their gray hair and pull their faces up to the height of their crime.

  Yes, that’s how I was, perhaps a little excessive but above all tormented that I couldn’t protect the Cheffe from the start, from the moment the bus brought her and her poor pasteboard suitcase from Sainte-Bazeille to Marmande and the Clapeaus’, where she found herself offered up to greed, to depravity, to lies honored as a way of getting along, she whom her parents had enveloped in an oblivious innocence that was theirs alone, which they weren’t even aware of, which was as natural to them as the air they breathed.

  No, I never did try to find what had become of them.

  It was only because of my endless questions, gentle but obstinate, that the Cheffe finally told me the details of the life she had led in Marmande.

  Not that there was anything to hide, it’s just that she took years to realize how much it all interested me, and it was good that she did but not only good, because, realizing it but not understanding it, she was cautious, as she was of anything she didn’t entirely grasp, she carefully weighed everything she told me, and sometimes she chose to say nothing.

  But she didn’t hesitate to tell me that the Clapeaus’ cook and gardener treated her like a thing of no interest, pretended they didn’t even notice she was there, even though the cook had to share her room with the Cheffe.

  By mutual agreement or not, they let their gazes vaguely glide over her without ever landing on her, not running through her either, and so she felt like she’d become a mass of dead, formless flesh, as repellent to the eye as to the mind.

  They never said a word to her, and since apart from reprimands and instructions the Clapeaus weren’t in the habit of speaking to the staff, the Cheffe had to get used to keeping quiet, she whose parents never minded her chatter, as she said, she who even took a certain childish pride in her ability to rattle on and on, and in so doing entertain and amuse her family, whose words came out sparsely and laboriously.

  You ask me, you’re wondering, why the Clapeaus’ cook and gardener pretended to see the household’s new maid as a colorless obstacle for their gazes, how they could have failed to see she was only a sad, lonely child, ripped away from the warm, nurturing environment that was all she’d ever known, you’re wondering and asking me why they should have been so unkind when there was no conceivable question of competition between them and the Cheffe.

  As it would turn out, the Clapeaus’ cook wasn’t wrong to be hostile to the little creature she’d been forced to make space for in her already cramped room.

  But she had no way of knowing that when the Cheffe started at the Clapeaus’, no way of knowing she wasn’t wrong.

  Did she sense it?

  I don’t know, the Cheffe didn’t know.

  “What did they have against me, right at the beginning?” she used to ask me. “Later on, I understand, but right at the beginning…”

  Was there something about the Cheffe that made her off-putting or intimidating?

  Did she bring into the Clapeaus’ banally corrupt, unexceptionally venal household the intransigent purity that reigned at her parents’, that showed on their very faces, the Cheffe asked me more than once, still wondering after all those years, even as her memory was perhaps exaggerating her parents’ miraculous innocence (I don’t know if it was, I don’t know anything about them, we never met), wondering in ever greater perplexity, and almost despair and delight, what could have made such guilelessness and joie de vivre possible in a couple so bereft of everything that constitutes other people’s happiness?

  Had the Cheffe, not knowing it and not wanting to know it, brought a little of that insufferable integrity into the Clapeaus’ house?

  Did the goodness that quietly, permanently illuminated her parents’ faces show on her face as well?

  I don’t know, the Cheffe didn’t know.

  It must be said that the Clapeaus themselves felt none too at ease with the Cheffe, although, and this is important, the face she’d inherited from her parents was a face that never judged, so any discomfort they felt in her presence came not from some stern disapproval they thought was directed their way (to which they would have been entirely indifferent) but from the questions the peculiar look on that childish face forced them to ask about their own decency, by which I mean their lack or failure of decency.

  I’m not talking about money or even behavior, I’m talking about goodness of soul, I’m talking about the very basic fact of having a good soul and feeling it.

  Feeling it, not knowing it, because there’s no room for pride in these things.

  In later times, the Cheffe would always believe her talents and intuition and the exceptional career that grew out of them had robbed her of the face that was hers in those days, she’d always think her success and ambition had dragged her far, far away from the pure shores her parents lived on, and at that she felt a loss and a deep sadness.

  Life with the Clapeaus, in that atmosphere of icy hostility on one side and timid imperiousness on the other, soon grew so wearing that after six or seven weeks she decided to run away, to go back to Sainte-Bazeille and her parents, never doubting for a moment that they’d give her complaints and unhappiness a loving, sympathetic welcome.

  She imagined herself simply resuming the happy, arduous life her time at the Clapeaus’ had interrupted for no good reason.

  But as she walked the national highway out of Marmande, on the grassy strip between the pavement and the ditch, in the fading afternoon light, she pictured ever more clearly what would be going on in her parents’ house at that hour and at that hard time of year, she saw them both coming and going in the three little underheated rooms, her father restless and bored in such a small, crowded house, knocking into things everywhere he went, too tall, too massive, her mother hunched over the youngest child she was still nursing even though, thought the Cheffe, she was so scrawny, so ill-equipped just to provide for herself, she could see everything that was happening at that moment, unchanged by her absence, she could see it all, and little by little, her pace slowing, she began to think there was no room for her in that picture anymore.

  The space she’d vacated when she left, which her brothers and sisters must have immediately
filled with their confined, hungry young bodies, was a space she couldn’t let herself take up again, even if she could find a way back into it, she couldn’t let herself do that, she thought, standing still by the roadside, separated from Sainte-Bazeille, from the wonderful life she remembered in Sainte-Bazeille, not so much by the kilometers she had still to walk in the dark as by the sudden thought that her parents wouldn’t be able to fight off an ambivalence on seeing her come home.

  And that was the first time the Cheffe ever dared think her parents capable of ambivalence.

  Oh, I think she was wrong.

  As I imagine them, they would have accepted their daughter’s return with no show of emotion, would have asked no questions, wouldn’t have taken her to task, would have been able to forget, immediately and to their deepest depths, all about Marmande and the Clapeaus.

  But very likely she wanted more than that, she wanted to surprise them and see them visibly happy and proud of her for fleeing the Clapeaus.

  And how could they be? she suddenly thought, standing by the road, unable to go on.

  Although she’d always found the official reason why she was sent to Marmande petty and in a way unworthy of the fanatical veneration she felt for her parents, she now suddenly realized it was probably the modest salary the Clapeaus would pay her that had convinced her parents it would be useful for her to leave Sainte-Bazeille, not, as she’d preferred to think—though no one had ever told her any such thing, and so hadn’t lied to her, hadn’t “put one over on her”—the many advantages of living in a city, gaining solid professional experience, etc.

  Yes, she understood, shivering by the side of that deserted, dark road, no longer sure which way to go but sensing she would be turning back, not knowing it yet, only sensing it, reluctant, disgusted, but resigned, she understood that anything she earned and ate elsewhere meant that much less her adored parents had to provide.

  How, then, could they be entirely happy to see her back with them?

  The Cheffe was ashamed to assume her parents would be torn between joy and disappointment, it felt like her heart had suddenly turned cynical, it felt like life with the Clapeaus had corrupted her, complicated her, but she didn’t think she was wrong, she was sure her parents would feel an ambivalence when they opened the door to her—but it was as if her own faintly sordid intelligence were creating that reaction in her parents, from a distance.

  Instead of telling herself, “Now I realize they can feel two conflicting emotions,” she told herself, strangely, “If I hadn’t had that thought, their love for me would still be as whole and untroubled as ever.”

  And for that she rebuked herself, and thought she’d suddenly turned wicked.

  She did what her intuition had already told her she would, she retraced her steps, quickly this time, almost running, for fear the Clapeaus might have noticed she was missing.

  Our smart apartment building in Lloret de Mar was designed almost exclusively for retirees like my friends, well-to-do French people whom a new life, strangely anonymous between fresh, neutral walls, seems to cast, with no sacrifice, no diabolical repercussion, into a kind of youth they never knew, alcoholic, vaguely communitarian, shallow, and coolly hedonistic, we laugh and joke, we gather on Santa Cristina beach in tiny swimsuits and minuscule bikinis and drink lots of white wine, we fear no judgment in our uninhibited, incurious, insistently frivolous little circle, we’ve never been so free, so deliberately juvenile. I’m not their age, nowhere near, but our similar lifestyles and interchangeable apartments make us equal on that score as well, I forget that I’m not old yet and they indisputably are, our health is good, we look after ourselves, we’re immortal, we look after ourselves and no one else.

  She went back to life as a maid, doing housekeeping and errands, laundry and dishes, and in her mind the change in the cook’s and the gardener’s attitude, easing from silent, deliberately hurtful animosity into ordinary indifference punctuated by the occasional curt and impersonal remark, was forever bound up with what happened to her on the road to Sainte-Bazeille: she’d had a thought that faintly dishonored her parents, and that flash of insight meant not that they no longer deserved her unwavering devotion but that she’d done something wrong, she’d defiled a purity of spirit.

  She’d lowered herself to the ignoble level of the cook and the gardener, she thought, and that’s why they’d laid off her.

  They must have seen what was gone from her eyes when she came back after her brief flight.

  They saw the absence of what once had incensed them.

  They were always calculating, designing, anticipating, unlike her parents, who were as improvident as could be but so perfectly thoughtful.

  Her parents, the Cheffe had always thought, were happy to be poor.

  They believed, the Cheffe had always thought, or rather they sensed, that they would lose something vital if ever they found their way out of the poverty that clung to their bones.

  Such as? Oh, the best part of them.

  I used to be disgusted by that attitude toward their poverty, there was something about those parents, or at least the Cheffe’s vision of those two paragons, that vaguely annoyed me when I was young, and vaguely sickened me too.

  But now I understand the Cheffe, and I’m sad and sorry I can’t tell her so.

  Even if they didn’t know it, the Clapeaus too showed her that something about her had changed after her encounter with doubt on the road to Sainte-Bazeille, because now they were more open with her, more sympathetic.

  And so, all things considered, the Cheffe wasn’t far from feeling at home in Marmande—not happy, because she thought she could never be happy again, now that she’d drifted so far from the spirit of her parents, but reasonably content, she was curious, she was eager to learn.

  And besides, even if the Clapeaus’ new friendliness constantly reminded her of what she saw as the ruination of her soul, as time went by she came to appreciate its warmth.

  Yes, she was very young. No one judged her more severely than she did, you know.

  She never cast stones at anyone but herself, and maybe at the child she once was, but after all, that was still her.

  The Clapeaus were in their sixties, with four grown children who brought their families to lunch every Sunday, and many acquaintances they often asked to dinner, which justified their having a live-in cook.

  Maybe they didn’t dare admit that they themselves needed fine dishes cooked for them every day, because they loved eating with a fervent, unrelenting love, stronger than they were, that forced them to keep food in the foreground of their thoughts at all times.

  It disturbed them a little.

  Maybe they had only so many guests to give themselves an excuse for that obsession.

  Because it frightened them, loving to eat as much as they did.

  “You have to give your guests a decent welcome, decent food,” they often said, since they couldn’t say, “We really invite people over as an excuse to stuff our faces.”

  Did the Cheffe, at her age, realize the Clapeaus didn’t entirely like being what they were, that they wished they could take a tamer, more ordinary interest in cuisine, that they felt in a sense possessed by eating and the pleasure it brought them?

  I don’t know. I only know that she always found a way to let the people she cooked for never feel ashamed that they passionately loved having her cook for them.

  Oh yes, she hated people feeling guilty because of her, because of the pleasure she could bring them, which happens, she hated that.

  But at the Clapeaus’ she was probably too young to understand how deeply those otherwise reasonably friendly and uncomplicated people hated that weakness, that ardor for fabulous, varied, new, memorable meals.

  Had she understood the remorse that faithfully visited them after every feast, then she would have seen more sense in their strange beha
vior with the cook, the way they fawned over her and harassed her at the same time, praised her with unfeigned enthusiasm in front of the guests and lashed her with baseless, strange, disjointed rebukes when they were alone with her, which the cook, viscerally aware of her power and standing, perfectly grasping what she would have found hard to put into words, answered with serene, impudent, weary effrontery, not fooled for a minute: “Yeah, yeah, you loved it and you know it,” she told them, unless she didn’t actually say those words but simply conveyed their meaning—it’s the same thing, I know the gist of what happened and not the details, I know the spirit more than the letter, of course, but isn’t it the spirit that matters?

  In any case, after some time the Cheffe realized the cook had a powerful hold over the Clapeaus.

  Whenever they’d berated her too violently on some empty pretext they themselves didn’t believe in even as they were making so much of it (blushing, stammering, looking away), they always came hurrying back to beg her forgiveness, one or the other of them, and everything about them was a plea: “Don’t leave us, forget all those stupid things we said, not under the effect of alcohol, alas, we never drink enough to break free of our foolish guilt, we stay mired in that guilt instead of springing away with a joyous, intoxicated kick, no, it wasn’t our usual cru bourgeois that made us deluge you with vague, incoherent complaints, it was only our irremediable sense of shame and dishonor after an exquisite dinner, as yours was yet again this evening, thank you, thank you, please don’t leave us.”

  Busy cleaning the kitchen, whisking a broom over the floor tiles glistening with cooking fat, the Cheffe heard every word of what went on between the sneering cook and the remorse-drunk Clapeaus, but I’m sure she never glimpsed the erotic aspect of the exchange, and the cook’s vengeful, arrogant sense of sexual triumph, when she afterward turned to the Cheffe and cried, joyless but with a thrill in her voice, “I sure showed them, I’ve got them eating out of my hand, you see that?,” was something the Cheffe simply couldn’t perceive.