The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  I hate her, I have no qualms about saying so, I hate her and I have contempt for her, she never deserved to be the Cheffe’s daughter.

  Enough of that, hatred and contempt don’t make you any bigger when you’re nothing much.

  What I was trying to make you understand is that in that rudimentary, pine-smothered kitchen the Cheffe tasted the exquisite fruit of a calling recognized and understood by every part of her body.

  Her feet went back and forth over the cement tiles, quick and lively as two perfectly trained little animals that delight in their task, instinctively and miraculously avoiding every danger, any wasted step, all the treacherous obstacles of the space they’ve been ordered to move through, and it’s a fact that I never saw the Cheffe make a motion or gesture that wasn’t marked by a magical precision, even in the most cramped or cluttered quarters, every tiny part of her diligently obeyed her order to make every move precise, and did so gracefully, what’s more, with a radiant eagerness that suggested everything she did in the ritual space of the kitchen was done in accordance with the precepts of beauty and necessity.

  It might have happened, I don’t claim to know everything, but I never saw the Cheffe hurt herself when she was working, never a stumble, never a bump.

  What I did see was the incredible virtuosity of her strong, square little hands, and the inconceivability of those hands not forever obeying their orders with the utmost exactitude, and I also saw that the Cheffe’s expert hands discreetly led their own life, and could stay busy on the cutting board while, for example, the Cheffe, with the telephone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, talked of things utterly unrelated to what her hands were doing, and her hands never went astray, her short fingers could think and decide and never misjudge, her hands never slipped up.

  And that was something the Cheffe discovered in that little kitchen in the Landes, she discovered her own body, which until then she’d used only as a single thing, like a reliable machine she controlled from her heart: now, moved and joyous, she realized her body was made up of many little animals who’d learned to work flawlessly all on their own, and who, that afternoon, happy, modest, at once obedient and quietly enterprising, showed her all their savoir faire, working as a tight-knit team that in a sense excluded the Cheffe for her own good, working with an efficiency the Cheffe could never have achieved had she gone on trying to control the machine that until then she’d thought her body was.

  That’s how she used to talk to me of her limbs and her organs: like independent beings, clever and devoted, that it was vital she not command, since she didn’t understand them as well as they understood themselves and each other.

  Sometimes, openly marveling, giving herself little slaps on her thighs, she’d say, “These legs never get tired, there’s nothing I can’t ask them to do.”

  And, squeezing her stomach, she would say, “It can take anything, it never gets sick, and it’s never full, the poor thing.”

  And since she didn’t think she was in charge of the little animals working together in her body, didn’t think she had any hold over them beyond the friendship they felt for her, she took no pride in her vigorous constitution or her body’s exceptional capacity for work, she felt nothing but gratitude, it was a gift from nature, and the only thanks could be modesty.

  Once she’d finished that chicken masquerading in its own generous, innocent flesh, she started a fish stock: into a pot half filled with water she dropped the two kilos of fry she’d bought from a Vieux-Boucau fish shop—smelts, loaches, sprats, little sardines—then added carrots and celery, rounds of leek and onions, cloves, and, just to see, what little wizened, pale saffron was left in the one labeled jar she found in the spice cabinet.

  Alone, hard at work, silent in that little kitchen transformed into a steam room by the damp heat of the cooking (and—not because it tortured her, it didn’t, but only to prevent an excess of steam from affecting her perception of tastes and smells—she opened the narrow window almost entirely obscured by the massive, rugged trunk of the old pine, and the air that drifted in was heavy with the odor of turpentine and dark, hot sand, so thoroughly disconcerting the Cheffe, unused to those oily exudations, that she immediately pushed the window shut again, and for a moment she felt like she was a prisoner of the pines, of their austere, unsettling benevolence), the Cheffe could hear only the fleeting little noises made by the trusty companions collaborating inside her, and the instructions she gave herself under her breath.

  But although she heard no sign of life from the other rooms of the house, she thought she could make out the Clapeaus’ panting breath just behind the kitchen walls, she could see them, multiplied and impatient, teeming, anxious, too excited to feel their usual shame at their gluttony, listening intently as she progressed in the creation of their ecstasy, the two of them perhaps thinking, with a shiver, Our happiness is in the hands of that child. Yes, she suddenly saw them in great numbers, watching over her, seconded by their spies the pines, dozens of Clapeaus not so much doubting or mistrusting her talent as trembling in terror at the thought that she might turn out to be utterly unequal to the task, and that lacerating fear wasn’t exactly about her in a way, in fact it protected the Cheffe as a person because the Clapeaus wouldn’t hold it against her if she disappointed them, they would blame only themselves, would accuse only their folly.

  She thought she could hear them coming and going along the kitchen wall, both outside among the coolly complicit pines and in the hallway between the kitchen and the dining room.

  That didn’t disturb her.

  She didn’t tell herself so, she almost didn’t realize it, but she profoundly understood the Clapeaus, she accepted them as they were, folly and all.

  She accepted, finding it neither good nor bad, that the prospect of a meager or mediocre dinner would plunge them into a sadness that she thought in no way trivial or ridiculous, or worthy of reverence either.

  Although…you’re right. I’m probably wrong about that.

  She understood the Clapeaus’ distress at a lackluster meal far better than she would have understood indifference, and she found the Clapeaus’ petrified apprehension entirely worthy of respect, even if she didn’t envy them their folly in any way.

  But the fact that they’d expanded the shrunken dimensions of their lives with a passion for food, that they’d allowed that mania to structure every moment of their days, she could understand that, respect it, already feeling in herself the stirrings of a very similar mania, more enviable only because she would make it her way to fame, because she would let it carry her but never overpower her, until her last years, at least, when that mania might indeed have finally submerged her.

  But in truth the thought of a multitude of prying Clapeaus trying to learn what she was making in that little kitchen, the thought that they’d managed to trick the lofty, puritanical pines into adopting their own inquisitive gaze (she couldn’t forget the old trunk at the window behind her, she sensed its rough breath as it vainly tried to insinuate itself into the kitchen), none of that bothered her, she held nothing against anyone, she worked quickly, her mind clear, happy, always a step ahead.

  Yes, that’s something I always noticed about her, she never accused anyone but herself.

  She didn’t complain, she didn’t criticize.

  Interested in people, as you put it?

  Oh yes, she silently watched people, not seeming to, with that slightly distant face of hers, that still face, sometimes almost frozen in a neutral mask that could be unsettling for people who came to her in friendship and fraternity, and since her eye turned judgmental only when it lit on a slab of meat, a crate of vegetables, or any other object or ingredient required for cooking, since it seemed to dim when it moved from a nimbly filleted piece of fish to the face of the apprentice handling the knife, you might have thought it was only the fish that interested her, not the apprentice, you
might have thought she found more to study and judge in the filleted fish, perfectly complete in its simplicity, than she ever would in the complicated, changeable face of the person before her, but if you did you were wrong, as you realized from some remark she discreetly slipped in about one or the other—because then the words she chose struck you by their unerring rightness, like so many arrows in the center of the target.

  You could never have come up with such words yourself, you would never have thought words could so precisely tell the truth of a face, its expression, the sense of a way of standing or moving, and the moment you heard them, those words seemed not just implacably true but also the only ones possible, and the Cheffe could come up with them because, appearances to the contrary, for all her withdrawn air and opaque gaze, she studied and interpreted faces more deeply than the rest of us, we who confronted the mystery of a face with our big, amiable grins, our faces ripped in two by sociability, all mystery banished.

  A sharp tack, some called the Cheffe, but if you ask me those ill-chosen words expressed only our difficulty in defining her, she was clever but not calculating, curious but aloof, firmly turned toward her own inner world, which no one knew the first thing about, I would claim, except perhaps her daughter, whose unstable, ungrateful, selfish, cruel ways forced the Cheffe to reveal her one weakness, no, it wasn’t love that brought her out of her secret refuge, it was sadness, it was despair, it was bitter incomprehension at seeing what her adorable, cherished little girl had turned into; it wasn’t love that brought her out of that refuge, and certainly I never managed to bring her out, since the things I know about the Cheffe, the things I’m telling you now, aren’t things she revealed to me, they’re things I think I’ve realized on my own.

  Neither my love for her nor her deep affection for me would have been enough for that.

  She could be naïve, so strangely naïve!

  Now and then, in the lull at the end of the shift, she would express her surprise at something a customer or an employee had done, and we’d laugh and tell her we were surprised at her surprise, we all thought it blindingly obvious that such a person could only do such things, and she would gently shake her head, murmuring, “That’s not how it seemed to me at all.”

  Then, in a joking tone that was only camouflage for her dismay at finding us young folk so jaded, she would say something like, “How could you possibly have seen that? You’d have to be just as debased as he is!”

  And we all laughed, and she laughed along with us, we were so happy we’d amused her (we thought we were amusing her), and even happier that we’d taught her something about life, that for a moment we’d had that small superiority over her, who knew nothing of the world outside her kitchen, we thought, just as we thought knowing the world meant never letting yourself be taken in, doubting plain kindness, mistrusting an honest face.

  So yes, she could be wrong, but always in the same way, when her study of a face led her to believe in a goodness that wasn’t really there.

  I don’t believe she ever mistrusted someone who turned out to have a generous heart.

  Why do I think it’s important to tell you about that side of the Cheffe, and why am I trembling?

  You tell me I’m trembling, it’s possible.

  Too many people who didn’t really know her, too many who in some cases scarcely got near her, have called her insensitive to other people’s existence, walled up in the narrow, fervid universe of her passion, venturing out now and then only to give voice to a severity and a hardness that, to hear those ignoramuses tell it, were the only things that could draw her out of herself, yes, I know, it was particularly her daughter who said that, the daughter the Cheffe never said no to, the daughter she always forgave, until at last she discreetly distanced herself from that dangerous woman, although she never stopped loving her with the tormented love she’d come to inspire in her, I sometimes saw her read—devastated, whispering words of despair and incomprehension—one of those furious emails her daughter was forever sending her at the end and then turn a contrite face to me, as if she were the one who’d done wrong, and the words she mumbled were always words that excused her inexcusable daughter or recalled the sweet child she’d been, as if the memory of the child could lessen the idiocy and cruelty of the adult, or make them seem insignificant, or even not entirely real.

  So I who can boast of only one thing in my life, which is that I knew the Cheffe better than anyone, I can say she was loving and compassionate and understanding, sometimes more than was good for her, and the proof is that not one of her employees ever bad-mouthed the Cheffe, not that they weren’t encouraged to by the many people who found it boring to have nothing negative to say or write about her, the Cheffe as she really was bored them, with her generous heart, her compassionate heart, more understanding than was good for her.

  And so the Cheffe worked in that little kitchen in the Landes, at once confident and tense, just as she always liked to be, with the kind of controlled, dynamic, galvanizing intentness that attracted miraculous ideas and received them without triumph, as if it was owed them, as if that went without saying, an intentness whose disappearance, once the work was done and the scale of the accomplishment measured, gave rise to a faint dizziness, an exhaustion, and a wonderment less marveling than incredulous: How could I have been capable of such a thing?

  Only that intentness, the Cheffe always said, could make the merciless toil of cooking bearable.

  When you didn’t feel it, or when you felt it but found no pleasure in it, and looked on the dismembered animals, the dirt-crusted vegetables, everything hiding the secret of its taste and waiting, gravely, unhelpfully, for you to figure out what to do with it, then an enormous weariness and nausea might make you wish you could just run away, the Cheffe said, and never again feel yourself bound up with that dead, stinking flesh, the entrails, the fat, the tedious labors, the inevitable filth, and the pain of all those, human and animal, by way of whom an ineloquent, mindless food made its way from kitchen to table, the animals’ shrieks, the humans’ exhaustion, you wanted to run away as far as you could when that monotonous misery hit you full force, when the cool ecstasy of creation wasn’t protecting you, said the Cheffe with her little oblique smile, “and sometimes I did, and I thought I was freeing myself, but of course I always came back,” said the Cheffe, “because I was even unhappier freed from the trials of cooking than enduring them, and I didn’t often have to endure them, whereas when I was far away from them I suffered all the time, no two ways about that.

  “I could never be happy for long outside my kitchen,” the Cheffe used to say, and then added, quickly and dutifully, “except with my daughter,” and we both knew it wasn’t true, or at least I did, just as I knew the Cheffe felt obliged to invent and to trumpet a joyful motherhood, not for herself, not out of pride, but in hopes of convincing her daughter, wherever she was, she was never with her, as if such words, repeated year after year, might in the end impregnate the air her daughter was breathing someplace in this world and disarm her forgetful but rancorous heart, her heart that preserved no memory of the love she’d been given but kept rigorous track of every perceived slight.

  You’re going to meet her?

  You’ll see it straight off, she’s a deeply deceitful person, inhumanly self-centered, but at the same time not very bright and so not as harmful as she’d like.

  I’m not worried, you’ll see it straight off, I don’t think I’m being too harsh, oh no, I’m not worried.

  Hate me? Oh yes.

  Feel contempt for me? Naturally.

  Put yourself in her place: How could she not hate the one person who never doubted her lifelong ambition, the only one she ever had: to undermine her mother’s mental and physical forces so that, once she’d worn her down, once she’d brought her low, she would see her swallowed up by the mediocrity, the laziness, the self-indulgent, self-pitying inertia she herself v
ery knowingly made the stuff of her life?

  I can understand her hating me.

  I never played the Cheffe’s game, which meant nodding and beaming when she spoke of her glorious, talented, lovable daughter, showing perhaps a tinge of envy or regret if your own child was less remarkable, and other people generally did cooperate in that little charade, never suspecting it was one, they weren’t so interested in the Cheffe’s life and her daughter that they’d think to distrust those claims, and they agreed for the sake of politeness, noncommittally.

  I alone held back, didn’t nod, didn’t smile.

  And the Cheffe understood that I knew what she strove in vain not to know, which is that her daughter was in no way the clever, confident person she claimed, that she never would be, that in fact she used all the meager resources of her very limited intelligence to try to make her mother guilty of her failures, to make her feel guilty and become guilty, since the daughter was always dragging her into situations she had to pull away from if she didn’t want to drown with her—and she would have drowned for good, but the daughter would soon have surfaced, I’m sure of it, she’s very attached to life and her little comforts, in spite of her perpetual threats to end it all.

  No, the Cheffe was never angry that I refused to be duped when she launched into her stories of a daughter who existed only in her imagination.

  It was a flutter of wings just by her ear.

  Yes.

  A quiet rustle that came from my devoutly sincere mind, and our eyes met, and then, possibly grateful or relieved, she saw my skepticism, I might even say my honesty, so she kept her hold on her reason and when she went back to describing her miraculous daughter she knew full well she was telling tales.

  “If it weren’t for you I would have gone over the edge,” she once told me, almost casually, and I never felt the need to ask what she meant, or make some lame attempt at denying it, I understood her at once: had she gone on too long exalting her daughter as an admirable young lady who loved her and gave her every motherly satisfaction, had she kept that up too long with no one ever contradicting her, not even with a fluttering aerial caress on her forehead, she would have succumbed to the temptation of believing what she was saying and so lost a piece of her sanity, no one would have thought she’d gone mad, no one would have noticed or cared, but, she thought, that loss would have sapped the very foundation of her engagement with cooking, which for her seemed to depend on a constantly clear and confident mind, and so she would indeed have gone mad as she understood it, since she would have lost her vigilant concern for truth and precision.