The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  Hence her gratitude that I refused to feel sorry for her, or uncomfortable or afraid, that I refused to feel obliged to greet her tales of her daughter with polite acquiescence.

  I held fast to my doubts and my horror of that woman, I crossed my arms, took a step back, and looked at the Cheffe, sending her my loyal, gentle, truthful thoughts, and the Cheffe never resented it, on the contrary, and she realized I’d saved her from a peril even more terrible than believing in the virtues of that despicable daughter.

  Once her bouillon of little fish was thoroughly cooked, once she’d made sure you could no longer tell the bits of vegetable from the pieces of fry, the Cheffe dredged out the biggest bones, then emptied the pot into the blender and found herself pleased with the resulting soup: thick and coarse, bright yellow from the saffron.

  She put in a cod loin and a fillet of pollock, let them cook for a few minutes, then turned off the heat.

  She’d never made or seen someone else make a fish soup that way, nor read any recipe, in fact she never would read very much, deciphering words wasn’t her strength.

  And yet, as she told me, everything the Marmande cook’s lifeless, inexpressive dishes were missing had indirectly tutored her, pushing her, at night in her bed, to come up with ways to make what she’d tasted far better, and so, she liked to say, in a perhaps slightly mischievous paradox, she thought she’d learned far more, and got much more exercise for her inventiveness, from the dreary, unwitting teachings of Marmande than she would have gotten training under some brilliant chef, in any case even decades later she still felt a quiet, surprised pride at the fine work she did in that little kitchen in the Landes, spied on by the pines enlisted by the Clapeaus, by the Clapeaus themselves, by the swarm of feverish Clapeaus frantic with desire and uncertainty and by the less trusted but no less respected pines, by the oppressive old pine at the window.

  The surprise, at herself or at that strange sixteen-year-old girl who so oddly happened to have been her, would come only much later.

  Nothing surprised that girl in the serene bustle of her work, in the deep concentration of her thought, nothing came as a surprise, inventiveness least of all.

  Everything seemed to happen by itself, her quick progress, her precise movements, the laconic dance of her sturdy, neat little body, of which she was calmly, happily aware as she strode back and forth, never wasting a step, now and then remembering, with a sharp aesthetic disapproval, the halting, uncertain, irritable way the Marmande cook moved through that big room whose proportions she seemed out of loathing to have resolved not to note, no more than she saw all the tiny details that made it the kitchen it was and not some other kitchen.

  To the Cheffe, the Marmande cook always seemed as if she’d been abandoned just that morning in some brutal, backstabbing environment she had to steer clear of for the sake of her safety or dignity, whereas even then the more resourceful Cheffe could draw on her own inner harmony, unruffled and adaptable, happy and beautiful wherever she was cooking, at peace, focused, delighted, a friend to the meddlesome pines, aware of and at one with her surroundings, and at the same time magnificently somewhere else.

  When I close my eyes and picture her in that little kitchen in the Landes, I’m convinced she already had that moving, enviable ability to be perfectly happy in herself, in an easy, friendly rapport with her open and obliging body, with her enormous but controlled ambition, with her temperate desires and well-regulated heart, that’s how we thought of her, that’s how we saw her, at first, when she was our boss, vaguely and respectfully believing she didn’t need anything because she found everything she needed in herself, even cooking was an extra, a challenge to take on, a suitable pastime for a queen with no love of idleness, we thought she could easily do without everything—cooking, her daughter, love, all of us—which of course I now know wasn’t true, and outside the kitchen she found her own company hard to endure, she was less at home with her rich, expansive personality than we were with our stunted little souls.

  Who do I mean by we?

  Oh, my coworkers back then, back when I first went to work for the Cheffe, when she took me on as an apprentice and I joined a team of young men who’d been with her for some time, whose feelings and opinions I made my own, in my ignorance, before I realized I saw the Cheffe very differently from them, I was in love with her, and I strove to understand her with all the subtlety I could muster, I wasn’t sophisticated, I was very young, sometimes my attempts to see into her failed and I was totally blind, but I kept at it, with love’s help I conquered my weaknesses, I came to know the Cheffe better than anyone, I don’t doubt that for a moment; who ever loved her like I did?

  Her daughter? I take it you’re joking.

  It troubles me to think she might already have hoodwinked you, it makes me feel less free to talk to you candidly.

  I need to believe you’re good people.

  How good can anyone be if they’re so easily taken in by a woman that crude, that predictable, that transparent in her pettiness?

  And how can I talk to you candidly, with an unguarded sincerity that’s not like me at all, that shakes me to my depths, the memory of which sometimes wrenches me awake in the night, terrified that I dared fill in the Cheffe’s silences, revealing a few of my own secrets at the same time, and I lie there sweating and depressed, hating myself and you too in a way, I can’t get back to sleep, my eyes open in the dark and the blood pounding in my neck—how can I talk to you candidly if I think my words are falling into the deep hole of skepticism that even the briefest conversation with the Cheffe’s daughter will have dug in you?

  Because then you’ll question everything I say, you’ll compare it with her daughter’s radically different telling and try to give equal weight to both sides, and you won’t realize you’re insulting me so cruelly that I find it simply grotesque to suffer so for the sake of the truth if it only means I’ll be compared to that wastrel, that liar, placed alongside her, given the same credence.

  The whole thing becomes ridiculous, you understand?

  It would be easy to smirk at my Lloret de Mar friends, they have no idea they belong to a type that seems to exist only to be smirked at, with their bright, practical clothes, their overblown good humor, their lack of inhibition and the resulting ingenuous display of flesh, but the way they’ve rigorously winnowed down their lives to end up happily reduced to whatever will fit into their sixty square meters in Lloret de Mar fills me with fond respect.

  The Cheffe was never much interested in desserts, though she did see their usefulness, even their necessity, which is to say that having gone over and over that question in her mind, having tried out various final courses that were nothing like treats but rather made a very slightly rugged epilogue to a perfectly cadenced journey (sorbet of green olives, for example, or diced cucumber cooked in honey, to follow a dish of oxtail with leeks), she accepted that it might seem ungenerous or high-handed to cancel the traditional conclusion, sweet, melodious, and uncomplicated, the dulcet, consensual last word of a statement that was always delicious but sometimes a bit rough, the Cheffe’s cooking could be brusque, especially later on, in its almost fanatical plainness, yes, her cooking could be hard when you first encountered it, could be uncongenial, but once you’d learned to love it you felt only repugnance for any mannered, pandering cuisine, anything soft and creamy, you felt like that food didn’t think much of you, as if you were someone not much could be expected of, who’s never asked to show what he’s capable of, his fearlessness, his curiosity, who knows what, you don’t feel respected as a customer and an eater, you feel ashamed for the cook.

  But the Cheffe never found the way, and in the end she stopped trying, to defy the age-old, deep-seated desire for a sweet ending, a moral to the story, if I may, a moment of universal agreement, all the tablemates united in happy, distracted concord with the cook’s intentions, whereas the Cheffe was still work
ing—up to the last moment, the final mouthful—to spur on not the eater’s capacity for surprise, not his resistance to provocation, she never liked to provoke people, even if, it must be said, she often did, but rather his quest for a seriousness and cool reserve that she herself strove to make the masters of everything she did.

  And those virtues she was so intent on attaining, and on imparting to those who liked her food, seemed to her impossible to find in the everyday, easy sweetness of a dessert.

  But she preferred to step away from the field of battle, she chose to say no more about it, to think no more about it, as if the very notion of dessert had never existed, and to serve at the end of a meal something that just happened to be more sweet than savory, more sugared than sharp, that could only with difficulty be remembered as a confection pure and simple.

  When you first tasted the Cheffe’s cooking and, if you knew nothing about it, assumed that some luscious reward would crown the private efforts you’d put into appreciating each dish at its full, very demanding measure, you might have seen what played the part of the dessert as a discreet test of your merit, and almost of your soul, because then, in order to find the delight you were looking for, you’d have to stifle your childish desire for the gratification of something sweet, but you did most certainly delight, if you could find it in yourself to be bold and curious, and as you delighted you felt you’d been elevated, taken seriously, and as you pushed back your chair you sent the Cheffe this thought that would long make of you, in your happiness, her debtor: you brought out the best in me.

  Yes, you delighted, and strangely that delight demanded an investment of seriousness and resolve, in return for which you would never forget a moment of the experience.

  And if you then went back to more obliging desserts, I believe you had to feel something crumbling inside you, a backsliding not into some weakness or eccentricity but into everything that’s most trivial about you, and in time, to be sure, that would fade, with your busy life and its everyday ways, but I like to think a regret would still smolder inside you, flaming up whenever you realized you’d shown a lack of boldness or style, the regret was there and you couldn’t remember where it came from or what it was trying to tell you, no more than you can remember the distant cause of certain sadnesses that sometimes come over you, on seeing a golden light against a little patch of wall or the glistening chrome of a radiator grille on a dull summer day, the regret was there, the regret that you’d lacked the ability or desire to stay on the exceptional plane that, for the duration of a meal, the Cheffe had raised you to by the spirit of her cooking.

  Tears? No, it’s my eyes watering, that’s all, it doesn’t mean anything.

  I’m not the type to shed tears in public, you know, that’s not in my upbringing, my mother would have mocked me heartlessly.

  Yes, that’s right, I never met my father, but let’s not talk about my life before the Cheffe, it’s completely without interest, because I truly came into this world the day I opened the door to her restaurant, hoping for work.

  I didn’t see much of my mother after that. I didn’t have the time.

  Completely without interest, I’m telling you.

  The Cheffe’s unwillingness to make a dessert that would satisfy only the pursuit of pleasure was something she discovered that very afternoon in the little kitchen in the Landes, it’s the oldest, most unchanging facet of her character as a cook, it almost dizzied her, and she stood still for a few minutes at the table, her hands flat against the wood, wondering if she was right to be like that, and although she didn’t know it, already fearing the excessiveness of her instincts but perhaps understanding that she had to obey them if she wanted to keep the flame of her mission burning high and bright.

  Yes, the Cheffe was a quiet visionary, a sober fanatic, her incandescence was hidden and deep, only the pine tree saw it as it watched her through the glass, its own ascetic ardor sealed away beneath its bark, deep in the trunk.

  What she knew for sure was that she wanted at all costs not to imitate the Marmande cook, who made the Clapeaus the desserts most likely to tickle their bottomless gluttony as well as their wretched, contorted shame at that gluttony.

  She found that unspeakably repugnant, but she was disgusted by her repugnance, and she wanted no part of any of it.

  Lying in bed at night, analyzing the vague impression of a mistake set off in her by a coffee parfait, an egg custard, a sponge cake, or a plate of soufflé fritters, she realized that what united all those desserts in her dislike, her sense of an endlessly repeated misstep, was that they were all very sweet, very fatty, very insipid, and that they appended themselves to the meal in a crass, intrusive way, they were never, the Cheffe felt in the meditative solitude of her bed, the restrained, concise, discreet conclusion to the necessarily more important, more serious, more scintillating meal, they were always out of place, they were an unwelcome protuberance on an interesting, precisely calibrated form.

  She was sometimes astonished at the Marmande cook’s enthusiasm as she made the desserts the Clapeaus so loved, her ardent concern for their tastes in that one area, she who was perpetually disgruntled and dyspeptic and could go on working for the Clapeaus only so long as she knew she wasn’t giving them everything they wanted, she who always carefully kept her work just short of completeness, in which way a little of her bitterness was drained off and the Marmande cook could preserve untouched what she gloomily loved to contemplate, thought the Cheffe, because she would never offer it up to anyone, her illusory treasure: her power of creation.

  But the cook went out of her way to charm the Clapeaus with her desserts, which were nothing but monstrous inanities of sugar and butter, as if, the Cheffe imagined, she permitted herself to mine her virtuous resources of invention only insofar as she saw it as a chance to corrupt the Clapeaus, who not only knew that vast quantities of sugar and butter were bad for them—though I can’t think that they cared, a good dinner meant more to them than the prospect of old age—but who most importantly had chosen to identify sugar and butter as the primary culprits in their weakness, reserving a very particular and visible hatred for those ingredients, even as they knew, or maybe they didn’t, I’m not sure of anything, that with a little effort they could have given up sugar and butter, whereas well-marbled meats, rich, fatty terrines, dry-cured ham, those they could not do without, they couldn’t hate things that brought them so much pleasure, and so they despised sugar and butter, which they needed less.

  They could have given them up, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, their loudly proclaimed hatred assailed something that wasn’t their real problem at all.

  And the cook sensed that, she knew the Clapeaus better than she knew herself, she knew them the way you know your children, your pets, all your house’s little creaks and cracks, she sensed that sugar and butter mattered less to them than the rest, she threw her colossal, boundless rage, a rage that had no reason to relent, that couldn’t relent, into making sugar and butter indispensable to the Clapeaus, and so to make the Clapeaus, who could still vaguely see the path, lose their way forever.

  As I say, the Cheffe wanted nothing to do with all that.

  She wanted to illuminate the Clapeaus with the cold, intense, irresistible brilliance of her mastery without having to enter their clammy hearts, without having to brush against their warm, sticky skin, neither provoking nor flattering, neither condemning nor excusing their tortuous emotions.

  And so she put together a dessert without thinking of them, not trying, as she had with the denatured chicken or the fish soup, to dazzle them.

  Her dessert would be intransigent, uningratiating, but irreproachable within the severe boundaries of its intention, only that intention could be criticized or mocked or indignantly rejected, not the drily perfect dessert it produced.

  Quickly, with all the assurance she’d seen in the Marmande cook, she made dough for
a tart without butter, just flour, two eggs, and water.

  On that dough she laid quartered peaches in close ranks, then sprinkled them with a pinch of sugar, a little salt, and, distantly, pretending almost not to notice she was doing it, some finely chopped verbena picked at the foot of the back stairs.

  She wasn’t sure that the tart would be delicious, nor that the Clapeaus could even finish a helping, so strongly did the recipe go against their habits, and neither was she sure she herself would find any pleasure in that tart, or rather that any pleasure she did find in it would derive from something other than the knowledge that she’d created a dish of absolute rightness, harmonious and balanced in its austerity, a dish that, to use the expression the Cheffe would later often borrow from the vocabulary of couture, “draped” to perfection.

  She didn’t know how much pleasure that dish might give, but she was sure, almost, that it would be a success in a larger sense, and she liked that, she thought she had to be right, not because she wanted to sway others but only so she could privately know she hadn’t gone wrong, that her intuition had guided her well, and that the thing she’d had in her mind, floating at the very edge of her thoughts, like an image you see in a dream—precise, more real than reality, obvious and implacable, ugly perhaps, but with an ugliness full of dignity and presence—she’d managed to re-create as surely and finely as could be.