by Marie Ndiaye
Maybe she was, but her uneasy conscience was not, and even on the hottest days of the year the Cheffe hid the back of her neck with a scarf; how could I not have known about the psoriasis?
The Cheffe had been dead for two years when I met the aged apprentice in his rest home, where with a lingering trace of cool, objective revulsion he described that young coworker he didn’t find beautiful frantically rubbing her neck in the courtyard, the Cheffe was dead and that unpleasant old man wasn’t, and I’d missed the chance to show the Cheffe my sadness, my boundless sympathy for what she’d gone through back then, standing behind her I would have stroked the back of her neck and perhaps, beneath my fingers, made out something still faintly rough, and the Cheffe would have felt my compassion; how could I not have known?
I still can’t forgive myself.
My Lloret de Mar friends want to cook an elaborate dinner to celebrate my daughter’s visit, they don’t think I could manage it myself, they see me buying only little ready-to-eat dishes at the Lloret de Mar supermarket. Their thoughtfulness, the fondness they seem to feel for me, a fondness far deeper than I’d imagined, deeper than I could ever reciprocate, touches me more than I’d like to be touched by anything in Lloret de Mar. They asked what sort of food my daughter liked and I couldn’t tell them, I felt a moment of panic and irritation. I wish everything could be the way it used to be in Lloret de Mar, I pray for something to stop my daughter from coming, nothing serious of course, something to make her change her plans, but with that reckless prayer am I not running the risk of bringing misfortune down on her innocent young head?
Little by little, seeing Millard at work day after day, the Cheffe came to feel a solid respect for that man she so little respected in every other way.
She who had never separated talent from goodness, she who saw an indisputable link between the Marmande cook’s small heart and her stunted abilities (was she afraid she herself might end up only an insignificant cook if her love for her daughter wasn’t great?), she was troubled to see that in Millard an inventive, resourceful talent coexisted harmoniously with a blinkered, trivial, vacuous personality, neither in any way affecting the other, the two of them together producing a Millard who was very happy to be alive, sure of his worth as a cook but blind to his failings, a first-rate professional and a detestable person.
His worthiness never faltered when he went to work on a dish, and he took a strangely humble pleasure in the customers’ praise passed on by the waiter, as if he’d never expected even so simple a reward as a compliment for his labors, his ambition always to do the best that can be done.
His cooking duly conformed to the practices and tastes of the time, but he added a personal, aesthetic touch to the classic recipe of, say, pike quenelles in Nantua sauce, snipping a few sprigs of flat-leaf parsley into the pink béchamel, casually observing, in a tone that tried to sound self-mocking, that there was too much pink in that sauce, it needed a fresh color for contrast, but he approached his work with great seriousness, and generally strove, without seeming to meddle with it at all, to lighten—if only for the eye—the floury thickness of a roux or the layer of fat floating atop a broth, he used all the green parts of the vegetables, he never said anything of it, he wasn’t comfortable explaining his instincts.
And with a surprise that never faded, the Cheffe saw that man’s lips spewing words and sentences of inexhaustible idiocy, full of an ill will that rarely rested, even as Millard’s sure hands obeyed the ingenious instructions of a mind unhobbled by idiocy or ill will.
How could it be, the Cheffe wondered back then, and was in a way still wondering when she told me about it thirty years later, that Millard’s ugly soul never got in the way of his hands’ diligent labors, or that those hands didn’t flounder helplessly on the counter, unhappy or embarrassed to find themselves guided by so hateful a mind?
For her part, the Cheffe feared that any failing in the conduct of her life, any lazy habit of mean-spirited thoughts, would cost her forever the favor that had been granted her, she kept a close watch on herself, tried not to let herself get away with anything.
Because Millard had the greatest respect for his craft, he always spoke politely and precisely to the Cheffe when he assigned her a job.
Thanks to that same seriousness, he soon saw that the girl was quick and capable, talented, already proficient in many tasks, and although every day he reflexively called for the girl to be replaced by an apprentice of the other sex, although each morning he viscerally longed not to see her walk into his kitchen, he never let those emotions interfere with the scrupulous, loyal idea of her held by the professional inside him, who soon stopped limiting her to prep work but entrusted her with jobs requiring what he called a good hand.
He discovered that what she didn’t already know how to do perfectly—puff pastry, meat glaze, a delicately stuffed fish—she learned the first time he showed her, and every term he used she remembered, but she kept her head down all the same, out of prudence, strategy, and discretion, pretending she had no ideas of her own, taking great care not to get a fat head, as Millard was quick to say of anyone who expressed an opinion in his presence.
I’ve had the outlandish idea of renting an apartment in Rosamar and telling my daughter that’s where I live, she’d never see Lloret de Mar or my friends, the two weeks of her visit would quickly go by, I’d never take her to Santa Cristina beach or any of my Lloret de Mar friends’ other meeting places. I’d tell them my daughter ended up canceling her visit, they’d soon forget the whole thing, they’d forget I have a daughter at all. That thought cheered me up, suddenly it all seemed so simple.
Hearing Millard’s approving if gruff and laconic reports on the Cheffe’s work, Declaerk raised her salary. In the article, he would use that elegant gesture as a pretext to denounce what he insisted on seeing as his employee’s disloyalty, insinuating that the Cheffe was an ungrateful girl, even trumpeting the kindly things she always said of him or Millard as proof that she couldn’t be trusted; why did she leave if she was so happy there?
That article’s readers must have clearly seen that Declaerk simply refused to accept that the Cheffe had earned her independence, and hadn’t been prodded into it by some disenchantment, he thought he was protecting her, he said, when all along he was only preparing her to walk out on him.
The Cheffe must have known Declaerk had spoken ill of her, but I never once heard her criticize him, never heard one sharp or ironic word about that man who so vaingloriously exaggerated his role in her education, who gave the ridiculous impression that out of pure fineness of spirit he’d taken on a completely lost girl and for all her many failings helped her along, she understood even his bitterness, she was sorry to see him show himself to be so vulnerable, so needlessly hurt, she would have taken his side against any attack, no matter how justified.
For him, for the smallness and spite he revealed in that article, she felt the indestructible forgiveness you might feel for your indigent parents stewing in their resentment as the wave of a success they can’t understand sweeps you far, far away over a silvery sea, and a stupid jealousy whose spur I wasn’t too proud to obey made me suspect that a lingering carnal attraction, the nostalgic memory of a special desire for that man and his trim body, lay behind an indulgence that might have been simply a sort of filial attachment.
Yes, I was jealous, I couldn’t imagine the Cheffe being so faithful to me, it was stupid (I was jealous of the saintly slimness of a man like Declaerk!).
He never got over the Cheffe’s announcement, after eighteen months with him, that she’d found a place to rent, a long-closed old bistro, far from Declaerk’s.
She wanted to open a restaurant of her own, she gave Declaerk fair notice, several months in advance, she innocently hoped for his approval and encouragement, even his advice, and possibly a loan, she told me, laughing at that very young woman’s naïve effrontery.
> She was surprised by Declaerk’s stone-faced reaction. He said nothing more of it for several days, then informed her he’d found a replacement and he never wanted to see her again, never hear another word about her, she could file a complaint if she dared.
Coming from him, that was little short of a curse on the Cheffe, and I like to think it came back to bite him, far harder than she had any right to wish, she obeyed his furious command and never again turned to him in any way, but he heard about her, oh how he heard about her, with a stinging pain it gives me some pleasure to imagine, though the thought of it inspired only sadness in the Cheffe.
She long hoped to see him walk into her restaurant as she’d walked into his decades before, not looking for work of course, but to show her he’d forgiven her and all his anger had faded, and then the Cheffe would forget she’d done nothing she wanted forgiveness for, she would be infinitely relieved, at peace, she would gratefully welcome his pardon, as if she were guilty of something, thinking there was a cause even higher than justice, the cause of reconciliation.
But Declaerk never appeared in the Cheffe’s restaurant, and if he agreed to answer a journalist’s questions about his onetime employee, a request that must only have stoked his resentment, it was probably because he hoped to discredit her, he didn’t understand, he refused to understand, that she was awaiting him with a magnanimous heart, a wide-open heart, she would have laid all her weapons at his feet before he’d spoken a word, even if she was unmistakably the stronger of the two.
I didn’t like to see her relinquish the authority that was rightly hers, sacrifice her legitimate self-regard for the sake of Declaerk’s misplaced pride, I saw in it something feminine that should never have been, that eagerness to make peace at any price with someone who had no idea of the good fortune granted him, the grace bestowed on him, but when I said so the Cheffe only chuckled and answered, “I felt sort of bad for him, you know,” and I told her I couldn’t accept her feeling the tiniest bit bad for a man whose emotions toward her were envious and ignoble, I told her it was precisely the excessive indulgence of women like her that encouraged the shameless misbehavior of men such as him, and the Cheffe didn’t answer, which I think was her way of telling me I was right but so was she, for reasons I couldn’t understand.
And it’s true, I still don’t know if the Cheffe sympathized with Declaerk because there was once vaguely something between them and she’d backed out and angered him or because, more generally, she felt sorry for envious people, because she felt guilty for being the object of such an emotion even if she’d done nothing to cause it, that’s how she was, horrified at the thought of very unintentionally engendering something hurtful, of ugliness spreading by way of her.
And so the Cheffe was shown the door at Declaerk’s in a brutal, humiliating way whose force she nonetheless felt only fleetingly, only glancingly, bent as she was on seeing her project through, she no sooner found herself in the street than she was already sailing far away from Millard and Declaerk in her thoughts, and the memory of her firing was already fading, like a trivial incident in the course already plotted out for her, the faint sketch of a destiny she could see with her imagination’s wide-open eyes.
She hurried to the rental agency for the space she had in mind, toured the premises, very excited to find them much as she’d hoped when she peered through the wide corner windows, it was a busy intersection, not far from the Place de la Bourse.
Inside she found a dining room measuring all of forty square meters, a kitchen of fifteen, and bathrooms in need of repair.
Yes, the same restaurant as now, the Cheffe later bought the two adjoining shops and expanded, but she never moved.
The floor was laid with those beautiful terra-cotta tiles you’ve seen, with a green cloverleaf motif on a pale blue background. The bankrupt bistro’s furniture stayed: dark oak tables, straw-seated chairs, and in the kitchen all the requisite butcher blocks, sideboards, cabinets, baking dishes, and casseroles, everything but dishes, glasses, and silverware.
The Cheffe told them she’d take it, begged for a little time, took the train to Marmande, and rang at the Clapeaus’ door.
They weren’t surprised to see her, she told me, in fact they seemed to be expecting her, which I saw as a luminously clear sign that she’d recaptured the silent, commanding hold she once had on them, that her power to provide what was for them the greatest of all pleasures once again radiated from her to the receptive Clapeaus, who, I thought, surely hadn’t known she was coming, no, but on seeing the Cheffe at their door found themselves struck by a certainty—that it was inevitable this girl would come back into their lives, that their lives couldn’t be overturned and remade as they were after the Landes without the author of that transformation regularly, ritually reappearing, because chance had no hand in all this, the Clapeaus must have told themselves day after day, missing the Cheffe without grief, calmly, grateful for what had been given them, knowing they hadn’t seen the last of it, living in a patient, wistful state of suspension, enduring it.
A half hour later, when the Cheffe took her leave, she was carrying a generous check.
She’d scarcely spoken a word, and neither had they. From the first moment they understood what she needed, just as she understood, thanking them, that they didn’t want to be thanked, that the very thought of it horrified them, they were visibly squirming and it wasn’t an act, so the Cheffe held her tongue, tucked the check into her little purse, and immediately bade them good-bye, not for a moment thinking to make some semblance of small talk, neither she nor the Clapeaus.
She would soon repay that debt, and although the Clapeaus were opposed, although they’d even written her several times urging her to stop sending checks that they never cashed anyway, she would insistently go on making those payments, knowing full well that the Clapeaus believed with a sort of terror that they weren’t on an equal footing with her, that she owed them nothing, that by taking from her even something as uncompromising as a repayment check they were sullying their passion, not living up to their idea of themselves, subtly endangering themselves—but for the Cheffe that was the Clapeaus’ concern, their very honorable obsession, while hers was owing nothing to anyone.
And so she signed a lease for the restaurant as well as the shabby little apartment above it, paid several months’ rent in advance, bought linens, dishes, silverware, and stemmed glasses, along with a simple mattress that for years would be her only furniture, she’d keep her clothes stacked on pallets, her own comfort didn’t interest her.
When I later grew close enough to the Cheffe that I dared stop by in the winter for a visit, I found that, although her apartment was no longer outfitted with only a mattress, she seemed to have filled it with things in obedience to a societal obligation whose codes she didn’t quite understand, taking so little interest in them, and caring so little about the opinion of the few people she allowed in, principally friends of her daughter’s, when she was living with her.
For example, I was amused to see that the Cheffe had crammed two armoires of two different styles and two sorts of wood side by side in the entryway, or that she’d laid down a thin Oriental carpet just next to a geometric contemporary rug of rough wool, and I also observed that the Cheffe moved through the apartment in a furtive, tentative, very slightly vexed way, as if on waking from a dream she’d found herself just where she hadn’t wanted to go, a place she furthermore didn’t know very well.
Once she’d bought everything she needed, she had a sign painted in red letters against a cream background, with a trompe-l’oeil effect so that the letters seemed to have been cut thick and then glued to the wood. As you know, she called her restaurant La Bonne Heure.
I rent a car for the day and drive to Rosamar to reserve an apartment I’ll tell my daughter is mine, and here I am walking the streets of Rosamar, so like the streets of Lloret de Mar that at any moment I expect to run
into Jean-Claude or Jean-Luc or Marie-Christine or Nathalie out doing their high-priced, sophisticated shopping in the best grocery stores, but no, I’m in Rosamar, where I don’t know anyone and no one knows me, which is why I could conceivably have my daughter visit me here, but now I don’t want to, my head is spinning in despair, my legs go weak, and I drop onto a chair on the terrace of a café exactly like my usual one in Lloret de Mar. I don’t see how I’m ever going to get through this. Suddenly the sun is my enemy and the sky seems too big, I miss Bordeaux in the winter, the dark, high-walled streets of my childhood and the cottony silence, the sounds imprisoned by the fog over the gray, invisible Garonne, in Rosamar as in Lloret de Mar the weightless light gratingly amplifies every metallic clank, every idiotic cry of joy in those places devoted to the pleasures of people like me; how will I ever get through this, get through what exactly, where’s the danger, what could my daughter do or say that I feel so incapable of enduring?
When the Cheffe was asked how she’d settled on that name for her restaurant, she always found some way not to answer, something like, “Well, it’s the perfect name, don’t you think?”
And it was indeed one of the best restaurant names you could possibly come up with, cheerful, simple, easy to remember, but the Cheffe had chosen it long before, back when she was working at the Clapeaus’, thinking of a memory she cherished even if it sometimes clenched her throat with an indefinable sorrow.
Because when she was a child scarcely a day went by that she didn’t hear her mother merrily proclaim “A la bonne heure!” for one reason or another, whether she was happy to see her daughter home from school or rejoicing at the promise of a well-paid job or glad of a light breeze that cooled a hot day, any occasion at all that wasn’t overtly unpleasant and could thus easily become the source of a sort of happy gratitude, the very root of the pleasure of being alive for the Cheffe’s parents, the mother let that expression spring from her lips, never mechanically, but rather like something risen up from the most open, most sincere part of her sincere, open heart.