by Marie Ndiaye
When the Cheffe told me the secret of that name, she also told me she’d revealed it to her daughter a few years before, and since in all the interviews that woman very freely gave before and after the Cheffe’s death I never once saw her bring up the story of La Bonne Heure, I think it’s safe to assume she was deliberately keeping it quiet so as not to portray her mother as a sensitive, even sentimental woman, she wanted to convince the whole world that hard and calculating was all the Cheffe could ever be.
She tells any journalist who asks that she has no idea where the name comes from, her mother must have stumbled on it by chance, which is of course meaningless and to my mind perfectly expresses the very special nastiness of that woman who should have realized that by revealing the name’s provenance she would be paying homage less to her mother than to her grandmother in Sainte-Bazeille, with whom she’d spent her first years, whom she’d loved more than anyone, said the Cheffe, but how does a creature as self-centered as she is feel love, that’s what I can’t help but wonder.
Once she’d scrubbed down the dining room walls, the Cheffe decided she’d leave them painted that bold royal blue, with a dark woodwork she generously waxed, and that undersea atmosphere, muffled and reflective, where every move seems to take place more slowly and more serenely than outside, went against the reds and golds that still prevailed at the time, it was a daring decision, and by way of a very yellow lighting the Cheffe sought to erase the feeling of coldness that might come from those blue walls’ subaquatic solemnity, it was a daring decision, the Cheffe made it all on her own, like everything else she did, and she never regretted it.
The walls at La Bonne Heure are still blue today, and I’ve often thought that the generally decorous behavior of that restaurant’s customers, their propriety, their tendency to keep their voices low even as they feel marvelously at ease and never watched over by a censorious staff, still come from that blue, imbued with its own solitude and gentle austerity even before it was imbued with the Cheffe’s uncompromising cuisine or the reserved ambience she imposed by her mere presence, visible or hidden.
It seems people always say this sort of thing to build up a legend, always the same, no matter the endeavor in question, but it’s an understatement to say that the early days of La Bonne Heure were hard.
“I never thought it was going to be easy,” the Cheffe would say, dismissing that subject and the emotions she felt in those very difficult beginnings.
She opened La Bonne Heure on April 3, 1973, with a menu she’d had printed on sky-blue paper.
On that menu were crawfish pie, lamb brain fritters with anchovy sauce, veal quenelles, baked tuna, lavender honey–glazed roast beef, the peach tart from the Landes, a vanilla parfait topped with coffee syrup, and although she was planning to hire someone for the dining room as soon as she could she wasn’t afraid to greet the customers herself and wait at the six tables, at lunch and at dinner.
The first week she had only a handful of customers, who left very happy, she modestly told me, but their numbers didn’t grow as the weeks went by, and nothing guaranteed that she was going to make it.
She closed only for Thursday lunch, she got up at five every morning, washed the table linens in her apartment’s bathtub, then went off to the Marché des Capucins, pushing a little cart, caught up, she told me, in a relentless, even furious rapture that almost erased any sensation of tiredness, that gave that sensation no chance to awaken, that made her look on the need for rest with a boredom not far from anguish, though she slept well, she sank into a narrow, cool grave and never turned over or moved or dreamt, climbing out the next morning feeling like the events of the day before were long past, that her life was just then beginning, untouched by care, that La Bonne Heure was going to open for the first time that noon.
It might have been the same unrelenting, imperious fever that swept her off to Sainte-Bazeille one Thursday at dawn, she was a galloping horse with no bridle, fiercely confident in her instinct, she ran to Sainte-Bazeille, ran into her parents’ house, came out still running, unhearing, unreasoning, burningly sure of herself, carrying her soon-to-be three-year-old daughter.
If she chose to come for her daughter just when looking after the child would most complicate her life, if she chose that very moment to take her back once and for all, as she announced to her parents, I believe that was a deliberate escalation of her struggle, an example of the furious but completely optimistic go-for-broke spirit she had back then, secretly convinced that she had to risk total disaster, as a mother, a cook, and a restaurateur, or give herself the chance to succeed brilliantly at all three, but in any case she couldn’t undertake the adventure of the restaurant without incorporating her daughter’s care into it, she’d never rejoice in the success of the one if she avoided her responsibility for the other, yes, perhaps there was something manic about it, but it was exactly that combination of nerve, heedlessness, and a consuming sense of her responsibilities that made the Cheffe what she became, a great artist.
Talking to you, thinking about the Cheffe, I sometimes forget that through the circumstances of her birth her gifts found their outlet in cooking, because no matter what she might say I consider her an artist, if things were different she would have made her name as a painter or writer, or who knows what, but the Cheffe didn’t like me thinking that way, she didn’t believe there was anything special about her, any particular talent, only the good luck to be organized, hardworking, intuitive, and to house within her, with no guarantee that it would last, the little spirit of her craft—“That’s exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about art,” I would answer, and the Cheffe would frown, she didn’t trust high-flown words, didn’t like fancy talk, as she called it.
Now, simply knowing that I can always take my daughter to Rosamar, I can accept the idea of having her in my real home, Lloret de Mar. The spell broken, I came back from Rosamar telling myself I would have had to live a lie with her for two weeks, forever fearing we might run into someone I know, inventing a different life for myself, different habits. There’s no point in fighting it, and I realize I’m almost relieved—my tranquility is at an end, something unpleasant is coming, but it’s the unpleasantness of reality, not of lies. I know the unpleasantness is coming, so there’s no reason to fear that it might, what’s done will be done, I feel unburdened before anything’s even happened, and this evening like every evening I’ll find myself on a terrace, drinking and eating and talking with my Lloret de Mar friends, and they’ll kindly ask me for news of my daughter, and I’ll tell them she’ll be here in a week, her name is Cora. Oh, that’s a pretty name. Yes, maybe it is, I’m not quite sure, I’ve rarely spoken it, Cora, her name is Cora, and that summons up so very few memories, Cora might be a pretty name, her name is Cora, I had nothing to do with it.
The Cheffe enrolled her daughter in nursery school and added her daily care to the packed, arduous list of things she already had to do every day—easier, she said, than all the many things she’d done up to then, even if the time she managed to make for her daughter by racing through certain chores even faster than she once did, washing the linens or cleaning the kitchen, say, must sometimes have seemed to her not time enough, which filled her with a painful sense of a failure, a dereliction, and the child who slept on the mattress beside her, hearing her own heart less clearly than her mother’s, that child less aware of her own thoughts than her mother’s, absorbed that regret and senselessly, cynically exploited it, as children do, becoming a capricious, mean little thing, skilled in blackmail and extortion, such that when they saw her again the Cheffe’s parents would be astonished at how little they recognized her, they who’d never had the slightest trouble with the child.
The Cheffe pretended she found it perfectly normal to be ruled and intimidated by a three-year-old girl, so long as it happened outside the restaurant and didn’t get in the way of her work, and her daughter understood that, she realized s
he could push the Cheffe around as roughly as she liked so long as she didn’t threaten La Bonne Heure’s well-being.
And since she was slyly intuitive, cunning, calculating, since she grasped that her mother would have mournfully taken her back to Sainte-Bazeille before she let tantrums and scenes hamper her work, she bullied her mother only when they were alone in the apartment, she always behaved herself in the dining room or kitchen, where the Cheffe sat her down to draw or look at a picture book, I’m convinced that her hatred for La Bonne Heure was born in and fed on those seemingly harmonious hours when she was sentenced to watch her mother come and go with no hope of affecting her or commanding her to obey the aimless but strategic summons of her omnipotent young presence, she would hate the restaurant, yes, but that didn’t mean she loved her mother any more.
That the Cheffe had to do battle each day to build La Bonne Heure’s reputation, that when she went home to her apartment late in the night she had to grapple with a child determined not to go back to sleep after the few hours’ nap she’d just awoken from, in a sense determined never to go back to sleep again, just as she was determined never to stop crying, I thought of all that on those nights when, drunk with exhaustion, shivering, I listened in gratitude and resigned despair, convinced I would never go home to rest, while in her sweet, steady voice, discreetly tinged with self-effacing humor, the Cheffe told me of all she went through in the early years, not easy but instructive, she said, of La Bonne Heure.
I myself don’t think life with the girl taught her anything at all, unlike the creation of La Bonne Heure, which taught her—unsparingly, but with loyalty, coherence, and a logical hope that her hard work would one day be repaid—much of what the Cheffe later used to make of herself far more than the owner of a fine neighborhood restaurant.
No, she learned nothing from life with her daughter, that child of such meager graces, apart from the least laudable aspect of her own character: an eager, desperate submissiveness to the sinister whims of people far, far beneath her who nonetheless looked down on her, like that girl, whose glowing opinion of herself was built on the certainty, never contested by her mother, by the way her mother treated her, that she was by far the sharper and cleverer of the two but alas luck never came through for her, the same luck that had mysteriously proven so generous with her mother.
As the weeks went by, the Cheffe’s paupiettes of rabbit with sorrel, transparent fillets of olive oil–marinated sole, or gratin of Provençal vegetables attracted a more copious clientele of regulars, who more and more often filled up the six tables, keeping others from discovering the place.
The Cheffe had her young sister Ingrid come up from Sainte-Bazeille to wait tables and help with the shopping, as well as look after the child after school, she was sixteen years old, the Cheffe’s daughter still likes to say Ingrid took the place of her mother, another fiction, a lie, or maybe a false memory.
Ingrid was an old woman when I met her, and I knew it made her more uncomfortable than amused to so often hear that the Cheffe’s daughter never mentioned her without calling her “My beloved Ingrid” or “My dear aunt” when she felt no friendship for the daughter back then and saw to her care so impatiently that the Cheffe often had to rebuke her, had to ask her to be nicer and more indulgent with the little girl, and the aged Ingrid assured me the Cheffe’s daughter had no grounds to claim she still loved her to this day, they hadn’t set eyes on each other for twenty years, maybe twenty-five, in short they’d never gotten along from the start, for which Ingrid felt not one shred of guilt, not even when I asked her what it means to say that a young adult of sixteen did or did not get along with a four-year-old child; wasn’t it her job to be kind and loving, to earn her niece’s respect and appreciation?
And that hard-faced old Ingrid shrugged her shoulders, exactly like the Cheffe often did, and told me that’s just how it was, she’d felt no affection for the child, who in any case didn’t lack for it, since her mother loved her and stupidly spoiled her, no, she’d never managed to find the child interesting, she was a weight and a weariness for the Cheffe, and for her too, Ingrid, who was beginning to develop a taste for cooking through her contact with the Cheffe and would have rather worked only in the restaurant instead of spending her days with that child, that’s how it was, a weight and a weariness.
But her sister the Cheffe loved the girl with a passion, there was no doubt about that, which is why the elderly Ingrid was mystified by those declarations of love for someone who’d treated her without warmth and those vicious, bitter, incongruous allegations against the Cheffe, who’d enfolded her in all the tenderness she was capable of, that girl who never gave anything back, such a weight, such a weariness.
Ingrid came from Sainte-Bazeille in the middle of summer, and with that the Cheffe carried out the plan she’d devised when she found herself turning ever more people away.
For the moment renting the space next door was out of the question, so she bought four new tables and set them out on the sidewalk, wide and sunny at that intersection, then put in a navy blue canvas awning, sitting beneath it with the bright August sun vainly trying to get through, you felt a heavenly coolness, limpid and majestic, a kindness freely given, and she also pared her menu down to the dishes she most loved—crawfish pie, cold Chantilly pigeon with spices, terrine of duck and spinach, transparent fillets of sole, green-robed leg of lamb, beef with honey, Landes peach tart, pistachio cream—along with summer specials that changed every day with the market.
I believe she was the first to surprise a dithering regular with dishes she picked out herself, perhaps adding some special touch, even leaving out ingredients or condiments she knew he had no fondness or taste for, as people do with friends they invite to dinner, the Cheffe didn’t pretend to be their friend, she wasn’t forward, she could even be distant, but she got to know people quickly and observantly, and in perfect sincerity she wanted people to feel at home in her restaurant, as if they were visiting a strange, slightly cold friend who never opens up about herself but knows a great deal about you, and who, in her reserved, almost unfeeling way, works to please you well beyond anything you can imagine.
You don’t dare call her a friend, so unyieldingly does she seem to resist any intimacy, so skittish is she about any manner of closeness, and yet she treats you as only a friend could, unfailingly thoughtful, perpetually attentive, she seems to care far more for you than she cares for herself.
Some of the Cheffe’s customers ate at La Bonne Heure for more than thirty years, several times a week, and although they could never call themselves the Cheffe’s friends, although they never managed to have her over as a guest or meet her outside the restaurant (she didn’t go to Arcachon, she didn’t go to Paris, she didn’t go to town hall receptions or the theater or opera, she never went anywhere she was invited), the only words they could have found to describe their bond with her were words that evoked a long-standing, unshakable friendship, even if as they paid their check they always felt like they still owed her something, felt like they’d never had the chance, since she turned down every invitation for parties or weekends away, to repay her with anything other than money (and not much of that) for the pleasure she offered them, the lengths she went to for them, never saying a word about it, never showing it, so maybe the inequality she deliberately imposed on that exchange proves she didn’t know how to be a friend.
I do think I can say we were friends, she fought it, but the need she came to feel for my presence, attention, and boundless love won out in the end, I was her friend and without saying so she asked me not to leave her alone through those nights when I stood in the kitchen, thighs twitching in exhaustion, and listened as she told me of the long years before I was there, offering her my solicitude and thankfully, fondly sacrificing my sleep for her, which she humbly accepted, she was grateful, knowing I’d never use a word she said against her, and so she conceded that you can owe someone even as yo
u remain on the pedestal where that person wants you to be, and then the debt would be erased the next night, when everything would start all over again, all debts forgiven, I was her friend, she’d never had that before.
My Lloret de Mar friends are as fond of a drink as I am, and it’s obvious that the happiness we feel when we meet up every day resides partly in the pleasure of drinking together, in that way we know each other, trust each other, because we’ve found we can all hold our liquor, as they say, and in our merry, frivolous little gatherings no one stirs up trouble or creates any awkwardness by proving a bad drinker, aggressive or obnoxious. And yet yesterday my Lloret de Mar friends thought it best to give me a tactful warning, we were all gathered on a terrace I’m not sure wasn’t mine, so how can I remember exactly what they told me, I can’t come up with the words but I do recall the meaning, because it shook me, drunk though I was, my Lloret de Mar friends told me I’ve been drinking too much for some time, I should take it easy, my health was going to suffer, couldn’t I go back to being the well-balanced guy I was just three or four weeks ago, and anyone listening to my Lloret de Mar friends from outside would have found that perfectly hilarious, we’re all serious alcoholics but we can spot the person who’s going too far. I’m that person, their warning shook me, I don’t want to alienate my Lloret de Mar friends, my only family, they’ve noticed how nervous I am about Cora’s visit, I feel embarrassed before them, nothing ever troubles them, they receive their own children with perfect equanimity, they’re just where they deserve to be, in the paradise they’ve forged for themselves, it’s a good and simple way to live.
Soon La Bonne Heure’s blue-tinted terrace was such a success that the Cheffe had to hire extra staff in the kitchen as well as the dining room.