by Marie Ndiaye
She still turned away more than she took in, which irritated her as a matter of principle, because to her a restaurant was a place where without premeditation everyone should be able to find a chair to catch their breath on, a clean table to put their elbows on, good food to comfort them, and out of respect for that principle she believed she should never have to tell that modest demand it can’t be met, never have to postpone her hospitality, never, without a thousand legitimate excuses and the very best reasons, have to put off the thing that cannot be deferred, the thing there can be no good reason for not producing without delay: the gift.
No, of course, the Cheffe didn’t give her meals away, strictly speaking, though I can tell you she always kept her profit as modest as she could, even for the wine she charged just a hair more than it cost her, she’d put no work into it so she thought she had no right to make money on it.
As the years went by the Cheffe turned toward an ever simpler cuisine, not, I don’t think, in the sense that she unwittingly followed the dictates of the time and conformed to the dogma of a nouvelle cuisine she never quite felt a part of, but in the growing and in the end almost exclusive importance she placed on the quality of each ingredient, from the priciest cut of beef to the humblest sprig of parsley, from the finest fish to the tiniest grain of salt that would season it, even as she insisted on presenting a generously filled plate, restrained in its appearance (no more than three colors), but on which the concern for perfection was literally nowhere to be seen, nor any other concern for that matter, apart from the concern for bringing immediate pleasure to any eye longing for beauty and anxious to know whether hunger would be sated and tastes pleased.
Many people came for a blowout at La Bonne Heure and never suspected, since the prices were modest and the plates bounteous, that every dish was made with the best ingredients the Cheffe’s painstaking research could dig up, whether it be the oil the beef or eggplant was browned in or that very meat and that vegetable, which the Cheffe no longer inevitably brought back from the Marché des Capucins but ordered from a stockman in Bazas or a grower in the Lot-et-Garonne, from farms she’d scouted out during the winter months and judged worthy of La Bonne Heure without worrying too much about prices, which is to say never raising her own on the pretext that she was paying more for her products, she adapted.
And so she came to offer a deeply thoughtful cuisine, highly refined in its appearance, preparation, and cooking, conceived precisely to erase any memory of labor, of duress, of punishing hours, but nonetheless a cuisine that almost anyone could approach without knowing anything about it, expecting nothing more than a full stomach.
The favorites at La Bonne Heure in those days? Apart from the famed green-robed leg of lamb and the Landes peach tart, veal cutlets with fines herbes breading were often ordered, as was cabbage stuffed with andouillette de Troyes, Bresse chicken with tarragon and Nyons olives, new turnips glazed with cane sugar, little fingerling potatoes with their delicate skin fried whole in goose fat, Webb lettuce with roast beef juice and dried fruits, terrine of duck and Corsican tangerines, all of them dishes that as a child in Bordeaux I heard people talk about like food for fairies or ogres, and it never once entered my mind that my mother could have put my coat and shoes on me, taken the bus that crossed the river on the Pont de Pierre, clasped my hand, and walked into that restaurant without having to prove she was a secret aristocrat, a fallen princess, that restaurant whose reason for being revealed itself, as I didn’t know at the time, in people like us, my mother and me, who sometimes went out to eat in restaurants where the food was somewhat unpolished and mediocre but sold for a price she found manageable, for the same money we could have had a feast at La Bonne Heure, surprising, delicate, wholesome dishes, my mother never even considered it, to her that was all fairy tales, she didn’t believe in such things.
The Cheffe rented the shops on either side of the little corner dining room, had wide openings put in to make three contiguous rooms, had the walls painted that same royal blue, with a dark, polished wainscoting up to the tops of the chair backs.
Noon or night, the dining rooms were never less than full, and as before there was no choice but to turn people away, but even then the Cheffe refused to take reservations, anyone could sit down at a table if there was room, and there, on the spur of the moment, find repose, and the freshness of the blue-and-green floor tile in its cold purity, and when autumn came the Cheffe lit the little bottle-green porcelain heating stoves.
My future coworkers, the people the Cheffe had hired before me, told me she seemed to glow back then with a constant joy, undimmed by everyday anxieties or fatigues, they told me her face seemed to be permanently smoothed, bathed in a silent, indestructible happiness, as if pulled tight by her chignon and by enchantment, and they also told me, as the aged Ingrid confirmed, that that face only furrowed, just a little, when the Cheffe’s daughter appeared or simply let her voice be heard from the next room or the street, high-pitched, demanding, and plaintive, and then the Cheffe slightly hunched her shoulders, and, like a dog that doesn’t know what to expect from its mercurial master, listened with a discreet apprehension, veiled but visible to those who worked beside her day in and day out, an apprehension that disappeared as soon as her daughter went away or her voice fell silent or when that changeable girl walked into the kitchen with a smile on her face, almost excessively friendly and cheerful and so utterly unpredictable that it gave the Cheffe a sort of jolt, she turned strangely timid, and toward her daughter turned servile in a way that was painful to see.
Yes, the very independent, very solitary Cheffe had unwillingly but not unknowingly or acceptingly made herself the slave of her daughter, a girl of unappealing features and limited intelligence, and I think she felt guilty, absurdly, that she hadn’t passed her fineness of mind and appearance on to her daughter, I think above all she submitted all to her daughter’s undeserved authority because her daughter had no hope of impressing anyone in any other way, and the Cheffe vaguely imagined she was hiding that from her, shielding her from that indisputable truth by offering herself up to her despotism, not, then, so that it wouldn’t be inflicted on others but so that her unhappy daughter, because that must have been how she saw her, could at least grow up with the certainty or the illusion that she had, in spite of everything, some sort of strong point.
And all through those years, all through that burgeoning of La Bonne Heure’s reputation, the Cheffe seemed to have no other real concern than shoring up her daughter’s belief in a preposterous idea of herself, than each day convincing her daughter of the persistence and boundlessness of the motherly love she poured out for nothing, which didn’t stop the daughter from continually testing that senseless love by treating the Cheffe in a way that made everyone around them cringe, and the Cheffe’s strange, long-standing fear of that child who was so unlike her was joined by another sort of fear, that she might see her upbraided for those public scenes that, the Cheffe was lucid enough to see, painted an unflattering image of her daughter, even more than of herself who endured them, she would have endured far more of them if they could be blamed on her alone, and if people could have some reason to love and admire her daughter, but that too was only a fairy tale, the Cheffe couldn’t believe in it.
Yes, that was her one torment, her one sorrow, and the only thing that ever troubled her face, a face as if each day burnished by an abrasive, inflexible joy, in the twelve-some years that La Bonne Heure peacefully flourished and finally became, virtually uncontested but nevertheless humble and elegantly unimpressed about it, the finest table in Bordeaux.
What did the daughter look like?
I didn’t meet her until she was twenty-five, as was I, since as it happens we were born in the same month of the same year, but what struck you about her when you first saw her must have been there since she was a child, and I don’t think I’m wrong to imagine that for the restaurant’s workers the mark left by t
he fingers of the cruel, ironic, or vengeful angel who on the night of her birth chose to make that girl a botched, parodic twin of her mother could already be seen on the teenager who came into the kitchen radiating boredom and disgust to make some inevitably harebrained, impossible, or ridiculous demand on her, just I myself saw that pitiless, indelible mark a few years later: her daughter had inherited the Cheffe’s stocky frame, her solid body, which couldn’t enter a space without seeming to accumulate around it an equal quantity of dense, stagnant air, but the astonishing grace of movement and the warm brown gaze that in the Cheffe immediately erased that impression of heaviness hadn’t been granted the daughter, there was something aggressively immovable about her stout form that was off-putting to look at, and her eyes were dull and narrow, they seemed dead even in the heat of her tantrums.
There came a time when I thought I should judge the Cheffe’s daughter less harshly, when I sometimes told myself she seized any excuse for outbursts and recriminations only in the hope of illuminating her eyes with the life she was lacking, of which she had only the appearance and never the emotion, the sensation, whose taste was unknown to her, so that that fire, lit at long last, would spread to the rest of her, and she would, she hoped, feel the emotion of being alive and no longer just the colorless experience of knowing it, I’m not sure how true that is, how true that was, because I long ago gave up trying to understand the Cheffe’s daughter, but in any case she looked like her mother in the most mocking, incomprehensible way, and there, yes, perhaps, you could feel some sympathy for her, because, she must have wondered more than once, who was fate trying to punish by ridiculing her like that, was it the Cheffe or was it her, and in the latter case why?
I’m not entirely deaf to reason, I take my Lloret de Mar friends’ advice, at least about driving, and I’m perfectly sober when I set out for the train station in Blanes to meet my daughter, Cora, so sober that, this late afternoon in June, I see everything around me in a blazing, prophetic light, I hear something eloquent and insistent from the yellowed palms, the swollen clouds, the potholed roadway, but nothing they’re saying gets through to me, precisely because I have no alcohol in me and my imagination has run dry and I know that if I were to stop off for a drink in that roadside hotel over there the meaning of their silent bellowing would unveil itself to my anxious heart and then I wouldn’t be nearly as anxious, because alcohol generously brings a comforting touch to everything I see, and everything that upsets me. That howling and thundering was only trying to greet me and accompany me on the road to Cora, that roaring was meant to praise me for going and meeting Cora, for welcoming Cora to Lloret de Mar, my only home, for introducing Cora to my Lloret de Mar friends, who expect us this evening on Anne-Marie’s terrace, my kind, loving friends, so genuinely eager to make my daughter’s acquaintance.
I was nineteen when I started as an apprentice at La Bonne Heure, fresh out of trade school, with a diploma the Cheffe didn’t even glance at when, one springtime midafternoon, she met me in the dining room, sat me down facing her, and asked me a few standard questions in a voice at once clear, commanding, and soft, regularly running a slow, tranquil hand over her glistening hair, so flattened down and pulled back toward the little chignon that it almost seemed she was stroking her bare, polished skull, I’d never seen such a face, a face that to my eyes, as I felt but couldn’t yet put into words, seemed the archetype of all human faces, unmarked by sex, age, or beauty, I thought that face painfully perfect, and as I held my own face toward it, a face so muddled by timid youth, by uncertainty and ignorance, I feared I could never live up to the moral rigor that must very naturally belong to someone whose dignity had given her such an incarnation—a face impossible to weigh on any common scale or judge by any ordinary standard.
The Cheffe might have seen my panic, my doubts and befuddlement, my vague longing to flee, every bit as urgent as my wish to die if I wasn’t hired.
She gave me a kindhearted, ironic little smile.
She had to force herself, she didn’t approve of sarcasm in critical moments, she was only trying to make me “come down,” as she liked to say, by which she meant that I’d too quickly and needlessly scaled summits of emotion where there was no air to breathe, I was suffocating, and that was of no use at all, not to me or to anyone else or the work.
So she gently mocked me with her slightly wry smile, obliging me to smile back, and I took my eyes off her face for a moment, I’d stopped thinking of running away, though in my heart there remained the trembling certainty that my life couldn’t go on if I wasn’t hired at La Bonne Heure.
What could I do anywhere else, and who with, and what good would experience do me if I didn’t acquire it from this face and this voice, in this ultramarine sanctuary, so still at that hour that I thought I could hear my own blood flowing through my clenched, hopeful body, that I could feel it pounding between my eyebrows and imagine the flesh there visibly throbbing; would the Cheffe feel sympathy or disgust at that, how to know?
All the same, I’d “come down” just as she wanted, and I could answer more or less calmly when she asked what made me think of applying at La Bonne Heure in particular, I could tell her, sincerely but with a lyricism I was painfully aware of, that since my earliest childhood I’d often passed by that restaurant’s windows, mysteriously tinged with blue from inside by the glow and the wisdom of a supernatural color, I’d always thought fairies must be at work in there, conjuring up the mysterious, wondrous plates I saw being set down on the tables of the terrace once April came, oh that was all true but what was that truth next to the one I didn’t know how to tell the Cheffe: on first seeing that photo in Sud-Ouest, the best known, virtually the only one known, with the Cheffe displaying an inexplicable cheeriness in the midst of her crew, I’d made a vow to do everything I possibly could to work at La Bonne Heure as soon as I got my degree, not for the cheeriness, and not for the hair inconceivably liberated and floating soft and feathery around her face, but for something in that face, however unreal its expression in the photo, something I immediately thought was speaking to me, silently hailing me from the wellspring of a companionship I’d never known, now revealed to me by the prosaic mediation of Sud-Ouest, a kinship I immediately understood and accepted, the Cheffe knew I existed and was calling me to her, that’s what her face was telling me.
And in the blue serenity of the dining room I discovered that the Cheffe was nothing like the woman in the photo, her hair was severely tied back and her face suffused with an alert, quiet joy, but certainly not cheeriness, and I marveled to think that that’s just what I’d seen in the photo, the Cheffe’s real face reaching out to me, I’d been called on and I understood, now her face was telling me that too in the beautiful, cool dining room.
So how could I fear I wouldn’t be hired?
I hurried to shut myself up, to what seemed the Cheffe’s relief.
I recognize my daughter straight off, even after all this time, I’m so moved that I almost turn and run for the car before she can see me or recognize me but her eyes land on me from the far end of the platform and I see she’s spotted me as quickly as I spotted her; how can that be when we don’t know each other in any meaningful sense? I frantically put on my sunglasses, and so in a dark blue light Cora’s face grazes mine, Cora’s cheek touches mine, she’s as tall as I am, her shoulders are broad, her face strong, I might almost be meeting an old friend because physically we’re strangely well matched, I’m not the sturdy father embracing his delicate slip of a very young daughter, I’m letting a solid young woman put her cheek to mine and I don’t have to bend down at all, she’s tall and strong and her skin is blue, the tinted lenses of my glasses are telling me. This is Cora, so this is what she looks like, my eyes close for a moment, so this is Cora.
When, years later, having become her closest friend, I dared to tell the Cheffe that at eighteen I’d heard the call she sent out to me by way of Sud-Ouest, that I�
�d felt her hand, seemingly motionless in the photo, tracing a sign on my apprentice-cook forehead, and, I thought, on mine alone, she gave me a long, perplexed stare, shrugged, and breezily told me, in essence, that a friendship’s origins and precise, private motivations don’t matter much, friendship is proven and justified every day by words and deeds, and what had brought me to La Bonne Heure one springtime afternoon was of no importance fifteen years later, when that friendship was demonstrated, strengthened, and expressed through daily collaboration and long nightly talks in the silent, deserted kitchen.
“And what about love?” I asked, in the same bantering tone. “Suppose it wasn’t friendship,” I said, “but love that let me hear your voice in the photo, suppose it’s love that keeps me here today, leaning against the hard corner of the counter, drunk with exhaustion but unable to imagine any greater pleasure than hearing you talk to me in the slumbering kitchen, confiding in me and me alone, knowing your words are falling into a greedy but loving heart, greedy because it’s loving, and respectful to a fault? What about love, then?” I asked her. “Isn’t it too easy, isn’t it too cautious to be forever calling it friendship?”
But the Cheffe, who was never tender or sentimental, who with no trace of bitterness coolly and tranquilly refused to believe in the love between a man and a woman, the Cheffe wouldn’t play along with me. “Call it whatever you like,” she said, “as long as everyone agrees what they’re talking about, that’s enough.”
But did we agree, exactly? And were we talking about the same thing? What did it mean to her if I was her friend, what did she feel for me, her employee on top of everything else, how deep was her trust in me?
Cora doesn’t talk much, I’m glad, I was afraid she’d ask questions I wouldn’t want to or know how to answer honestly. And so we drive in a strange silence, like old friends, like aged relatives who email each other every day or so often talk on the phone they have nothing to say. I take the opportunity of the occasional right turn to steal a glance at her profile, she has a kind of confident, decent air that intimidates me, I mumblingly ask after her mother, although I couldn’t possibly care less. And Cora, that tall, commanding young woman who is my daughter, sweeps the air with her dismissive fingers and tells me she didn’t come all this way to talk about her mother, I could have found out how her mother was doing if I wanted to, she says, pointedly but not unkindly, as if to tell me I can skip the small talk, it will be easier for both of us. She’s wearing a long, full dress, mauve, decorated with big blue flowers, her bare shoulders are very tan, you can make out the sturdy bones beneath her flesh, muscular as the flesh of some swimmers, Cora sits up very straight. I then understand my daughter isn’t here to pour out her feelings or vent her anger or make some sort of demand, I sense that she’s here simply to size me up.