The Cheffe

by Marie Ndiaye

  The Cheffe agreed to it all, pathologically cooperative, and I saw the sad, beleaguered look drain from her eyes, replaced by an expression of flat acquiescence, a look of grimly pleased dejection that put a new sort of joy on her face, paradoxical, almost cynical, as if with every passing moment she were saying to us, “So here we are,” but where were we exactly, and why, in that opaque atmosphere thick with antagonism, vanity, and disdain, should she assume we were bound together, to varying degrees but unbreakably, like galley slaves united by the chain and their shared awareness of their fate?

  Because the Cheffe never seemed to doubt what we felt for her daughter: admiration, fear, reverence.

  And I think it was because I was caught up in the Cheffe’s eagerness to see us fear and adore her daughter that I silenced all my misgivings and tried to recapture the wonder I’d felt when I first saw her walk into the kitchen, the powerful sense, immediate and unambiguous, that she deserved my affection and my devotion every bit as much as her mother.

  “She’s not going to accuse me of denying her daughter,” I cynically told myself at first, but in the end I stopped even aiming for that, swept away on a tide of tangled emotions that produced only one insistent, fanatical thought: to obey the Cheffe’s will even if I couldn’t understand it, even if that will disappointed and diminished me, infuriated and disturbed me, even if it forced me into a fraudulent friendship with her daughter, because later it would all turn out to be justified.

  Still, I’ll admit it, in the early days I approved of some of the daughter’s ideas, even approved with enthusiasm, I’ll admit that today, not without shame.

  “My mother’s falling behind,” she said, “we’ve got to innovate.” She never missed a chance to mention that the Cheffe had no degree, unlike her, who had learned things the Cheffe with her limited understanding couldn’t conceive of or entirely accept, but that she nonetheless needed to know, if, as the daughter put it, she wanted her place to have class.

  The daughter thought we needed new dishware, for instance, which didn’t seem to me a bad idea, and a few more tables, she thought we weren’t getting all we could out of the space, and she also found the sound of conversation and tinkling silverware tedious as well as un-chic, she wanted music piped in, and there too I agreed, all the more enthusiastically because I didn’t like the idea and didn’t want the daughter or the Cheffe to see it.

  She picked out elaborately overdesigned dishes. Once again, I pretended to admire the basins that replaced our shallow soup bowls, even though on first sight they made me think of miniature urinals, and the oval plates, the slate slabs for serving cheese, I admired it all even as I found it vulgar, pretentious, and impractical, as I stood before the Cheffe, whose face showed no reaction, and who, when as a pure formality her daughter asked what she thought of it, answered, “I’m sure you know best.”

  But the day the daughter announced that she’d decided to delete the prices from the menus given to women accompanied by a man, as she insisted all the best establishments did, I let out a bitter, furious laugh and slammed down the knife I was holding.

  The Cheffe gave a little cry of protest, of reproach, childishly putting her hand to her mouth, then looked at me severely, not, I’m convinced, to chide me for overstepping my place but to tell me that no one was to express such an attitude toward her daughter as long as she herself made no objection, she was right, I saw that and mutely begged her forgiveness. I gently picked up my knife.

  A certainty then came to me, cold and sharp, a certainty that brought me closer to the Cheffe: we were headed for disaster, knowing it and accepting it with a consent that was as cold, grim, and fervent as it was mysterious and senseless.

  It was easier that way, I told myself, and, darkly relieved, I felt my indignation fade, I caressed my beloved knife in apology for treating it so roughly, without a trace of lingering antipathy I looked at the daughter’s hard face, telling myself she would soon lose the power to send me into a rage or drag me away from my secret, time-honored, inexpressibly precious connection with the Cheffe.

  Finally, the daughter decreed that the prices were too low, and we had to raise them considerably.

  I saw the Cheffe recoil at the idea, whose brutal arrogance shook her resolve to submit without question to her daughter’s commands, she protested that she’d already had to raise the prices not long before, but then, seeing the daughter sternly cross her arms, the Cheffe threw me an alarmed, hunted glance and in a tone of hopeless entreaty cried out to her daughter, “We really have to?,” and the daughter nodded with an exasperated sigh.

  The Cheffe forced out a laugh, dredged up with heartbreaking effort from an almost completely drained store of frivolity and irreverence, and then, on the brink of tears, murmured, “Anything you say.”

  And she fled the dining room, leaving me alone with the daughter.

  Opening her little eyes wide, the daughter gave me a look miming a beleaguered, sarcastic alliance, the two of us obviously united against the Cheffe, and I played along, raising my eyes heavenward, wanting to die.

  The daughter had new menus printed up, she insisted on an expensive violet paper with the words in pale gray, you had to work to decipher them through the curlicues.

  As the weeks went by, as I got used to concurring with all the daughter’s dangerous whims and not dwelling on them afterward, I learned to maintain a relationship with her that was no longer founded only on my desperate desire to please the Cheffe and not too cruelly heavy with fear, anger, and disgust, I could joke with the daughter, and even, for as long as it lasted, I could manage not to remember the reasons for a fear, anger, and disgust that had grown more remote and abstract inside me, like feelings you remember from childhood, and the Cheffe was there, faraway, smiling wanly, erased, I didn’t step aside, I went on bantering with the daughter, the Cheffe was there, behind my back, broken and opaque, I didn’t step aside to let her in, I was obeying her mystifying wishes but the strength was all on the daughter’s side.

  The Cheffe and I lost all our closeness.

  We kept our thoughts to ourselves when we happened to cross paths, almost staring at our shoes, cold and polite.

  I avoided any camaraderie that might give my bewildered coworkers the impression I was on their side, that we were fearing the same fears, because I would never take their side against the Cheffe, and since I had to be on the daughter’s side to stay with the Cheffe I had no choice but to distance myself from my coworkers, even if they were right to deplore all these changes and to fear falling numbers at La Bonne Heure, which is exactly what happened, as you know.

  The daughter hated La Bonne Heure, she hated everything that made the restaurant a success, everything the Cheffe had invented in her delicate, tender inspiration, the dark blue of the walls and the awning, the clean, simple dishes, all that, yes, the daughter hated it blindly and violently, everything her mother had chosen, loved, lavished her thoughts on, and she hated, I’m sure, though she didn’t know it, the mere fact of La Bonne Heure’s existence.

  How else to explain why the first complaints of the regulars, who now ate from fussy dishware to the sound of music turned up a little too loud, encouraged the daughter to harden her ideas in the ice bath of absolutism, as if those justified grievances fit perfectly into the plan she’d devised to demolish her mother’s La Bonne Heure and remake it in her own image, her own way, so utterly unlike the Cheffe’s?

  Because the daughter rejoiced in those complaints.

  A customer asked for the music to be turned down, the daughter refused, he promised he’d never be back. “Good riddance,” I heard her whisper exultantly, and when I asked her why, she told me she didn’t like that guy, she didn’t like all these people who acted like they owned La Bonne Heure.

  “But those are the people who made this place,” I answered, in the light, amused, confidential, almost flirtatious voice I
now used with the daughter, as a familiar despair reddened my cheeks, my forehead, the back of my neck.

  “They’re the ones who loved the Cheffe’s cooking from the start,” I went on in my pretend voice, my insolent, slightly cynical voice, which I thought particularly appealed to the daughter, like a reflection of her own.

  She muttered that they’d have to get used to things or go eat somewhere else, that’s how it was and that’s all there was to it.

  The daughter had made the dining room the seat of her omnipotence, she’d laid off and taken the place of Delphine, whose job was to greet the customers, to show them to a table and make sure the meal went smoothly.

  And so she gracelessly piloted her intrusive body between the tables, spoke to the customers in a voice both superior and overfamiliar, not to mention too loud, and she was forever interrupting conversations to ask if everything was fine, if they liked the food, then walking off before she could hear the answer.

  Thanks to her, a tense and at the same time strangely careless atmosphere hung in the air at La Bonne Heure, an atmosphere of apathetic decline.

  Oh, I used to tell myself, the Cheffe was perfectly happy to have a good reason never to come out into the dining room again; how could she who so hated showing herself even to a discreet, mannerly audience possibly think of going out and greeting the new clientele her daughter’s management gradually began to attract as the months went by, as she slowly undid everything that once had made up the quiet uniqueness of La Bonne Heure?

  She was perfectly happy, I seethed as I looked at the Cheffe working mechanically in the kitchen, outwardly impassive, and to us kind in an aloof, cursory, reflexive way we took no pleasure in, I least of all, since when we very occasionally came face-to-face I gave her a sort of questioning, helpless, naked stare, and the look she returned was exaggeratedly, artificially hard, indifferent, which hurt me even as I felt sure it was her way of trying, in her distress, to protect me.

  Yes, La Bonne Heure’s new customers were exactly what the daughter was after, rich and crass, not worried about the price so long as, in an atmosphere they could consider tony and relaxed, they ate dishes with names so allusive as to have no meaning, but nothing too out of the ordinary—and the daughter took all the Cheffe’s most demanding dishes off the menu, the ones without which the Cheffe found cooking only a pale pleasure, nothing she needed in any way, the daughter kept only the dishes least dear to her mother’s heart, wood pigeon with quince confit, fat leeks stuffed with partridge salmis, almond and pistachio cream, which the Cheffe had left on the menu in a spirit of magnanimity toward customers discouraged beyond all possibility of pleasure by her insistence on rigor.

  And to that too the Cheffe acquiesced.

  One morning, brushing past me, she whispered, “You ought to quit.”

  “Why?” I answered, shocked.

  “You know perfectly well,” the Cheffe told me, giving me the wry little smile that was hers alone, which since her daughter’s return she’d replaced with the imitation smile that seemed to waver in front of her lips, she raised a hesitant hand, quickly caressed my cheek, then walked off with her lively, light gait, which now also seemed false, studied, as if with each step the Cheffe were fighting the temptation to drag her tired feet over the tiles, or even collapse in a corner and abandon herself to a will other than her own—since it was indeed that will, not its absence, that made her obey the daughter’s every command, and hadn’t the Cheffe shown the mighty force of her will from childhood on?

  So yes, I quit, right away, and I had no trouble finding a good job at Le Select, near the Grand Théâtre.

  I didn’t think I was following the Cheffe’s advice, I was angry, in my paradoxical way I thought I was insulting her—I was so angry!

  And I thought I could find no better way to hurt her than to take her at her word, since, I told myself, she was surely counting on the fidelity of my long-standing, absolute love to make me refuse a suggestion she was probably only giving me because she thought it was her duty.

  I was sure what she’d told me to do was the last thing she wanted.

  But I did it anyway, so abruptly that we had time only to exchange a few hurried words, and I didn’t properly tell her good-bye, I just went away, not caring whether my disappearance might interfere with the work, whether I could be replaced at such short notice, I was so angry, so stirred up, my anger lifting me high above any thought of regret, that was new to me, and I didn’t entirely dislike it, it let me see myself as heroic and implacable.

  But once I’d been hired at Le Select and fell into the routine of a cooking untouched by the Cheffe’s spirit, then my galvanizing anger faded away, I reflected in despair that I’d been disloyal to the Cheffe, and it wasn’t enough to tell myself again and again, as I tried, that she’d driven me to it: that very reasonable argument collapsed as soon as I measured it against the tests real love has to face, the tests true loyalty has to face—and what is love, much-vaunted love, without the discreet and even invisible loyalty that has to come with it, what does love, that pleasure and asset for every heart, mean without an indelibly faithful spirit, known only to the person who feels it?

  I’d betrayed the Cheffe, since I’d deserted her the moment she suggested it, and in my self-pity I’d let my anger—at her for not trying to explain herself, at myself for not understanding her—become the uncontested master of my will.

  For that, I told myself, I would never be forgiven.

  Heading home at night from the huge kitchens of Le Select, where I worked under a dutiful, insignificant chef (the food they served there was stingy and pretentious, tiny cubes of raw fish, ordinary chicken breast portioned like caviar, minuscule praline tartlets), I often detoured past La Bonne Heure and invariably found it locked up, because it now closed far earlier than it used to, and the apartment windows were dark, the whole face of the building was hostile, condemning me for my desertion.

  It felt like another desertion when I turned away to go home, and another desertion when I set off for Le Select every morning, and still another when I got down to work on tasks devoid of ardor or moral sensibility or even the most simpleminded pleasure, and another when I went to stand beneath the Cheffe’s windows to watch for any sign I might interpret as meant for me or favorable to me, and that’s how I lived, forever feeling my own unworthiness, which I got used to, which in time I stopped distinguishing from the gloomy thoughts that were the daily fare of my existence, that’s how I lived, and in that gray feeling of worthlessness I married one of my coworkers, Sophie Pujol, I got married almost without knowing it, limply, smirkingly, to a woman as blasé and smirking as I was, who asked me, once the ceremony was over, “What have we done?”

  Neither of us knew, but whereas I never saw an omen in anything—blinded to any presage or promise by my sense of my fall—Sophie Pujol would always believe that our serene, fraternal decision to divorce eight or nine months later had something to do with the news I’d heard in Le Select’s kitchen, the news that La Bonne Heure had lost its star, Sophie Pujol was sure I’d seen it coming and when it did I felt we had to divorce, she wouldn’t give up on that idea, she didn’t hold it against me, anything but: she was as tired of that sarcastic marriage as I was, she was relieved to have it behind her, and while she was at it she gave up her place at Le Select, she opened her own restaurant, Le Pujol, facing the river on the Right Bank, she was soon a success, and still is.

  It was Le Select’s chef who told me with visible, vindictive delight that La Bonne Heure had lost its star.

  I didn’t believe it at first, I thought it had to be a jealous rumor. The Cheffe’s daughter had been in charge of the restaurant for only twenty months.

  Then came the confirmation, immediately followed by the announcement that La Bonne Heure was closing for good, or rather wouldn’t reopen, it was on winter hiatus at the time.

  Horrifie
d, I bolted out of the kitchen and ran to see what was happening. I hadn’t seen the Cheffe since I left, hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of her.

  Even though I thought I’d made every possible effort not to mention her name or existence in front of Sophie Pujol, even though I’d succeeded and said absolutely nothing, Sophie Pujol would confess, a little after the divorce, that our marriage had been hard for her, however unserious, sardonic, and casually friendly the climate of our shared existence, that she’d constantly felt the supernatural, sorrowful presence of another woman there with us, she’d tell me she always saw a shadow at my side, which I sometimes turned to without realizing it, looking deep into eyes that weren’t Sophie Pujol’s but the eyes of that ghost who lived in the very heart of our marriage, who, even if we’d loved each other more seriously, would have prevented any communion between us, any full, sincere intimacy, and it was as if, Sophie Pujol would tell me, I’d never gotten over the death of someone I would always love more than any other, that’s why our marriage was so hard for Sophie Pujol.

  As always, no light shone at the kitchen windows or the Cheffe’s apartment above La Bonne Heure.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth as a megaphone, I shouted her name at the dark windows, I think I even shouted the daughter’s name, and I shouted out “Sainte-Bazeille!” too, desperately, aggressively trying to force the Cheffe to come out and stop my assault on the delicacy of that sacred name, “Sainte-Bazeille!” I howled, filling my voice with all the misery, frustration, and fear that were choking me.

  Nothing moved.

  I spent the next few days enlisting the help of the Cheffe’s circle, or more precisely the very few people who might conceivably have some idea what had become of her, but no one—not my former coworkers, not the two regulars who I thought privately called on the Cheffe now and then, not her sister Ingrid, whom those last two helped me to find (she’d bought a bistro on the coast)—could tell me a thing, they hadn’t heard from her either, they hadn’t even seen much of the Cheffe since the daughter’s return, they laconically told me, “It wasn’t the same anymore.”