The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  Next, Jean-Rémy tossed the eight kilos of mushrooms that Marianne had washed into a deep pan of boiling water. He planned to reduce them until all that remained was half a liter of concentrated stock. A teaspoonful of this in a sauce was one of the little secrets that gave his food so much more flavor than other chefs’.

  By now, Madame Geneviève and Laurine were constantly rushing into the kitchen and slapping order slips down on the counter. The young chef barked one-syllable instructions—“Non,” “Ja,” “Tomm-tomm!”—and then pointed to an aquarium containing lobsters and crabs.

  “Choose a crab, Marianne,” he called, gesturing at the lobsters and crabs staring back with their long-stalked eyes. He pointed to one of the cooking pots and to the clock. “Put it in the fish stock, for fifteen minutes.”

  “Put the poor thing in boiling water? But—”

  “Allez, get a move on!”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Jean-Rémy impatiently grabbed a crab from the aquarium. As he was about to drop it into the seething water, the hot steam caused him to jerk his arm back.

  Marianne said, “Jean-Rémy, please don’t. Not like that.” Her tone was beseeching. They stared each other in the eye, and he flinched first.

  She took a deep breath, carefully picked up the crab and set it down on the polished steel table. It scrambled around a bit as she searched among the bottles on the sideboard before reaching for the cider vinegar and pouring a few drops into the creature’s mouth. The clatter of its pincers on the steel surface grew fainter before suddenly ceasing altogether.

  “This may sound odd, but you can kill animals humanely too,” Marianne explained to Jean-Rémy, who was still standing in the center of the kitchen with raised hands and a disbelieving expression on his face. “Vinegar sends them to sleep, you know.” She cupped her hands to her cheeks, cocked her head and closed her eyes, then lowered the crab into the boiling water. “It’s bathtime. See, it doesn’t hurt so much.”

  Jean-Rémy noticed that the crab didn’t recoil from the hot steam as the others who had accomplished this final passage had done.

  Under Jean-Rémy’s guidance, Marianne cut up the crab and prepared a sauce of onions, garlic, butter, sour cream and herbs, which he then flambéed with a little Calvados and deglazed with a splash of Muscadet. He tried a bit of claw meat: something was different. A tiny difference. It tasted of the sea. Marianne’s little vinegar ploy had returned the taste of the sea to the crab.

  “Nice trick, savior of sea creatures!” said Jean-Rémy. “Right, now let’s get on with everything else, or there’ll be a riot out there.”

  After an hour, Marianne felt as if she’d spent her whole life moving around a Breton kitchen among hissing gas flames and bright, shiny pots and pans. When the rush was over, Jean-Rémy poured some Muscadet into a couple of water glasses, cut up a lobster and waved to Marianne to take a dinner break with him on the sun-bathed doorstep in the backyard. The sun was dancing with the leaves of the trees, and the air was thick with the scent of rosemary and lavender.

  “You’re a good cook,” Jean-Rémy remarked and raised his glass. “Yar-mat.”

  Marianne had hardly ever drunk wine in the daytime, let alone eaten lobster. She observed Jean-Rémy out of the corner of her eye, and when he unashamedly used his fingers, she followed his example. For one delicious moment, life felt better than ever before.

  —

  Jean-Rémy had given her an advance on her wages at the end of her shift. The restaurant was closed the next day. Marianne had gone upstairs to the Shell Room and taken a bath, enjoying the weariness that suffused her body. The cat had sat on the side of the bathtub and licked itself clean. Now Marianne was lying on her bed, gazing at the banknotes she’d propped up against the tile. Her very own money.

  She turned over onto her back and realized that she was squashed up against the left-hand edge of the bed, as if Lothar’s body still occupied most of the space. She inched over into the middle and slowly spread her arms.

  The cat made a daring leap and settled down between her calves. He needs a name, thought Marianne as she stroked him gently. But…if she gave him a name today, nobody would call him by it after tomorrow. For tomorrow she planned to say goodbye.

  She got up again. She wanted to get a glimpse of Kerdruc at dusk. She switched off the light and opened one side of the window. All she could hear was the gurgling of the river, the soft slapping of the steel cables against the ships’ masts, and the chirping of the crickets. At first the colors appeared to intensify, as if they were blossoming once more in the bluish twilight, but then they began to fade and dissolve into countless shadows.

  A silhouette was moving toward the breakwater, and Marianne stepped back from the window as if she’d been caught red-handed. She saw Madame Ecollier stop on the quayside and raise a glass of champagne. Her entire body radiated defiance—defiance and anger. It was like gazing into a living diary.

  Madame Ecollier was toasting Rozbras on the other side of the river. It looked neater, more elegant and more expensive on the far bank, like a model village, thought Marianne, her gaze following that of the restaurant owner. Kerdruc was an untidy, weathered relic in comparison.

  All of a sudden Marianne had a strong feeling that Madame Ecollier had hidden the dresses because she hated the memories woven into their fabric, yet she couldn’t do without them. She watched as the other woman drained her champagne in three quick swigs before hurling the glass far out into the harbor.

  Marianne returned to her bed in some confusion, wormed her way into the middle with a barely perceptible smile and fell into a syrupy-sweet sleep within seconds. Her last thought was so fleeting that it barely registered: It has been a lovely day.

  Marianne woke before sunrise. She couldn’t recall ever having enjoyed such a deep and replenishing night’s sleep. She had felt so safe and secure. Looking out of the window, she could smell the sea.

  As she pattered past the deserted reception desk, she impulsively took one of the yellowed postcards of the guesthouse from a stand. They were all postage paid.

  She wrote the address of Grete, her friend and neighbor in Celle, on the fine lines, then paused. She wanted to thank Grete for having been there for her, for her laughter and feathery slippers and for having sent her postcards from all over the world when she’d traveled to forget her love for the hairdresser. Marianne had loved being let in on her adventures.

  The hairdresser was married and had returned home to his wife every night of the twenty years he had slept with Grete. When his wife died, he followed her two weeks later, leaving Grete seriously put out. “He had such a guilty conscience that he even snuck off into the grave after her!”

  “Thank you for everything. And for being who you are,” wrote Marianne, then slipped the card into her coat pocket.

  She found the sign for the coastal path on the left a hundred yards along the village’s main street. Next to the sign was a postbox into which she dropped the card. She was certain that this would be her last sign of life to her hometown.

  Four miles to Port Manec’h, where the Belon and the Aven flowed together into the Atlantic; twelve thousand paces and it would all be over.

  Marianne passed an old thatched granite cottage with stooping eaves, a house as old as hope, before the narrow footpath peeled away from Kerdruc and led off into the dim woods. Trees like cathedral buttresses and walls overgrown with grass and ivy arched over the slender path. The fragrance of the woods blended with the peculiar aroma of seaweed, salt and spray.

  A wood that smells of the sea.

  The path narrowed, and lichen and muddy puddles grappled with the tight bends. On the far side of a hollow, Marianne came upon the first branch of the Aven. A trickle divided the loamy riverbed in two, and the footpath wiggled its way up a rise past towering, lichen-covered rocks. It was like being in the rain forest, with only sky, trees, water, earth and the blaze of the rising sun above her head.

  She breathed in,
breathed out. She screamed. She seemed to have no control over how long her scream lasted. She screamed breathing out and breathing in. The cry pulverized her entire life into fragments, and she screamed and spat them all out. Her soul spewed up pain.

  Walking on, she felt as if something had jumped off her back, something that had dug its sharp claws into her skin. It was fear. Fear had jumped off, an ugly, red-eyed beast that was now scuttling through the undergrowth to look for someone else’s back to possess. She heard a rustling and a cracking in the depths behind the green wall.

  I never even noticed that I am alive, she thought.

  High tide was driving new, salty water into the side channels of the river, and the scent of the wood was changing.

  Her movements split the passing time, and Marianne no longer felt like a stranger in this place: it was as if she had merged with it and dissolved the unruly borders between man and matter. Moisture had gathered in the small of her back. She could sense her body more than ever before, could feel her muscles twitching with the unfamiliar exertion and wanted more, wanted to move, to walk, to work. And then the fragrance hit her—that singular fragrance!

  Far below, under the primeval white cliffs, the sea washed against the shore. Marianne could smell it and hear it. She tasted salt on her lips, and she fell helplessly in love with the sight of the sea with the light dancing on its surface.

  She followed the ancient customs path north along the top of the cliffs. She hoped against hope that it would soon lead her down to the water’s edge so that she might at last dip her hands into this endless, scented expanse.

  —

  Marianne sang to the beat of the waves slapping against the shore behind her—a narrow, terraced white beach under cliffs hemmed with sedge grass, bilberries, wildflowers and broom. She walked toward the sea, singing “Hijo de la Luna” as she went, one of the most beautiful songs she knew, full of longing and pain. In it a young gypsy woman begs the moon for a husband, but the moon demands her firstborn in return. The woman finds her beloved and the child is born. Its skin is light and its eyes gray. The gypsy man believes it to be another man’s and stabs his wife to death, then abandons the child on a mountaintop. As it wails, the moon wanes to a slim crescent that could serve the child as a cradle. People criticize the mother and the moon: a woman who gives up her unborn child to get a husband doesn’t merit a child’s love, and the moon has no right to be a mother, for what can it do with a creature of flesh and blood? What did you want with the child, moon? Yet no one criticizes the man who kills his wife out of vanity, fear and foolish pride.

  And it’s always the same story, thought Marianne, lifting the hem of her dress a little higher. No one accuses men of anything; it is the woman who bears the blame if he doesn’t love her, if she’s too weak to leave or if she has a child but no wedding ring. We are the sex that blames itself. Lothar killed love and life, and I never managed to accuse him of anything! What did you want with my love? Tell me! What did you want with it?

  She was awash with feelings and thoughts that kept rising to her lips but no further. Why had she never been bold enough to be candid with her husband, to demand of him, “Know my body! Respect my heart!?”

  She railed at her own cowardice then fell silent. She could hear nothing but the roar of the sea. She ventured another two steps into the water, which was now up to her thighs. She walked farther into the painful, cold waves until they washed about her stomach and splashed her face with brine. The sea was a living organism, its surf like boiling milk. Watery claws snatched at her.

  “It’s all over for me,” she whispered.

  Another step. The claws clutched harder. She felt her blood pounding, her breathing, the wind snagging in her hair and the sun warming her skin. She thought of the Shell Room, and of the cat between her calves; she thought of Jean-Rémy.

  So today was to be the last day on which she would see and feel the sea, just as the sight of the endless horizon was inspiring an unfamiliar feeling of boundlessness within her. This was the last time she would hear her own voice, but it had to be done.

  Who said so? Salty spray spattered her face. Yes, who said so? Was she not free to do or not do whatever she pleased? She could do it right now! She had the power to decide at any moment that it was over.

  She spun around to take in the rugged beauty of the coastline.

  Tomorrow.

  She turned and waded back to the shore.

  Tomorrow.

  Yann Gamé liked watching Pascale Goichon, probably because they were both artists who regarded their work not as work but as a passion. Pascale’s hands had a way of shaping clay that was only bettered, if at all, by her gardening or her cooking. When she could remember a recipe, that was.

  Pascale was a woman who lived her life to the full, and sometimes the painter could barely stand to watch his old friend losing her memory. Her husband Emile and Yann had known each other since the evening almost fifty years ago when Emile and Pascale had fallen in love.

  Yann stroked Merline, the snow-white retriever. She’d been the first dog Pascale had taken into her home, followed by a growing number of stray dogs and cats, which now populated the plot of land. From his seat on the terrace, he watched Madame Pompadour chase a bumblebee. Pascale had named the dogs after royal mistresses, even the males. The cats all had names inspired by fruit and vegetables. Mirabelle and Petit Choux—Little Cabbage—had made themselves comfortable in the sun by his feet.

  “My muse? You’re asking me if Emile’s my muse?” Pascale repeated. The freckles under her bangs—formerly ginger, now milky white—seemed to be mocking Yann. “I work with emotions.”

  Her sculptures often showed a couple reaching out to each other, but only rarely was their passion fulfilled in an embrace. Often only fractions of an inch separated the figures as they implored each other for a kiss, forever frozen in yearning.

  “Are Emile and his leg in good working order?” asked Yann. It was mad: Emile, a bear of a man, whose brain was gradually divorcing from his body. First his foot had started to twitch, then his leg. The whole of his left side would tremble and obey its own rules if he forgot to take his medicine.

  “Are your tiles in good order?” Pascale asked in return.

  “Yeah, everything in good order,” Yann lied. Everything in good order, everything as always. He gave painting lessons to less able artists, visited Pascale and Emile twice a week, ate at Ar Mor on Mondays, painted tiles and composed mosaics for the rest of the week and otherwise waited for summer to shade into autumn.

  “Order will be the death of us,” commented Pascale. “So, what’s wrong?”

  He should have known that he wouldn’t get off so lightly. He removed his glasses so that he didn’t have to look at Pascale. It was hard for him to admit what was making him more and more desperate with each passing day.

  “Art has always been everything to me, Pascale. And now I’m sixty I’ve realized it’s not enough. My life is empty. An empty canvas.”

  “Oh get down from your cross; we need the timber. And what do you mean by art, Yann Gamé? Art is a muscle that needs exercise. It doesn’t care if it paints tiles, forms funny little people”—Pascale pointed to the clay sculpture in front of her—“or reels off lines of words. Art just is.”

  She made a gesture that combined rolling her eyes, shrugging her shoulders and pointing out at the countryside and the world, all in one. “It is, that’s it. The question is how you feel. Do you feel lonely? I’ll tell you something, Yann Gamé: what’s missing in your life is love. Can you remember love? The feeling that makes people do stupid things or become heroes? No art in the whole world will ever love you back. You put everything you’ve got into art, but it gives you nothing back. Nothing at all.”

  Yann loved Pascale for those thirty seconds, for that speech. It was possible that Pascale might tune out of the conversation at any moment and ask Yann who the hell he was. Then she would shuffle into the kitchen and recognize nothing—not the
table as a table, the sugar as sugar, or her husband as her husband.

  Art. Love. Yann didn’t consider himself an artist. He was an artisan, a craftsman. The little bit of “art” in “artisan” was enough for him. But what about love? Love was like a giant canvas—he didn’t know how to fill it; he had no picture of this feeling inside him. It was the missing element.

  He thought of how Colette Rohan was always trying to persuade him to paint larger pictures. Or merely pictures, not just tiles. The gallery owner had compared him with Gauguin, Sérusier and Pierre de Belay, and eventually convinced him to paint women—naked women.

  Naked women in Pont-Aven? God, this was the provinces, not Paris!

  “Colette Rohan wants orgies,” he said, sighing. “Big pictures with big naked women in them.”

  Pascale gave a snort. “It’s Colette’s business if she sees bigger things in you. But who knows, maybe one of your tiny tiles has made someone’s life a big thing.”

  “You honestly believe that?”

  “It’s nice to imagine,” she said, smiling dreamily at him. “Will you promise me something, Yann?”

  “No,” said the painter. “I don’t like promises. Tell me what I can do for you, and a yes will have to suffice.”

  “Will you fall in love again?”

  Merline, who had so far lain quietly by Yann’s feet, yelped and jumped up. He had pinched the dog’s ear.

  “Yes or no?”

  “I can’t promise I’m going to fall in love!”

  “Why not, you shortsighted Breton twit! Falling in love is the best thing that could happen to you. Food will taste better, the world will be more beautiful and you’ll finish your paintings quicker. Don’t be such a coward. Fall in love! Open your eyes, open your heart, stop being so damned shy and reclusive, and start behaving like an idiot!”

  “Why should I be an idiot all of a sudden?”