The House in France

by Gully Wells

  Still, I really couldn’t expect the magazine to keep gobbling up course after course of delicacies from this one small corner of the world. What other dishes could I tempt them with? Not yet confident enough to write about a place I didn’t know (that would come later, with pieces on Russia, Jamaica, Brazil, China, Mexico, Estonia, Sicily, and God knows where else), there was only one other option: Spain. During the five years we had explored the country together, Tom had taught me well, and I was rather proud to have graduated top of the class in my college of one. According to my tutor I was unusually gifted at art and history, my grasp of current affairs was less assured, and as for my language skills—the sorry results spoke for themselves. Which was more than I could do.

  The editors loved the idea of Madrid—the rebirth of a democratic Spain, the excitement of la Movida, King Juan Carlos’s relationship with the Cortes—but now I was in a total panic. Could I write the story all by myself? Probably. But could I produce a piece with real insight, quotes from interesting politicians, an overview of the revolution that had taken place in Spain since Franco’s death? You must be kidding. It had been fifteen years since I had set foot in Spain, fifteen years since Tom had called me in London to announce he was getting married, fifteen years since we had last spoken. But what were old friends for, if not to help you out in an emergency?

  We met at the Café Gijón on the Paseo de la Castellana, the same place his grandfather used to go before the civil war—oh, if only the old man had lived long enough to see Franco entombed in the Valle de los Caídos, and his country’s triumphant return to democracy.

  “Una manzanilla La Gitana para la Señora, por favor.”

  What else would I drink in Madrid?

  “Y dos raciones de chipirones en su tinta.”

  And two portions of squid in black ink.

  Tom smiled and leaned across the table. “As I was saying yesterday.…”

  “Ah, Miguel, how could I forget?”

  Miguel de Unamuno, a friend of Dr. Marañón’s, and one of the great Spanish intellectuals of that generation, had been the rector of the University of Salamanca during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Famous for his liberal views, he had been thrown out in 1924 and sent into exile on Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. After Rivera’s fall in 1930, Unamuno returned to the university and began his first lecture with the immortal words, “As I was saying yesterday.…” As if no time had passed at all.

  As we were saying fifteen years ago … as if no time had passed at all. The tutorials resumed, and over the next week Tom introduced me to journalists, politicians, writers, the man who ran the Prado, the woman who ran the mayor of Madrid—people I could never have met or interviewed if we hadn’t had lunch at El Gijón.

  “Hey, you remember that place we went to the first time I ever came to Madrid, off the Plaza Mayor, where we had coagulated blood and rat’s penis to start, and the poor little calf’s head with the milky eyeballs, and the dismembered baby pig? Do you think it’s still there?”

  “Of course it’s still there. It opened the year before Cervantes lost his arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Why one earth wouldn’t it be?”

  “Okay. Since you have been the fixer from el cielo, I propose we go there tomorrow night before I fly back to New York in the morning.”

  The Madrid piece ran a few months later, and I was thrilled to get a letter from a Spanish reader complimenting me on how well I had captured his hometown. It was forwarded, with love and gratitude, to my tutor.

  SOMETIMES I DIDN’T EVEN have to dream up an idea for a story to get on a plane. Every year the magazine gave a big party at the ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) convention, wherever it happened to be—Rio, Hong Kong, Budapest, Lisbon, Sydney. The agents lived for their work, and didn’t mind how many thousands of miles they had to travel (first class) to be feted at various extravaganzas laid on by the titans of their industry.

  In 1993 the convention was to take place in Cairo, and Tom Wallace, who was now the editor (restless Harry had left to become head of Random House), asked me if I would go with him. The climax of this dazzling evening would be the presentation of awards—the Oscars of the travel business—to whatever airline, resort, hotel, spa, car rental agency, and city the discerning readers of Condé Nast Traveler had voted best in the world. It seemed that my role was to play Vanna White to Tom’s Pat Sajak.

  However, not all the recipients were glossy advertisers. Vladimir Chernousenko, a Russian physicist, had gone into Chernobyl as leader of the team that had the grim job of trying to clean up and contain the disaster. He was rewarded for his bravery with the loss of his job, after he had spoken out publicly about the situation, the Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award, a trip to Cairo, a check—and cancer. Vladimir was staying at our hotel, and some days he was so weak he couldn’t leave his room, but that night was different. His eyes shone as he gazed out at the Pyramids—“You know, when I was a small child I used to dream of them”—he enjoyed his wine as only a Russian can, flirted energetically with every lady in sight, and when the band started to play the first bars of “Strangers in the Night”—“Ah, my favorite song!”—he asked me to dance.

  Okay, it was a cliché. Sinatra, champagne, candles, camels outlined against the Pyramids, but a transcendental, unforgettable cliché because of the heroic dying man I was dancing with.

  NO MORE THAN six or seven, younger than Rebecca, wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a torn T-shirt, the boy darted through the rush-hour traffic, almost getting hit by a bus, garlands of tiny white flowers dangling from one skinny brown arm. The lights turned red, he ran toward the car holding one of his fragile jasmine necklaces out to me, smiling, and I gave him whatever money I had in my bag. It must have been quite a lot because he seemed momentarily stunned and pushed the rest of his flowers through the window, trying to make me take them. “No, no, you must keep them. But please, please get out of the traffic.” I waved frantically toward the sidewalk, pleading with him. Laughing, he made it back just as the lights changed. I slipped the jasmine necklace over my head.

  Yes, it was the same scent that had infused the magical tent. No, the obscene tent. How much had that ridiculous circus cost, anyway? How much food had been thrown out last night? (Or had the staff taken every last bit? I hoped so.) Oh, do shut up. If you really cared, you wouldn’t be weeping in the back of an air-conditioned car, you wouldn’t be telling Park Avenue orthodontists where to go on vacation, you wouldn’t be prancing around in Chanel. Go get a job at Oxfam, why don’t you? Work for the UNRWA in a Palestinian refugee camp, or how about joining the Peace Corps? But of course you could never leave your family, could you? So find something in New York; plenty of kids in the South Bronx who need help. With no snappy comeback, I reverted to my usual faute-de-mieux reply and told my conscience to fuck off.

  No, after careful consideration, I thought I’d just continue with my own peculiar, erratic, impetuous, highly emotional, disorganized response to poverty. Go on giving Vinnie—who hangs out on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Tenth, entertaining passersby with strange whistling noises—coffee, cigarettes, and sandwiches, and in the winter enough money for the shelter. When in St. Petersburg, give your complimentary fruit basket, with additions of brandy, a chocolate bar, and a pack of Marlboros from the minibar to the old man with one arm, selling pencils on Nevsky Prospekt. Always hand out rubles to roaming bands of raucous street kids, ignoring the advice of Russian friends who will tell you: “You mustn’t do that. It just makes them wilder, and we’ll never get rid of them.” Olga was right. It did, and we didn’t.

  “They’re just sharamigas; pay no attention to them.”

  “And what the hell are sharamigas?”

  So she explained. During the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon fled back to Paris in his sable-lined sleigh, while his poor starving frozen soldiers were reduced to begging, “Cher ami, cher ami—aidez-moi s’il vous plaît.”

  Never, ever haggle. Why would you want to ch
eat somebody with so much less than you? Why not go on handing out beer and a bag of pretzels to anybody who looks as though they could use a drink? Jesus, don’t we all need a stiff cocktail when the going gets rough? And I might just hit the next person who, when I stuff a couple of bucks into a sharamiga’s empty paper cup, says, “Oh, you mustn’t give him anything. He’ll just go straight out and spend it on drugs or alcohol.”

  Well, perhaps I won’t actually hit them. Instead I’ll tell the truth: “Oh, but I must. You see, it’s entirely selfish. If you’re a member of the Good Luck Sperm Club, you have to do something to stop yourself going completely mad.”

  La Bouillabaisse

  ONE SUMMER WHEN I WAS ABOUT SIXTEEN, after reading a few too many books by Elizabeth David, I became obsessed with the idea of cooking bouillabaisse. My poor mother was bullied into getting up at dawn and driving to the market in Toulon down by the old port, where we immediately headed for the bellowing harridans who inhabit the fish stands—overflowing with a mélange of grotesque sea creatures straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s fevered imagination. Spiky black rascasses; terrifying moray eels; weavers, their hideous eyes bulging out of the top of their heads; combers, known as serans écritures on account of the blue-and-purple scribbles carelessly dashed across their red scales; Saint-Pierres, shiny black moules, multicolored girelles, and tiny green favouilles (crabs) were wrapped in newspaper and piled into our baskets. Still alive, some of the more adventurous favouilles decided to make a break for freedom in the car on the way home. The next morning I found one of them scuttling around on the backseat, so of course he had to accompany us, in a plastic bowl filled with water and two teaspoons of sea salt, to Bikini Beach, where he disappeared into the sand.

  For some reason, probably nerves at the thought of embarking on this tricky enterprise with only my mother as sous-chef, I had decided to invite our two neighbors, Francette and Jeannine Tricon, gifted cooks both, to come and help me transform my Quasimodo creatures into this sublime Provençal dish. Naively I had failed to take into account the explosive, proprietorial emotions that could be ignited when it came to the composition of une bouillabaisse véritable. Some purists (usually people who come from Toulon or Marseille) will tell you that the real deal can be found only in their hometown and in a few places along the coast between these culinary lodestars. (Other less fanatical aficionados will allow that the permissible area extends as far as Monaco but not a single kilometer beyond.) So at least we had the geography right. The trouble began when Francette spotted the basket of small, round potatoes, soil still clinging to their rosy skins, that Madame Tricon had smuggled into my kitchen.

  “Les pommes de terre, je pense pas!” she hissed in my ear while our neighbor was washing her offerings in the sink. “Jamais les pommes de terre!” Long practiced in the delicate art of conciliation, and perhaps misguidedly convinced of the beneficial properties of alcohol when it came to smoothing over disagreements, I ignored her and instead offered them each a double dose of rosé de Bandol while we set to work cutting up the fish. First the tiniest ones, freshly netted rockfish, were put in the pot along with the less-than-lively crabs, who had survived a night in the fridge (the cold must have sapped their fighting spirit), along with some fennel, leek, celery, olive oil, salt, and the bleeding guillotined heads of the bigger fish. Francette, a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, poured in water (traditionally the fishermen who cooked this on the beach over driftwood fires added seawater in lieu of salt), and the broth was put on the stove to boil (the bouille part), after which she lowered (the baisse bit) the flame and it was set at a steady simmer. At this point I saw the ashy tip of her cigarette disappear into the soup—oh, what the hell.

  “Oh lá lá, j’ai jamais vu ça!” Madame Tricon exclaimed with entirely false bonhomie. Christ, what now? Francette had produced a bagful of cigales de mer, a type of lobster that she was seriously proposing to add to this controversial witches’ brew. “Perhaps this is something they do in Paris?” she asked her neighbor brightly. “Non, pas du tout, Jeannine, it is something I learned from my friend who is the chef at Chez Fonfon in Marseille.” Time for more wine. I have absolutely no memory of the rest of the evening, or what the bouillabaisse tasted like, but I swore then that I would never, ever get into cooking it again.

  What changed my mind was a book called Lulu’s Provençal Table that landed on my desk in New York twenty-something years later. Lulu Peyraud lived in Le Plan du Castellet, and her family owned the rightly famous Domaine Tempier that produced some of the—if not the—best wine in the area. I had been introduced to her by Nick and his girlfriend, Jemima, who were friends of Madame Peyraud’s daughter, Catherine. Feeling inexplicably flush one day, Nick and I had driven over to their house for an informal wine tasting and had returned home with a case of—what else—cuvée La Migoua. The memory of that brief visit never left me. Surrounded by vineyards, the old farmhouse—its dusty blue shutters closed to keep out the ferocious summer heat—was approached by an allée of plane trees, its terrace shaded by a huge, slightly lopsided umbrella pine and a vine-covered pergola. The air was thick with the thrumming of cicadas and the scent of rosemary, flowering fennel, and wild thyme. Madame Peyraud’s great-grandmother Léonie had been given the property as part of her dowry in the mid-nineteenth century, and I remember thinking that if she had decided to return that day, she would surely have been happy to see that nothing had changed at all.

  Sitting in my office in Manhattan, I opened the book and started reading. Alice Waters, who wrote the introduction, had met the Peyrauds in the seventies and credits “the Peyraud family’s example with helping us find our balance at Chez Panisse.” She remembers

  one evening when Lulu had not expected us for supper but nevertheless insisted on cooking us a little something. She had a basket of wild mushrooms that she proceeded to quickly brush off and then sauté with garlic and lots of herbs. Although she seemed to be cooking them almost unconsciously, chatting away with us over a welcoming glass of rosé, they were probably the most flavorful wild mushrooms I have ever eaten.

  A few days later I picked up the telephone and asked Madame Peyraud if I might come see her when I arrived in La Migoua later in the summer. Perhaps we could cook bouillabaisse together? “Absolument. Je serais ravie.”

  No, it wasn’t exactly dawn, but it can’t have been too long after when I arrived at the Domaine Tempier to accompany Madame Peyraud to Bandol so that we could meet the fishing boats as they came into the port with the night’s catch. How else could one possibly be sure not only of the freshest fish but also of finding some of the more elusive creatures who might otherwise be stolen from under one’s nose by other sharp-eyed and -elbowed shoppers? I hopped into her car, and as we drove along the still-cool back roads down toward the coast, Lulu, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Simone Signoret, with her wide-set dark eyes and short blond hair, started to talk bouillabaisse.

  To start with there is no “correct” recipe. The fishermen on the beach had just used whatever they couldn’t sell, and to this day, the list of ingredients is somewhat elastic, but not entirely. Baudroie (anglerfish) for instance is vital. Its head, the cartilaginous central bone, chopped small, and other trimmings go into the broth, while its pinkish beige liver, as smooth and delicious as foie gras, is an essential ingredient in the rouille. Those frolicsome favouille crabs lend a necessary peppery flavor to the broth, which should also include a generous slice of conger eel, an entire head of garlic, a couple of pounds of the tiny rockfish, as well as onion, tomatoes, leek, celery, carrots, and a bouquet of the fennel that happens to grow outside Lulu’s kitchen door. Francette’s cigarette ash is entirely optional.

  “Whenever I cook fish, I always add lots of herbs, but for bouillabaisse I leave out the thyme and bay leaf, and concentrate on fennel.” We were back in Lulu’s kitchen with our baskets of fish, and out came the knives. The cut-up pieces of fish were set to marinate in a mix of ground fennel seed,
saffron, crushed garlic, and olive oil on a platter, while we got to work on the broth. Raised up off the ground and almost big enough to stand up in, an enormous fireplace—just like the one in our house—dominated the room and would have been built as much for cooking as chauffage. Regrettable electrical intrusions like the refrigerator and dishwasher were concealed behind antique wooden doors, and marble mortars, wooden pestles, and spoons, metal whisks, ancient metal grills, copper cooking pots, sharp knives—all things her great-grandmother might have used—constituted her entire batterie de cuisine. (Perhaps the shiny new Cuisinart, blenders, electric knife sharpeners, and other equally regrettable modern innovations were hidden away in a cupboard—but somehow I doubted it, and certainly didn’t dare ask.)

  “Alors, maintenant on fait la rouille!” Without which there can be no bouillabaisse. Cayenne peppers were attacked in a big marble mortar, coarse salt and garlic added, the sublime anglerfish foie gras was pounded until we had a smooth paste, then an egg yolk and a mix of bread crumbs and saffron, moistened with fish stock, and after that I dribbled in a steady stream of olive oil. This celestial, garlicky, fish-infused mayonnaise is spread as thickly as you dare on garlic bread crusts at the bottom of each soup plate, the rest being passed around at the table, just in case you feel that you might have been shortchanged on your daily garlic ration. And what of Madame Tricon’s problematical potatoes? “Mais oui, toujours les pommes de terres!” Lulu added them to the broth, with the tomatoes, more garlic, more saffron, fennel, followed by the mussels and marinated fish. And what of Francette’s controversial cigales de mer? “Oui, absolument. But I couldn’t find any this morning. Sometimes I add octopus as well.”

  Ever the sly diplomat, when I got back home I made sure to tell Francette and Madame Tricon (separately, of course) that the great Lulu Peyraud had decreed that they had been completely right. Unsurprised at being vindicated, they both shrugged and said I told you so, whatever that is in French. And—having experienced perfection—I never cooked bouillabaisse again.