‘No, no. That’s not my idea at all. I want to make food that appeals to children but which adults can eat too. I want everyone to feel at home here, do you see what I mean?’
‘So we won’t call it a children’s menu?’
‘No.’
‘What will we call it?’
‘It won’t have a name,’ I say.
And, suddenly, there’s a moment of illumination: nothing has a name here.
‘Have you noticed? I don’t have a sign,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t say “restaurant” over the door.’
‘Have you got something against names?’ he asks rather dubiously.
‘Yes.’
‘So how will people know?’
This boy asks good questions. Questions there are no answers to. I bite my lip. He fidgets; I can see that he’s looking for a solution, that he wants to help me.
‘I’ll tell them,’ he suggests. ‘I’ll go out into the street and hand out leaflets. I’ll find a way to make them realize. I’ll explain without actually naming anything.’
Ben is getting enthused, but I tell him we don’t have to go to extremes. I’m against names if names restrict things to categories, but I’m not against words.
He nods vigorously.
‘I can stay till four today,’ he tells me out of the blue in response to a question I asked an hour and a half earlier. ‘I’ve got lectures after that,’ he explains.
‘Are you a student?’
‘Yes. A waiter and a student.’
‘Of what?’
‘Political science.’
‘That’s really hard isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ he agrees with appropriate gravity.
We share the work between us. He takes care of the easier food and I do the more complicated dishes. He butters slices of bread and puts seasoning on the carrots while I prepare the tajine of fish, the minestrone and the goat’s cheese terrine with herbs and olives. Ben is so biddable he’s exemplary, almost worrying. He’s accurate and careful. He doesn’t talk spontaneously but answers when I ask him something.
I want to know how he met Hannah and Simone. He can’t remember.
‘We just met,’ he says.
He sees that as an answer.
‘Have you known them long?’
‘A while.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Since nursery school.’
He has always lived round here and knows everyone. He thinks it was a good idea to open a restaurant. It’s just what was needed. Specially somewhere ‘like this’. As we chat I realize he has subtly changed register, shifting from his grandfather-style lexicon to younger, vaguer, less precise language. He uses the words ‘thingy’, ‘whatsit’ and ‘gizmo’ a lot as well as ‘like’. I think it is out of consideration for me because he realizes just how hurtful actual names can be, terms that are too precise, too definitive, designating and judging at the same time, identifying and classifying. I ask him whether he still lives at home.
‘Yes, but not with my parents,’ he says.
‘Where are they then?’
‘In the cemetery.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Did you inherit anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you very rich?’
‘No.’
‘We must talk about your wages,’ I tell him.
‘You’ve already explained that you can’t pay me.’
‘But you mustn’t accept that, Ben. This is very serious. I can’t pay you, but I can’t pay for the two fillets of hake I’ve just bought at the market either, or next month’s rent or the electricity. I can’t pay for anything but I pay it all anyway. So I might as well pay you too.’
‘It’s not worth bothering,’ he says.
‘Yes it is. It would just be impossible any other way. If you refuse to be paid you can leave straight away. I don’t want to see you again.’
Ben looks aggrieved.
‘What about the others?’ I ask, ‘People you’ve worked for before, did they pay you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I then? Why shouldn’t I have the right to pay you? Because I’m too poor? Because I’m a woman?’
He shakes his head. His eyes dart about wildly and he brings his hands up to his face as if afraid of being beaten. I wonder what he’s been put through. How this body of separate elements assembled itself. What treatment he’s been subjected to, to be so docile, what upbringing to be so fearful.
‘I want…’ He hesitates for a moment. ‘… I want to change the world,’ he admits, flushing. ‘Hannah and Simone told me about you… how you work. I’m interested in that. I get the feeling you’re trying something new. I want to be part of that experience.’
My poor love, I think to myself. What on earth will you get from the experience of bankruptcy?
‘What do you mean?’
‘They told me about the price for life. They also told me it was a secret. I won’t tell anyone. I swear.’
I explain that it’s not really to do with a method, it’s more a tactic to ensure customer loyalty, that there’s nothing new or noble in that, nothing that’s remotely like an ideal. ‘Don’t go hoping you can do a work placement here. I don’t do science or politics. I’d be absolutely no use to you for your studies. You’d be wasting your time. All work deserves payment. Have you heard that said before? Even if the work in question is interesting, even if it’s a pleasure or an education. You want to change the world and that’s all very well, but all I want to do is make my little business work. I don’t want any misunderstandings between us, Ben. If you work here, it’ll be to earn a living.’
I don’t believe a word I’m saying. I listen in amazement to myself as the sentences come out of my mouth: trite sentences, banalities intended to protect us - him and me - from our megalomania, our ridiculous enthusiasm, our pathetic and unjustified faith in mankind’s own capacity for progress and improvement.
‘What about the food for children?’ he asks, making a heart-rending effort to meet my eye.
‘Yes, what about food for children?’ I ask tartly.
‘Well, that’s political,’ he mumbles. ‘You’re not doing that to earn money, otherwise you’d call it a children’s menu. You’re doing it to be fairer, for equality.’
What Ben says is true, but the gravity with which he says it - instead of reinforcing my desire to fight and fuelling my sublime ambitions - dashes my hopes and makes them look pathetic. How did we come to this? How did we create a world in which conspirators get together to talk about recipes?
A few weeks later when I see Simone and Hannah again I ask them whether Ben is normal. They immediately understand the gist of my question and both say together, ‘Oh, no, no, no. He’s not normal at all. But he’s a brilliant waiter, isn’t he? Are you pleased? Things are going better since he’s been here, aren’t they?’
‘What about his studies?’ I ask them.
‘He’s skipped loads of grades. Though, he’s a bit retarded, but…’
They don’t know, don’t understand, tie themselves in knots. They clearly don’t want me to think they don’t like him. They adore him. They think he’s the best waiter in the world. They should never have told me that. Oh, why did they say it? They’re full of regrets, afraid I’ll sack him because of them.
‘Why do you think he’s the best waiter in the world?’ I ask them.
‘Because he loves it,’ they say.
‘How long have you known him?’
‘We met him last year, he was working at the Shamrock, the café next to the high school.’
‘Didn’t you know him at nursery school?’
They don’t understand my question. I give up. Ben tells white lies, but he can also tell the truth. He really has been living in this neighbourhood all his life, and it’s true that he knows everyone. I can see that from the first day he works for me. As we’re finishing tidying up the kitche
n Vincent bursts in with a rose in his hand. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Ben here. He pats him on the shoulder, offers me the flower and sits down.
‘Coffee?’
‘If you like.’
‘I’ve taken Ben on as a waiter,’ I tell him.
‘Good idea,’ he comments abstractedly.
He drums his fingers on the table. Slumps. Sits back up. On edge. He hums a tune, then whistles it. He gets up, heads over towards the bookshelf, then sits back down.
I give him his coffee and sit down opposite him. He smiles at me without opening his mouth, which makes him look rather like a toad.
‘Still in your mega-epic mood?’
He nods his head without unclenching his teeth.
‘You know,’ he eventually confides quietly, ‘about what I said the other day. I didn’t mean it.’
A gap about the size of Lake Michigan appears in my memory. What can he be referring to?
‘Well, I did,’ he says. ‘I did think it but that doesn’t mean that… do you see what I mean? It didn’t mean anything, it was just a comment, in passing, an observation. I don’t go in for generalizations.’
It comes back to me, Jews and money. Poor Vincent. He feels all guilty now.
‘I couldn’t care less,’ I tell him.
‘Sorry?’
He’s offended now, terribly.
‘I couldn’t care less about all that. It’s much more straightforward than people think, or much more complicated.’
As we talk, as I try to explain to Vincent that I don’t think he’s anti-Semitic, while he tries to get me to say that I’m a Jew, while we fight it out over quite separate territories, territories that don’t even share a border - him toiling away with his right-thinking ideas and me labouring on with my straight-thinking - while all this is going on something happens in the restaurant. I don’t realize straight away because I’m too absorbed in our argument, but while we hammer away, the room fills up. There are customers sitting down, some are even standing by the counter. There are two men in overalls, a woman with glasses wearing a smart coat, a funny little bald man in a raincoat with a scarf neatly crossed at his throat. Ben is serving them, bringing them coffees, a little glass of dry white wine and, I have no idea how, even locating a pineapple juice. I have to face the fact that Chez moi has become a bar. Cigarettes are lit, ashtrays spring from nowhere.
A man of about fifty, an efficient-looking sort, comes in and says, ‘Hello, Ben, a coffee please.’
‘You’re on, doctor,’ my waiter replies.
The workmen in overalls pay for their drinks. ‘See you later, Ben,’ they say as they leave.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ I ask Vincent.
I look round slowly, first one way then the other. I look at all the strangers who have come into my home without my inviting them. It’s not as if it says non-stop service on the window, I haven’t opened a brasserie or a bar. But it’s too late. My failure to identify it has produced an unexpected twist. I dare not stand up. As far as the others are concerned, I probably look like a customer because I’m sitting at a table with a friend and a cup of coffee. I don’t know whether I like the feeling of dispossession that sweeps through me. I do burst out laughing, though.
‘He’s a local lad’, Vincent tells me, as if that were enough to explain my restaurant’s sudden popularity. ‘Everyone knows him. He’s had a - how shall I put this? - an unusual life. He’s hung about in the streets a lot. His parents…’
He stops himself, not because he’s baulking at the thought of revealing my new waiter’s family secrets, but because I’ve leapt to my feet to ask Ben how much he’s been charging for a coffee. We didn’t have time to discuss it. The till has rung several times. How can I treat this all so lightly?
Very quietly, Ben explains that he charges €1 for a cup of coffee at a table, and 60 cents up at the bar. It’s cheap and he knows it but he thought this fitted in well with my style. For the dry white wine he went the other way, he reckoned that at €3 a glass. That’s very expensive but if we don’t use off-putting prices on alcohol we’ll end up with all the local drunks. He can see I wouldn’t know how to cope with that sort of clientele, so there’s no point going down that road.
‘And the pineapple juice?’
‘€2.20.’
I wonder where those 20 cents came from. They came from his imagination and his business sense. €2.20 sounds right. It gives people the impression they’re saving the 30 cents that would round it up nicely so they end up leaving that as a tip but still feel they’ve come away with a bargain.
When he comes to leave, Vincent puts €1 on the table. I look at the coin. It shines like a rising moon on the wine-coloured Formica. Announcing a new era. I hesitate to pick it up. I look up at Vincent who’s smiling.
‘Mazel tov,’ he says.
Ben and I have agreed he should work part-time. Vincent has helped me with all the social security contributions and paperwork. I’ve become a boss. I collect bills, demands for payments and bailiffs’ warnings. It’s like a sort of un-medicinal herbarium, constantly growing and threatening me. I don’t file anything, just let it pile up, charging headlong towards disaster, but the feeling is so familiar I have trouble taking action against it. My life, which I would like to have been so simple, just gets more and more complicated and I have to acknowledge that the distinction - in itself disturbing - between the real world and the world of dreams has company: I now also have to differentiate between the actual universe and a virtual one. The actual one is what goes on in my restaurant every day: customers, orders, food coming and going, drink deliveries, dishes simmering, vegetables peeled, bills given, rolls of coins, banknotes, cheques, reservations, regular customers, the hubbub, that soft hubbub of happy adults and children. The virtual one is what I receive in the post and is instantly lost in my labyrinth of drawers: forms and summonses couched in terms that I find barbaric, and to which I don’t deign to reply, figures which always seem to accumulate in the same column, the debit column. I feel like those parched landscapes where the depleted groundwater can no longer hold together the cracked soil, those sterile expanses cleaned out by summer storms but never actually slaked by them. I don’t know how but the money that comes into my till never reaches into that dark parched pipework, not the tiniest droplet to quench the thirst of the paper monster.
One morning Ben tells me we can’t carry on like this. ‘You just keep going regardless,’ he tells me.
‘But it’s working, isn’t it? The restaurant’s still just as busy. Since you’ve been here people have been tripping over each other to get in. We have three sittings at lunchtime and three in the evening. The mini-canteen’s working. And the catering side will be up and running soon.’
Without saying a thing, Ben opens the drawers of the minute cabinet shoehorned between the sink and the cupboard, a piece of furniture salvaged from beside a dustbin on the Rue de la Folie-Méricourt and which acts in turns as my desk, butcher’s block and bedside table. As the drawers crawl out along their runners the wads of multicoloured paper spew down onto the floor tiles. My chest feels constricted with shame. I look away, wondering whether I will ever be free of that emotion. I would like to apologize to Ben, to ask him to forgive me for making him take on this role. The world has turned upside-down. I am the older of us, I should be protecting him, teaching him, giving him advice. Ben has no experience, he should be relying on me, trusting in my judgement, listening to me recount my edifying adventures, and reaping the benefits of my wisdom. But no, it’s the other way round. He spots the pitfalls better than I do, he’s sensible and mature. He asks me for €10 to go to Office Depot.
‘What’s that?’ I ask, terrified - because the words conjure some sort of dumping ground for failed businesses - that Ben is going to denounce me to the Inland Revenue or some such organization, that he’ll hand my files over to the police.
‘It’s a stationer’s,’ he says.
‘Don’t you th
ink we’ve got enough paper as it is?’
He smiles. Reassures me. Claims he can sort everything out.
He goes out and I’m distraught at the sight of his silhouette wavering through the early winter fog. Where are you going, little chick? How are you going to save this feckless old hen?
While I’m waiting for him to come back I make some shortbread biscuits which I will serve with figs in whisky and a vanilla zabaglione. I rub some shoulders of lamb with garlic and harissa, and put them in the oven, then blanch some celery and chard before glazing them with brown sugar. I cut some grapes in half. The word grape is so close to gape, the gaping holes in my reasoning. I look at the inside of the fruit, the smooth watery green flesh. A tear drops onto the stainless steel surface, followed by another, the grape is overflowing. The tide is rising again, I think to myself. Build a seawall, quick! my heart sings. A seawall between me and myself. How can I help the memories welling back up? How do I break my conscience away from the past? What can I do so that nothing evokes, nothing symbolizes, nothing reminds? Why does life consist of this endless rehashing? Do we never recover from our amputations, our mutilations? And why always the same mistakes? As if we were besotted with our own blunders, our own inability to do what we ought to do as we ought to do it. I feel as if anyone else in my position, with the luck I’ve had (getting a loan on the strength of fake sureties, benefiting from supportive neighbours, taking on the best waiter in Paris) would have run Chez moi clearly and efficiently. Anybody, except for me, could have made this the perfect example of a small business. But, there you are, my complete lack of organization always has to play its part. I always end up - and it’s like an illness, oh, how I suffer, how I would love to be cured - making a complete mess. I’m unreliable. I’m like someone on drugs, unstable, furtive, dangerous. I watch the episodes as they happen, each a reaction to another, like a point with its counterpoint. The characters are similar: they are young and they are here to judge. Ben is so gentle and indulgent but his jurisdiction is a reincarnation of Hugo’s, of the trial of the son versus his mother. They were both right and I was wrong both times.
Chez Moi Page 9