Chez Moi

by Agnes Desarthe

  I feel like throwing it all out of the window, his brilliant obsessive publicity ideas, his masterful marketing techniques, his old-before-his-time business plan. If he gets his kicks out of running a business he can go and do it somewhere else. Chez moi isn’t to do with making a fortune. Chez moi is for eating good food at a modest price. My customers have a wonderful time and every time they do I think to myself: there, I’ve made someone happy, without any pain, with no risk of it being habit-forming and no inexorable spiral of always wanting more.

  I think about the seat of satiation. Some people seem not to have one. But they are rare. As far as I know there is no equivalent seat for sexual appetite. You can never have enough. It’s a fire that needs constant feeding. Addiction, addiction, addiction. But in a restaurant, no thanks, I’m fine, I’m no longer hungry.

  Is it possible to think one thing without immediately thinking the opposite? Simone and Hannah’s philosophy questions are giving me nightmares. I don’t want to be like Ben but I don’t want to be like me. I’m dangerous and not very reliable. In my head I write Ben a letter of dismissal:

  Due to divergent methods, due to ideological differences and to protect you from yourself and your illusions, I have no choice but to bring an end to our collaboration which, believe me, has been of great value to me.

  I read through it. I like the calm note of the epistolary style: anger no longer rearing its head but lying down, the blend of gentleness and betrayal that can be secreted into it. If a ‘Dear John’ letter three pages long, riddled with criticism and recriminations - insults even - ends with something like ‘but, deep down, I know I’ll never love anyone the way I loved you’, then it’s still a love letter. I also delight in the way a shy restrained letter can reveal the writer’s feelings thanks to one word he or she couldn’t hold back, flying off like a reckless butterfly, landing - it knows the exact spot - in the corner of the reader’s mouth, as a quivering smile, trembling at the premonition of a secret love that has in fact been avowed.

  There, I feel calm now. The last drop of cognac has blended with my blood. I resent Ben for not wanting me. It’s only human - as we like to say when we dare not admit animal stupidity. It’s been six years since a man held me in his arms. And even then, that last time, was he really a man? Six empty years.

  Except for one evening perhaps. But that was nothing. A black sky, dotted with stars. Far too many stars, I thought. They were all over the place, up above the big top, big stars and tiny stars, clusters of stars and shooting stars. It was hot. The leaves on the trees shifted slowly like a Spanish dancer’s eyelashes. The ground and the walls gave off the smell of a thwarted day, a day that has vanished but which is still there, persisting through the evening. I will not be killed, says the day. Impossible to get to sleep. You only have to inhale that air laden with regret for the sun and that’s it, it will be a sleepless night. I can’t get to sleep. I won’t get to sleep. I’m crazy tonight.

  Eloi came out because he heard the goat tugging on her tether. He had devised an act called the Wheel of Death but he also spent a lot of time looking after the animals. He was worried she might have been trying to escape. A goat in Paris. A goat climbing up to Montmartre. I was outside, breathing in the mingled smells. Together we admired Marina’s rectangular pupils as she bleated imploringly. She wanted to be stroked. We laughed and stayed there, side by side, in that demented night air. A hundred times, a thousand times, our hands dreamed of touching. We stood motionless, our lungs filled with the same tempting aromas. Aromas of a summer night which bathes naked bodies in its scalding syrup. Afterwards you have to lick it off right through till morning. I could picture us rolling on top of each other in the thistles, and then crushing the chives beyond: onion-scented love. My hips wanted to leave my body, the pressure was incredible, an onslaught… phew, Eloi had already gone. Eloi, whose wife - who was much younger and prettier than me - was waiting for him in his caravan, had gone home.

  I won’t be able to get back to sleep now. I take a book from the shelf. A collection of letters, another one, and I read: ‘So we bought the bull which my mother called Banjo, I don’t know why. I always thought that if she had a dog she would have called it Azor, without a hint of irony. I would have called my dog Azor too, but ironically. You might say no one would have seen the difference.’ I read through this passage from a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote to her friend ‘A’ on the 9th of August 1957, and I think of this incredible gift, within reach, this instant consolation for all suffering offered by the mind.

  The morning wind sneaks under the metal shutter.

  Good morning, I say to myself.

  When Vincent comes over for his cup of coffee a few days later (he had to go to Cologne for a week to attend a convention on floral decorations), I can’t help telling him: ‘The boy slept here the other night.’

  ‘Which boy?’ he asks, as if he doesn’t know.

  ‘Ben. Ben slept here.’

  I remember at this point that Vincent doesn’t know Chez moi is also my home. As a result, the impact of my announcement is considerably diminished. Still, there’s no question of passing up on this opportunity to show off. Our recent financial success has given me wings. The take-away orders are mounting up, we do two sittings in the evening and sometimes three at lunch time. The ‘mixed bathing’ is working: toddlers from nursery school eat their meatballs and mash on the same seats as bank employees, and students share a bread basket with painters from the building site nearby. Ben teases me, saying I’m elated by it. I nod and keep my ears open, listening out for the threat, the catastrophe that is bound to come and drown our little corner of paradise. I can’t hear anything. I can’t see where the enemy could come from. According to Ben’s projections - he’s got some very impressive accounting software - we’ll soon be out of deep water. What goes up must come down, I tell myself; once we’ve achieved success we’ll surely have our downfall. Perhaps it will be at the hands of a health inspector. He’ll find my tights screwed up in a ball next to the dishcloths, my eau de toilette in the spice cupboard. He’ll make further investigations and I’ll be crippled by a fine I can’t pay. But we haven’t got to that stage. We’ve got to the stage of making revelations to our friend Vincent.

  ‘I slept here too,’ I tell him mischievously.

  ‘What?’

  Vincent’s question displays more exasperation than curiosity.

  ‘I live here, you know,’ I say quietly so that the other customers don’t have the benefit of this confidential information.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I live in my restaurant. I didn’t tell you at first because we didn’t really know each other and I didn’t know how you’d take it—’

  ‘Well, I take it very badly,’ he interrupts. ‘I think it’s grotesque, degrading, childish. No, it’s not true,’ he adds, smiling. ‘You’re taking me for a ride. How could you live in this…’

  ‘I’ve got everything I need,’ I tell him. ‘A bed, a loo, a kitchen, a sink. And, more importantly, I can’t afford to live anywhere else.’

  ‘What about the money from selling the tea-room at Invalides?’

  I’m happy to discover he’s forgotten nothing of the various fabrications I’ve told him.

  ‘I’ve never had a tea-room anywhere. I lied to you. I didn’t want to disappoint you.’

  ‘But you’re disappointing me now,’ he replies.

  ‘You sound like something out of a soap opera,’ I tell him.

  He closes in on himself. I’ve hurt him.

  ‘Don’t be angry, Vincent. You were the first person to help me. Everything I’ve done here is thanks to you.’

  ‘But Ben’s the one you ask to stay the night,’ he mutters.

  He’s earned his kiss. I hop over the table and, slowly, kiss him, the way you do when you haven’t kissed someone for six years; with relish, curiosity and patience.

  The customers haven’t seen a thing, we were hidden by the coat stand. />
  I’m shaking.

  Vincent is shaking too. He takes a pack of aniseed-flavoured pastilles from his pocket, struggles to pop one out of its aluminium bubble and sucks on it nervously. What on earth am I going to do with you? I ask myself, catching him out like that, when he’s not sure what his breath smells like. I kiss him on the forehead and go back to my kitchen, carefree and courageous.

  For the last few days I’ve been intoxicated by the giddy heights I’ve reached. I sit back and look at what I’ve achieved.

  ‘Everything’s possible,’ I tell Ben.

  He is sitting at his computer with his back to me, picking up the evening’s take-away orders.

  ‘You really can change the world,’ I add, in the hope that he will take an interest in what I’m saying.

  But no. He’s concentrating. He’s connected. He is quite incapable of straightening his neck and turning to face me. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve come this far. I’ve reached a degree of satisfaction which makes me immune to irritations. I’m experiencing the blend of excitement and sadness that comes with realizing a dream. I now know the proud weariness of a superhero. Chez moi is still just as busy. We’re exhausted but we’re appreciated. My restaurant has become a meeting place, a haven, a lovers’ refuge in the afternoon, a foodies’ secret destination in the evening, a forum for the talkative in the morning, and a transient nest for single parents. We’ve even set up a mini self-service for the youngest children because they love helping themselves. Part of the room is set aside for them. Ben has cut a gap in the bar, one metre up from the ground, and he passes their trays through it with their raw vegetables, their warmed main dish of finger food, and their fruit purée. At first we thought it was a bad idea because babies of just four wanted to carry their food back to the table without any help. They walk so slowly. They can hardly stand on their tiny feet. But it’s actually no problem at all. There’s never any kind of problem here. The adults around them automatically put their hands over threatening table corners as those fragile vulnerable heads come near, arms reach out to avoid falls and, most importantly, the youngsters are getting better at it. My ‘children’s corner’ is beginning to look like hotel school.

  At first Ben worried about different generations cohabiting like this. He was afraid cigarette smoke would make the little ones cough, and the nippers’ whining would annoy older customers. But no. A slight shift in timings (the children eat at about twelve and the grown-ups an hour later) makes the division of our shared space possible. ‘And anyway,’ I told Ben, ‘at worst anyone who doesn’t like it just won’t come back.’ We haven’t registered any discontent so far. People come back. We no longer have a day off or a closing time. Customers spontaneously stop coming in at about eleven in the evening. They’re sparing us - and thinking about their cup of coffee the following morning.

  At one stage I thought I was distracting Ben from his studies and felt guilty, but he eventually admitted that he’d been granted a prolonged period on work placement. I signed the agreement.

  ‘What will you say when you go back to college?’ I asked him. ‘What are you going to find to write in the report about your placement?’

  Ben thought about this. ‘I’ll say I had a great time.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘That’s part of what I think. The rest takes up 350 pages that you won’t be allowed to read.’

  I don’t let this mystery annoy me, accepting everything about Ben because he accepts everything about me. It’s a relationship of mutual tolerance.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen, I can remember fantasizing about phalansteries in history classes. There were several different sorts, those where you wore your clothes laced up at the back so that you relied on your neighbour’s good will; those inspired by monasteries; and those whose primary aim was profitability. Whatever the formula, I thought they were a happy arrangement and would have liked to live in one. Our teacher handed out a sheet listing the main social utopias: it cited the creator’s name, the date and place each one was founded and, at the end of the line, the word ‘failed’ followed by another date. How could they have failed? I was inconsolable. When I asked Mr Verdier he deemed it pointless to reply. ‘We can’t dwell on this for ever,’ he announced. ‘They’re just experiments, an illustration of the innovative thinking typical of the nineteenth century.’

  The innovative thinking typical of the nineteenth century, I thought on my way home after the lesson was over, whatever became of that? I looked up Fourier in the encyclopaedia and found an entry about his work and the debates it had raised. With knitted brows I read through the narrow columns of minute letters which seemed to collide with each other before my ill-accustomed eyes, but - not understanding a word of it - I was disappointed with my lack of mental agility, and devastated by my mediocre facility for concentration. Nevertheless, I have retained the vision of humanity developed in those communities: according to this merchant’s son born in Besançon in 1772 and the author of The Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies, published in 1808 (I happen to own - and this is both a miracle and a secret - a first edition of this work in my collection of thirty-three books; hence my ability to display such knowledge to this day when my memory, even bent double with effort, even doped with phosphorous, would never be able to reproduce it), according to Charles Fourier, then, we had reached the fifth stage in our history. Having experienced Eden, the Savage state, Patriarchy and Barbarism (for which read the beginning of capitalism), we had reached the era of Civilization, which only briefly preceded the salutary one of Harmony. This final phase, favoured by the blossoming phalansteries, was meant to last 35,000 years. People would live to the age of 144; they would grow a fifth limb, adapting them to resist the climate which would, in fact, be temperate. The overall optimism galvanized me. At last! I thought. At last someone who thinks like me. Someone who predicts that things will turn out for the best.

  I now wonder what I found so attractive in this system decried by a good many people as an embryonic form of totalitarianism. I think what I had spotted in it straight away was the unprecedented opportunity it gave people to be rid of family constraints. Despite my youth, I had grasped that this was to do with opening up the stifling unit, and peacefully destroying a super-saturated intimacy in favour of a weaker solution for the common good. It meant freeing yourself from an individual body encoded with its bovine genome to dissolve into the social body, like a good-natured giant with purified free-flowing blood, light transparent blood, devoid of moods and passions. In this ideal world, as I pictured it, you were no one’s child, like the heroes of certain fables who fascinated me because, even though they were very young, they never mentioned their parents; neither did the narrator feel any need to explain the protagonist’s ancestry: all they needed was a first name and they were ready for adventure. I didn’t like stories about kings and queens giving birth to princes and princesses, I hated biblical tales in which everyone was always the son or daughter of such-and-such or so-and-so, who in turn was son of, and so on, without end. I was all for the abolition of genealogy.

  Phalansteries suited me with their seductively horizontal structure. I also suspected, although I didn’t have the means to formulate this, that love and desire operated differently there. I didn’t use any of these words. Didn’t even think them. But I can remember sitting with the encyclopaedia on my knee, reading and re-reading the magic word ‘phalanstery’, and when one or other of my parents appeared snapping the huge volume shut, flushed and sweating as if I had been caught in some indecent position.

  I don’t know how, when I was borne by such aspirations as an adolescent, I could only a few years later have thrown myself into the narrow bottleneck of marriage and the still narrower one of motherhood. Panic probably. I relinquished my ambition to be the heart of a star, the idol of a court, the interchangeable and changing companion. Burying my dreams of a dissolute life - a dissolved life, in fact - I consented to become one of the co
rners of an isosceles triangle, isosceles and isolated, spinning mournfully against a gloomy azure beside other similar triangles which could never slot together without causing damage. Families and their austere geometry. Perhaps it was the world, in its incomprehensible vastness, which frightened me. Let’s find a refuge, I told myself, let’s shelter from statistics and put an end to dizzying calculations of probabilities which threaten to paralyse us; I would have liked to belong to everyone and be for everyone. The idea of making a choice seemed so small-minded, but I wasn’t equal to my own ambitions. Having spent so much time leaping like a hare from left to right and right to left, I lost the main thread of my existence. One morning I woke to find I was tired of running. Stop! Put a steering-lock on the wheel of fortune, then it will stop turning. I drew the right number once and for all. I found Rainer and clung to him. If someone had told me to give away my lungs because I would now breathe air inhaled by my husband, I would have accepted. At the time, being oneself seemed an intolerable burden. I was in favour of sharing and, having turned away from my glorious plans for a community, I found the expected and total subservience, submission and acquiescence to a partner a good substitute for that pooling of resources, relieving me of the horrors of egocentricity. Rainer and I were one but, as there were two of us, it didn’t matter. I liked thinking like him, telling myself I was wrong, fashioning my own thoughts to match his. He was rigorous while I was scatter-brained. He was patient and methodical where I had childish infatuations and absurd fads. I wanted to shake off my old skin. In fact, everything in my life is to do with skin.