‘What is it?’
‘You mustn’t move. I’m going to spread the cataplasm on your forehead, but it mustn’t get in your eyes; or here,’ he adds, pointing to the open summit of my wound, where the skin has opened out like a star, sketching a little spider of blood.
‘Will it sting?’ I ask anxiously.
‘It stings eyes and open wounds. On the skin it warms and cools at the same time.’ He spreads his strong-smelling pitch from my eyebrows to my hairline, taking care not to press too hard. It has a grainy texture like eggs beaten with sugar, it is liquorice black and its effect is instant. It heats and chills at the same time.
He leans over me and looks at me attentively. ‘How old are you?’ he asks me.
‘Why do you want to know how old I am?’
He laughs. He says bumps like this only happen to children. That it’s the first time he’s treated an adult with his preparation.
‘I’m forty-three,’ I tell him.
‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘That’s very good. And your restaurant, is it doing well?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. I’m not very good with figures. Ben takes care of all that. He says we need to expand.’
‘He says you need to reinvest,’ he corrects.
I don’t see the difference.
‘He’s right,’ adds Mr Slimane.
As he peels the layer of sticky paste from my face, I have a surreptitious look at him. I see his mouth, his flat inward-sloping lips. His teeth - which are revealed by a grimace because the gloop is resisting his efforts - are not very straight, they overlap and I have no idea why but they bowl me over like an unexpected piece of architecture. As the paste comes away, he throws it into the pan. When it’s done he smiles, satisfied.
‘It’s much better,’ he says.
I pat my forehead tentatively with the tips of my fingers. The bump is noticeably smaller. He hands me a pocket mirror, having wiped it carefully. It’s spectacular: the colours have melted into each other and the bump has flattened out, only the scarlet spider is still there in the top right-hand corner.
‘It was my neighbour who gave me that recipe,’ he explains. ‘When the children were little we spent the whole time going to the doctor for the slightest thing. Their mother was a real worrier. Then one day Mme Dubrême who lived over the road invited me round and taught me how to make various unguents. She didn’t want me to tell my wife about them. She said “city people don’t understand anything about witchcraft”. My wife was from the city. “But what with you being an Arab, it doesn’t frighten you, am I right?” She was right. But I don’t know if it’s because I’m Arab or because I was fed up with spending a fortune on doctors.’
‘What else did she teach you?’
‘Plaster made with mustard and nettles, thyme honey for sprains, the fifty-three virtues of rhubarb. And love potions, of course.’
‘Do they exist?’
‘No, that was a joke, they don’t exist. If they did my wife wouldn’t have left with the mayor from the next village.’
His wife has gone. What a good idea that was of hers. I’m so happy she found love with her rural politician. It fills me rather disturbingly with joy.
‘Was it a long time ago?’
‘What?’
‘Your wife.’
‘Four years.’
‘I remember your sadness,’ I tell him. ‘There was something in your eyes.’
‘I loved her.’
‘Do you still love her?’
‘She still loves me too,’ he answers evasively.
I’ve had enough of talking about his wife. This conversation doesn’t suit me at all.
‘Love,’ he goes on, ‘never ends. It changes but it never ends.’
‘What does it change into?’
‘Into everything, into anything. Into hate, very often. Into coldness. Into friendship…’
‘I’m not following this, not following at all.’
I have sat up. My bump is no longer hurting. I just need to sort out this little problem with love and I can pick my day back up exactly where it stopped.
‘It’s too easy to say it changes,’ I tell Ali who is busy cleaning out the saucepan. ‘If it turns into hate, then it no longer exists. It’s been replaced by hate. There’s nothing of it left.’
‘There is day even in the night,’ he replies.
‘Your neighbour was right, you’re very much an Arab.’
That makes him laugh.
‘There’s nothing particularly Arab about saying there’s day in the night,’ he informs me. ‘It’s one of your great French poets who wrote that. I learnt it at school.’
‘And what does it mean?’
‘It means that a relationship between a man and a woman is like a firmament. The hate you feel for someone you’ve loved is nothing like other kinds of hate. It’s fuelled by the old love.’
‘Supposing it is,’ I say, ‘what difference does that make?’
‘You like discussions,’ Ali tells me.
I nod, lowering my eyes, as if caught out. I so love ideas, the way they collide, drown inside each other, turn their backs on each other and confuse each other’s issues. But I’m ashamed of this fascination, because I so quickly run out of words, because I’ve never learned to think, because I have about as much rhetoric as a farmyard goose.
‘I like them too,’ he says, slapping his thighs as if giving his legs the signal to leave.
He checks that everything is as it should be and tells me when he will next be here.
‘You were sad too,’ he says in the doorway. ‘I could see it in your eyes.’
We finally make eye contact. There will be night in our day, I tell myself, looking at his eyes, which are dark as juniper berries.
Job interviews terrify me. Ben has insisted: I absolutely have to conduct them in person. People need to know who’s the boss here, he explained.
We’ve run an advertisement and it’s raining applications. The CVs and covering letters flood into the letter-box, drowning out the bills in their gleeful torrent. I receive candidates in a small office that we have managed, I’m not sure how, to fit in behind the bar. They come during the rare slack periods, and our conversations are punctuated by the strident whirr of hand-held drills, the shudder of pneumatic drills and the thud of sledgehammers on walls. The former haberdashery has begun its moult. Men in orange, yellow or white hard hats come and go. They seem to feed off nothing but cheese sandwiches and apples. They’re a funny bunch, not very talkative but quick to laugh. They chat among themselves in a language I don’t know, and address me in a French full of rolled ‘R’s and devoid of definite articles. But they prefer speaking to Ben; I don’t inspire their confidence.
In the course of the interviews I meet mostly young girls. Some are limp as cucumber peelings, others smell of tobacco from three metres away; there are the very stupid ones who can only come up with one answer - ‘Dunno’; then there are the clever ones who have terrible trouble expressing themselves, flushing, rolling their eyes and stammering with nerves. One Thursday afternoon I see Mlle Malory Rouleau. I’m in love with her name, and pray she will be the perfect candidate. Malory Rouleau, Roleau Malory, I say, making a nursery rhyme of it. I picture her as vivacious and sensual, exotic and reassuring. I don’t read any CVs, don’t ask for any certificates or diplomas, not the least bit of experience, because I know how easy it is to fake all that. So I know nothing about Malory Rouleau.
When she walks in I think she looks like a banana and, even though it’s a fruit I like - so nourishing, so unfairly belittled - I’m immediately disappointed. She sits opposite me, both stiff and limp, rather like her emblematic fruit. Her cheeks are long and beige, boring as a winter’s day.
I amuse myself delving through my list of interviewees.
‘So you must be…’ I say, as if I didn’t know who I had in front of me.
‘Malory Rouleau?’
She pronounces her own name with a note of i
nterrogation. Is she expecting me to confirm her identity?
‘And how old are you?’
‘Twenty-five?’
Here again she wants reassurance.
‘Diplomas?’ I ask simply, hoping my laconic tone will encourage her to say a bit more.
‘I’ve been to catering school?’
And is that where they taught you to speak like that? I feel like asking her. I don’t. I carry on with the interrogation, thinking of the diverse tortures that parents inflict on their children, and teachers on their pupils for them to turn out like this, unnerved and amorphous. Malory Rouleau reminds me not so much of a banana as fruit purée.
These meetings are discouraging. I’m too demanding. You would have thought I was looking for the love of my life, and a woman at that! After three days of interviews, I’ve become allergic to dandruff, the least pimple of acne disgusts me, and bare midriffs send shivers down my spine. Ben teases me.
‘You weren’t so picky when you took me on,’ he points out.
‘It’s not the same at all,’ I tell him. ‘You were the only one and you were perfect.’
He smiles. His whole face is carved in two with suffering.
‘You’re not going to cry?’ I say belligerently.
‘I am,’ he replies.
One tear falls. Solitary and perfect.
‘You know, Ben, soon I’m going—’
He clamps his hand over my mouth. How does he know I want to talk about leaving? How does he understand I wanted to tell him about my succession? I will make him my heir. I can feel the end is near. I’m probably not the only one. He keeps his hand over my mouth, and it is at that exact moment that Barbara comes into my life.
Barbara is tall, very tall even. She is about thirty years old, has a wide luminous forehead and thick red hair held in a bun at the back of her head. She walks with purposeful strides, she is not shy.
‘Am I disturbing you? Would you like me to come back later? It’s for the job.’
Ben takes his hand away.
‘Please sit down,’ I say.
She puts her bag on a chair, sits facing me and looks around. She nods her head, smiling radiantly. I’m dying to know what she thinks. She’s only been here a minute and I’m already so used to her I can anticipate how much it will hurt when she leaves. She smells of soap. She looks cunning.
Barbara is a top-flight maths teacher and extraordinarily badly qualified.
‘I might as well be honest with you,’ she says, ‘I’m not a cook. I can’t even boil an egg.’
‘I was the same,’ I say in a slightly motherly voice. ‘But anyone can learn!’
‘I won’t learn’, she replies.
I’m delighted by her authoritative tone. I take her on then and there, and I’m proud of my choice. Within three days she’s the boss and I’m the employee, and that’s absolutely fine.
It’s difficult to explain what Barbara’s job consists of. Since she’s been with us, Vincent has grasped that Chez moi is a restaurant. He says things like ‘I’ll pop by and see you at the restaurant’, or ‘By the way, I picked up some cut-price white carnations for the restaurant’. Nothing has changed but everything happens even more quickly. Even the building work is accelerating. She is the oil in the cogs, the wind in the sails. Ben adopted her immediately. I’m not jealous, I’m relieved. When I ask her why, with her diplomas, she isn’t looking for better paid work, more worthy of her abilities, why she isn’t teaching, for example, she explains that she has spent her life in classrooms and can’t picture going back to one straight away. She wants to see people. ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ I tell her, ‘there’s a lot of coming and going here.’ She wants to know how a small business works, and she needs to put some money aside to go round the world in a few years’ time. For a moment I toyed with the idea that her teaching qualification could be as fictitious as my work experience at the Ritz, but I didn’t give that possibility the time of day. I don’t need to know more about her. Barbara knows how to do all the things I don’t. She delegates, organizes, sorts. Barbara sings as she works and has an admirable way of making the most of Vincent’s flowers. She is an ace at housework and the rational use of space. I let her choose the new furniture for the haberdashery, and she negotiates even better rates than me with the supplier on the Avenue de la République.
A month after her arrival we inaugurate the big new dining-room. Ben wants to have a party and I say ‘Yes, why not, that’s a good idea,’ and something inside my chest - something heavy and solemn like the pendulum of a clock - shifts with menacing slowness. Time is doubling back on itself now, and here comes this second launch to remind me of the first, except that this time everything is perfect. My parents, my friends, and even my brother - who finally has the good grace to come and see me - drink to my success. We have invited our most loyal customers, and the whole neighbourhood pops in. Simone and Hannah start the dancing, magically reconciled. Everyone eats, drinks and dances. This is great, people tell me, the most wonderful party, the best evening of their lives. I look at the smiling faces, the shimmying hips, the handshaking. I hear it all, the music, the words, the popping champagne corks, the laughter, but it’s as if I’m inside a glass cage. Nothing I eat satisfies me, nothing I drink has any effect on me. I feel as if I’m attending my own funeral. I focus on tiny details, concentrating all my attention on the join between two floor tiles which is a little wider than the others, a crust of bread stuck between the zinc circumference and the Formica top of a round table. People kiss me and hug me and talk to me. My eye keeps escaping towards the big blue lacquered door that I’ve had painted in a trompe-l’oeil on the back wall. I would like to call Mrs Cohen back and tell her there’s no problem for her son’s bar mitzvah, everything’s ready. I would like to go through that door and disappear into the garden my mind’s eye has painted behind it. The grass there is soft and sweet, there are bulrushes bowing along the banks of a river. I put lime trees in it, hornbeams, weeping elms, blossoming cherries and liquidambars. I plant it with ancient roses, daffodils, dahlias with their melancholy heavy heads, and flowerbeds of forget-me-nots. Pimpernels, armed with all the courage peculiar to such tiny entities, follow the twists and turns between the stones of a rockery. Triumphant artichokes raise their astonished arrows towards the sky. Apple trees and lilacs blossom at the same time as hellebores and winter magnolias. My garden knows no seasons. It is both hot and cool. Frost goes hand in hand with a shimmering heat haze. The leaves fall and grow again. Grow and fall again. Wisteria climbs voraciously over tumbledown walls and ancient porches leading to a boxwood alley with a poignant fragrance. The heady smell of fruit hangs in the air. Huge peaches, chubby-cheeked apricots, jewel-like cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, spanking red tomatoes and bristly cardoons feast on sunlight and water, because between the sunbeams it rains in rainbow-coloured droplets. At the very end, beyond a painted wooden fence, is a woodland path strewn with brown leaves, protected from the heat of the skies by a wide parasol of foliage fluttering in the breeze. You can’t see the end of it, just keep walking, and breathe.
Ali has brought me a present. He is late. I thought he wasn’t going to come. Too shy, I told myself. In his arms he’s cradling a parcel wrapped in newspaper. Enigmatic smile.
‘Can I open it?’
‘It’s fragile,’ he tells me.
He hands the thing to me, awkward but light. What is about the shape of a balloon, weighs nothing and mustn’t be knocked? It’s a riddle. He advises me to sit down in a quiet corner to unwrap it. We hide behind the bar. Crouching beneath the counter, we give each other a conspiratorial wink. People are calling me: ‘Myriam, where do the empty bottles go?’, ‘Myriam, is there any more bread?’, ‘Myriam, what did you do with the corkscrew?’ I can’t be found. I peel the layers from my present, in no hurry, and at the heart of that printed envelope I find a big ball, disturbingly white and soft as the skin on a baby’s tummy. I press my index finger hesitantly against the surface. It
is both pliable and resistant. It smells of woods and trees. I examine this large spongy sphere carefully, trying to find a crease, a flaw. But no, it is perfectly smooth.
‘Is it for telling the future?’ I ask.
Ali bursts out laughing.
‘It’s a mushroom, you city girl,’ he tells me.
I don’t believe him. I’ve never seen such a perfectly huge, white, round mushroom.
‘But it hasn’t got a stem!’ retorts the latent mycologist in me.
Ali turns it over gently and shows me a slightly crumpled, brownish area.
‘That’s how it’s attached,’ he says.
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. It’s called a giant puffball. It’s edible.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In my garden.’
‘Is it good?’
‘It’s delicious. You slice it like… like rump steak, and fry it, in olive oil.’
‘You picked this in your garden?’
He nods. It reminded him of me, he explains. Like a face with no eyes or mouth, no nose or ears, a face that is a soul. He thought of me and felt I would like it, and it would make me want to see the country. Because I’m inquisitive. Because I always ask masses of questions. He says that yes, actually, it’s true, you can read the future in it.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The future is what we don’t know, what we too readily refuse to believe.’
I ask him whether there are smaller ones.
‘They come in all sizes.’
‘How come?’
He shrugs: ‘Nature’s like that. It makes things in every shape and size.’
‘But why?’
‘So that it can carry on. As contingencies.’
He tells me about different varieties of blackcurrant, freckles on pear skin, humour in cows and the sheer nerve of hares. Paths, shadows, holes, underground streams, grass which can cut, grass which can whistle, periwinkles and snapdragons. He describes everything in minute detail but not poetically, as if we urgently need to compile a topographical statement.
Chez Moi Page 18