She turned off the great arc of the harbor road and pedaled up a formidable hill so steep that she almost felt in peril of tumbling backwards. Ondine normally never ventured up this exclusive street; it was flanked on both sides by villas with walls so high that you could barely glimpse a house’s second-floor windows or tiled rooftop. She felt she was gliding through a secret tunnel.
When she came to the top of the hill she paused triumphantly, then gazed in awe at the view, for she’d never seen the grand sweep of the harbor from this breathtaking perspective. The sparkling sapphire sea appeared more wide open and beckoning; and the pale blue sky, dotted with puffy white clouds that looked as soft as ermine, seemed to promise a wider, limitless world.
Sighing, she turned onto a brief, sandy side road and soon came upon a villa with a white-painted wooden gate set between cream-colored walls.
“Here it is,” Ondine gasped, slowing down. She hopped off her bicycle and walked it up to the gate, which was topped with a row of iron spikes shaped like arrows. She discovered that while the gate was firmly shut, it was unlocked, and the metal latch lifted easily. She pushed her bike inside, parking it just long enough to hurry back and shut the gate behind her.
Finally admitted to the inner sanctum, Ondine quietly wheeled her bicycle up to the new Patron’s villa—a sprawling, peach-colored two-story affair with large windows, pale blue shutters, and a terracotta-colored tiled roof. The downstairs shutters were closed, but the ones on the second floor were thrown open to admit the breeze, and a gauzy white curtain fluttered ghostlike in one.
She parked her bicycle at the side of the house, where an irregular slate path led to the kitchen door. She unhooked the hamper and clambered up a short flight of stone steps. With her free hand she turned the brass doorknob. It, too, was unlocked.
Feeling strangely excited yet apprehensive, Ondine gave the door a push.
Then she stepped over the threshold, and went inside.
Ondine at Picasso’s Villa
THE PATRON’S HOUSE WAS SILENT and cool, for, being made of stone and stucco, it still held the chill of last night’s damp spring air. The kitchen was rather rustic, with wide, irregular floorboards that creaked as Ondine crossed them, carefully carrying the heavy metal hamper to a round wooden table in the center of the room.
“Zut!” she grunted, glancing around to get her bearings. In the far corner was a narrow black stove with its pipe angling out a bit crazily to its chimney. An icebox stood against the opposite wall.
She threw back the lid of her food hamper. Her mother had wisely folded an apron atop everything. Ondine tied it on, then lit the stove. The bouillabaisse was in a compact cooking pot with a fitted lid, so she carried it straight to the stove just as it was to keep it warm on a low heat. Everything else was in various containers which she unpacked now, along with the striped pitcher.
So far Ondine had not heard a single sound from anywhere else in the villa.
Perhaps he’d gone out for a walk, or to visit somebody. It never occurred to her that anyone might be sleeping past sunrise, let alone noon. As she acquainted herself with his kitchen, Ondine saw that a swinging door led to the rest of the house. She pushed it open and peered in.
A dimly lighted dining room held an oblong table ringed by high-backed chairs, with a vase of dusty dried flowers standing rather forlornly in the center. There was a chest of drawers that served as a sideboard, decorated with a long lace runner.
“It looks as if no one has had a meal in here for a thousand years,” Ondine observed with a slight feeling of panic. Where did he want his lunch served? Her mother hadn’t given instructions. She did not want to presume that the Patron would deign to dine in the kitchen, even though it was cheerier there.
Beyond this room was a small parlor with upholstered chairs arranged around a low table before a fireplace. As Ondine darted quickly through the darkened parlor she felt like a fish swimming in deep waters, curiously flitting through a sunken ship. At the far end was an open, arched doorway leading to the front door’s foyer and a stairway to the second floor.
She drifted to the foot of the stairs and cocked her ear to listen. Still not a sound from above. Was nobody home? Could he have forgotten their arrangement?
A narrow hall ran alongside the stairway and led straight to the back of the villa, where a door opened onto a fenced yard, beyond which were a neighbor’s flower fields. The only other room on this main floor was a little one at the back of the house. Its door was wide open, and Ondine stepped in to see if it would serve for lunch.
It was just a narrow study with a writing table, chair, telephone, lamp. Upon the table was a Parisian newspaper, and a big brown envelope addressed to M. Ruiz which had already been opened. Spilling out of this pouch was a scattering of smaller envelopes addressed to Picasso, apparently being forwarded from Paris, a postmark which made the package look important.
Ondine suddenly understood. “He doesn’t want our postman to see the name Picasso and then go blabbing all over town. And he’s right; the postman is the biggest gossip in the village!” Her Patron had taken great pains to conceal his identity. “Who is this Picasso?” she wondered.
She noticed a writing pad left out on the table, bearing a note scrawled in dramatic flourishes of thick inky lines. A pen lay beside it. The letter looked unfinished, for he had not signed off with either name—Picasso or Ruiz—as if he’d grown bored with the whole undertaking.
The message was written in Spanish. Recalling what her mother had said about using her convent training, Ondine could not resist testing herself now, haltingly parsing it out. It was addressed to someone with the Spanish name of Jaime Sabartés and seemed to be a peculiar kind of progress report:
I relax at last, I am sleeping eleven or twelve hours a day. You can assure Miss Gertrude Stein that I no longer write poems. Instead, I find myself singing, which is so much more satisfying than all the other arts. Olga and her wretched divorce lawyers can’t sue me for possession of half of the musical notes I sing, now can they?
Also, I received your parcel of rags, hurrah! So now I can clean my brushes, should I ever pick them up again! But what do you think? Perhaps I will give up painting entirely for my new singing career, and I’ll become a Spanish Caruso.
“Why would he ask for rags to be sent from Paris?” Ondine mused. “What kind of man can’t go out and buy rags for himself? Come to that, why doesn’t he just tear up an old shirt?”
Well, this Patron obviously did not have a wife looking after him. In fact, he’d mentioned divorce lawyers. Nobody that Ondine knew had ever gotten a divorce; it was a mortal sin.
But surely it was a sin to snoop around, too. She returned to the dining room and realized that it had seemed unwelcoming simply because it was so dark from the closed shutters. She flung them all open, allowing the bright spring sunlight to illuminate the room. The front garden’s scents breezed in, chasing away the mustiness. Now she could see that this room had its own cozy Provençal charm.
“Much better,” Ondine nodded approvingly. “Good thing Maman told me to bring flowers,” she added under her breath, removing the old, dusty ones. She filled the vase with water and added her fresh bunch of daffodils. She stepped back to survey the effect; they brightened the whole room considerably.
Just then she heard a distinct thump overhead that made her jump. The spell was broken—she was no longer an adventurous fish swimming through a sunken ship, but a delivery girl who was supposed to serve. Ondine froze, and heard more creaking—yes, someone was moving about upstairs. She waited for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Nothing yet.
But he could come down here any minute, hungry. Perhaps he’d heard her walking around and noticed the enticing scent of the food warming on the stove, which was now wafting through the house.
Quickly she hurried back to the kitchen and carefully poured wine from the pigskin bladder into the tall pitcher she’d brought. Her mother had been clever to include it, for with
its brightly painted vertical pink-and-blue stripes, it looked so cheerful in the simple dining room.
Ondine returned to the stove, lifted the lid to check the bouillabaisse, then carried the pot to the dining-room table and placed it on a trivet she’d found in the sideboard. The broth and the fish were to be eaten separately, so she laid out a soup dish containing slices of bread that had been dried but not toasted, over which he could ladle the broth; while the seafood had its own special plate.
Mindful of her father’s warning to make everything satisfying for this Monsieur Picasso or Ruiz or whoever he was, Ondine arranged the meal’s dishes in an appetizing semi-circle around the main plate so that everything was within easy reach. She found a nutcracker in the kitchen and a small wicker bowl in which she put some unshelled nuts and fresh fruit.
Now it was time for her to leave the man in peace to eat his lunch. She should go. She knew this, and yet, there was something so playful about the Patron’s funny little letter that it infected her own lively spirit; and when she found a blank tablet and pencil on the kitchen counter, she could not resist quickly scribbling a note, in French since he evidently read Parisian newspapers, and she wasn’t confident enough to compose Spanish grammar:
We hope that this lunch meets with your approval. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to improve our service. We shall return for the dishes and will tidy up afterwards. Bon appétit.
—
ONDINE PROPPED THE note beside the fruit bowl. Then she slipped out the kitchen door, hopped on her bicycle and pedaled rapidly away from the house without a backward glance.
She loved the feeling of how much lighter the bicycle was now without the food hamper. Turning out of Monsieur Picasso’s street, she steered back onto the bigger road with its high-walled villas on both sides. At the top of this steep hill with its extraordinary view, she felt a sudden thrill in that brief, suspended moment before takeoff, poised between the bright sky hanging above her and the wide sea stretching beyond the harbor below.
Then she took the plunge, coasting down, down, down the hill—yet it felt more like a wonderful upward lift, as if she’d taken flight like a bird. Picking up more speed, it seemed that her flying hair and skirt were wings that might just carry her up, up and away to the great wide world beyond.
“Hooray!” Ondine cried aloud, feeling weightless and fearless and free.
But when she arrived at the farmers’ market on the other side of town to pick up new flowers as her mother instructed, she felt her spirits quickly plummet back to earth under the sharp gazes of the farmers’ wives who presided over the spring harvests that their customers had eagerly awaited. The florist’s stall was a riot of bright color, and the fruit and vegetables were piled high in perfect pyramids.
“Bonjour Ondine!” the butcher’s stout wife called out, eyeing her speculatively.
“Bonjour Ondine!” the red-haired flower vendor chirped as Ondine pulled up to her stall.
“Where have you been on your bicycle today?” demanded the skinny fruit-seller.
“A new Patron,” Ondine said neutrally, nodding in the general direction of the villas. Too late, she realized that there were so few holiday renters at this time of year that any visitor was bound to be news to this gaggle of gossips.
“You mean that Spaniard at the top of the hill?” the fruit-seller said, handing Ondine a small blood-orange to eat. “I hear he’s got a lady-friend down here that he sees on the weekends. But what does he do with the rest of his time?”
The florist, reaching in among her blooms to pull out the delicate daffodils that Ondine pointed to, said conspiratorially, “He’s a suspicious character; no one ever sees him during the day, but my brother Rafaello says he keeps his lights burning well past midnight!” Rafaello was a policeman who patrolled the neighborhood at odd hours and, after years of seeing the darker side of human nature, habitually viewed most people as potential criminals.
“Mark my words, that new tenant is a bank robber, hiding out with his loot!” the butcher’s wife agreed. “I ask you—who else rents a whole house off-season all to himself, with no family?”
The others also found voluntary solitude so incomprehensible that they quickly retreated to the terra firma of their usual gossip about which local girls might get engaged this spring. Sooner or later, everyone became the subject of their wagging tongues.
“Don’t worry, Ondine,” piped up the little fromagère, arranging creamy mounds of cheese in appetizing rows on a wooden board. “Your day will come to marry and have children. The wheel turns.”
“The wheel turns!” the others echoed wisely.
Ondine paid for her flowers and hastily pedaled away. She knew that those women didn’t really mean to be so hurtful, but all they could imagine was that Luc had met a bad end or else found another girl wherever he was. Ondine had tried not to even consider such possibilities. Now something about their pragmatic marketplace chatter had revived her doubts about her own judgment, even today.
What if the Patron was displeased with the note she’d just left for him? A girl like Ondine—especially while serving such an important person—simply did not speak unless spoken to; so she should never have had the audacity to write to him.
“Why did I do it?” she fretted as she reached the café. She’d even inadvertently invited him to criticize her mother’s cooking if he wanted to! Her father would be furious if he found out.
But there was no time to brood. A large group of out-of-town businessmen had arrived unexpectedly and were now seated on the terrace awaiting a late lunch, and the waiters were frantically hopping to serve them all. As soon as Ondine stepped into the hot kitchen, her mother, who was reheating the soups, quickly put her to work slicing, buttering and filling fresh baguettes with cold meats, cheeses, pâté and olive tapenade to make the delicious variety of open-faced sandwiches called tartines.
Madame Belange moved with the confidence of a cook who knows that her cuisine is well prized. Only when there was a brief lull did she turn to ask briskly, “Did everything go all right at the villa?” She was satisfied with a simple nod from Ondine.
Later, when her father strode into the kitchen, he glanced at his pocket-watch and said firmly, “Ondine! Go back to collect the Patron’s dishes, now.”
“Yes, Papa!” Ondine washed her hands, put on her jacket and hurried outside. Hopping back on her bicycle she pedaled steadily, keeping an even pace, this time arriving without being breathless.
When she entered the Patron’s silent kitchen everything was as she’d left it. She didn’t hear any clink of silverware coming from the dining room. Cautiously she peered in.
There were only a few crumbs where the bread plate had been; and empty shells from the devoured shrimp and other shellfish. The salad and cheese were gone, too.
“He ate everything!” Ondine exclaimed softly in relief. Picasso’s cloth napkin was now folded politely beside the plate, and she found this gesture somehow touching.
How lonely it was to be an artist, eating all by himself, she thought, as she carried his single plate and set of flatware back to the kitchen. Lonesome, and yet, how strangely liberating to be able to come and go as you pleased without having to explain yourself to anybody, nor listen to their reproachful opinions. Ondine could barely imagine that sort of freedom.
Lifting the lid of the cooking pot which she’d left on a trivet at the table, she exclaimed, “Ah!” for she saw that Picasso had gone back for more helpings of bouillabaisse. “Maman will be pleased.”
She began packing up the dishes. The villa was even more quiet than it had been before, and Ondine sensed that the house was truly empty this time. She returned to the dining room to tidy up.
The bowl of fruit and nuts had been ploughed into. And there she discovered her note to Picasso, still propped against the fruit bowl. Not only had he read it, but beneath her scribble, right on the same page he’d written something of his own:
S’il vous plait
, je voudrais plus de piment
followed by a whimsical drawing of a long, bright red pepper, after which was written:
dans votre excellente bouillabaisse.
“He’d like more peppers in our ‘excellent bouillabaisse’,” Ondine giggled with delight.
She must remember to write down his preference in the notebook when she returned to the café. She put his letter in her pocket, smiling. But just as Ondine snapped the metal hamper shut and loaded it onto the bicycle, she realized that something was missing.
“Why—where’s Maman’s striped pitcher?”
In this unpredictable place, it had apparently vanished into thin air.
Ondine in the Minotaur’s Labyrinth
ONDINE COULD NOT DECIDE WHICH would be worse—getting caught snooping on the Patron, or facing the wrath of her mother if she returned without the pink-and-blue pitcher. She decided to take a chance on this artist, and look around.
A quick tour of the kitchen cupboards made it clear she’d have to go farther afield. Nothing in the dining room or study, either. She nerved herself and called out boldly, “Hello?”
Silence. This might be her only chance to search upstairs for the missing pitcher.
Ondine took a deep breath and went up, peering cautiously through the open doorway of a very small and plain bedroom, where the pillows were rumpled and the navy coverlet cast aside.
Why would he choose to sleep in this little room like a monk? She got her answer when she moved to the next room, which was strangely devoid of a bed, yet cluttered with sketchbooks, newspapers and paint paraphernalia spread out on every available surface.
What a jumble. Helplessly she scanned the room for the striped pitcher. Nowhere in sight. In this impromptu studio, she did not know what to look at first.
“What’s he done with it?” she wondered. “Maybe he broke it and threw it out?”
Cooking for Picasso Page 3