Gourmet Rhapsody

by Muriel Barbery

  That is sashimi: a fragment of the cosmos within reach of one’s heart, but, alas, light years from the fragrance or taste that is fleeing my wisdom, or is it my inhumanity . . . I thought that by evoking this subtle adventure into the territory of raw delights, a thousand leagues from the barbarity of those who devour animals, something might give off the perfume of authenticity that is inspiring that unknown memory, the memory I despair of ever capturing . . . Shellfish, yet again, it must be shellfish: yet perhaps it’s simply not the right one?

  (Chabrot)

  Rue de Bourgogne, Medical Offices

  Three possible paths.The asymptotic path: a wretched salary, green scrubs, long shifts as an intern, a probable career, the path of power, the path of honors. Professor of Cardiology. The public hospital, devotion to the cause, love of science: just the right amount of ambition, nous, and skill. I was ripe for all that.

  The middle path: everyday life. Lots and lots of money. A posh clientele, teeming with depressive bourgeois ladies, rich and extravagant old men, sun-tanned drug addicts, angina, flu, and long and immeasurable ennui. The Montblanc my wife offers me every twenty-fifth of December slides over the whiteness of the prescription pad. I raise my head, crack a smile at the right moment, a bit of comfort here, a bit of politeness there, a lot of false humanity everywhere and for a price I am able to grant to Madame Derville, the wife of the president of the Bar, absolution from the anxieties caused by her condition as an incurable hysteric.

  The tangential path: treat souls not bodies. Journalist, writer, painter, éminence grise, a mandarin of letters, archeologist? Anything at all, save the panels of my worldly doctor’s office, save the famous and well-paid anonymity of my curative charge, in my affluent neighborhood, in my minister’s armchair . . .

  The middle path, naturally. And stretching ahead, decades of nagging dissatisfaction, inner turmoil, sometimes eating away at me, sometimes virulent, sometimes hidden—but always present.

  The first time he consulted me, I caught a glimpse of my salvation. He made a gift to me of the very thing that I—too corrupted by my bourgeois blood to renounce it—could not be, merely by tacitly agreeing to be my client, simply by frequenting my waiting room on a regular basis, with his ordinary docile manner of a patient who makes no fuss. Later he gave me another gift, magnanimously: that of his conversation. Worlds hitherto unknown to me suddenly appeared, and the very thing that my flame had always coveted so ardently, and had despaired of ever obtaining, was suddenly mine, thanks to him, vicariously.

  To live vicariously: to give birth to one chef and be another’s gravedigger, to extract words from a feast, phrases, symphonies of language, and to give birth to the dazzling beauty inherent in a meal; to be a Maître, a Guide, a Divinity; to touch inaccessible spheres with one’s mind, to penetrate stealthily into the labyrinths of inspiration, come close to perfection, and touch on Genius! What should one’s preference be, truly? To live one’s sorry little life as a good obedient Homo sapiens, without purpose, without salt, because one is too weak to stick to one’s objective? Or, almost trespassing, to share endlessly in the ecstasy of another who knows his quest, who has already begun his crusade and who, because he has an ultimate goal, partakes of immortality?

  Later still, there were other exemplars of his largesse: his friendship. By accepting the gaze he bestowed upon me, in the privacy of our man-to-man conversations where I became, in the heat of my passion for Art, the witness, the disciple, the protector and admirer all at the same time, I received a hundredfold the fruit of my willing subordination. His friendship! Who has not dreamt of friendship with a Great Man in our century, who has not longed to walk shoulder to shoulder with the Hero, to confer accolades on the prodigal son, the great Maître of those who love to gorge themselves on fine fare? His friend! His friend and confidant, granted the ultimate privilege, oh how precious and painful at the same time, to have to bring him the news of his own death . . . Is it for tomorrow? At dawn? Or during the night? The night . . . It is my night too, because the witness dies when he can no longer testify, because the disciple dies in the agony of loss, because the protector dies when he has failed, and the admirer, finally, dies from adoring a corpse doomed to the tranquility of the graveyard . . . My night . . .

  But I regret nothing, and ask for everything: because it was he, because it was myself.

  The Mirror

  Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom

  His name was Jacques Destrères. It was at the very beginning of my career. I had just completed an article on the specialty of the Gerson restaurant, the very article that would revolutionize the accepted structure of my profession and place me in the firmament of food criticism. I awaited with excitement yet confidence for what was to follow, and had taken refuge with my uncle, my father’s older brother, an old bachelor who knew how to live and whom everyone in my family regarded as an eccentric. He had never married, nor had we ever even seen a woman by his side, and my father suspected him of being “one of them.” He had done well in business and in his old age had retired to a lovely little property near the Rambouillet forest, where he spent tranquil days pruning his rose bushes, walking his dogs, smoking a cigar in the company of a few old business relations and concocting his little bachelor’s meals.

  Sitting in his kitchen, I watched him at work. It was wintertime. I had had an early lunch Chez Groers, in Versailles, and then made my way along the snowy little back roads in what was an exceedingly good mood. The fire was burning merrily in the hearth, and my uncle was fixing us a meal. The kitchen at my grandmother’s had accustomed me to a noisy, feverish atmosphere where, amidst the clanging of saucepans, the sizzling of butter and the chop-chop of knives toiled a virago in a trance, and only her long experience granted her an aura of serenity—of the sort displayed by martyrs in the flames of hell. Jacques, on the other hand, undertook everything with moderation. He did not hurry, nor was he slow. Every gesture came in its own good time.

  He rinsed the jasmine rice in a silvery little colander, drained it, poured it into a saucepan, covered it with one and a half times its volume in salted water, put a lid on the pan, and let it cook. The shrimp waited in an earthenware bowl. While he was chatting with me, mostly about my article and my projects, he was shelling the shrimp with painstaking concentration. Not for one moment did he step up the pace, not for one moment did he slow down. When the last little arabesque had been stripped of its protective shell, he conscientiously washed his hands with a soap that smelled of milk. With the same serene uniformity in his gestures, he placed a cast iron frying pan on the stove, poured a trickle of olive oil into it, let it heat, then scattered the peeled shrimp into the pan. His wooden spatula adroitly circled the shellfish, not allowing a single tiny crescent to escape, scooping them from every side and causing them to dance on the fragrant grill. Then some curry. Neither too much nor too little. A sensual dust tinged the pinky copper of the crustaceans with an exotic gold: the Orient, reinvented. Salt, pepper. With his scissors he snipped a branch of cilantro above the frying pan. Finally, very quickly, a capful of cognac, a match; a long, angry flame leapt up from the pan, like a shout or a cry set free at last, a raging sigh fading as quickly as it flared.

  Waiting patiently on the marble table were a porcelain plate, a crystal glass, superb cutlery and an embroidered linen napkin. On the plate he carefully arranged, with the wooden spoon, half of the shrimp, and the rice, which had been placed in a tiny bowl then turned upside down to create a plump little dome, crowned with a mint leaf. Into the glass he poured a generous helping of a transparent wheat-colored liquid.

  “Shall I pour you a glass of Sancerre?”

  I shook my head. He sat down at the table.

  A bite to eat. This is what Jacques Destrères called a bite to eat. And I knew he wasn’t joking, that every day he would take great pains to cook himself a little mouthful of paradise, unaware of how refined his everyday fare was, a true gourm
et; he lived every day as an authentic aesthete, where absolutely nothing was staged. Without touching the food he had prepared before my eyes, I watched him eat with the same detached, subtle care that he had put into cooking his meal, and this meal that I did not touch remained one of the most delicious I have ever tasted in my life.

  Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person’s feast. Jacques Destrères’s meal had all the perfection of a feast because it was not my feast, because it did not spill over onto the before and after of my everyday life, and it could remain in my memory as a closed and self-sufficient unity, a unique moment etched there outside of time and space, a pearl of my spirit released from the feelings in my life. As if one were looking into a room reflected in a sunburst mirror, which turns into a painting because it is no longer opened onto something else, but merely suggests an entire world without an elsewhere, strictly confined within the edges of the mirror and isolated from any life around it: another person’s meal is enclosed within the frame of our gaze, and is exempt from the infinite vanishing line of our own memories or projects. I would have liked to live that life, the one evoked by the mirror, or by Jacques’s plate, a life without prospects, for the possibility of that life becoming a work of art would vanish through the mirror, would be a life with neither once upon a time, nor ever after, with neither surroundings nor horizons: just the here and now—beautiful, full, enclosed.

  But that is not it. Everything that the fine restaurants brought to my nourishing genius, everything that Destrères’s shrimp might have suggested to my intelligence cannot teach my heart a thing. Spleen. Black sun.

  The sun . . .

  (Gégène)

  Corner of the rue de Grenelle

  and the rue du Bac

  You and I are made of the same cloth.There are two categories of passersby. First of all, the most common category, even though it does contain some nuances: these are the people who won’t ever meet my gaze, or if they do, it is just fleetingly, when they give me some change. There’s a faint smile there too, sometimes, but always as if they were a little embarrassed, and then they hurry away fast as they can. Or they don’t stop at all and go by as quickly as possible, with their guilty conscience bugging them for a hundred meters or so—fifty before, when they’ve seen me from a distance and make haste to screw their head in the other direction, until they’re safely fifty meters past the ragamuffin, when their head can regain its customary mobility—then they can forget me, they can breathe easy again, and that wrenching moment of pity and shame gradually fades away. I know what those people say when they go home at night, if they even think about it again, in some place deep in their unconscious: “It’s awful, there are more and more of them, it breaks your heart, I give them something, of course I do, but after the second one I have to draw the line, I know, it’s arbitrary, it’s horrible, but you can’t go on giving endlessly, when I think of all the taxes we pay, it shouldn’t be up to us to give, it’s the State which is at fault, it’s the State which isn’t doing its bit, and even so it’s a good job we’ve got a left-wing government, otherwise it would be even worse. Right? What’s for dinner tonight, pasta?”

  I’d fuck them dry, I would. And that’s being polite. To hell with them, those pinky bourgeois, they want their cake and they want to eat it too, they want their season ticket to the Châtelet and want to see the down-and-outs rescued from poverty, they want their tea at Mariage’s and all men on earth to be equal, they want their vacation in Tuscany and to see the sidewalks swept clean of anything that might stimulate their guilt, they want to pay their cleaning lady off the books and they want you to listen to their altruistic I’m-a-defender-of-humanity tirades. The State, the State! They’re like illiterate folk who adore the king and accuse only the evil corrupt ministers of all the ills they’re subject to; it’s the Godfather saying to his minions, “I don’t like the look of this guy,” without acknowledging that what he has just ordered in a veiled sort of way is the man’s execution; it’s the bullied sons or daughters who insult the social worker asking for explanations from unworthy parents! The State! It’s only fair to go after the State when you want to blame someone else, even if that someone else is none other than your own self!

  And then there’s the other category. The brutes, the real bastards, the ones who don’t hurry by, don’t look away, they look right at me with their cold gaze, not a drop of compassion; tough luck, you old bum, you can just snuff it if you didn’t know how to make it, no indulgence for the riffraff or the plebes vegetating in their subhuman cardboard boxes, we’ll give them no quarter, it’s win or lose, and if you think I’m ashamed of my money, well you’re mistaken.

  For ten years, day after day, he would set out from his palace and deliberately walk right by me with his smug rich man’s step, and he’d stare down my plea with a calm and scornful gaze.

  If I were him, I’d do the same. People shouldn’t think that all tramps are lefties and that poverty makes you a revolutionary. And since word has it he’s going to die, I say to him, “Go ahead and die, mate, die from all the money you never gave me, die from all your rich-bastard banquets, die from your life of power, but I sure won’t be throwing up a cheer. We’re made of the same cloth, you and I.”

  Bread

  Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom

  We were breathless; it was time to leave the beach. The day had already seemed both deliciously short and long. The shoreline at this point, a long sandy arc stretching lazily into the distance and devoured by waves, offered us the most heedless of swims, with the maximum of pleasure and the minimum risk. Since morning, with my cousins, we had been diving over and over into the breakers, or taking flight from their crests, breathless, inebriated from the endless rollers, only returning to the common assembly point—the family parasol—just long enough to gobble a fritter or a bunch of grapes before racing hell for leather back into the ocean. There were times, however, when I would drop flat onto the hot, crunching sand and find myself instantly transfixed by a daze of well-being, only barely conscious of the drowsiness in my body and the customary sounds of the beach—from the cry of gulls to the laughter of children—an interlude of intimacy in the very singular stupor of happiness. But most of the time I drifted with the waves, surfacing and disappearing beneath their liquid, moving mass. Childhood exaltation: how many years do we spend forgetting the passion we breathed into any activity that held a promise of pleasure? Why are we now so rarely capable of such total commitment, such elation, such flights of charming lyricism? There was so much exultation about those days spent swimming, so much simpli­city . . . so soon replaced, alas, by the ever increasing difficulty of finding pleasure in things . . .

  At around one in the afternoon we would strike camp. On our way back to Rabat, a dozen or so kilometers away, in the furnace of the car I had the leisure to admire the waterfront. I never tired of it. Later, as a young man who no longer partook of those Moroccan summers, I would occasionally conjure up the most infinite details of the road leading from the beach at Sables d’Or to the town, and in town I would go back over the streets and gardens with painstaking euphoria. It was a lovely road that overlooked the Atlantic in many spots; villas submerged in oleander offered glimpses through the false transparency of wrought iron onto the sunny life being lived behind those gates; farther along was the ochre fortress overlooking the emerald water, and only much later would I learn that it was nothing more than an ugly prison; then there was the little beach of Temara, sheltered, protected from wind and current, and I eyed it scornfully with the disdain of those who only appreciate the sea for its harshness and turbulence; the next beach along, too dangerous for swimming, was scattered with a few intrepid fishermen, their brown legs whipped by waves as if the ocean wanted to swallow them in a raging roar; then came the outskirts of the city, the souk teeming with sheep and the light-colored canvas of awnin
gs snapping in the wind, the neighborhoods swarming with joyful, noisy neighborhoods swarming with people, poor but healthy in the salt air. The sand clung to my ankles, my cheeks were burning, I grew drowsy with the heat in the car and let myself be lulled by the melodic yet forceful tones of Arabic, rocked to the rhythm of incomprehensible snatches of conversation stolen through the open window. A sweet ordeal, the sweetest of all: those who have spent their summers by the seaside know what this means, the exasperating necessity of heading back, of leaving the water for the land, of enduring the discomfort of becoming heavy and sweaty once again; they will know what it means, they have cursed it, but remember it, on other occasions, as a blessed moment. The holiday rituals, immutable sensations: the taste of salt at the corner of one’s lips, shriveled fingertips, hot, dry skin, sticky hair still dripping slightly down one’s neck, shortness of breath, what a pleasure it was, how easy it was . . . Once we arrived home we would make a dash for the shower and re-emerge gleaming, our skin soft, our hair tamed, and the afternoon would begin with a meal.

  We would buy it carefully wrapped in newspaper, at a little shop outside the city walls before we climbed back into the car. I would look at it out of the corner of my eye; I was still too dazed to make the most of its presence, but I was reassured to know it was there, for “afterwards,” for lunch. Strange . . . That this most visceral memory of bread, coming to me on this day of death, is that of a Moroccan kesra, a lovely, flat round, closer to a cake in consistency than to a baguette, does not fail to leave me pondering. Whatever the case may be, once I was rinsed off and dressed, blissfully awaiting my post-beach stroll through the medina, I would sit down at the table, tear off a first conquering mouthful from the sizeable chunk that my mother handed me, and in the yielding, golden warmth of this food I found once again the consistency of sand, its color and welcoming presence. Bread, beach: two related sources of warmth, two alluring accomplices; every time, an entire world of rustic joy invades our perception. It’s a fallacy to claim that what accounts for the nobility of bread is the way it suffices unto itself while accompanying all other dishes. If bread “suffices unto itself,” it is because it is multiple, not because it exists in multiple variants but in its very essence: bread is rich, bread is diverse, bread is a microcosm. Bread contains such stunning diversity; it is akin to a miniature world which reveals its inner workings as it is consumed. You storm it through an initial encounter with the barrier of crust, then yield to wonder the moment you are through, as the fresh soft interior consents. There is such a divide between the crunchy shell—on occasion as hard as stone, at other times mere show, quickly yielding to the charge, and the tenderness of the inner substance which lodges in one’s cheeks with a docile charm—that one is almost at a loss. The fissures in the envelope are like unexpected rural missives: one thinks of a ploughed field, of a peasant in the evening air; the village steeple has just rung seven o’clock; the peasant is wiping his forehead with the lapel of his jacket; his labors done.