Dirt

by Bill Buford

  For lunch, we ate at L’Espace Brasserie for no reason except that it was there, and had tables outside. I asked for an andouillette, winning clicks of approval from the waitress. I mistakenly believed it was related to an “andouille,” the spicy sausage found in New Orleans gumbo. An andouillette is not an andouille. It is also not really a sausage. It looks like a sausage because it is dressed up like one, a large casing tied tight by strings on each end, but into which is crammed so many crushed wirelike intestinal tubes that you have to pick them apart to confirm that you are looking at what you thought you were looking at: basically, the insides of a skinny tummy. It was tripe. I was not unfamiliar with tripe. At the butcher shop in Tuscany, I had even made a preparation of it, and knew that there were two kinds: the subtle variety, in which the basic digestive aromatics of the animal are dispersed into a slightly gamy flavoring; and the not-so-subtle, in which you are made to feel that you have been asked to inhabit an animal’s stomach. This one was the not-so-subtle. It was an introduction.

  In the evening, we went to La Machonnerie, a bouchon in Vieux Lyon. Jessica addressed the owner (Lucas, midseventies, wide girth, scraggly beard, and a practiced jollity) in a French so assured that he directed us through the front bar (airy, with windows, and clusters of nervous British tourists) to a low-ceilinged room in the back, no windows, red-and-white-checkered tables, noisy, raucous, exclusively populated by French, except that they didn’t seem French, or not like the restrained versions that I’d seen in my life until now. They were in a sweat. It beaded up on their foreheads and showed darkly through their shirts. They were talking, talking, talking—to anyone, to everyone, poking their heads into each other’s plates, laughing hard, and drinking bountifully by the pot (a vessel without a label, pronounced to rhyme with “dough,” slightly smaller than a bottle, making it acceptable for two people to drink two during a meal—and, on festive occasions, ordering a third or a fifth).

  Our appetizers were grattons, curly brown scratchings of deep-fried pork fat (fat with fat). We ate a local pâté-en-croûte, pork with foie gras in a buttery casing (fat with fat with fat). My heart racing, and in a health panic, I ordered fish: a lake fish, a brochet (pike), famously bony, and prepared (bonelessly) as a dumplinglike soufflé floating in a sauce made from local crayfish and cream. It was my first Lyonnais quenelle. It was served, confusingly, with the Lyonnais version of mac-and-cheese—macaroni with heavy cream. (Fat with fat with fat with fat…) Bouchon, the word, has many meanings (traffic jam, plug, cork) but its sense as “a place you enter to drink and eat, get sweaty, and stand on the table and sing midway through your meal” appears to date from the sixteenth century, and described “the grapevines placed over the door of an eating-and-drinking establishment.” The message then, and now, was from Bacchus: “Come on in and get blotto.”

  Our host, making the rounds of the rowdy room, reached our table and realized that we were Americans. He instantly changed his affect and, seeming not to trust us, started performing tourist shticks, including the three-rivers-that-flow-into-Lyon joke (the Rhône, the Saône, and the Beaujolais) and apologized for serving us San Pellegrino. (“It was bottled in Italy as a still water but became so excited crossing into France that it began bubbling.”)

  Afterward, we walked back to our hotel, pausing on the Pont Bonaparte, the bridge crossing the Saône (Lyon and Napoleon always liked each other)—a cold wind, a storm coming—and regarded the city: Roman steps, a medieval wall, an abandoned convent, stone churches, lights everywhere, ripplingly reflected on the river.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, we explored the arrondissements that various advisers had recommended to us for a place to live. We began with the sixth (“Good for children,” a home-fixer from Only Lyon had told us), on the other side of the Rhône River, near the Parc de la Tête d’Or (vast pond, a zoo, forests), Haussmannian architecture, boulevards evocative of Paris, and expensive cars of families returning from their summer holidays. It was the weekend of la rentrée, when all of France comes home from their vacations, and the mood is never exactly jubilant. Even so, the people of the sixth had a closed-in quality, an insularity verging on unfriendly. An impression, in any case.

  We tried the fourth (“You’ll adore it, it’s just like the East Village,” the home-fixer had said), known as the Croix-Rousse, named after a cross planted there in the sixteenth century, a high point of the city, with panoramic views and a steep escarpment. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, silk workers wove their fabrics here (because of the light). But if it was like the East Village, that wasn’t for its vitality, but its grittiness, shop fronts closed up, shutters padlocked shut, jumbly and scrappy and conveying a strong imperative to bathe after visiting it.

  The fifth, Vieux Lyon, the Renaissance part of the city, had historical appeal. But it was also busy with tourists, “Irish pubs,” “English pubs,” Saturday-night binge-drinking bars, and a perimeter of strip joints.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. What we were finding was a city that knew what it was, whether you liked it or not. It had a personality, a strong one. It wasn’t a boutique destination. It wasn’t naturally friendly. It was a little rough. (I would turn out to be wrong: It was actually very rough and entirely unwelcoming.)

  The prospect of dinner was a relief. I proposed Léon de Lyon, Richard’s recommendation for my future employment. I hadn’t contacted the proprietor-chef yet, Jean-Paul Lacombe, hoping to try out the place before signing on. In the event, he wasn’t there, since it was, technically, the last weekend of the vacances.

  The entrance was on a corner. There were red velvet banquettes and stained-glass windows. The aesthetic was fin-de-siècle, exuberantly ornate, and evoked an era when Lyonnais meals were eaten by gaslight or candle. It seemed unchanged since the original café that had opened its doors in 1904. We were wowed. Lacombe’s father, Paul Lacombe, bought it just after World War II, and then, in 1972, and after his first Michelin star, he died of a heart attack. At the age of twenty-three, his son, who had been working in Paris, was summoned home. Six years later, Léon de Lyon earned its second Michelin star. A 1980s guide to the city’s restaurants declared that everyone should eat there at least once in his or her lifetime.

  A maître d’ briskly ushered us to a “salle.” Jessica protested nervously, fearing that we were about to be quarantined. The maître d’ insisted in English. She objected again in French, but we were feeling less than confident, and followed him into a salle that was boxy and out-of-the-way with a low ceiling, too much light, and a feeling of mumbled self-consciousness. The other diners were British. The exception was a Frenchman, eating by himself. He knew the restaurant and had asked to be seated here. He wanted to practice his English.

  “You should order the pâté-en-croûte,” he told us. He was well into his second bottle of wine. “It’s the only good thing on the menu.” He whispered, “The restaurant is having a difficult time.”

  Unknown to Richard, Lacombe had just renounced his stars. He was abandoning the pomp and the competitiveness, and was concentrating on several bistros that he had opened around the city. Downstairs, on my way to the restroom, I saw mementos of Lacombe’s earlier life hanging from the walls: photos of Bill Clinton, Charles de Gaulle, the Rolling Stones. In the one picture of père and fils, circa 1950s, the father—towering, erect, formidable, and probably a dickhead—teaches his child, aged twelve, how to make a sauce. Shelves held three centuries of French cookbooks: They were about to be sold off. A deep cellar of Rhône wines had been discounted heavily. We chose an old bottle for our meal, a historic Côte-Rôtie made from Syrah grapes that would have grown twenty miles away, but the service was so slow that we finished it before our food arrived. We ordered a second. The maître d’ said, “Non. You want something else.”

  “We do?” Jessica asked, but he didn’t hear. He returned with an already opened bottle and disappeared. />
  “The treasures of the cellar,” the Frenchman next to us explained, “are not for tourists.”

  The wine, as the maître d’ would have known, was undrinkable.

  We didn’t order the pâté-en-croûte, which was a mistake. We also didn’t order any of the other Lyonnais dishes, which was a bigger mistake. What we got was inedible. A plate of quail was vibrantly raw. At one point, in the long intermission between courses, I strolled back to the kitchen and saw a so-called team of young men, angry, slamming into each other. They may have been in a rentrée bad temper, or disgruntled because they were having to work on a rentrée weekend, or just unhappy. This wasn’t cooking with love. It was cooking to injure.

  As I asked for the check, Jessica picked up a feeling that she wasn’t liking and said she would wait for me at the end of the street. I stood and congratulated the maître d’, his deputy, and a sous-chef who had just then wandered out for having produced one of the rudest, ugliest, most unpleasant meal experiences that I could remember having suffered in a long time. “Congratulations!” I said. I seized the maître d’s head between my hands and kissed him robustly on both cheeks. He was so stunned that I felt encouraged, and kissed his deputy and the sous-chef. Then I gave them each my card.

  “You did what?” Jessica asked when I found her hiding behind a bus. “Why did you give them our card?”

  I reflected. It was not an unreasonable question. “Actually, I don’t know.”

  Jessica seemed to ponder the situation. “Not such a good day.”

  The Lyonnais, I had been told, really don’t like outsiders. At the end of our first full day, I agreed: They really didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, we set out to meet Marc Veyrat, the man our hotel concierge confirmed was “the craziest chef in France.”

  He was a long shot. In the unlikely event that Veyrat took me on, how would we reside in Lyon, where, as the French Consulate had made clear, we were constrained to be, while I commuted to the crazy man’s restaurant, one hundred miles to the east, on the Lac d’Annecy?

  We arrived amid sleeting rain, high winds, and cresting whitecaps on the lake, and, at the base of a steep mountain that disappeared into stormy clouds, discovered an address that looked like a Victorian candy box, a four-story mansion, painted an elegant gray-blue, with bright white balconies. We checked in, removed wet clothes, asked for a towel, and confirmed that the chef was around.

  “If the dining room is open, he is here,” a receptionist said. “It’s a rule. If he goes away—to see a doctor in Paris—he closes the restaurant, booked up or not.”

  I said that we were lucky.

  “He is expecting you.”

  Veyrat grew up in the village of Manigod, not far from the lake, but several thousand feet higher, facing Mont Blanc. His parents had a small farm, raised animals, and ran a simple table d’hôte—a table with food—for villagers and walkers. (“I grew up,” he would tell me later, “with my face in the ass of a cow.”) His father taught him how to forage (“he made me recite every herb, fern, and berry that I saw on my way to school”). The mountains, he said, were too extreme for conventional agriculture.

  There were evocative props: a wooden wheelbarrow, a pair of wooden clogs, a thresher, a hoe, a walking stick, wooden baskets. The walls were white, roughly plastered, and videos were being projected on them, depicting Veyrat engaged in country activities: picking wild celery, or showing children how to make a galette des rois, the Epiphany cake, or deep in conversation with a goat, always in the black shepherd’s hat and capelike shirt.

  The dining room furniture was made from recently woodsman-chopped pines—and held in place with wooden pegs. It was a coherently contrived natural message: Among our sixteen courses, we ate a lake fish served on bark, small eggs retrieved from mountain nests, and soup made from ferns.

  And yet, for all the rusticity, it was also a high-tech performance. A large flat-screen in the kitchen, like a flight display at an airport, depicted which course each table was eating. The staff was equipped with Bluetooth headsets. Our table was bugged.

  Jessica has an allergy. She whispered, “There are nuts in the bread.”

  A server appeared. “Madame, may I give you a different bread?”

  And, later, I said softly, “The cheese is a little rich.”

  A different server appeared. “Sir, may I propose an Alpine cooked cheese?”

  I have since come to regard the bugging as a piece of flattery. Ever since I heard about Veyrat, I had been petitioning for his attention, but the man, philosophically unreachable, never really responded. I sent him a French translation of my book about Italy. Again, no response. But a waiter then told us, sotto voce, that many people in the restaurant had read it. I became excited: I seemed to be breaking through.

  Veyrat showed up, moving from table to table, in costume, the hat, shirt, the spectacles. His face really was white—not like milk, but like a dead person. It was a too-long-indoors white, with a spooky pale transparency. Also, he had two canes.

  He’d had an accident, he explained, describing it in French, which I struggled to follow; when I gave up, Jessica translated. He had been skiing and went over a cliff. “I broke my neck, both shoulders, a collarbone, and the tibiae and the fibulae in my leg.” He’d had several operations. Another was scheduled the following week.

  He returned to our table later to administer our fourteenth dish, which involved a cauldron of liquid nitrogen and two doughy green-brown balls on a tray. He picked them up with tweezers and dropped them into the cauldron, where they boiled with instant bubbling fury.

  He told us to close our eyes.

  “You have embarked on a walk on a summer morning,” Veyrat intoned. “You have entered the forest. Leaves brush across your face, when—”

  He stopped. I had opened my eyes. He stared at me. I closed them.

  He inhaled deeply. “When a root trips you. You try to catch your balance. But you fall, face-first, into the dirt.”

  He pulled out the clods with a spoon, trailing vapors of nitrogen.

  “Now, with your eyes closed,” he whispered, “open your mouth.” He waited. “Très bien,” he said, approvingly, and inserted the balls, whereupon, if you are Jessica, and have obeyed the instructions, a nitrogen-boiled earth-grenade has arrived on your tongue without your seeing it coming, and your palate explodes with every forest experience of your life. If you are me, and peeking through your eyelashes, watching out for the trick, and are on the verge of dismissing the whole exercise as a silly piece of vaudeville shtick, the dirt clod nevertheless manages to be an impressive object to find disintegrating in your mouth.

  In France, Veyrat is loved and loathed, but mainly loved, because few people are so eccentrically themselves.

  I looked back into the kitchen and tried to imagine myself wearing headphones (and, astonishingly, I could).

  Veyrat and I met in the morning, and tried to make plans. There was also the question of his surgery.

  “If it fails,” he said, “I close the restaurant.”

  Besides, he said to Jessica, quietly, “Your husband has to learn French. I’m happy to have him in my kitchen, but he has to know what I’m saying.”

  He was right, of course. I wondered: Could I learn French in two weeks? The question then became urgent: On the eve of our return to New York, we found a place to live.

  * * *

  —

  In our brief absence, a new friend, an American, Victor Vitelli, had found an apartment listing we might like. It was by the Saône river, situated auspiciously on the Quai Saint-Vincent—Vincent was the patron saint of winemakers—and opposite La Fresque des Lyonnais, a mural of two millennia of the city’s famous citizens, painted onto the side of a six-story windowless wall. “There’s also a famous boulangerie,” Victor told us, the bak
ery where all of Lyon knows to buy its bread. The rent was 1,900 euros a month, which was high for the city, but to us, accustomed to Manhattan, seemed exceptionally good value. Jessica made an appointment.

  On our walk over, I peeked through windows—few had curtains—and saw high wood-beamed ceilings. I poked into entryways and found stone stairs rendered concave by boot traffic. Some buildings dated from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A gnarly first-century aqueduct column by a post office reminded us that the Romans had been here. So did the street called the “Rhine road,” the route their troops followed to do battle with the “Franks” (i.e., the Germans) to the north. There was an anachronistically graceful former-monastery courtyard, overgrown, but with a sweeping outdoor staircase. In the neighborhood—what I would learn to call the “quartier”—there were workshops, not shops: a bookbinder, a violin maker, two botanists producing “snail dirt,” a guitar maker, a one-room pastry “factory,” a radio station, and a puzzle club. One street over, Arabic was the principal language, and three women, their heads covered, were fetching water from an archaic faucet, bearing large buckets.

  There was also—on the square, the Place Sathonay—a porn shop, park benches occupied by drunks, drug deals (I saw one, Jessica two), a prostitute, graffiti on most surfaces, dog shit everywhere. At a playground, sparkly with bits of broken glass, we watched small children hitting each other. I had a picture, tingling in my brain like an unpleasant laceration, of our progeny, not quite three years old, here, in a foreign country, struggling to express themselves, and learning how to fight with their fists—a bleeding lip, a broken nose.

  Our building had a plaque over the door: It was where the end of World War II was announced and celebrated. It had been built in the nineteenth century and had extravagantly high ceilings. You could see the midget Eiffel Tower from several windows. You could study La Fresque des Lyonnais from a balcony. You could watch the flow of the river Saône.