Dirt

by Bill Buford

  I looked around. There were heaps of coats on a hook or rammed into a stone windowsill. On every available surface, there was an unwashed coffee mug. Fabric couches (looking like still-damp beach towels from last summer) were draped across wood poles. They were for shaping baguettes. A lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. Another one sprouted from a socket. There were the flickering blue lights of the ovens. The darkness put you on your guard. You could trip here and die. It wasn’t a place that reminded you to wipe your feet before entering it. But maybe, in the perverse way of these things, this room, with all its sacred history, was what Bob’s baguettes tasted like.

  He stopped the kneader and tore off a piece of dough. It was ready. It was thin and elastic. “You can see through it,” he said, laughing as he stretched it across my face like a mask.

  I thought: I know this moment from making pasta. As you roll out pasta dough, its texture changes and it seems to glisten. You keep rolling until the grains of the wood board underneath start to appear: when, in fact, you can see through it.

  Tonight’s dough would be ready the next afternoon. The morning’s baguettes would be made, therefore, from last night’s.

  “Let’s get breakfast,” Bob said. An off-track-betting bar opened at six.

  The coffee was filthy, the bread was his but stale, and the clientele might be flatteringly described as “rough” (phlegmatic one-lunged hackers knocking back sunrise brandies, while studying the racing odds), but, for Bob, they represented companionship. His life was solitary nights. These people were members of his first society. He was at ease among them. He introduced me as the guy who was working in the boulangerie to write about him.

  * * *

  —

  The French language happened and didn’t. I seemed to be speaking it (up to a point) but often didn’t understand it when spoken back to me. I dreaded the phone. I could order a taxi but didn’t know if I had been told it was coming or when or that I needed to pay cash. The boys understood everything but rarely spoke. People had said, “Your children will pick up French in no time,” and they didn’t, not really. Once, Frederick was worried and addressed Jessica: “Mamam, there is a word following me. I don’t like it. It follows me everywhere.”

  “What is the word?”

  He whispered: “Soldes.” Soldes means “sales.” (In France, retail sales are allowed only during a prescribed four-week period when every merchant puts out a sign: “Soldes.”)

  The boys were assigned to an orthophoniste, a specialist in “ré-éducation du langage,” an austere, skinny woman with a scarf and perfect posture who had been engaged by the school to help students pronounce the French language properly. Every child’s speech was subjected to her scrutiny. During our time there, she was made so busy that she rented an office directly across the street, with big windows that offered a clear view of who had been summoned for re-education, including many native French families. Everyone was challenged by the language, its subtle sounds, its muted vowels. When she examined our children, she became provoked when they claimed they didn’t know the word for “spanking,” which is fesser (from fesse for “butt”). She thought she was being made fun of. Implicit in her indignation was the assumption that all children are spanked. They probably are—in Lyon, we’d seen plenty of spanking—it just wasn’t something we did.

  Our children were diagnosed with a malady known as bilinguisme, and the orthophoniste demanded that Jessica come to her office immediately. Jessica’s speech was then examined and found to be exemplary. The orthophoniste prescribed a treatment: Jessica was ordered to speak only French at home. The instruction didn’t apply to me.

  Was my French improving?

  No.

  Did my French even exist?

  Meh.

  I had a bad episode with “four”—not the number in English, but the word in French for “oven” (pronounced as if someone has just hit you hard on the back). It is the same sound if the ovens referred to are in the plural (fours). And it is, of course, what Bob bakes his bread in, the blue-lit, glass-door contraptions on the ground floor.

  One afternoon, there were two people in the back at the boulangerie: Denis, Bob’s then number two, and me. Denis, his only full-time employee—blond, thirty, with closely cropped hair, and dressed in white like a proper baker—was upstairs. I was below, making dough. When I bounded up to retrieve a sack of flour, Denis asked: The bread—was it still in the oven (au four)? At least I think that this was what he said. He repeated the question, and this time it was more like “Don’t tell me that the fucking bread is still in the oven, is it, you moron?” I still didn’t understand. What I heard was strong emotion (anxiety, mainly) and “four.”

  “Four,” I said to myself. “Four. I know that word.”

  Yes? Or no? I could hear the kind of answer that was expected. (I thought: fifty-fifty chance. Should I just pick one?) Instead, I repeated the word to myself: four. I was sure I knew it. Why wasn’t it coming to me? “Four?” I said, aloud this time, which was provoking, probably because it wasn’t “yes” or “no.”

  “Au four? Au four? C’est au four? Le pain!”

  Denis bolted down the stairs in what seemed to me like histrionically high distress. I heard an oven door being “slammed” open and a bread tray yanked out on its rollers.

  “Oh, putain!”

  For me, still upstairs, the door was the prompt. Of course. Four! It’s “oven”!

  The bread was ruined. Thus, the “putain!” (Putain means “whore.” “Pute” is also “whore,” but “putain!” is what you say when you’ve burned fifty baguettes.)

  * * *

  —

  We were expected to register at the prefecture. Bob knew the procedure. He had been there with his Cuban wife.

  “It will be horrific,” he said. “You haven’t suffered this kind of humiliation before. Arrive early.”

  We were summoned as a family, with photos and all our French Consulate documents, and were to be interviewed; if “approved,” we would be directed to an immigration medical facility (near the city prison). If “approved,” we returned to the prefecture, with new photos and bank statements, and were issued a temporary residency while our portfolio was dispatched to an office outside Paris, which would tell us, if we were really “approved,” to return to the prefecture for a proper carte de séjour, entitling us to stay for one year.

  I went on my own, showing up just after six, and was twentieth in a line that would number in the thousands. I had told Jessica to bring the boys once I knew what the wait would be.

  Around eight-thirty, she texted readiness (“ordered taxi”).

  Soldiers arrived, bearing weapons—the crowd-control factor. Promptly at nine, the doors opened, the nineteen people in front of me were rapidly dealt with—very rapidly—and suddenly I was, too quickly, sitting in front of a representative of the French government.

  [Jessica? Where are you?]

  As I was pulling out the documents, the representative asked, “And your family members?”

  “Running a little late,” I said. “I’ll just check.”

  [Me, texting]: “Shit. Am in. Status?”

  [Jessica, texting]: “Taxi a no-show.”

  [Me, texting]: “FUCK!”

  “They’re almost here,” I said. “Children, you know how it is. Gloves, coats, scarves.”

  “Pas de souci,” the representative said. No worries. She proposed that the two of us go through my bank statements while we waited. I pulled out each document, checking and double-checking that it was correct.

  My phone vibrated. “Excuse me,” I said.

  [Jessica, texting]: “Reordered taxi. On our way. Finally!”

  It was nine-fifteen. Rush hour.

  “Any minute now,” I said.

  To her credit, the repr
esentative seemed helpfully meticulous, very, very meticulous, and we were, both of us, scrutinizing each document intently, confident that we were going to spot an error. But eventually—it took ten minutes—we reached the last statement. There was nothing left. She arranged the documents in a pile, banged them gently on the counter, and bound them with the clip that I’d delivered them in. She was about to hand them back, when I blurted out: “Lyon is the gastronomic capital of the world.”

  It is true, she said, and laughed, the Lyonnais like their food.

  “It is why I am here.”

  “Really?”

  I wondered if she had a favorite bouchon.

  She did.

  “So you’re a true Lyonnaise?”

  “I am Lyonnaise.”

  “Would you mind writing down the name for me of your favorite bouchon?”

  “Not at all.” She seemed pleased to be asked. She tore a piece of paper from a notepad, whereupon I went instantly to my phone.

  [Me, texting]: “Update?”

  [Jessica, texting]: “Terrible traffic.”

  She handed me the paper.

  I wrote a book about the Italian kitchen, I said. “Can I give you a copy? It’s in French.” She seemed impressed that I’d brought it along and (to my surprise) agreed to accept it, whereupon I asked if I could sign it (“And could you write out your name for me?”). I told her that I was working at a boulangerie (“C’est vrai?”) and asked her if she knew it, “Bob’s on the Quai Saint-Vincent.”

  “Bob’s?” she asked, confused, whereupon I explained that it wasn’t his real name but no one knew his real name, and I urged her to go there (“Best bread in Lyon”). I offered to write out the address for her.

  She thanked me and took it.

  She now needed to see the next person, she said. If my family wasn’t here, she couldn’t process our case. I would have to go to the end of the line.

  “I am sorry for my French,” I said.

  “No, your French is good.”

  “No, it’s not. I know it’s not.”

  “Yes, it really is. You make yourself perfectly clear.”

  I thought, despite my panic and unease, that something unusual was taking place and that I would do myself a service to note it. I had just conducted a sustained piece of linguistic stalling with a government functionary in this new second language. I had made progress. And my stalling had been effective. I had almost pulled it off.

  I made a last pitch. “Couldn’t you process my case only and do the others later?”

  “No. I’m sorry. You have to go outside to the end of the line.”

  I stood up. I thanked her. I pulled out the folded sheet of notepad paper that I’d put in my shirt pocket, and thanked her for the name of the bouchon. I said I would go there. I stuffed each file back into my bag, and imagined the stress that Jessica must be suffering in a taxi, with children, in traffic, when, miraculously, she appeared, my family, in the last possible seconds, a thrilling sight, ma femme avec les garçons.

  We finished at two-thirty.

  After our visit, Bob seemed to regard me in a new way. We weren’t Americans on a gastro safari—tourists don’t go to the prefecture. We were committed—manifestly—to being here.

  “Tomorrow, we do deliveries. It is time to meet the real Lyon.”

  * * *

  —

  Bob delivered bread via an ancient tanklike Citroën that he hadn’t washed—ever. On the passenger seat were Casino plastic sandwich-wrappers, a half-eaten quiche, a nearly emptied family-sized bottle of Coca-Cola, and editions of the local paper, Le Progrès, that had been opened at such specific spots and then tossed on the floor as to suggest that this is what Bob did while driving—he caught up on the news. He pushed it all to the floor and invited me to sit. Inside was a fine white cloud, as though the air had reached a point of molecular flour saturation and none of it would quite settle. I found a place for my feet, maneuvered a sack of baguettes between my legs, and buckled in. The car seemed to explain why Bob so seldom bathed: Really, what would be the point? (In the wintertime, Bob had the appearance of an old mattress.)

  He drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The car, by force of habit, reminded him that he was late and put him in an instant accelerating delivery mode. L’Harmonie des Vins was the first stop, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy, preparing the lunch service, but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, as if a friend had popped by unexpectedly, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced (“a journalist who is writing about me”), quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out.

  Next: La Quintessence, near the Rhône (narrow street, no place to park, so he didn’t, cars backing up behind him, none of them honking), a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction (“writing about me”), the bag drop, kisses, out.

  We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, holding it between two arms like a hug, trying to keep up: L’Olivier (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, even if too busy to smile, bag drop, high-fives, out.

  One eating establishment after another: in—fast, joy, bread (still warm), introductions (“a writer”), two-person kitchen, sometimes one—then out. Many seemed less like businesses than improvisations that resulted, somehow, in dinner. Chez Albert: created on a dare by friends. Le Saint-Vincent, with a kitchen no larger than a coat closet (and formerly a toilet).

  Bob drove south, in the direction of the football stadium—the deliveries would take two hours, two dozen drops (in itself a tribute to his bread), and took me to a city more varied than I had known—and into the seventh arrondissement, industrial, two-up/two-down housing, gray stucco fronts, with an improbable bistro on an improbable corner, Le Fleurie, named after a Beaujolais cru, as accessible as the wine. “I love this place,” Bob said (J’adore): a daily chalkboard menu on the sidewalk, twelve euros for a three-course meal (lake fish with shellfish sauce, filet of pork with pepper sauce), polemically T-shirt-and-jeans informal, the food uncompromisingly seasonal (i.e., if it’s winter, you eat roots).

  Bob walked straight to the back, forthrightly in a swagger, a sack of bread on his shoulder, the familiar routine, the joyful effusions, the easy smiles, which I, too, was enjoying, so infected by Bob’s ebullience that I felt not that I was a member of Bob’s team, but that somehow I had become part Bob.

  The day’s last delivery completed, Bob asked after Olivier, the chef, and was directed to the bar.

  Olivier Paget, Bob’s age, was born in Beaujolais, father a carpenter, grandfather a farmer, cooking since age sixteen; normal chef stuff, including stints with grands chefs making fancy food, like Michel Rostang (yet again!) and Georges Blanc, where Daniel Boulud had trained. But Paget, his training complete, didn’t do fancy. He located himself in a remote far-from-the-action working-class district, called it a “bistro,” made good food at a fair price, and filled every seat, every lunch and dinner, every day: tight.

  This, Bob said, is my idea of a restaurant.

  By way of explanation (Paget pouring us both glasses of Beaujolais), Bob confessed to his loving the idea of “grande cuisine”—the term for cooking of the highest order by a grand chef. It was his dream fantasy, he said, and he still hoped that one day he would experience it. “I tried once”—a meal at Paul Bocuse’s three-star Auberge, with Jacqueline, Bob’s wife.

  No one could have arrived with higher expectations. Few could have been more disappointed.

  It wasn’t the food, which Bob doesn’t remember. “We were condescended to.�
�� Waiters sneered at them for not knowing which glass was for which wine, or for grabbing the wrong spoon, and served them with manifest reluctance. (Jacqueline is black; that evening, there was one other black person: the restaurant’s footman, at the entrance to welcome guests, dressed up in a costume uncomfortably reminiscent of Southern plantation livery.) The bill was more than he earns in a month. It had been a mugging.

  Bob knocked back his Beaujolais, and Paget poured him another, and as I watched them, the easy intimacy between them, I believed I was starting to understand what I had been seeing all morning: a fellowship, like a fraternity, recognized by a coat of arms visible only to other members. Everyone we dropped in on today belonged to it. They knew that Bob’s bread was exceptional. They also knew that the bread was more than just bread.

  Bob confirmed a table for Friday, a lunch with friends. He was always arranging large meals for friends—they were like board meetings for the kindred—including a seasonal mâchon, the all-day Lyonnais “breakfast” practice (starting at nine, and featuring every edible morsel of a pig, limitless-seeming quantities of Beaujolais, and loud, sloppy parades of singing men who, by then, are trying to remember how to get home. I feared it). Friday’s lunch was less ambitious. “Just ten people,” Bob told me. “You should come, too.”

  * * *

  —

  The chef, a guest at his own restaurant, was among the kindred, and joined others who “lived food” pretty much all of the time. (And wine. They also very much lived their wine.) Three were in the trade—a cheese guy, another restaurateur, someone who arrived with a rope of boudin noir—but not everyone. There was a schoolteacher, a violinist. It didn’t matter. Everyone suffered the same affliction: an inability to think about much else except the meal you’re having now and the one you’re having next. They were eaters all. They were all devotees of Bob.