Dirt

by Bill Buford

  He finished a potato and picked up another. Ansel was very fast. “I don’t like that I might end up breathing air that he has breathed,” he added. “Do you understand? He is the reason I am leaving.”

  “You are quitting because of Christophe?”

  “He makes me want to spit.” He stuck his fingers in his throat.

  “You’re not leaving because you have another job.”

  “I don’t have another job.”

  We were silent. It was a strong position.

  “You should use a knife,” he said, pointing to the potato in my hand.

  “Yes. I know. I’m slow with a knife.”

  “It’s the peeler that’s slow. A knife is not slow,” he said. “How many strokes do you have to do to peel your potato? You don’t know, do you?”

  I didn’t. I carried on. Ansel watched me. He was counting.

  “Twenty-five,” he said. “It took you twenty-five strokes to peel that potato. Do you know how many it takes with a knife? Seven. Watch.”

  Ansel picked up a new potato and proceeded to shave it, beginning at one end and finishing at the other. Then he did a second shaving. With seven strokes, he’d got all the peel. He didn’t have to go back and trim off any skin that he’d missed, because he had missed nothing, including the top and the bottom of the potato, which, with a handheld peeler, I always have to address with a bunch of mini-strokes.

  Ansel held up his potato between his forefinger and thumb. It was a perfect heptagon.

  “I used to keep an egg in my pocket. To practice.”

  I mentioned a potato-peeling competition that I’d read about in Le Progrès. It had taken place the weekend before, at the seedy Place Carnot. The competition seemed so eloquently symptomatic of where I found myself—in Lyon, this self-obsessed capital of gastronomy. (I mean, really—an open competition to determine the fastest potato peeler?)

  “Yes, I know that competition. I won it twice.”

  When I got home that night, I boiled up an egg, and carried it around with me for a day. I couldn’t quite make it work, the motion, pretending to shave an imaginary potato with an imaginary knife.

  I had better luck with the real thing. On Saturday, I bought a sack of potatoes and practiced on Sunday morning, before the family got up.

  Ansel was a knife guy, and the knife, in the kitchen, is your essential tool. He taught me something that I thought I already knew about keeping your knuckle against a blade so as not to be cut by it. I did this, but only intermittently, afraid of pressing up against something so dangerous and probably because I had been cut so much and so badly. Ansel said that I was therefore an utterly stupid person. For his part, Ansel wouldn’t cut butter unless his knuckle was against the blade. And, as for me—he who seems to have been regularly cutting himself since he walked into a kitchen—I have, after my session with Ansel, not cut myself with a knife. Not once. (To be clear, I still cut myself: I just figure out other, ingenious ways to do it.)

  Ansel was an asshole. Chern was right. And I was happy he was leaving. But I was also happy I had finally talked to him. He was a good asshole.

  The next day, Friday, Ansel’s last day, was the day when Michael didn’t show up. It had never happened—since the restaurant had reopened—that a cook simply didn’t appear.

  * * *

  —

  Michael was the most reliable, self-contained member of the kitchen. He tended to the morose, and his affect was of unrelieved misery, but he worked hard, kept to himself, was never late, and was rarely given to displays of aggression or histrionics (unless, I discovered, you accidentally crowded his cutting board).

  Christophe waited an hour. At exactly nine o’clock he called Michael on his cell. No answer. He left a message. He tried again ten minutes later. He stared at the phone. He summoned Sylvain, who was doing the weekly inventory of the walk-in, and told him to move to garde-manger.

  Sylvain, half-waiting for his own phone call—his wife was expected to deliver their first child—marched into the garde-manger kitchen and spat on the floor.

  Michael was a putain, he said. No, he was worse than a whore. He was a dog.

  Sylvain was revved. His speech was fast. It was clipped. “A dog,” he said, “a filthy, filthy dog. A dog, a dog, a dog.”

  Did Sylvain know something that I didn’t? I thought of possible explanations: illness, food poisoning, a family member in trouble, a malfunctioning alarm—the most plausible, I felt, if only because of the hours. The longest days, which ended between one and two in the morning, occurred when, without warning, Christophe inspected the stations and found that each one needed recleaning and then reinspection.

  “Pas propre,” he would say.

  “Sale.” The other word he used: “dirty.”

  “Pas propre.” He would point and sneer.

  A smudge, a fingerprint, grease on a slicer blade, a dark dot on the grouting, a streak on the unforgivingly streaky chrome refrigerator door. “Sale.”

  It took a long time for Christophe to get to “Okay.”

  I counted the hours, not without pride: sixteen to eighteen hours per day (with a short-but-not-guaranteed afternoon break) times five days. An eighty-hour week, plus or minus. At home, I left before anyone else got up and returned after they’d gone to bed. But my routine was easy: I walked there and back. Sylvain, both Johanns, and the guy who ran the meat station, Mathieu Kergourlay, drove home and had long commutes. Chern and Hortense lived in the dorm at L’Institut Bocuse, and waited for a late-night bus.

  I had come to like the no-compromises, in-your-face totality of it. There was no morning team doing your work. You prepped, you cooked, you plated, you cleaned your station, you washed the walls, the floors, and the worktops, and then you started over and prepped the dinner. There was an honesty, even a philosophy—that making food was more than cooking it. I was liking the hours. They had a purity because they were so absolute. This is what you did. But if something went wrong—there was no sick leave, no backups—then someone, like Sylvain, had two jobs, his and Michael’s.

  Around 11:00 a.m., there was a call. Christophe missed it and listened to a voice message—no name, a friend, Michael had been in an accident, late last night, and flipped his car.

  Sylvain was indignant. He seized a worktop with his hands. His neck muscles swelled alarmingly. I feared for him, the intensity of his rage, the unreleased power of it, his face turning red.

  Sylvain knew nothing else except that, in some way that he didn’t yet know, Michael had done wrong. He had violated the code. La rigueur—Sylvain used the word. Suck it up. Be hard. Don’t let the side down.

  Viannay used it. Once, I had been late, needing emergency dental surgery, and I didn’t show up until after le personnel was finished. Viannay was waiting for me at the door, at the top of the steps, blocking my entrance, arms crossed.

  I had left a message. Panic: Did he not get it?

  “I heard it.”

  I apologized for my lateness.

  He pointed to his watch.

  I apologized again. I pointed to my jaw. “The pain.” I tried to be jokey.

  Viannay shook his head. “La rigueur. Do you understand? La rigueur.”

  I apologized. He wasn’t moving. He was blocking the door.

  “You are with us, or you are not.”

  “I am with you.”

  Then he stepped aside.

  Les règles. The rules. Les règles governed the food. La rigueur governed behavior.

  * * *

  —

  After lunch, the police phoned. There had been a passenger, Michael’s girlfriend. When the car overturned, she was injured, and was in the hospital, in intensive care. Michael had been drinking.

  Sylvain slammed a fridge door with his fist and made a dent.

  “Michael was intoxicated. H
e was over the limit,” Viannay reported.

  Michael showed up the next morning. Viannay asked to speak to him upstairs and fired him.

  “He doesn’t have the skills,” Viannay told me. “The issue wasn’t the drink. Do you understand? He wasn’t good enough.”

  Why was Viannay telling me this? He seemed excited by blunt truth.

  * * *

  —

  Viannay could do badass. And then not. He could go from warm to cold to hot in an instant. You studied him. We all did. (“Look at the collar,” Frédéric whispered to me, referring to the MOF stripes, staring at Viannay, wanting to learn whatever it was that he had.) He was the patron chef. We were in his territory at his pleasure. The laws were his. You didn’t feel entirely safe in his presence. Then you did, and he was your friend. Then you didn’t, and you thought he might hurt you.

  His rages were rare but focused, like a predator’s. He became exceptionally quiet, tiptoe quiet, like a forest animal. Viannay never screamed. He spoke softly, unless he was very angry, when his voice was something like a sibilant whisper. He clenched his teeth, and the jaw seemed to elongate, and the face changed. He put me in mind of a wolverine or a mink, vicious, fast, mean.

  One morning, I was in the middle of a particularly tedious activity, stripping delicate plants of only the perfectly formed examples of their foliage. Christophe demanded them. (He’d experienced a horticultural epiphany of some kind, and now believed that, by tossing perfect leaves hither and thither on a plate, the items on it—the meat, the veg, the sauce—were then connected aesthetically, or metaphysically, or maybe just physically.) Christophe had concurrently developed an intolerance for any leaf delivered to him that was inferior or damaged. “Feuilles,” he would bark over the loudspeaker. “Feuilles” is “leaves.” Christophe wasn’t calling for feuilles. He was expressing displeasure at the feuilles I’d just given him, because, invariably, I had delivered up ones that were both inferior and damaged.

  Viannay came upon me while I happened to be having a little private tantrum, me and my crate of leaves, hurling them this way and that, the little fuckers, with nothing less than outright hostility. There were just so many, and they all were flawed—look there, a whole handful of bent stems—and I wasn’t seeing a single perfect one, because nothing was perfect, and, frankly, even morally, nothing should be perfect, and I found myself longing for Italy and its happy acceptance of nature as nature, with all its bent stems.

  Viannay froze. He stared at me. “What are you doing?”

  It was as if he’d come upon me stealing from him (and maybe, on some level, I had been), and he passed from chef guy who seemed to be my friend to man in a rage: the teeth, the jaw, the carnivore mug.

  Then he changed back. It was as though a cinematic cloud had just floated across the night sky, and Viannay’s normal face returned, his having realized that I was American, and he had been to America, and knew that the people there are ignorant of the culture of the leaf and other matters important to a Frenchman.

  “Let me show you,” he said. “The leaves are tender. They need to be treated tenderly.” Doucement. He proceeded to demonstrate: how you dip your hands into the crate of leaves, and then, with curiosity, even affection, you sort through them, one by one, putting the inferior ones aside, looking for the perfect specimen. Each promising leaf was like a possible romantic relationship (“This one? No, alas”), and Viannay’s ever-changeable face softened.

  “It takes a while to find a perfect leaf,” he said. Then he had it. He laid the leaf on the palm of his hand. He stared at it so closely his eyes crossed slightly. Gently, he set it upon a paper towel.

  “This is a good leaf.”

  * * *

  —

  In the evening, Viannay summoned Johann to the pass via the kitchen loudspeaker.

  It was Johann the mellow who appeared, all happy and casual, toque slapped on at the last second, chef pants falling down.

  “I want you to make me a dessert for Monday,” Viannay said, “something with raspberries.”

  “Oui, Chef!”

  Johann headed back to the pastry kitchen, flattered. He was smiling.

  Viannay was partial to classic, established French desserts, rendered flawlessly. There was an implicit assumption—Paul Bocuse was probably the inspiration—that the items in the French repertoire were perfectly good, provided that they were perfect. On Viannay’s menu was a Grand Marnier soufflé, with an especially intense orange flavor, and the Paris-Brest, the choux pastry shaped like a wheel, my unequivocal go-to favorite dessert from now to everlasting. In the appropriate spirit, Johann created a layered fruit construct called a mille-feuille croustillant aux framboises—three planks of puff pastry, raspberries between them, held in place by a raspberry cream. It was red and white and pink.

  Viannay crunched into it with a spoon. It made a satisfyingly firm “crackle.” He had a bite. He chewed, and I could hear the snap in his mouth. He took another bite, a bigger one, and then another, and rapidly dispatched the dish.

  Johann was pleased. It was obvious that Viannay liked it.

  In fact, what was obvious was Viannay’s hunger.

  He wiped the corners of his mouth. He cleared his throat. Then he fired Johann.

  “It is not good enough,” Viannay said. And like that: There was only one Johann.

  The other Johann asked if he could work out the week, and Viannay allowed him to. Johann had been surprised to be terminated but accepted his plight with a worldly equanimity. Viannay had been unequivocal: Your desserts are not good enough. Goodbye. Ice.

  Sylvain spoke to Johann in a corner. Was it cocaine—coco? (Johann wouldn’t have been the first chef who couldn’t get through the long hours without some extra help.)

  No, he said. There was no mention of drugs. It was simple. He said I was not good enough.

  One day, Hortense was weeping. Just before the lunch service, she had gone out into the front kitchen to sweep the floor (now her job), and Frédéric, towering over her, had said something—I saw the encounter but didn’t hear what had been spoken—and she fled back to garde-manger in high distress. Viannay was summoned. By the time he arrived, her face was puffy and sopping, wet like a towel, and she was struggling to get a full breath.

  Viannay touched her shoulder to calm her. He got her to regulate her breathing. He leaned onto the worktop, huddling close, inches away from her. I was nearby, funneling jelly into a terrine, and was impressed by the instant bedside manner, the humanity of it.

  The huddling was for privacy. He was whispering in a white hiss. He had no interest in the offense. It was the kitchen. You deal or you leave. You are with us, or you are not. And she confirmed that she was.

  * * *

  —

  On Sunday mornings, I took the boys out as early as possible and for as long as possible. It was a pleasure. It was also Jessica’s instruction.

  Most of the Presqu’île closes on Sundays, except for the cafés and bistros near the farmers’ market on the Quai Saint-Antoine. Our place became La Pêcherie. Its appeal was in its bountiful baskets of pain au chocolat (the boys each ate at least two), fine hot chocolate, and serviceable coffee. (An enduring French fallacy is café culture. French coffee is filthy, weak, incompetently made, and miserable-making to drink. The best coffee you get is the one you drink after crossing the border into Italy.) The Café Pêcherie was opposite a suburban bus stop and, on Sunday mornings, hosted stragglers after their festive all-nighters as they waited for their public transport, drinking a beer for breakfast, struggling to remain balanced on a bar stool, sometimes rushing downstairs to the toilet, aromatic curiosities whom my children stared at warily.

  The boys and I then went to the market, and returned home by way of “the Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls,” an ancient ruin, unearthed only in 1978. It had been built by the Romans to be an outdoo
r meeting place for the indigenous tribes of the Rhône Valley, and is so large it seems improbable that it had been buried so thoroughly by history that it took nearly two thousand years to locate. In its time, it was where hairy men (the Gauls, being famously furry) traveled great distances to get flat-out drunk. My boys became fascinated by the plumbing: so many places to pee, poop, and vomit.

  We crossed the river and came upon Christophe, whom I was slow to recognize in his street clothes and without his giant toque. He was sitting with a woman—dark hair, pale complexion, loop earrings, red lipstick—at an outside table of the Wallace Bar, a Scottish sports pub known for its bad food, good beer, and many televisions. I had never seen Christophe outside of the kitchen. I had never seen him with a woman. I had never thought of his actually existing in normal life. I didn’t look at them long—Christophe and I acknowledged each other by the most imperceptible of infinitesimally tiny nods—but the two seemed to be not entirely at ease. Was this a date? At the Wallace? Did Christophe’s idea of courtship involve indigestion? (Was it possible that someone loved him?)

  Frederick’s feet bounced against my chest and George’s small hand was in mine, and I was aware of a sudden unease. It seemed unsafe for me to be seen thus, with my progeny. In the kitchen, you become a different person from whoever you might be outside it. I was accustomed to being on guard there. Hard men, hard women. I didn’t like being seen with my children by the person who ran the place. They weren’t hard. They were vulnerable. I felt vulnerable with them in my care.

  * * *

  —

  THE LOIRE VALLEY. The Loire is France’s longest river, flowing up from the south and then, just before Paris, veering west to the sea. Its valley was where the capital used to get much of its wine, mainly because it was so close. It was also where kings and queens got away to, for hunting, or from the heat, or just to escape.

  I drove there on a weekend. I left our home and headed straight north, the Saône on my right, the hills of Beaujolais on my left. After an hour, I reached the Rock of Solutré, a towering limestone formation that marks the beginning of southern Burgundy and that had once been home, perhaps as early as 50,000 B.C., to the region’s cave dwellers (the Middle Paleolithic era, in “the Stone Age”). On hilltops all around are vines, white grapes, almost exclusively Chardonnay, the happy wines of Pouilly-Fuissé, Saint-Véran, and Mâcon.