The Cheffe Read online

  How could they imagine she wouldn’t feel sad, even hurt, that she was rich and still had to go on visiting her parents in that Sainte-Bazeille hovel?

  Was that the beatific spirit of Sainte-Bazeille, that inability to say yes? To recognize the offering when it’s given with love, to graciously welcome it into the house?

  That’s me saying all that.

  The Cheffe saw nothing to be hurt about, she saw only her parents, whose health was declining between the damp, rotting walls of the house they wouldn’t leave, and they didn’t say but might well have thought: We’re perfectly happy as we are, we want nothing from anyone, why must she pester us with her worries and her wishing we had a better house than we do, we who never yearned for anything better, who in fact always ran from anything better, dimly sensing it wouldn’t be good for us?

  But I took offense for the Cheffe when she told me of that fruitless battle, in a lighthearted voice so I’d think none of it mattered, and once again I was outraged at her parents, those two fine people with their tightly closed hearts, incapable of sacrificing their freedom to accept a gesture of pure affection and devoted attachment that asked for so little.

  The Cheffe never went any further than that in the story.

  What came next, which I both imagined on my own and gleaned from my talks with one of the Cheffe’s sisters, has always struck me as just the kind of bad decision mulish people are prone to, an incomprehensible fit of boldness, the last card disastrously slammed down on the wrong table, plunging everyone into confusion, into a sort of daze that for a time wipes out any possibility of reasoned reflection, and so it was that the parents, having once again declined the Cheffe’s offer to buy them a nice house in Sainte-Bazeille, told her out of the blue that there was one thing they did want and that was a car, and I don’t know if they meant that or if it was simply what they’d come up with to placate the Cheffe, to quell her need to heap kindnesses on her parents, I don’t know, but maybe they saw it as a way out, a way to be left alone and not have to give up living their own life as they pleased, since a car would be a considerable gift, extravagant, and from their point of view insignificant.

  The joy of hearing them finally ask her for something blinded the Cheffe.

  She who usually thought of everything, how could she have dreamt of letting her father drive, when he’d essentially never driven in his life?

  Her sister had no answer when I asked her that, she shrugged, then surmised that neither the parents nor the Cheffe seriously thought the car would be driven, that it might have been enough for all three of them to implicitly understand that the vehicle taking up much of the front yard was an expression of the Cheffe’s love, and her polite, closed-hearted parents’ recognition of that love, I added to myself, and it could be, the sister went on, that the parents were vaguely planning to give that car to one of their children once what the Cheffe would see as a suitable period of time had gone by. “It could be,” said the sister, “but alas, that’s not how it was, and against all expectations and all reason our father sat down behind the wheel, and you know how it ended, you can’t explain a thing like that.”

  The sister also told me the Cheffe let out a sort of hoarse, chilling wail at the funeral in Sainte-Bazeille, and then fainted.

  The Cheffe never told me about that, and when she spoke of her parents in our sometime late-night talks in the empty kitchen, her wording and persistent present tense gave me every reason to think they were still living, and so I would have thought had my coworkers not told me that story in my first days on the job, probably more or less incidentally, and then, I found myself thinking, not incidentally at all but with a bright-eyed intensity and an eagerness to show me they knew a few of the Cheffe’s secrets, to tell me they had the power to strip her bare, possibly to hurt her terribly, she who let no one approach her—“Don’t touch me,” seemed to say her inward-looking gaze, her body wholly given over to the injunctions of the work, her brief, unjoking, cordial smile, which nonetheless protected another smile, a smile I think few but me ever saw: broad and gentle, tender, confident.

  What’s that? Oh yes, the Cheffe’s daughter must have seen that precious smile hovering over her when she was a child, but I have no doubt that suspicion, sadness, and disappointment wore it out by the time she was a teenager, and from then on the best the Cheffe could do was joylessly pull back her suddenly tight lips, whether she was face-to-face with her daughter or forced to think of her by a ridiculous, belligerent email, she tried to stop thinking about her, you know, but she couldn’t ignore her daughter’s emails, and when I was at her side, as I always was toward the end, I could see her mouth distend into a horrible smile, misshapen and dejected, as she stared at the screen, and then I knew she’d just heard from her daughter, and I put my hands on her shoulders, very gently.

  “It’s my daughter again,” she murmured, and I whispered back, “Don’t worry, I’m here.”

  My hands lay lightly on her shoulders, I could feel the warmth of her skin, I was sure I could feel her relaxing, sure she loved me, needed me, loved me.

  No, I don’t know if the Clapeaus ever saw the Cheffe’s real smile.

  I don’t think so.

  When they came to set the dining room table, drained by apprehension and doubt, and so wearing faces fit for a disaster, sagging, grave, and oddly pious, they seemed to be training their ears no longer on the kitchen, where their young employee had been hard at work for hours, their sixteen-year-old maid whose promotion to cook suddenly seemed an insane idea, it frightened them a little, such recklessness wasn’t like them, maybe they were angry at themselves for so rashly entrusting that girl with such a responsibility, and at her for so impetuously accepting it—they seemed to be training their ears no longer on the kitchen but on the pines that guarded and surrounded the house, that saw everything, knew everything, and the pines kept their silence.

  The Clapeaus sat down facing each other at the table laid for two. They waited wordlessly, solemn and hopeless.

  Then the kitchen door opened, the Cheffe’s determined little form appeared, and the mysterious, deep-rooted faith they’d suddenly felt just that morning came flooding back, they saw the profound joy in her dark gaze, without quite knowing it they felt the vehemence of her tension, hermetically contained in that calm face, in that slight, not-visibly-pounding chest, a tension perfectly sealed away, perhaps seeping out just a little in the form of tiny drops of sweat at her hairline.

  They sensed the girl’s joy, but also the fear creeping its way into her carefully stilled heart, she hadn’t yet fully mastered her miraculous, single-minded focus on cooking and so couldn’t drape herself in practiced detachment as she imagined the Clapeaus’ formidable anticipation and then their reaction to what she would put before them, it wasn’t yet time to be trembling, she was doing her best to fight it off, it was hard, a fear was creeping in.

  She let the Clapeaus see her and went back into the kitchen, leaving the door open.

  She hadn’t spoken a word, and neither had they.

  The only tureen she could find was decorated with painted roses, which she thought utterly wrong for fish, so she brought the soup out in the austere, pitted cast-iron cookpot, set it on the table, snatched away the heavy lid.

  She knew she was going against the Clapeaus’ conventional tastes by forcing them to look on what they must have thought of as that hideous old pot, she knew it might even offend them, like some obscene move on her part, but she was hoping the rough, violent majesty exuded by that ugly, irreproachable, proud cookpot juxtaposed with the embroidered linen tablecloth and silver cutlery brought from Marmande would serenely silence any objection from the Clapeaus, would snuff out their sense of an inelegance, not that their notion of what deserved a place on the table would be changed just like that, but because the power of the cookpot (regally decreed by the cookpot itself) would intimidate them, having
caught them off guard.

  The Cheffe gently sank the ladle into the soup, stepped back, and turned toward the kitchen, she was planning to let the Clapeaus serve themselves, she thought it essential that they see the untouched ocher soup between the black walls of the pot and take palpable measure of its full, rich consistency, so different from the cheap bouillon of mortification the Marmande cook used to inflict on them, she was determined to astound them and win them over, she reminded me, as if seeking forgiveness and wanting to justify what she would much later come to see as pure vanity, that insistence on making everyone at the table wonder at your handiwork before they get down to eating.

  She would later take care to serve nothing whose form had to be marveled at, nothing meant to arouse oohs and aahs, on the contrary, she strove to give each course and each plate a presentation so delicate, so rigorous, so pure that it would strike the eye only if the eye was open to that pleasure, only if it was ready for it, only if it wanted it.

  And if it didn’t, if it never noticed that cool beauty, the Cheffe didn’t think it mattered, she thought people could still appreciate a dish even if something about it eluded their eye, just as she had nothing against people who wolfed down their dinner like they were shoveling in some lunchroom slop, she didn’t think they were savoring it any the less.

  She thought any dish that made a show of itself was hiding something, and she didn’t like what that thing was—a pointless or unfounded pride, a childish plea for attention, maybe an attempt to distract from the rudimentary work done by a cook who hadn’t thought it necessary to treat the primary ingredient with the kind of brio he lavished on a puff-pastry swan or a stunning nougat gondola.

  The Cheffe hated even the idea of showiness, that was the source of her refinement.

  And I’ve always thought the splendor she humbly created on a plate lingered on in the minds even of people who didn’t realize they’d noticed it, awakening their souls to harmonies of another order, it made them more perceptive and sensitive and the Cheffe knew nothing about it, couldn’t know anything about it, must not think of it for even a moment, something wondrous happened by way of her and she didn’t know it, must not know it, must not understand it.

  But at that first dinner in the Landes she chose not to ladle out the fish soup so the Clapeaus would have to look into the pot and see the rough, pleasing balance of the colors and substances, the pink-tinged cod loin, still whole in the glossy soup, the rugged sides of the proletarian cookpot, which, in its stern dignity, was not honored to be containing and presenting that refined soup, not gratified, no, rather it consented, with a slightly crotchety grace, to grant that soup the favor of its own indisputable elegance.

  The Cheffe was hoping the pot’s self-assurance would make the Clapeaus forget the tureen with the little painted roses, and would even make them forget such things as tureens with little painted roses existed.

  And the Cheffe was also hoping to tell the Clapeaus she meant no offense, quite the contrary, she dared to confront them with that cookpot, with its almost alarming power, only because she had deep faith in their discernment, which wasn’t entirely true, the Cheffe believed in the Clapeaus’ power of perception only to the extent that they’d already been subjugated by the pines when they sat down at the table, mindful of the need to replace their usual cook by any means necessary and ground down, flattened by the pines that knew them and didn’t speak to them, that knew their failings and weaknesses and didn’t mix with them.

  “Don’t let the pot frighten you,” the Cheffe would have liked to say, realizing the pot might not be quite forceful enough to rattle or overturn the Clapeaus’ little world, she almost wished she could caress their troubled brows with her confident hand and reassure them, soothe them, she liked seeing them happy.

  She withdrew to the kitchen and saw to taking the chicken out of the oven, keeping one ear on the little sounds coming from the dining room.

  She heard only the clink of spoons on porcelain, she knew the Clapeaus weren’t fond of chitchat at the table, they focused all their attention on the sensations afforded them by the food, even when they had guests they scrupulously avoided all small talk, little caring what the others might think.

  Before long they were finished with the soup, from what the Cheffe could make out, and still she didn’t hear a word. That worried her a little.

  But she came out of the kitchen shielded by a protective, hard-won calm that made her every move seem to take place outside herself, as if she were controlling and commanding her mind from a slight distance, and she took care not to look too directly at the Clapeaus as she carried off the dishes then the pot, but her gaze once fleetingly met Madame Clapeau’s, she’d glanced up at the Cheffe almost timidly and then immediately looked down at the table again, a flash of fright lingering in her eyes’ wake, and the Cheffe could see that the bowls had been emptied, with only a thin sheen of soup left in the pot, and she was relieved but all the more troubled by the flare that had shot from Madame Clapeau’s eyes, which she thought she could still see faintly gleaming between herself and her employer; didn’t that fear mean that she, the Cheffe, was a witch?

  In its bloodred enameled cast-iron oven dish she brought out the huge chicken she’d massacred and then resuscitated, like a savage joke, surrounded by little vegetables still sizzling in the modest pool of golden, perfumed fat conscientiously and honorably exuded by the Jodas’ admirable chicken.

  She held out the dish and briefly displayed the glistening, tanned skin, stretched to the splitting point over the stuffing-swollen breast, the abnormally inflated legs, she wanted the Clapeaus to think they knew it was just a plain oven-roasted bird so the deception would stand out in the fullest relief—and her virtuosity as a magician in the brightest light, the Cheffe would reluctantly admit to me, with a shame I rarely saw when she told me a story.

  Because afterward she took the chicken back to the kitchen to be sliced and arranged on a green earthenware platter, then came back and set it down on the table, Monsieur Clapeau, at the mere sight of that strange overflowing flesh, cried, “She’s turned the whole chicken into one big cromesquis!” and from Madame Clapeau’s throat issued a sound that did little to soothe the Cheffe’s nerves, that even nearly tore a hole in her composure and struck her as the sonic equivalent of the thin flame of terror she thought she could see still burning, bright and quivering, between Madame Clapeau’s face and her own, denouncing her as an amoral little sorceress, not because she’d humiliated the Jodas’ beautiful chicken but because, the Cheffe vaguely sensed, she was letting herself flaunt the hold she thought she had over the Clapeaus, the hold she now incontestably did have, which Madame Clapeau no more contested than she rebelled against the pines’ cool authority, which she, Madame Clapeau, would nonetheless rather have felt enfolding them intangibly, unspoken, not nakedly exposed on a green earthenware dish, in an impudent cookpot, and then a prison closed over them, and Madame Clapeau shivered, broken.

  I went too far, the Cheffe quickly thought, but she hadn’t, she’d gone just up to the point beyond which the Clapeaus would never be able to free themselves of her.

  Madame Clapeau simply needed some time to adjust.

  Monsieur Clapeau stared indecisively at his wife’s downturned, joyless face, then murmured toward the Cheffe, “Very nice, very nice,” and he who hadn’t gleaned from the Cheffe’s new aplomb what an influence that sixteen-year-old girl would henceforth have in their lives now glimpsed it in Madame Clapeau’s alarm, but he was already conquered, they were both of them conquered, and in a sort of horror and resentment they were enslaved, and they consented to it.

  Nervous but still breezy, he added: “So you knew how I love cromesquis?”

  Madame Clapeau gave him what seemed to the Cheffe a look of slightly sickened surprise, but also of distant pity, they were prisoners and he was trying to cozy up to the girl; did he think he was goin
g to come to some understanding with the pines, with the girl, with the forces that now possessed them?

  The girl had lived with them, beside them, and now she was in them.

  They had to consent to that with a modicum of dignity.

  The Cheffe spared Monsieur Clapeau the awkwardness of an answer, she slipped away to the kitchen, where, shaken by a delight she’d never known before, pitiless, almost cruel, she opened the little window and craned her neck to press her forehead against the big pine tree’s bark, the pine kept silent but the Cheffe wasn’t expecting anything from it, there was, she thought with a cool brazenness, nothing it could teach her that she didn’t know already, whatever she was thinking the pine kept silent, the bark scraped her forehead.

  What the Clapeaus would have been drinking?

  Yes, I can tell you that, they’d brought their wine from Marmande. They drank only red, always the same, Château Léhoul, a Graves, they claimed white gave them bad dreams.

  I think they were afraid of adding another passion to their passion for cuisine, and so, knowing themselves, restraining themselves in that area because doing so brought them no great frustration, they’d long before resolved never to devote another thought to wine, and above all not to let themselves be invaded by a curiosity about wine, a taste for wine, they’d settled once and for all on that fine Léhoul and forgotten everything else.

  The last act of that first dinner at the house in the Landes, although the Cheffe passed over it quickly, finding nothing worth noting in it (but I’d learned to mistrust her shows of dismissiveness when she was trying to distract me from some very particular point, even if, as a matter of integrity, she wasn’t overtly ruling out speaking of it someday, how well I knew every oscillation of her cherished face!), was, I believe, marked by the Clapeaus’ instinctive determination to give themselves at least a little freedom within the boundaries of their submission, and so a way out of the dumbstruck astonishment, ever so slightly tempered by fright, that they’d been plunged into by the revelation (and their unavoidable, awed acceptance) of the girl’s authority, her investiture, that’s what they’d wanted, and without knowing it what they’d feared; who could ever aspire to feel suddenly small and needy?