The Cheffe Read online

  She knew that, but maybe she wanted to be sure I wouldn’t snicker even to myself, to make sure I’d take everything she said seriously and literally, sure I’d believe every word without hesitation.

  If, she explained, the Clapeaus didn’t think they were allowed to cook, it was because no communication can be had with the object of your worship except by way of an intermediary knowingly or unknowingly destined for that role, and that was the cook, who even with her many failings did indeed perform all the duties of that very special, undelegable mission.

  The Clapeaus would have thought they were committing an unpardonable offense against the sacred laws of cooking if they arrogantly set out to enter into contact with it, to lay their hands on it, shall we say.

  No one would have punished them, said the Cheffe, but they would have known they’d done something wrong, and more than wrong, criminal.

  And the cook must have seen that, she understood the Clapeaus better than she understood herself, closed and aloof though she was with them, and sometimes, in a spirit of intentional cruelty, she spat out, “Here, why don’t you try it for once!” and cackled as they recoiled in horror, sure of her unbounded power in the space of the altar, meaning that her limited abilities didn’t matter, since she was sanctified and they weren’t, and never would be, because they were afraid.

  Excuse me? Yes, I’m getting carried away, you’re right, no, I know you’re not saying it but you’re right all the same, I’m becoming ridiculously grandiose. And for what?

  But I find it hard to keep my demeanor serene and my tone moderate when I’m talking about things that meant so much to the Cheffe, my old fervor always comes back, entire and unchanged, and I can see myself, young, ignorant, alone with the Cheffe in the kitchen after the other employees had gone, raptly listening but taking care not to show any of that raptness, that hunger to know everything about her, as in her clear, crisp voice she told me what I’m telling you today, her eyes fixed on mine, as if to make sure she saw nothing in them to trouble her, no boredom, no fatigue, no restlessness.

  And if she were to glimpse in my eyes the shadow of an interest greater than she considered plausible, or an emotion stronger than she thought permissible, I knew she would stop at once, and then I might never again spend those late-night hours with her in the just cleaned, orderly, empty kitchen, my mind almost blank with fatigue, sometimes trembling with cold or exhaustion, no, I would spend them alone in my Mériadeck studio, just as awake, seeing the Cheffe as if I were standing beside her, unable to bring herself to leave the kitchen even when there was nothing more to wash or put away, seeming to dread going up to bed in her apartment over the restaurant, her lips moving, facing the counter I leaned on to listen to her, and I wouldn’t be there, and she’d scarcely notice.

  But, from the solitude of my bed in Mériadeck, I would know I wasn’t there, and I’d suffer terribly for her, even if she was not a woman to be pitied, and suffering for her was no better.

  No, she didn’t sleep much.

  She would have liked to make herself sleep exactly as long as she needed to recover her strength for her work, but she couldn’t.

  Instead she drifted around the deserted kitchen, telling herself again and again she should go up to bed, then looked at the clock and discovered in dismay that she’d been telling herself that for an hour, two hours, and there she was still downstairs, wandering among the counters and ovens, not even knowing what she was thinking about.

  I’m telling you all this, the business with the Clapeaus and the cook, to explain how the germ of a conviction that never left her might have been planted in the Cheffe’s mind: cuisine is a thing to be touched by authorized hands only, respectful, delicate, mindful of what they’re doing.

  No matter, in a way, if they’re not expert, so long as they’ve been ordained.

  By whom? Oh, by yourself, it’s nothing to do with a diploma or a master’s blessing, no, you have to feel whether the breath of cooking has entered into you.

  The Clapeaus were too given to fear and tangled feelings for that spirit ever to enter their mixed-up hearts.

  They spent some weeks every summer at their house in the Landes, bringing the cook along with them, but the summer the spirit of cooking took root in the Cheffe’s heart, the summer she turned sixteen, the cook refused for the first time to make the trip, she wanted to go visit her family, to spend some time with her children, thereby informing everyone that she had children, in Champagne or I’m not sure where, a long way from Marmande.

  The Clapeaus watched her pack her suitcase, not for a moment thinking they’d see her again, little doubting that the children in Champagne were a pretext to quit without saying so, and it gave the cook a sharp pleasure to see them so distraught, vainly trying to hide their panic at the thought of going a few weeks without her, she liked that because she hated their need for her, and she said nothing to suggest she’d be back, she knew she would, she didn’t say a word about it, too bad for her.

  There comes a time, the Cheffe always thought, and so do I, when so much contempt for others and so inflated an idea of one’s own worth can no longer be rewarded, a time when it must in fact be punished, by decision or by accident.

  So too bad for her, the Cheffe always thought, and so do I, and I assure you that the Cheffe, in all her love of fairness and decency, not to mention compassion, the Cheffe who readily and completely forgot other people’s every little mistake, the Cheffe never shed a tear over the fate of the cook, never tried to find out what had become of her, if she was happy in her new position.

  Because when they got to the Landes the Clapeaus realized they didn’t feel up to the arduous task of finding a suitable cook, which is to say one who knew and understood them.

  The cook knew them perfectly and understood them perfectly, even if, hating them as she did, she often pretended she neither knew nor understood them.

  Sitting in the still-slipcovered armchairs of the house in the Landes, where they set foot only in summer, the Clapeaus looked around and their eyes lit on the Cheffe, just turned sixteen, busy uncovering the many pieces of unnecessary, uninteresting furniture that cluttered that house, like the house in Marmande.

  “You’re going to take the cook’s place for a while,” they told her, as if it went without saying, and maybe it did, but it wasn’t their tone that convinced the Cheffe she was capable of the work.

  The Clapeaus’ offer or order roused something in her that she must have felt for some time, ever since she first witnessed the Clapeaus’ futile discussions with the cook and imagined herself in her place, musing on what she would have said, even deciding that if she were the cook there would never have been any such discussion.

  Because, she’d told herself many times, she wouldn’t have aimed her work just far enough from what the Clapeaus wanted to make them labor to explain what they were hoping for but not so far away that they could legitimately complain they hadn’t been listened to.

  She would, she thought, have striven not to fulfill their wishes, which were in any case vague, contradictory, unworkable, but to cook with such little regard for the contingencies of their respective situations, with a will so bent on creating a perfection far beyond the chance likes and dislikes of all concerned, both them and her, that the Clapeaus would have to surrender to her, happily, gratefully.

  She would, she thought, have cooked in a way that couldn’t be argued with.

  I asked her: “So no one would have the right to criticize you?”

  She answered: “Oh yes, of course they would, as you know I myself criticize everything set before me.”

  No, it was the sincerity of her quest for a culinary ideal that the Clapeaus wouldn’t be able to question, they would understand and admire it, because they themselves were searching for a gastronomical experience that would raise them above mere gluttony, that would let them forgive themse
lves for being what they were.

  Which is why, listening in on those scenes between the Clapeaus and the cook, the Cheffe always sensed, unable to find the words in her mind but feeling it with all her being, that the cook wasn’t the person they needed, and that, as in an unhappy marriage, the one side’s failings and follies only aggravated the other’s.

  She froze, her hands still hovering over a slipcover they were about to lift off, then stepped back and crossed them over her stomach, calmly answering, “Yes, of course, gladly,” and already her mind was racing, almost bolting, coursing with images of dishes it had invented before she fell asleep at night, when, unlike the early days in Marmande when she saw only her parents’ faces, she reviewed what she considered the cook’s mistakes, the improvements that could be made to the pork-and-chicken-liver terrine the Clapeaus rightly found a little bland, the ingredients it would be best to use sparingly, like flour and bouillon for sauces, yes, even then the Cheffe wasn’t fond of flour in cooking.

  Did she eat or taste everything the cook made?

  Yes, I believe she did, apart no doubt from grilled meats served in individual portions—rib or sirloin steak, veal, pork, lamb cutlets—and even that I can’t guarantee, because to their great credit, or maybe it was simply their guilty conscience, I’m not quite sure, the Clapeaus wanted their servants to eat well and abundantly, even overeat, as long as drinking didn’t come with it, they had no tolerance for drunkenness.

  As a rule they paid no mind to expenses where food was concerned, so I would imagine that what the Clapeaus couldn’t decently consume would have been more than enough for the Cheffe, the cook, and the gardener to finish, but it wasn’t even a matter of finishing it, I’m not talking about leftovers, I mean whole servings given to each.

  The Clapeaus would never have dreamt of forcing the cook to make separate meals for herself, the Cheffe, and the gardener, no, they were never petty like that.

  That was how the Cheffe had gradually learned to judge the cook’s skills, and above all her inspiration, and as she told it the skills were beyond reproach but the inspiration was essentially nil.

  She used to tell me, “It was like you were eating the same thing every time, no matter what kind of meat or vegetable or grain she was using, everything turned into the same handful of tastes, it was tedious.”

  And every sauce was a béchamel, with different seasonings depending on the dish, or else a cream or butter liaison, and the sauces were inevitable and excessive, ladled over everything in exactly the same way, you couldn’t tell fish from meat or potatoes, as the Cheffe told herself many times, at night, before she fell asleep.

  Bold ideas came to her, which she didn’t write down but mentally filed away by category; for example, the idea of allspice, and this was how she fixed it in her memory: try adding it to vol-au-vents, to beef bouillon, to the rum that raisins and candied fruit are soaked in for fruitcake.

  Or again, on the subject of crème fraîche: avoid it, except in blanquette de veau.

  Those decrees were naïve, and they expressed not so much some special precociousness in the Cheffe but her limited experience, since the only dishes she knew were the ones made by the Clapeaus’ cook, and the only tastes she knew were the Clapeaus’.

  But at that early age the Cheffe acquired the habit of never going to sleep without first thinking back over all the food that was eaten that day, evaluating, analyzing, judging everything she’d put in her mouth and everything she’d studied with her sensitive eye, the arrangement of colors on a plate, the severe beauty of cast-iron casseroles, already sensing the interest, both for the eye and for the appetite, of bringing the casserole straight to the table rather than, as the cook did, as everyone did at the time, transferring whatever had been simmering inside it—soup, jugged hare, ragout of beef cheeks—to a tureen decorated with fussy, old-fashioned flowers, or a silver platter whose gray-tinged patina made browned meats seem dreary and off-putting, she always thought, which is why when she had her own restaurant she never served anything on silver, and also why she always took great care choosing the color of her enameled casseroles, thinking of the tinge the food took on in the last stages of the cooking.

  The morning the Clapeaus told her she’d be filling in for the cook, that morning when the Cheffe’s strong, square little hands realized they would finally be put to the use they sensed they were made for, the Cheffe was convinced she had to dazzle the Clapeaus with that first dinner, she had to crush them under the irrefutable weight of her talent, ingenuity, and charm.

  Yes, at that moment she wanted to cast a spell on them, nothing less.

  And if her cooking would later show that she mistrusted beguilement more than anything else, that she avoided any technique suggesting an ambition to please, to pamper refined tastes, that day, in the living room of the house in the Landes, with the bright summer-morning sun struggling to shine through the pine trees, the old rust-branched pine trees that derived an ascetic, minimal existence from the sand, the thought of bewitching the Clapeaus excited the Cheffe’s intelligence, her thoughts raced at such a clip that she feared she might not be able to keep them in line, she panicked.

  She told the Clapeaus she’d have to go out and do some shopping immediately, and never before had the Cheffe told the Clapeaus what she had to do, only the Clapeaus had the implicit right to say such things, and yet here she was on that inaugural morning telling them just that, her gaze fixed not on the two Clapeaus slumped in the armchairs still draped with dusty slipcovers but on the desiccated branches of the pine trees, so old that only the very tops were green, so that from the house’s windows there was nothing to see but what looked like dead trees, bare, rust-red branches that sometimes pressed up against the glass.

  It was summer, the season of the Clapeaus’ perennial holiday, and the pines surrounded the house with a rusty, dry wreath that stretched all the way to the ocean, whose languid murmur the Cheffe had now heard for the first time in her life; it was summer, and the Clapeaus stoically endured that time and that house, the prison of the rust-red pines, the ceaseless murmur of the ocean, the damp smell of the house, its meager comforts, they endured that obligation, imposed by a tradition they themselves had invented, to spend long weeks each summer far from their beloved house in Marmande, the only place where they felt at peace.

  “The kitchen’s not as well equipped as in Marmande, of course, and it’s much smaller too,” they said to the Cheffe, suddenly almost humble, as if in such conditions the Cheffe might refuse to take over.

  They stood up together to show her the kitchen and cooking things.

  It was a small room in the back of the house, its tile floor gritty with sand, kept dark all day long by the thick, rugged trunk of a pine tree growing just outside the narrow barred window, and yet when she walked into that kitchen the Cheffe felt a happiness she’d never felt before.

  For the first time in her life she felt she was in a place that would be hers and hers alone.

  There was a newish gas stove and an old wood-burning oven, many pots, pans, and casseroles of all sizes, and a hodgepodge of out-of-date spices and condiments, like jarred ashes, accumulated by the cook, who’d taken care not to label or name them, guarding her secrets, the Cheffe immediately thought, not that she was unhappy with what she was finding, since with the cook’s past appearances on this stage erased she wouldn’t have to follow in her footsteps.

  She said nothing of all that to the Clapeaus, nothing of what she was thinking, didn’t confess her emotion on discerning, in that little room severely guarded by an old pine tree planted just outside, the brand-new elements of a happiness and a raptness she was now feeling for the first time, though she’d had a glimpse of it when she lay in her bed at night mentally drawing up menus, lists of perfect dishes, corrections to the ones she’d eaten, but only a glimpse or an illusion, and now the reality of that happiness, that raptness, now
the plenitude of that happiness and raptness was spreading all through her sixteen-year-old body, eager, as she said, to finally go to work.

  And when the Clapeaus anxiously asked what she thought, when they announced they could always go to a restaurant this first evening, give her some time to get used to things, she answered with concern on her brow but joy in her heart that she would gladly make that first day’s dinner if they didn’t mind driving her around to buy the things she would need, and all the while she was peering into the cupboards, pulling out drawers to inspect the knives and spatulas, her steps quick and lively on the tiles dusted with gray wind-borne sand, and she made it so clear that she’d taken possession of both the room and the Clapeaus’ hungering flesh that they took a step back, huddling in the doorway, no doubt convinced they’d done well to entrust this girl with that mission, but once again feeling left out, never called, never chosen, never worthy of the work.

  And that girl, so young and so small, that girl who still had the cheeks and the long, delicate, flyaway hair of a child, that girl they hardly knew, whom they’d taken so little interest in, that girl was firmly pushing them back toward the hallway with her gaze, which had taken possession of them just as it had of the little kitchen, and at that moment the Clapeaus must have known she would still be their cook when they went back to Marmande, they had yet to eat a single dish made by her hands but they knew it, they saw what had settled over her, what never settled over them, and they knew it.

  They didn’t ask what she was planning to make.

  With one hand she silently brushed the sand from the table, a sand so fine that it worked its way in at the windowsills, under the doors, then tore a sheet from the notepad hanging by a string on a nail near the sink and sat down to write out a shopping list, her back turned to the Clapeaus so they wouldn’t see she wrote slowly and clumsily, holding the pencil very straight over the paper like a tool meant for piercing or gouging.