The Cheffe Read online

  She didn’t really need that list, that was simply an image of her she thought she had to give the Clapeaus in those early days.

  The Cheffe kept a record in her mind of everything she needed for her work, just as she did every thought that came to her about cooking, her memory was vast and remarkably organized, and in any case her difficulties with reading and writing made reliance on written words pointless, since in a very concrete sense those words said nothing to her, evoked some object in her mind only at the price of a strenuous, disheartening effort.

  Yes, the Cheffe had a phenomenal memory.

  People who knew of her illiteracy and thought her simpleminded and so went into ecstasies over her culinary gifts, which they saw as the revelation of some unexpected, titillating sort of primal intelligence, always overlooked or underestimated her prodigious memory, thanks to which the Cheffe never needed written recipes or notes, she kept all her recipes meticulously archived in her head, she had the most methodical mind I’ve ever known.

  I can never remember which terrace I’ve been invited to for a party, I often have to work, as I sit on a metal chair or stand at the railing, forearms on the hot aluminum, hips thrust back, buttocks bulging under my eternal Bermuda shorts, to remember if this is my terrace or André’s or Florence’s or Jacky’s or Véro’s or Dominique’s or Manuel’s or Sylvie’s, to remember if I have hosting duties or if it’s one of them who’s supposed to be offering me yet another drink, a grilled sausage, a bowl of tabbouleh. I settle the question by looking down at the pool, measuring the distance, since from my apartment, the only one of the bunch on the ground floor, you could easily straddle the balustrade and dive without danger into the gilded, glistening water, it’s been known to happen, all those scenes mingle in my memory and the overlit water soon gives me a migraine, I should turn away but a stupor rivets my forearms to the aluminum railing and my blurred, flickering gaze to the water, clearly you wouldn’t dare dive from this terrace into that pool far below; so am I at Jacky’s? Am I at Pascaline’s?

  And as the Clapeaus’ massive Citroën pulled away from the house, turned onto the sandy road through the pines, so dense and rust-red that they eclipsed the blazing noonday sun, allowing only a dull red halo of dusty light around their trunks, the Cheffe wasn’t thinking—too new to all this for such things to occur to her—that she was sitting in that vast leather backseat as if she were the boss and the Clapeaus had to drive her wherever she wanted, the two of them crammed into the front and eager to hear her wishes, to learn what shop they’d be taking her to once they emerged from the dense, rusty, innumerable ranks of pine trees reducing the unclouded July sun to scattered, quivering patches on the gray sand.

  “First of all, a good chicken,” said the Cheffe, “and then I’ll need various kinds of fish, and leeks, carrots, potatoes, and other things I’ll tell you as we go.”

  The Clapeaus conferred.

  Their voices were almost sharp, atypically tense, as they discussed how best to go about finding all that.

  Monsieur Clapeau had stopped the car at the end of the dirt road, just before the highway, as if reluctant to cast off into the vibrating blaze of the sunlight, which made liquid mirages undulate on the asphalt.

  When, a half hour later, they drove into the yard of the Joda family’s farm, the same bleached, shimmering light made puddles as undeniable as they were chimerical on the packed dirt—which is why, I’m sure, the Cheffe could never separate the exaltation of cooking, the effervescence of mental energy focused solely on the invention of a meal, from the extreme, inhospitable heat, from the livid, liquid, scintillating light of a late summer morning in southwestern France, she closed her restaurant during the winter months, her imagination failed her at that time of year, she turned sad and hard.

  Yes, she could be hard, but I like to think I was the only one who felt it, who knew it.

  She never let it show.

  “My heart is a brick,” she would tell me when I went to see her in her apartment over the closed restaurant, when I sat down in my usual armchair and asked why she was keeping her thick, dark blue velvet drapes half drawn instead of letting in the meager January light. “My heart is a brick,” she would say with a weary shake of her head, and that was supposed to explain everything: the half-open curtains, her silence as I labored to entertain her with stories I’d read in the local paper, her slightly blank gaze, her refusal to make even the most cursory attempt at politeness, she who generally had such exquisite manners.

  That’s where it all came from, from that blinding white sunlight on the highway outside the rust-red cover of the pines, it came from the heat and the sight of nonexistent but undeniable rippling water on the packed earth of the Jodas’ farmyard that summer when the spirit of cooking recognized the Cheffe and the Clapeaus saw it in her and on her, never in them, but they could still see it, that’s where it all came from: the morose winter sun would never have brought her out, the Cheffe always told herself, she would have gone on being invisible, unknown even to herself, untouched by anything, had the summer light of her sixteenth year not been there to reveal the thing in her that could have stayed veiled forever.

  Do you realize that all the Cheffe’s best recipes, the most popular but also those dearest to her heart, like her little vol-au-vents with Camargue oysters, her clam and green asparagus soup, her calf sweetbreads flambéed with Armagnac, they were all inevitably conceived and developed at the height of the summer, when you couldn’t stand in the restaurant’s kitchen without gasping or feeling an oily sweat overflowing from the hollows of your flesh, the Cheffe was at the peak of her powers and ingenuity while we were all drooping around her, seeing to our everyday tasks by pure force of habit, with nothing like thought guiding our hands, and in those stifling weeks the Cheffe’s instincts were at their apogee and her joy at its peak, no oily sweat ever trickled over her skin because her joy absorbed everything, exhaustion, the unbearable heat, the thick, stifling air, the joyful grace of creation absorbed it all, her skin shone with a gentle, fresh, quiet glow.

  She never spoke of it, but I knew, having walked past the restaurant on those summer nights when the choking heat drove me out of my Mériadeck studio, when I decided I’d rather wander the dead, dark streets than toss and turn between my damp sheets, I knew the Cheffe spent a good part of those nights in the kitchen alone, experimenting with some idea her imagination had offered her.

  I saw the harsh white glow of the lights shining onto the sidewalk from the three barred ground-floor windows, and I painfully envied the Cheffe, who was working inside, in the inspiring solitude of the night, in the infinite, intoxicated hours of the night, chopping, cooking, testing, all alone and all-powerful in the thick silence of the night, how I envied her for not being weighed down by love, for doing what made her happier than anything on earth, with no one and no sad thoughts of anyone (apart from her daughter, but was that love, wasn’t it crushing despair?) troubling the pure, simple joy of her favorite thing, of creation fixed solely on itself and perfectly happy to have nothing exist around or outside it.

  How I envied her, yes.

  But I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth if I didn’t add that I was perfectly happy loving the Cheffe as I loved her.

  Who knows which is better?

  The Jodas offered to sell the Clapeaus a very fat chicken they’d slaughtered two days before.

  The Cheffe inspected it closely before she agreed to the purchase, and when, decades later, she described how intently she’d pinched the deep yellow skin to gauge its thickness, tried to break a bone to check the bird’s vigor, how she’d gravely inspected the gizzard and liver to be sure they looked healthy and fat, she couldn’t hold back a little laugh of embarrassment and amused disbelief.

  “When I think what I was planning to do with that magnificent chicken,” she always said, “when I think I’d made up my mind to demolish that wonderf
ul meat!”

  And of course she made allowances for her youth and what she saw as her obligation to show the Clapeaus all the talents she was certain she had, which necessarily implied, she recognized, some degree of artifice or display (showing off, she called it), but she was still ashamed that she hadn’t yet realized, that glorious summer, had felt no stirring of doubt, no need to silence her sensitivity, that she hadn’t realized the one and only justification for putting an animal to death lies in the respect, care, and thoughtfulness with which you treat its flesh and then take that flesh into you, bite by bite.

  Forty years later, that still bothered her.

  Because the spirit of her cooking was so fundamentally contrary to the spirit that whispered the idea for that first dinner in her ear that she found it hard to imagine she’d once been that girl.

  The Cheffe would later devote all her care to respecting the products she used, she inwardly bowed down before them, paying them homage, grateful, honoring them as best she could, vegetables, herbs, plants, animals, she took nothing for granted, wasted nothing, damaged nothing, mistreated nothing, defiled no creation of nature, however modest, and the same went for human beings, even if her work didn’t involve chopping them up, the same went for all of us, she never humiliated us.

  For the Cheffe, everything that lived was to be esteemed, everything that existed.

  She never tore into anything or anyone, ever.

  Except, perhaps, for that beautiful chicken from the Joda farm, yes indeed, and she never quite got over it, ha-ha.

  Had they been asked, the Clapeaus surely would have held a very different opinion, they would surely have cherished an enchanted memory of that first dinner in the Landes, a memory soon magnified by their obsessive habit of making something legendary of a meal they’d especially enjoyed, but the Clapeaus’ judgment would have changed nothing for the Cheffe, she knew that to them there was no such thing as a morality of cooking.

  That question would have been simply beyond their understanding, their minds weren’t made for considering or even perceiving such things.

  The Clapeaus’ car pulled away from the Joda farm and drove on to Vieux-Boucau in the infernal noontime heat, all the windows rolled down, but to the dazed Cheffe that searing wind only made the leather car seat all the hotter, only blasted her face and bare pink forearms all the harder, there was no one else out on the steaming road at that hour.

  For the first time in her life the Cheffe felt privileged, regal, even if at that moment she was physically suffering, even if she was starting to worry, seeing the time go by, wondering if it might have been a mistake to accept that decisive challenge, the challenge of making, in just a few hours, a meal that would forever leave the Clapeaus in her thrall.

  Meanwhile, they were on their way to Vieux-Boucau because the Cheffe wanted fish and shellfish, even though she’d never seen the ocean and at the time couldn’t have cared less about the ocean, scarcely turning her head when Madame Clapeau pointed out the shoreline on their left, too lost in her thoughts of the soup she’d planned as a first course.

  The Cheffe didn’t know the first thing about fish, not their names, not their uses in cooking.

  But, having accompanied the cook to the market in Marmande and tasted the soup she made every Friday, she was convinced that if that weekly, inevitable, impoverished soup—obediently downed, without a word, by the Clapeaus—was so flat, if its aftertaste was almost soapy, it could only be because the cook made it from her very thin vegetable bouillon, into which she simply dumped a few fillets of whitefish that imparted no flavor, not even their own subtle, fresh, seaside taste, that created only a dull white foam whose look and smell always sickened the Cheffe.

  She didn’t like seeing that soup brought to the table in Marmande, she didn’t like fish soup being thought of that way, as something obligatory and dreary, inevitable and repellent, and in her nightly meditations, reflecting on the day’s meals as she lay in her bed, she concluded it would take virtually nothing, just a little effort, to make fish soup delightful, and she felt entirely capable of that little effort.

  And so, as a way of making the Clapeaus her captives, she’d thought it an obvious decision to try to conquer them with a soup whose mere mention had always made their faces fall.

  And here’s what the Cheffe set out to make once they were back in the house shaded and guarded and intimidated by the rust-red pines, here’s what she conceived, what she created by the grace of an admirable resolve, and not only for the sake of those two Clapeaus from Marmande, of course, but also quite simply to prove to herself she could cook.

  And if she could cook, if she knew how to cook, then her aim was within reach, she’d have only to marshal the troops of her vigor, her tenacity, her quickness, her daring, and marshaling those troops was nothing to her, even then her will was enormous, almost obsessive, no effort daunted her, her work could have killed her and she wouldn’t have noticed and wouldn’t have cared.

  Here’s how she worked in that house in the Landes, the summer she was sixteen.

  She began with the Jodas’ magnificent chicken, whose tender, plump, yellow flesh would have to be sacrificed to her goal, which as I told you she would later condemn, but in that dark, sandy little kitchen she wasn’t yet thinking that way, and it was with an untroubled sense of doing exactly the right thing that she carefully stripped the meat from the carcass and chopped it very fine, then put that dense, tender flesh through the meat grinder, even though its very essence demanded that it be taken into the mouth just as it was, simply cooked, and above all perfectly intact.

  She mixed that chopped meat with five eggs, herbs, trimmed bread soaked in milk, a little cumin and clove, and then, in a wondrous feat of dexterity, she flawlessly reconstructed the shape of that sumptuous chicken, molding the meat around the bones, sculpting it over the carcass so it would seem that the chicken had never been touched, and then she draped it in the delicate, corn-colored skin to make the illusion complete, to lead the Clapeaus to believe that that monstrously reconstituted chicken, remade with an aggregate that could never rival the original, had come to them just as it was from the farmyard, a dizzying trompe l’oeil, something the Cheffe would later reject, almost unreasonably, but which that afternoon seemed to her the very summit of her art, the magisterial affirmation of her superiority over the Marmande cook, who could never have managed to pass one thing off as another.

  How the Cheffe would later hate all shams.

  She stuffed the carcass with the leftover meat, and now the chicken looked even plumper, seemed about to burst with the excess of its own excellence.

  It was a miracle of legerdemain, the Cheffe would grant, there was no way to tell that the animal had been brutalized, taken apart and then put back together in a sort of sick joke.

  She put it in the oven, generously basted it with melted butter, and then an hour later surrounded it with new potatoes, coarsely chopped carrots, turnips, red onions, whole heads of garlic.

  Her solitude, in that little kitchen dimmed and grimly defended by the rough, aged trunk of the pine blocking the view from the window, filled her with a kind of calm, quiet jubilation whose matchless pleasure she would later never stop seeking—that was the first time she’d ever been left alone to work, left alone to come up with her ideas, and therefore alone with the prospect of potential disappointment or possible praise, and it was precisely that intoxicating creative aloneness I glimpsed in her and envied her on those stifling nights in Bordeaux when, as I told you, I went to seek out the lights of our kitchen; it was precisely that ardent, intense solitude, at once reflective and rapt, whose acidic tang the Cheffe never tired of describing for me, something I myself have never really known, not with that fullness and purity, since I never had the kind of impregnable detachment from everything not immediately involved with cooking, the kind of ungiving withdrawal into yourself without wh
ich you can’t seriously think or invent, and which, I long ago realized, is a paradox of that trade, since in those moments the very people you want to delight, to fascinate, and to subjugate, the diners, have been completely eliminated from your mind and your memory, even if your every thought is devoted to their future pleasure.

  I could never put the people I was cooking for out of my mind, I always feared they might not be happy, I always tried to tailor my work to what I assumed were their tastes and desires, that’s why I’ve always been average, virtuous but anxious, that’s why I’ve never reigned over anything, not that it ever brought me serenity, I’ve never been free of mundane cares, I’ve never known peace, never known the calm, cold exultation of perfect aloneness in the act of creation.

  In that rudimentary little kitchen amid the pines, the Cheffe felt, perhaps, not happier than she’d ever been (she was happy with her parents, happy in her strange, rough childhood) but happy in a way she’d never known, finer and more expansive than any other pleasure she could imagine, happy for reasons that came only from herself, her endurance, her boldness, her faith in her abilities, and not because someone else, not even her beloved parents, was trying to make her happy, which she never trusted, and very likely that destroyed any possibility of her prizing or accepting the love of a man: she wanted to owe the emotion and sensation of happiness to herself alone, and having so long wanted that, she made herself incapable of finding pleasure or profit in a man’s aspiration to bring her joy, that bored her, everyone bored her but her daughter, who did all she could to bring her the opposite of anything like joy, but did she really love her, was that love at all or was it guilt-racked despair? I have my own opinion, you’ve met her, you’ve seen that unpleasant, sterile woman, arrogant and vain and now trying to peddle specious anecdotes about the Cheffe to the whole wide world.