And there we should have met our demise. But clever people were always underestimating Papa. He was sharp, sharp as a filleting knife. Papa assumed politics in a small French town were little different from politics in Bombay—all was greased by the oil of commerce—and so his first move in Lumière was to put the mayor’s brother, a solicitor, on a hefty retainer. Nothing so crude as what transpired up on Malabar Hill, but just as effective.
“Tell that man to stop,” Mallory imperiously ordered the mayor. “That Indian. Have you seen what he is doing? He’s turned that beautiful Dufour mansion into a bistro. An Indian bistro! Horrible. I can smell that oily cooking all up and down the street. And that placard? Mais non. This is not possible.”
The mayor shrugged. “What do you want me to do?”
“Shut him down.”
“Monsieur Haji is opening a restaurant in the same zone as you, Gertrude. If I shut him down I have to shut you down as well. And his lawyer won permission from the Planning Committee for the placard. So, you see, my hands are tied. Monsieur Haji has done everything correct.”
“Mais non. This is not possible.”
“But it is,” continued the mayor. “I can’t close him down without justification. He is acting completely within the law.”
Her parting remark, I understand, was singularly unpleasant.
Our first face-to-face with la grande dame took place three days later. Mallory arose at six every morning. After she ate a light breakfast of pears and buttered toast and strong coffee, Monsieur Leblanc drove her to Lumière’s markets in the beaten-up Citroën. You could set your watch by their ritual. Promptly at six forty-five Monsieur Leblanc retired with the newspaper Le Jura to Café Bréguet, where some of the locals were at the bar and already on the day’s first ballon of wine. Meanwhile, Mallory in her gray flannel poncho and wicker baskets on each arm made her way from market stall to market stall, buying fresh produce for the day’s menu.
Mallory was a magnificent sight to behold, pounding the streets like a workhorse, each of her hard breaths exploding in white smoke. The bulk orders—a half dozen rabbits, perhaps, or fifty-kilo sacks of potatoes—were delivered by van to Le Saule Pleureur no later than nine thirty a.m. But the chanterelles and the delicate Belgium endive and perhaps a paper cone of juniper berries, they went into the baskets hanging from Mallory’s meaty arms.
On that particular morning, just weeks after we arrived in town, Mallory as usual started her shopping at Iten et Fils, the fishmonger that occupied a white-tiled corner shop on Place Prunelle.
“What’s that?”
Monsieur Iten bit the corner of his mustache.
“Eh?”
“Behind you. Move. What’s that there?”
Iten stepped aside and Madame Mallory got her first good view of a cardboard box on the counter. It took just a second before she knew the claws waving in the air belonged to crayfish scrabbling over one another.
“Wonderful,” said Mallory. “I haven’t seen crayfish in months. They look fresh and lively. Are they French?”
“Non, madame. Spanish.”
“Never mind. I’ll take them.”
“Non, madame. Je regrette.”
“Pardon?”
Iten wiped a knife on a tea towel.
“I’m sorry Madame Mallory, but he just came in and . . . and . . . bought them.”
“Who?”
“Monsieur Haji. And his son.”
Mallory squinted. She couldn’t quite comprehend what Monsieur Iten had just said. “That Indian? He bought these?”
“Oui, madame.”
“Let me get this straight, Iten. I have come to you—and before you, to your father—for over thirty years, every morning, and bought your best fish. And now you are telling me, at some godforsaken hour, an Indian came in here and bought what you knew I would buy? Is that what you are telling me?”
Monsieur Iten looked down at the floor. “I am sorry. But his manner, you see. He is very . . . charming.”
“I see. So what, then, are you going to offer me? Yesterday’s moules?”
“Ah, non, madame, please. Don’t be like that. You know you are my most valued customer. I . . . I have here some lovely perch.”
Iten scurried over to the cooler and took out a silver tray of striped perch, each the size of a child’s palm.
“Very fresh, see? Caught this morning in Lac Vissey. You make such lovely perch amandine, Madame Mallory. I thought you would like these.”
Madame Mallory decided to teach poor Monsieur Iten a lesson and she blew out of the shop like a winter storm. Still furious, she marched up to the open-air market in the square, her heels grinding into the rubbery carpet of discarded cabbage leaves.
At first Mallory flew through the two rows of vegetable stalls like a bird of prey, her eyes darting about over the shoulders of housewives. The vendors saw her but knew it was unwise to say a word during her first sweep through the market, unless they wanted a vicious tongue-lashing. Her second cruise through, however, one was permitted to engage her, and each farmer did his best to attract the famous chef to his produce.
“Bonjour, Madame Mallory. Lovely day. Have you seen my Williams pears?”
“I did, Madame Picard. Not very nice.”
The vendor next to Madame Picard guffawed.
“You are wrong,” called Madame Picard, sipping a thermos cup of milky coffee. “Wonderful flavor.”
Mallory turned back to Madame Picard’s stall and the other vendors turned their heads to see what would happen next.
“What’s this, Madame Picard?” snapped the chef. Mallory took the top pear off the pyramid and tore off its small sticker proclaiming WILLIAMS QUALITÉ. Under the sticker, a small black hole. Mallory did the same to the next pear, and the next.
“And what’s this? And this?”
The other vendors laughed as the red-faced Madame Picard rushed to restack her pears.
“Hiding worm holes under ‘quality’ stickers. Disgraceful.”
Madame Mallory turned her back on the Widow Picard and walked to a stall at the far end of the first row, where a shrunken white-haired couple in matching aprons and looking rather like salt-and-pepper shakers stood behind the counter.
“Bonjour, Madame Mallory.”
Mallory grunted a good-morning and pointed to a basket of waxy purple orbs on the floor at the back of the stall.
“I’ll take the aubergines. All of them.”
“I am sorry, madame, but they are not for sale.”
“They’ve been sold?”
“Oui, madame.”
Mallory felt a tightening in her chest. “To the Indian?”
“Oui, madame. A half hour ago.”
“I’ll take the zucchini, then.”
The elderly man looked pained. “I am sorry.”
For a few moments Mallory was unable to move, to speak even. But suddenly, from the far end of Lumière’s markets, a booming voice in accented English rose majestically above the general din.
Mallory’s head jerked toward the sound of the voice, and before the elderly farmer couple could recover, Mallory was barging through the early morning market crowd, her baskets bunched in front like a snowplow, forcing the other shoppers out of her way.
Papa and I were at the edges of the market bidding for two dozen red and green Tupperware bowls. The trader—a tough Pole—was holding firm, and Papa’s approach to such obstinacy was to roar his price at an ever-louder decibel. The final touch was the menacing pacing back and forth in front of the stall, intimidating other potential customers from coming forward, a tactic I had seen him use to devastating effect in the markets of Bombay.
But in Lumière there was the slight obstacle of language. Papa’s only foreign language was English, and it was my job to translate his ravings into my schoolboy French. I did not mind: this was how I eventually met several girls my age, such as Chantal, the mushroom picker from across the valley, her nails always gritty with dark humus. In this case, however, the Pole across the table could speak no English and just a little French, and that protected him from Papa’s full frontal assault. So what we had was a stalemate. The Pole simply crossed his arms across his chest and shook his head.