Stunned silence.
We braced ourselves for Madame Mallory’s inevitable explosion, but to our astonishment it never occurred. Instead, Jean-Pierre, still red-faced with anger, hobbled forward, one clog on and one clog off, and stood before Madame Mallory, shaking his fist at her.
“How can you do this to us?” he fumed. “C’est incroyable. We, who have been so loyal, have put up with your tyranny for so long, have devoted ourselves to your kitchen, cast aside for this little shit? Who is this boy, your plaything here? Where is your decency?”
Madame Mallory was the color of Asiago cheese.
Remarkable as it sounds, until that point she’d had absolutely no idea that by singling me out, by taking me under her wing, by making me so obviously her “chosen” one, she had deeply offended her devoted chef de cuisine. But when in that moment she realized what she had done, that as a result of her insensitivity poor Jean-Pierre was tortured with jealousy, her emotions were visibly stirred.
You could see it in her face. For if there was one human condition that Madame Mallory understood, it was jealousy, the intense pain of realizing there are those in the world who simply are greater than we are, surpassing us, in some profound way, in all our accomplishments. She did not show outward signs, of course, for that was not her way, but you could see the strong emotions trembling just behind her eyes. And the pain she felt, it was not for herself, of this I am sure, but for her chef de cuisine, long-suffering like her in the dark shadows of Le Saule Pleureur’s kitchen.
But Jean-Pierre was off on a tear, strutting back and forth in front of the range, peeling off his whites and theatrically throwing them on the kitchen floor. “I can’t work here any longer. I’ve had enough. You impossible woman!” he yelled.
At that remark, however, Monsieur Leblanc stepped forward, to protectively shield Madame Mallory from Jean-Pierre’s anger.
“Now stop that, you ungrateful bastard. You have crossed the line.”
But Mallory stepped forward, too, and, much to our amazement, took Jean-Pierre’s shaking fist in her hand and brought it up to her lips so she could kiss his raw and red knuckles.
“Cher Jean-Pierre. You are entirely right. Forgive me.”
Jean-Pierre came to a screeching halt. He was unnerved, maybe even frightened, by this strange Madame Mallory before him, and he looked to me like a child who had just seen a parent act entirely out of character because of something he had done. So now Jean-Pierre fell over himself trying to apologize, but Madame Mallory put a finger to his lips and sternly said, “Hush. Stop there. There is no need.”
She held his hands to her and said, with her usual authority, “Jean-Pierre, please, you must understand. Hassan, he is not like you and me. He is different. Lumière and Le Saule Pleureur, they can’t hold him. You’ll see. He has much farther to travel. He will not be with us long.”
Madame Mallory then made Jean-Pierre sit on a stool, which he did, hanging his head in shame. She asked Marcel to fetch him some water, which the boy brought, two hands holding the glass, because he was trembling so. After Jean-Pierre gulped the water down and he seemed calmer, Chef Mallory made him look up at her again.
“You and I, this place is in our blood, and we will both live and die here, in the kitchen of Le Saule Pleureur. Hassan, he has the makings of a great chef, it is true, and he has talent beyond anything you and I possess. But he is like a visitor from another planet, and in some ways he is to be pitied, for the distance he has yet to travel, the hardships he has yet to endure. Believe me. He is not my favorite. You are.”
The air, it was electric. But Chef Mallory simply looked over at Monsieur Leblanc and said matter-of-factly, “Henri. Take a note. We must call the solicitor tomorrow. It must be made clear, once and for all, that when I am gone, Jean-Pierre will inherit Le Saule Pleureur.”
And she was right. Three years after I began my apprenticeship at Le Saule Pleureur, I was ready to move on. An offer from a top restaurant in Paris, on the Right Bank, behind the Élysée Palace, stoked my ambition and lured me north. Madame Mallory said she thought the offer ofsous chef, at a very busy restaurant in Paris, and with the possibility of promotion to premier sous chef, it was exactly what I needed. “I’ve taught you what I can,” she said. “Now you need to season. This job will do that.”
So it was, in essence, decided, and a kind of bittersweet mixture of sadness and excitement was heavy in the air. And the ambivalence of this period is crystallized for me in that day when Margaret and I drove to the gorge at the end of Lumière’s valley, on our day off, for a walk along the localOudonRiver running around the base of the ragged-edged Le Massif.
Our outing started in town, when we first went by the local cash-and-carry to pick up lunch, some Cantal and Morbier cheese and a few apples. Margaret and I drifted through the shop’s narrow aisles, past the hazelnuts in red mesh sacks and the clouded Corsican olive oils. Margaret was just ahead of me, passing along the section of the aisles devoted to chocolates and biscuits, when a knot of men in their early twenties, Lumière’s handball team, came boisterously down the other side of the aisle, looking to purchase some snacks and beer for their sports club. I remember they had ruddy faces and were immensely fit and their hair was wet from having just come from the showers.
Margaret’s face lit up when she saw them, they had all been through the local school together, and she turned and said, “Go pay. I will catch up with you in a minute.” So I turned around and crossed over into the next aisle on my way to the cashier. But a pot of imported lemon curd caught my eye, which I wanted to have with the local cheeses, a kind of ersatz chutney, and I popped the jar into the wire basket on my arm before continuing down the aisle.
It was when I was directly on the other side of the stack containing the chocolates and biscuits that I heard a male voice asking what had happened to her “nègre blanc,” followed by all the other men laughing. I remember pausing—listening intently—but I never heard Margaret challenge the remark. She just ignored it, pretended it never happened, and then joined their laughter as they continued with their provincial palaver and teasing on some other subject. And there was a moment of disappointment, I must confess, when I held my breath and waited for her response, but I also knew Margaret was anything but a racist, so I pushed on and paid the bill and she joined me shortly thereafter.
We stashed our goodies in her Renault 5 and then drove to the end of the valley, parking in the state forest’s sanctioned parking lot, where fall’s yellow and orange leaves created a kind of natural papier-mâché carpet under our feet. There we laced on good walking boots and shrugged on our kit, and slammed the car trunk shut, finally setting off at a brisk pace, hands intertwined, across the seventeenth-century stone bridge that spanned the river.
It was a sparkling fall day but summer was dying and a slight melancholia fluttered down on us each time a yellowed leaf fell to the ground. The river below the bridge was as clear and sharp as Sapphire gin, the water gushing and gurgling around fat rocks. Small brook trout flitted about the pools, sucking in flies, or working their fins as they sulked in eddies. A picture-perfect stone cottage stood in the hollow on the far side of the river, and a state employee, a forestier, lived in the cottage with his new wife and baby, and at that moment when we crossed the bridge birch smoke was rising from its chimney.
Margaret and I followed the forest trail downstream, the river to our right, the sheer rock face of Le Massif, the snowcapped Jura mountain, rising majestically to our left. I recall that the forest air was cool and damp and mossy, filled with a water spray that fell finely from the mountain’s granite face soaring high above us.