Gourmet Rhapsody Page 6

  Where the crust meets the soft bread, on the other hand, our inner gaze encounters a mill; the dust from the wheat whirls around the millstone, the air is infested with a volatile powder; and the picture changes once again, because your palate has just taken possession of the honeycombed foam, now freed from its yoke, and the labor of the jaw can begin. It is indeed bread, and yet you can eat it like cake; but chewing bread, unlike pastry, or even sweet breakfast rolls, leads to a surprising result, to a . . . sticky result. As you chew and chew upon the soft interior, a sticky mass is formed, which no air can penetrate: the bread adheres—yes, like glue. If you have never dared to take a mass of soft dough between your teeth and tongue and palate and cheeks, you have never thrilled to the feeling of jubilant ardor that viscosity can convey. It is no longer bread, nor dough, nor cake that we are masticating; it is something like our own self, what our own secret tissues must taste like, as we knead them with our expert mouths, saliva and yeast mingling in ambiguous fraternity.

  Around the table, we ruminated in silence, conscientiously. There do exist some strange communions, after all . . . We were far from the rituals and banquets of institutional ceremonies—it was not a religious act of breaking bread and rendering grace to Heaven, yet we were nevertheless united in a holy communion that caused us to attain, unbeknownst to us, a higher, all-decisive truth. And while a few of us might have been vaguely aware of this mystical orison, misguidedly attributing it to the pleasure of being together, of sharing a consecrated delicacy, within the convivial and relaxed atmosphere of summer holidays, I knew that their misapprehension arose for lack of the words and knowledge with which to express and illuminate such an exalted moment. The rural countryside, far from town; the gentle way of life and organic elasticity: there is all that in bread, whether the bread is from here or elsewhere. That is what, without the shadow of a doubt, makes bread the preferred vehicle for inner contemplation, for drifting in search of ourselves.

  After this initial appetizing contact, I would prepare for the next round of hostilities. Fresh salad—no need to point out the degree to which carrots and potatoes cut into tiny regular dice and seasoned with a hint of coriander are an improvement upon their more coarsely chopped fellows; then a bounty of tagines, causing me to lick my chops and stuff my face like an angel, without remorse or regret. But my mouth had not forgotten, my mouth remembered that this festive meal had been inaugurated by the encounter between its mandibles and a tender doughy mouthful, and even though to prove my gratitude I would go on to swoop the morsel into my plate to mop up all the sauce, I knew my heart was no longer in it. With bread, as with everything, it is the first time that counts.

  I recall the flowery luxuriance of the Oudaia tea room, whence we could look out onto Salé and the sea, in the distance, just below the river which flowed beneath the city walls; the colorful narrow streets of the medina; the jasmine cascading down the walls of the inner courtyards, a poor man’s wealth a thousand leagues from the luxury of perfumers in the West; life under the sun, in the end, which is not the same as life elsewhere, because living outdoors one views space differently . . . and the bread, round and flat, a dazzling aubade to the union of the flesh. I can tell . . . I can tell that I am close. There is something of all this in the thing I am searching for. There is something . . . but that’s not quite it . . . bread . . . bread . . . But what else could it be? What else on earth do men live by, if not bread?

  (Lotte)

  Rue Delbet

  I always said, I don’t want to go there, I like Granny but I don’t like Grampy, he frightens me, he has big black eyes, and then he’s never happy to see us, never happy at all. That’s why it’s weird today. Because for once I would like to go there, I’d like to see Granny, and then Rick, and Maman is the one who doesn’t want to go, she says Granpy is sick and we’re going to disturb him. Granpy sick? It can’t be. Jean is sick, yes, he’s very sick but that doesn’t matter, I like to be with him, I like it in summer when we go to the pebbles together, he takes a pebble and then he looks at it and he invents a story, if it’s a big fat one it’s a man who’s eaten too much, so now he can’t walk anymore, he rolls, and rolls, or else it’s a little flat one, he’s been walked on and boom, flat as a pancake, and lots of other stories like that.

  As for Granpy, he never told me any stories, never, he doesn’t like stories, and he doesn’t like children, and he doesn’t like noise, I remember one day, at Rudegrenele I was playing ni­cely with Rick and then with Anaïs, Paul’s sister’s daughter, we were having a good laugh, and he turned and looked at us, a nasty look, a really nasty look, I felt like crying and hiding, I didn’t feel like laughing anymore at all, and he said to Granny but he didn’t even look at her, “This noise must stop.” So Granny put on her sad expression, she didn’t answer him, she came to talk to us and she said, “Come, children, let’s go play out on the square, Granpy is tired.” When we got back from the square Granpy had left and we didn’t see him anymore, we had dinner with Granny and Maman, and Adèle, Paul’s sister, and we had a really good time again but I could see that Granny was sad.

  When I ask Maman questions she always answers, No, everything is fine, all that is grownups’ business, I mustn’t worry about all that and she loves me very very much. That I know. But I also know a lot of other things. I know that Granpy doesn’t love Granny anymore, and that Granny doesn’t love herself anymore, that Granny loves Jean more than Maman or Laura but Jean hates Granpy and Granpy thinks Jean’s disgusting. I know that Granpy thinks my papa is an imbecile. I know that Papa is mad at Maman for being Granpy’s daughter, but also because she wanted to have me, and he didn’t want any children, or at least not yet: I also know that Papa loves me very much and maybe even that he’s mad at Maman for loving me so much when he didn’t want me at all, and I know Maman is mad at me a little sometimes because she wanted me when Papa didn’t. Oh yes, I know all that. I know that they’re all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don’t understand that it’s really their own self that they’re mad at.

  People think that children don’t know anything. It’s enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.

  The Farm

  Rue de Grenelle, the Bedroom

  I eventually ended up at this spruce little farm on the Côte de Nacre after two hours of fruitless efforts to find a gastro inn that had just recently opened and which, I’d been told, was somewhere near Colleville and the American cemetery. I have always liked this part of Normandy. Not for its cider, or its apples, its cream or its poulets flambés au calvados but for its vast beaches, where the strand is laid bare by the low tide, and where I truly grasped the meaning of the expression “between heaven and earth.” I took long walks along Omaha Beach, I was somewhat stunned by solitude and space, I watched the gulls and the dogs roaming in the sand, I raised my palm to shelter my eyes to study the horizon, which taught me nothing, and I felt content and trusting, reinvigorated by this silent escapade.

  That morning, a fine summer morning, clear and cool, I had been wandering in search of my gastro inn with increasing bad humor, lost down unlikely sunken lanes, gleaning along the way only contradictory directions. I eventually set off down a little road that ended in a cul-de-sac in the yard of a Norman stone farmhouse with a porch crowned by an impressive wisteria, windows overwhelmed by red geraniums, and freshly painted white shutters. At the front of the house, in the shade of a linden tree, a table had been set and five people (four men and a woman) were finishing their lunch. They did not know the address of the place I was looking for. When I inquired, for lack of a better solution, whether there was somewhere not too far away where I could find something to eat, they sniffed with a hint of scorn. “Better off eating at home,” said one of the men in a tone that was heavy with innuendo. The man I assumed to be the master of the house placed his hand on the roof of my car, leaned in toward me, and suggested without fur
ther ado that I share their luncheon with them. I accepted.

  Sitting beneath the linden tree, which was so fragrant that I nearly lost my appetite, I listened to them conversing over their coffee and calvados while the farmer, a plump young woman with a winsome dimple on either side of the corners of her mouth, served me with a smile.

  Four fine de claire oysters, cold and salty, with neither lemon nor seasoning. Swallowed slowly, blessed for the imperious chill with which they cloaked my palate. “Oh, this is all that is left, there was a gross, twelve dozen, but the men, when they come in from work, have an appetite.” She laughed softly.

  Four oysters, unembellished. A complete and uncompromising prelude, royal in unpolished modesty. A glass of dry white wine, chilled, with a fruity refinement—“it’s a Saché, we have a cousin in Touraine who gives us a good price!”

  This is just to work up an appetite. The men next to me are unbelievably garrulous, talking cars. Cars that run. Cars that don’t. Then there are those that grumble, or rebel, or make a fuss, or backfire, or chug breathlessly, or have trouble up the hills, or skid in the turns, the ones that judder, or smoke, or hiccup, or cough, or nose up, or strike back. Memories of a particularly stubborn Simca 1100 are honored with a long tirade. A nasty cold-assed bitch of a car that wouldn’t start even in the middle of summer. They all nod their head, indignantly.

  Two thin slices of raw smoked ham, silky and supple along languid folds, some salted butter, a hunk of bread. An overdose of vigorous taste and smooth texture: improbable but delectable. Another glass of the same white wine, which will accompany me for the rest of the meal. An enticing, charming, beguiling prologue.

  “Yes, the forest is full of it,” is the reply to my polite question about game in the region. “In fact,” says Serge (there are also Claude and Christian, the master of the house, but I can’t recall the name of the other fellow), “it’s often the cause of accidents.”

  A few green asparagus stems, plum and tender enough to make you swoon. “This will keep you going while the rest is reheating,” says the young woman hastily, no doubt thinking that I am surprised to see such a meager main course. “No, no,” I said, “it’s magnificent.” Exquisite tone, rural, almost bucolic. She blushes and hurries away with a laugh.

  Next to me, the conversation continues in finer form than ever, about game animals unexpectedly crossing the road through the forest. There is talk of a certain Germain who, on a moonless night, ran over an adventurous wild boar and, thinking in the dark that it was dead, tossed it into his trunk (“Just think, what luck!”), set off on his way. Meanwhile the beast gradually came to and started to kick about in the trunk (“What a confounded ruckus!”) and then, by dint of so much thumping with its muzzle, dented the car and managed to escape into the night. They are laughing like children.

  Leftovers (enough to feed a regiment) of fattened chicken. An overabundance of cream, chunks of bacon, a pinch of black pepper, potatoes which I suspect come from Noirmoutier—and not an ounce of fat.

  The conversation has taken a detour, setting off down the sinuous winding road of local spirits. Good ones, not-so-good ones, and those that are frankly undrinkable; illicit liquors, ciders that are too fermented, with rotten apples that were poorly washed and poorly crushed and poorly picked; supermarket calvados that tastes like syrup, and then the true calvados, which scorches your throat but perfumes your palate. The liquor of a certain renowned Père Joseph sets everyone off with peals of laughter: a disinfectant, that much is for sure, but not a digestif!

  “I’m so sorry,” says the young woman, who does not speak with the same accent as her husband, “there’s no more cheese, I have to go shopping this afternoon.”

  I learn that Thierry Coulard’s dog, a fine creature renowned for its sobriety, forgot itself one day and began to lap up a small puddle beneath the barrel, and either it had a seizure or was poisoned, and fell down stiff as a board and only escaped the claws of death thanks to an exceptionally sturdy constitution. They are holding their sides with mirth, I have trouble catching my breath.

  An apple tart, with thin, crisp flaky pastry, and wedges of golden fruit insolently veiled beneath the discreet caramel sugar crystals. I finish the bottle. At five in the afternoon she serves me a coffee with calvados. The men get to their feet, slap me on the back and say they’re going back to work, and that if I’m still there in the evening they’ll be glad to see me. I hug them like brothers and promise to come back someday, with a good bottle.

  It was there, beneath the centuries-old tree at the farm in Colleville, to the tune of pigs making a confounded ruckus (to the utmost delight of those who will tell the story one day), that I enjoyed one of my finest meals. The food was simple and delicious, but what I really devoured—to the point of relegating oysters, ham, asparagus and chicken to the rank of secondary accompaniments—was the truculence of my hosts’ language: the syntax may have been brutally sloppy, but it was oh so warm in its juvenile authenticity. I feasted on their words, yes, the words flowing at that get-together of country brothers, the sort of words that, at times, delight one much more than the pleasures of the flesh. Words: repositories for singular realities which they then transform into moments in an anthology, magicians that change the face of reality by adorning it with the right to become memorable, to be placed in a library of memories. Life exists only by virtue of the osmosis of words and facts, where the former encase the latter in ceremonial dress. Thus, the words of my chance acquaintances, crowning the meal with an unprecedented grace, had almost formed the substance of my feast in spite of myself, and what I had enjoyed so merrily was the verb, not the meat.

  I am roused from my reverie by a dull sound, one that cannot fool my ears. Through my half-closed lids I can see Anna slipping furtively by in the corridor. This ability my wife has to move forward without walking, without altering her progression with the usual interruption of steps, has always made me suspect that such aristocratic fluidity was created for my sake alone. Anna . . . If you knew how happy I have been to rediscover that labile afternoon, between eau-de-vie and forest, tossing my head back to gulp down the eternity of words! Perhaps those are the inner workings of my vocation, between what is said, and what is eaten . . . and the flavor, still, escapes me, dizzyingly . . . I am drawn by my thoughts toward my life in the provinces . . . a large house . . . long walks through the fields . . . the dog at my feet, joyful and innocent . . .

  (Venus)

  Rue de Grenelle, the Study

  I am a primitive Venus, a small fertility goddess with a naked alabaster body: large, generous hips, a prominent belly and breasts falling to my rounded thighs, which lie one against the other in a somewhat comically shy attitude. A woman rather than a gazelle: everything in me invokes flesh, not contemplation. And yet, he looks at me, he never stops looking at me, the instant he lifts his eyes from his page, the instant he begins to meditate and sets his long dark gaze upon me without seeing me. Other times, however, he scrutinizes me thoughtfully, trying to penetrate my immobile sculpture’s soul, I can tell he is a whisker away from establishing contact, from guessing, conversing, and then suddenly he gives up and I have the exasperating feeling that I have just attended the performance of a man who is looking at himself in a two-way mirror, never suspecting for a moment that from behind the mirror, someone is observing him. And sometimes his fingertips graze over me, he rubs the folds of my splendid womanhood, wanders with his palms over my featureless face, and upon my ivory surface I can feel his fluid, all untamed emotional maladjustment.When he sits down at his desk and pulls the cord of the big copper lamp, and a ray of warm light flows onto my shoulders, I am reborn each time from this demiurgical light, I reemerge from nowhere, and this is the way it is for him with the flesh and blood creatures who cross his path in life, they are absent from memory when he turns his back upon them and, when once again they enter the field of his perception, they offer him a presence he cannot grasp. He
looks at them, too, without seeing them, apprehends them in a void, the way a blind man gropes before him, because he thinks he is grasping hold of something, when in fact he is merely stirring up evanescence, embracing the void. His watchful, intelligent eyes are separated from what they see by an invisible veil that hinders his judgment, renders opaque that which could, however, be so easily illuminated by his wit. And the veil is that of his rigidity, of the distraught autocrat, with his perpetual anxiety that the person opposite him might turn out to be something other than an object he can dismiss from his vision at leisure, that this person might not be a freedom that could recognize his own . . .