Chez Moi Page 2
When I come back out, I notice they’ve taken out a packet of cigarettes. I am gripped with an irresistible urge to announce that Chez moi is a non-smoking establishment, but that would be stupid: I smoke myself and it would be unbelievably bad for business. The gluttons have already finished their first course. Didn’t their mummies teach them to eat slowly, putting the spoon down between each mouthful? The scrolls of Camel smoke merge with the clouds of steam from the saucepan. We become ghost-like figures, lost in thick mist. They don’t seem to mind and I congratulate myself that my first two customers aren’t persnickety. Passers-by have started gathering, intrigued by the mysterious fog. This is the beginning of my glory. A man rushes in to save us, looming out of the mists yelling ‘do you want me to call the fire brigade?’ Startled, we burst out laughing. You know, there’s a wonderful atmosphere here.
After reassuring him that everything is all right, I suggest he sits down. I open the door to create a draught, and offer him an ice-cold beer. ‘While I’m here, I’ll have a bite to eat,’ he says, loosening his tie. I catch him eyeing the girls’ amber-coloured hips, and make up my mind to give them their desserts on the house.
‘This is too good!’ one of them exclaims, dipping a piece of bread in her sauce when I go over to clear their plates. I do like them, actually. I make a mental note that they’re my lucky mascots. I think I can picture a particular way of running the business: I could attract pretty women by offering them certain advantages and privileges. Crowds would converge on my restaurant to feast their eyes and my profits would be guaranteed. Any kind of sale, as a matter of principle, eventually reminds us of the slave trade or immoral earnings. I try to think of a counter-example but cannot find one. I’m not ashamed: I knew all that when I opened Chez moi. It’s fine with me. Absolutely fine.
Last night I dreamed the Beatles came and had supper in my restaurant. All four of them. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and the other one, the one whose name I can never remember. I was really pleased when I saw them coming in but worried too, because of this recurring memory lapse. What if I have to introduce them to someone? Just as I am about to name the fourth Beatle, bang, I go blank, nothing comes to me, or actually it does, but it’s worse than nothing: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed. Luckily there aren’t any other customers so I don’t need to worry about being caught out like that. I tell them how much I like them, and they answer with touching modesty and sit down at the table closest to the kitchen. We’re instantly immersed in a radiant familiarity, with me at my oven and them at their table but all in it together as if they chose those seats specially, so they could talk to me. I feel honoured, but at the same time I think their consideration for me is quite natural; this is a dream, remember.
I take their order and that brings on more worrying: Paul McCartney wants fish fingers (I forgot to say they all speak very good French, without a trace of an accent). Fish fingers don’t feature on my menu and I immediately hate myself for the arrogant way I put my menus together. What makes so-called serious food, dishes that are meant to be refined - cod loin in blackberry jus with wild mushrooms, millefeuilles of lamb and aubergines, torte of mascarpone with grapes and cognac - what makes them any more worthy of being served at Chez moi? I find my own elitism repulsive. To crown my embarrassment, Yoko Ono, who I hadn’t even noticed until then (she probably wasn’t there at the beginning of the dream: that’s the problem with dreams, people come in and out at the wrong time), stares at me sternly. She’s right. I’ve slavishly followed bourgeois notions of cooking when, when… stammering won’t get you anywhere, come on! Get into your kitchen! I go to the fridge and take out a beautiful slab of monkfish. Armed with my thinnest knife I cut into its rich dense meat, well away from the central bone, which is too bloody for my liking, and the stomach where the flesh becomes softer, floppier, thinner, like wide ears on some washed-out sea monster. I cut out a rectangular piece which reminds me of those little blocks of wood I used to buy in loads of five hundred for my son so that he could build wonderful fortresses. It shouldn’t be allowed for real memories to get mixed up in the flimsy structure of dreams because the pain it causes is unbearable. This fish ‘block’ is perfect: smooth, white and supple. I make a thick coating for it, browning some breadcrumbs in butter. The crumbs aren’t quite rounded enough for my liking, not as rounded as on the fish fingers I remember from the days when I used to fry them up for my son, who loved them, secretly congratulating himself for living in a world where shapes were governed with such stupefying coherence: building blocks were followed by fish blocks and, at bath time (he liked having his bath after tea), blocks of soap. What am I talking about? I’ve no idea what went through my son’s head. That’s the other drawback with dreams, the propensity to hallucinate, the illusion of intellectual omnipotence. My golden breadcrumbs are ready. I dip the fish in a touch of egg-white and roll it in them, and it works: when I’ve run over the plate of tiny nuggets four times it is perfectly disguised, perfectly unrecognizable as a monkfish fillet and perfectly recognizable as fish fingers. When I lay it on Paul McCartney’s plate, he shrieks with joy and, probably by way of thanking me, starts singing ‘Norwegian Wood’. They all sing along with him. Even Yoko Ono. Guitars and other instruments join in, somewhere in the wings. It’s wonderful. It makes me cry. It makes me cry because that’s the record that was playing the first time I made love.
I remember it very well. I was on the floor on my back. The urge had been getting stronger for months and months. I kept laughing, not because it was so strange, not because I felt ashamed (I didn’t at all) and not because I was embarrassed. I wanted to laugh because it made me so happy, that discovery, the intoxicating belief that I was inventing something. I thought of Archimedes and Copernicus. I thought of Newton and Einstein. I thought of Galileo. In the depths of me, just like in the universe, this untapped seam, like gravitational force, in me, just like the earth, this inexhaustible source of energy. Why hadn’t anyone told me about it before? How could I not have guessed? And was it for free? And could everyone have it? And was it really that easy? So easy? I didn’t think about not being on the pill, or that the boy hadn’t used a condom, that I might get pregnant or catch God knows what. I just thought this is crazy. And while all this was going on the Beatles sang ‘Norwegian Wood’.
How come we live several different lives? Maybe I’m generalizing a bit. Maybe I’m the only one who feels like this. I will only die once and yet, during the time I’m allotted, I will have lived a series of related but clearly distinct existences.
At thirty, I wasn’t the same person I am now. At eight, I was a very individual little thing. I see my adolescence as quite autonomous in relation to what followed. The woman I am now is rootless, unattached, incomprehensibly alone. I used to have lots of people round me. I had become very sociable. Initially I was shy, then reserved, then sensible… finally mad.
It’s a quarter to midnight and I run a tiny bath in the giant sink. Only newborns are given baths in basins. Newborns and me. I put in the plug and let the warm water fill up till it’s twenty-five centimetres deep. There are another thirty centimetres to the edge. I climb onto the work surface. The metal shutters are closed. I am standing here naked on my draining board and I’d like someone to see me because it’s an unusual situation and it deserves an audience. I sit down with my back against the smooth steel, and it doesn’t overflow. I like the arithmetical precision of the thing. Being quite incapable of calculating anything, I used guesswork and it didn’t let me down. In order to take up less space I put my arms under my bent knees, ending up - more or less - in what’s called the crow position. In the days of the Santo Salto circus I used to warm up with the performers. We did a sort of yoga, stretching and pushing exercises. My limbs, which had never been subjected to any form of discipline, made cracking noises and my muscles trembled but I didn’t let it put me off and no one made fun of me. Pretty much all of us had some previous conviction, had gone astray, and not one of us
would have dreamed of commenting on someone else’s behaviour. We had no choice but to tolerate each other. It was a world within a world, oblivious to the rules governing the rest of society and indifferent to its conventions. You could become a mother at fourteen or forty-eight. Stay single or have three husbands. You might be an aunt of the children you were bringing up, and you could work in the kitchens one day and on the till the next; and that never stopped anyone pampering the horses or feeding the dogs. Our animals were particularly intelligent. We liked to take in a great variety of species and didn’t believe tigers necessarily made for a better performance than dogs or cats. The frontier between the domesticated and the wild was unclear. We constantly blurred it, allowing some to be wild while firmly believing in our own ability to subdue the untameable. No one spoke, we all shouted, rarely using verbs or adjectives but relying heavily on names, nicknames and onomatopoeia. Hup. Bang. Woah. Half an hour before going into the ring we were a bit like stick insects, motionless, alert, subsumed into our ropes, batons, poles, nets and barres, indistinguishable from our own accessories, camouflaged. Our animals fell silent and we all exchanged looks exhaustively: men and dogs, goats and young girls, snakes and women. It was a cold world but not chillingly so. We didn’t have time for feelings, but physical contact compensated for the shortcoming. There was always a hand on your back, your shoulder, your elbow, an instep on the inside of your thigh, a head against your stomach, a knee wedged in your groin. We formed a collective Karma Sutra peculiarly devoid of eroticism. Skin is a platform, a flat surface but, like the earth, it is also rounded and self-contained and made up of interdependent elements. We take a long time to understand our own skin, the paradoxical way it’s both a surface and an envelope, its singularity and multiplicity: the skin on our feet, the skin on our necks, our chins, genitals, ribs, the sole same organ keeping itself constantly informed. I thought I knew my skin but one day a hand on the back of my neck - an unexpected, or should I say un-hoped for, hand - showed me I was wrong: there was a whole world left to discover. That was before Santo Salto and it’s a long story which I will have to go into, but at the moment I’m talking about skin which, like the wild animals we lived with, can be domesticated and tamed.
My first week at the circus I was electrified by the constant hugging, the warmth exchanged, taken from someone else, sold on, lost, then found again. When the circus manager, who everyone called boss, explained what he wanted me to do he put his hands on my shoulders and looked me right in the eye. I couldn’t see why he needed to be quite so emphatic. It was only a question of the right amount of meat and carbohydrate, of vegetable supplies and limiting the use of spices. It was only later, after a few days, when I had a pot of cayenne pepper in my hand, that I understood the point of his touching me: it was a way of physically imprinting his words in my skin, because things were only ever said once. If I hadn’t remembered the weight of the boss’s hands on my shoulders as I sprinkled the pepper I would probably have used too much, the dish would have been sent back to the kitchen and I would have been fired. I couldn’t afford to be. I had no money, no home and absolutely no structure left in my life. If I had left the circus, it would have been only too easy for me to dissolve into the streets, to disappear because I had been disowned, no one wanted to see me, no one, not my family nor my friends. I had become such dubious company that no one would have noticed if I had run away, dispersed into thin air or died. What sort of thread did I manage to cling to? We always think there’s a thread until the day we meet a truly good magician or a truly good acrobat. Sometimes there’s no trick, sometimes it all comes down to training. I suppose I had been well-trained for survival. Yes, that was it. That’s my skill, or perhaps it’s a gift.
It’s not just that I adapt easily, it’s that I revel in adapting. Does it go back to my early childhood? Is there a doctor or a fortune-teller who could establish that? This sink here, for example: when I step into it, I don’t think about the fact that I haven’t got a bath; instead I’m delighted by the telescopic tap and the shower head that the facetious manufacturer thought of adding. When I’m in a bath, I don’t think enamel, oh, a lovely enamelled bath (actually, I don’t know if it’s enamel or china, that smooth heavy substance which makes me think of unpasteurized milk and is such a heartbreaking white). No, I don’t miss that noble surface; instead I wonder at the versatility of stainless steel: sturdy but light, hollow but undentable, neither hot nor cold by nature but successively hot and cold depending on the temperature of what is in contact with it, like an echo of my own system for thermal regulation - cold with cold people, warm with the warm, no little nuances, no balancing out, just joining in. It’s what some people would call flexibility, the same flexibility that means I’m quite happy to take a bath in a sink fifty centimetres across. I sometimes construct complex day-dreams on the subject: I’m on a desert island, I’ve been abandoned on top of a glacier, I’m stuck in a cave several hundred metres underground. The most worrying thing is that these nightmarish imaginings don’t arouse any fear in me. Quite the opposite: these disastrous scenarios with me as their heroine help me defeat the endless banalities I have to get through every day. Just living, now that’s difficult, away from whirlwinds, away from danger, calmly looking at the cork board with bills pinned to it and telling yourself you’ll honour them on the ninetieth day and that, if there’s not enough money, you’ll use money you don’t even have and risk going bankrupt, like a surfer in the tube of a giant wave, except he’s risking death whereas I’m not risking anything: at worst repossession, failure and extreme poverty, and, even though these spectres are terrifying, even though I know how bitter they feel from having come too close to them already, they’re nothing compared to death. So yes, that’s what I have to do, every day, follow the straight stretch of road onto the next day, get up - early, very early - do the shopping, clean, chop, think, warm through, fry, defrost, strain, count, serve, count again, clean some more, throw away, take back, scour, peel some more, press, blanch, break up and knead. At night, sitting in my bathwater, I go back over it and the list of my daily activities, the sum of all those things is nothing, and yet it’s everything. I try to define my reason for living. It can’t be formulated or pinned down, it’s a kernel of pure joy that I never quite reach and is linked - although I don’t know how - to sensations in my skin. I get out of my sink, dry myself carefully and rub myself with oil that I don’t use for cooking, because I do still have some boundaries, in spite of everything.
The florist arrives armed with his first salvaged bouquet.
‘I don’t open till eleven,’ he tells me.
He’s got time for a cup of coffee, then. That is how I interpret this information he has given me and which would otherwise be pointless.
‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘If you like,’ he says, as if the pleasure would be mine.
He sits down on the moleskin banquette for women while I nip behind the counter to get away from his breath. I adore my percolator. And that’s not too strong a word, I really adore it, like an idol. There it stands, gleaming, with its handles and buttons, its tubes and grids like the dashboard of a private jet. I can’t get over the luxury of it. My percolator is a Hirschmüller, that’s a German subsidiary of the original manufacturers Kruger, based in Neufchatel in Switzerland. I’ve got quite hot on kitchen equipment thanks to my new friend the salesman on the Avenue de la République. It’s an old model but nearly new, and he gave me fantastic credit on it, the sort of credit to make me think he was in love with me if I weren’t so lucid: what he likes is the use I’m putting my machines to, and that’s a step in the right direction, I tell myself, as I slot the little receptacle into the breech.
‘I like it strong,’ the florist says. ‘If you don’t mind.’
I’m tempted to give him some coffee beans too, for him to chew on to purify his exhalations.
‘No problem,’ I tell him. ‘I’m the same.’
‘I’m Vincent.’<
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‘I’m Myriam.’
I tear open the brown paper packaging.
‘I haven’t got a vase,’ I say apologetically, looking at the flowers: grim-looking auriculas, carnations with brown-tipped petals and gypsophila so ready to drop its flowers that my draining board is instantly covered in a pretty carpet of snow. There are also two tall stems of some plant I don’t recognize, probably something exotic, which culminate in a sort of wrinkled scarlet quiff which, in spite of myself, I think looks like you know what.
‘What a pain!’ he says instead of running back to his store-room to offer me his chipped pots, out-dated single-stem vases, rusty buckets, I don’t know, all those containers probably cluttering up the back of his shop which he keeps for some inexplicable reason.
I sacrifice two wine carafes and three glasses.
The coffee’s ready. The floral ambiance is a bit exuberant for my liking, and the bouquets give off a smell of tired gardens which has a powerful effect on my sensitive nerves.
‘How’s business?’ Vincent asks, dipping his pale lips in his strong coffee.
I think for a moment: it’s the eleventh day since I opened and I’ve got €300 in takings and €4000 in debts, not to mention my various loans.