The Hundred-Foot Journey (21 page)

“A bit heavy-handed with the juniper berries, I would say. You only need three or four to feel their presence. Otherwise, the taste, it’s too German. But, really, other than that, very well done, particularly the untraditional side dishes. Simple but effective. I must say, Hassan, you have the right feel for game.”

The explosion was immediate.

“C’est merde. Complètement merde.”

Mallory’s public compliment, highly unusual, was just too much for Jean-Pierre. Unable to contain his fury any longer, Jean-Pierre snapped his foot hard, which in turn sent his clog shooting forward like a missile at the startled-looking Marcel on the far side of the kitchen. But the apprentice showed immense grace and speed for a boy his size, for he dropped to the floor like a felled stag at the crucial moment. The footwear continued on its trajectory and hit the kitchen’s far wall with a loud crack, taking down on its descent a jug sitting on a shelf, which crashed loudly to the floor in a shower of shattering pottery shards.

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 of
sous 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 local
Oudon
River 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.

Slowly, our hands swinging, we started talking about the offer from Paris, delicately, neither of us really discussing the great underlying question, as to what might happen to us. A stream fell suddenly down the mountain to our left, tumbling and cascading, its lace of white water leaving a trail of mossy carpet on shiny veins of feldspar. I remember, like it was yesterday, the way Margaret looked that morning, the faded blue jeans, the light blue fleece, the day’s wind naturally raising color on her cheeks.

“It’s a good offer, Hassan. Well deserved. You must take it.”

“Yes. It is. And yet . . .”

Something was holding me back, an oppressive knot sitting inside my rib cage, and I didn’t really understand, at that point, what it was all about. But the main river, the fast-running Oudon to our right, took a bend at that point, creating a long deep pool and a forest flat at its banks. It was the perfect setting for lunch, and I deposited our rucksack on a lichen-covered boulder, under the immensely ancient pines, lindens, and horse chestnuts, the icy river in sight just beyond their trunks.

We stretched ourselves flat across a rock and languidly ate our lunch, the apples and cheese and the thick-crusted bread Margaret herself had made, which we slathered in lemon curd. I am not sure at what stage we heard the voices, but I remember the way they came to us through the woods, distant at first, but then ever louder as the figures moved across the forest floor, hunched, like crabs scuttling across a seabed. Margaret and I lay still, dozy with contentment, watching in silence as the figures approached.

It was mushroom season and this damp part of the state forest was locally known for prize cèpes and chanterelles. Madame Picard’s family had for years controlled the mushroom-picking license for this patch of the forest, and the widow was the first to come into view. Swathed in her trademark black sweater and skirt, under a billowing rain slicker, Madame Picard jumped from forest clump to forest clump like a mountain goat, kicking rotten birch tree stumps with her army boots, to reveal hidden clusters of
pieds-de-mouton
under the rotting cover.

Suddenly a squawk of excitement, as Madame Picard stood upright, clutching in her grimy hand
trompettes-de-la-mort,
the coal black and prized chanterelle that indeed does look like a trumpet of death but is actually very tasty and safe to eat. She turned to her lumbering companion behind her, a large man panting heavily and lugging two large baskets that were filling rapidly with their musty finds.

“Be careful with these
trompettes
. Leave them on the top. So they won’t get crushed.”

“Yes, bossy madame.”

Papa stood there like a bear in the forest, still in his favorite tan kurta, but buried now under a massive waxed coat that perhaps had once belonged to the late Monsieur Picard. On his feet, he, too, wore army boots, but in his case they were untied, the tongues pulled this way and that, the laces unraveled and wet and dragging behind him in the forest, making him appear, of all things, like a rapper from Paris’s suburbs.

Margaret was just about to call out, to wave them over, but, I don’t know why, I put my hand on her forearm and shook my head.

“I tink it is time we rested. And ate. I am rather hungry.”

“You will drive me crazy, Abbas! We just got started. At least one full basket before lunch.”

Papa sighed.

But when Madame Picard turned, to bend down with her stubby knife and cut another mushroom out from the forest floor, Papa saw something that was of great interest. For he tiptoed forward, reached in between Madame Picard’s legs for a grab, and yelled, “I found a truffle!” Madame Picard instantly screamed and almost fell forward on her face. But when she found her balance and stood again, the two of them were roaring with laughter. Clearly, she had rather enjoyed Papa’s goose.

I was horrified. My head instantly filled with images of my mother and Papa, walking together along Juhu Beach, from so long ago. I felt a heart pang. She was so elegant and understated, my Mummy, unlike this crude woman before me. But after a few moments I finally saw Papa as he truly was, just a man snatching a few of life’s simple pleasures.

He was not at that moment thinking about the responsibilities of the restaurant, or of the family, all of which consumed his waking hours day in and day out. He was just an aging man, with a few decades more of life, enjoying his brief time on earth. I was suddenly ashamed of myself. Papa, who shouldered so much for so many, he, of all people, deserved this carefree and joyous moment without my brow furrowed in distaste. And the more I watched Madame Picard and Papa carrying on like randy teenagers—both slightly bent, both hustlers—the more I realized this was entirely right.

It came to me then: it was not my family that was having trouble letting me go to Paris, it was me not wanting to let go of them. This, I would say, was the moment when I finally grew up, because it was in that wet forest that I was able to say to myself,
Good-bye, Papa! I am off to see the world!

So the hardest good-bye, those final days, was in the end not with the family, or with Madame Mallory, but with Margaret herself. That talented and decent sous chef was just five years older than I, but the affair we had while we both worked at Le Saule Pleureur, it made me a man.