Five Quarters of the Orange (3 page)

I
had been back for almost six years when I opened the
crêperie
. By then I had money set aside, custom, acceptance. I had a boy working for me on the farm—a boy from Courlé, not from one of the Families—and I took on a girl to help with the service. I started with only five tables—the trick has always been to think small at first, to avoid alarming people—but eventually I had double that, plus what I could fit on the
terrasse
in front on fine days. I kept it simple. My menu was limited to buckwheat pancakes with a choice of fillings, plus one main dish every day and a selection of desserts. That way I could handle the cooking myself, leaving Lise to take the orders. I called the place Crêpe Framboise after the house specialty, a sweet pancake with raspberry
coulis
and my homemade liqueur, and I smiled a little to myself, thinking of their reaction if they could have known…. Several of my regulars even came to calling the place Chez Framboise, which made me smile all the more.

It was at this point that men began to pay attention to me again. You understand, I had become quite a wealthy woman by Les Laveuses standards. I was barely fifty, after all. Plus I could cook and keep house…. A number of men paid a kind of court to me, honest, good men like Gilbert Dupré and Jean-Louis Lelassiant, lazy men like Rambert Lecoz, who wanted a lifetime meal ticket. Even Paul, sweet Paul Hourias with his drooping nicotine-streaked mustache and his silences. Of course anything like that was out of the question. This was one foolishness I could never succumb to. Not that it caused me more than the occasional pang of regret; no. I had the business. I had my mother’s farm, my memories. A husband would lose me all that. There would be no way I could conceal forever my assumed identity, and though the villagers might have forgiven me my origins at first, they could not forget six years of deceit. So I refused every offer, the
tentative and the bold, until I was generally held to be first inconsolable, then impregnable and then, finally, years later, too old.

I had been in Les Laveuses for almost ten years. For the last five I had invited Pistache and her family to stay during the summer holidays. I watched the children grow from curious big-eyed bundles to small brightly colored birds flying over my meadow and through my orchard on invisible wings. I have a good daughter in Pistache. Noisette (my secret favorite) is more like me; sly and rebellious, black eyes like mine and a heart full of wildness and resentment. I could have stopped her leaving—a word, a smile might have done it—but I did not; fearing, perhaps, that she would turn me into my mother. Her letters are flat and dutiful. Her marriage has ended badly. She works as a waitress in an all-night café in Montreal. She refuses my offers of money. Pistache is the woman Reinette might have been, plump and trusting, gentle with her children and fierce in their defense, soft brown hair and eyes as green as the nut from which she takes her name. Through her, through her children I have learned to relive the good parts of my childhood.

For them I learned to be a mother again, cooking pancakes and thick herb-and-apple sausages. I made jam for them from figs and green tomatoes and sour cherries and quinces. I let them play with the little brown mischievous goats and feed them crusts and pieces of carrot. We fed the hens, stroked the soft noses of the ponies, collected sorrel for the rabbits. I showed them the river and how to reach the sunny sandbanks. I warned them—with such a catch in my heart—of the dangers, the snakes, roots, eddies, quicksand, made them promise never,
never
to swim there. I showed them the woods beyond, the best places to find mushrooms, the ways of telling the fake chanterelle from the true, the sour bilberries growing wild under the thicket. This was the childhood my daughters should have had. Instead there was the wild coast of Côte d’Armor, where Hervé and I lived for a time, the windy beaches, pine forests, slate-roofed stone houses. I tried to be a good mother to them, really I did, but I felt there was always
something missing. I realize now it was this house, this farm, these fields, the sleepy, reeking Loire of Les Laveuses. This is what I wanted for them, and I began again with my grandchildren. Indulging them, I indulged myself.

I like to think my mother might have done the same, given the chance. I imagine her as a placid grandmother, accepting my rebukes—
Really, Mother, you’re going to spoil those children rotten
—with an impenitent twinkle, and it does not seem as impossible as once it did. Or maybe I’m reinventing her. Maybe she really
was
as I remember her—a stony woman who never smiled, who watched me with that look of flat, incomprehensible hunger.

She never saw her granddaughters, never even knew they existed. I told Hervé my parents were dead, and he never questioned the lie. His father was a fisherman, his mother a little round partridge of a woman who sold the fish on the markets. I pulled them around me like a borrowed blanket, knowing that one day I would have to go back into the cold without them. A good man, Hervé, a calm man with no sharp edges in him upon which I could be cut. I loved him—not in the searing, desperate way I loved Tomas; but enough.

When he died in 1976—struck by lightning on an eel-fishing trip with his father—my grief was tinged with a feeling of inevitability, almost of relief. It had been good for a time, yes. But business—
life
—has to move on. I went back to Les Laveuses eighteen months later with the feeling of waking up after a long, dark sleep.

It may seem strange to you that I waited for so long before reading my mother’s album. It was my only legacy—except for the Périgord truffle—and in five years I had barely glanced at it. Of course, I knew so many of the recipes by heart that I hardly needed to read them, but even so…I had not even been present for the reading of the will. I can’t tell you on what day she died, though I can tell you where; in an old folks’ home in Vitré called La Gautraye, of stomach cancer. She’s buried there too, in the local cemetery, though I only went there once. Her grave is close to the far wall, by the refuse bins.
Mirabelle DARTIGEN
, it says, then some dates. I notice with little surprise that my mother lied to us about her age.

I don’t really know what prompted my first studies of her album. It was my first summer in Les Laveuses. There had been a drought, and the Loire was maybe a couple of meters lower than usual, showing ugly shrunken verges like the stump of a sick tooth. Roots straggled down into the water, bleached yellow-white by the sun, and children played among the roots on the sandbanks, paddling barefoot in the filthy brown puddles, poking with sticks at the rubbish floating from upstream. Until then I had avoided looking at the album, feeling absurdly at fault, a
voyeuse
, as if my mother might come in at any time and see me reading her strange secrets…. Truth is, I didn’t
want
to know her secrets. Like walking into a room at night and hearing your parents making love: an inner voice told me it was wrong, and it took more than ten years for me to understand that the voice I heard was not my mother’s, but my own.

As I said, much of what she wrote was incomprehensible. The language—Italian-sounding, unpronounceable—in which much of the album was written was alien to me, and after a few abortive attempts to decipher it, I abandoned the attempt. The recipes were clear enough, printed in blue or violet ink, the mad scrawlings, poems, drawings, accounts between them written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover.

The words are written, very small, above a recipe for white puddings. I found these short anecdotes disturbing, with their joyless humor.

In other places my mother speaks of her trees as if they are living people—
Stayed up all night with Belle Yvonne, she was so sick with cold
. And though she only ever seems to refer to her children by abbreviation—
R-C, Cass
and
Fra
—my father is never mentioned. Never. For many years I wondered why. Of course, I had no way of knowing what was written in the other sections, the secret sections. My father—what little I knew of him—might never have existed.

T
hen came the business with the article. I didn’t read it myself, you understand; it came in the kind of magazine that seems to view food simply as a style accessory—
This year we’re all eating couscous, darling, it’s absolutely de rigueur
—while for me food is simply food, a pleasure for the senses, a carefully constructed piece of ephemera, like fireworks, hard work sometimes, but not to be taken seriously, not
art
, for heaven’s sake, in one end and out the other. Anyway, there it was one day, in one of these fashion magazines. “Travels down the Loire,” or some such thing, a famous chef sampling restaurants on his way to the coast. I remember him too: a thin little man with his own salt and pepper pots wrapped in a napkin, and a notebook on his lap. He had my
paëlla antillaise
and the warm artichoke salad, then a piece of my mother’s
kouign amann
, with my own
cidre bouché
and a glass of
liqueur framboise
to finish. He asked me a lot of questions about my recipes, wanted to see my kitchen, my garden, was amazed when I showed him my cellar with its shelves of
terrines
and preserves and
aromatic oils (walnut, rosemary, truffle) and vinegars (raspberry, lavender, sour apple), asked where I trained and seemed almost upset when the question made me laugh.

Perhaps I said too much. I was flattered, you see. Invited him to taste this and that. A slice of
rillettes
, another of my
saucisson sec
. A sip of my pear liqueur, the
poiré
my mother used to make in October with the windfall pears, fermenting already as they lay on the hot ground, gloved with brown wasps so that we had to use wooden tongs to pick them up…. I showed him the truffle my mother had left me, carefully preserved in the oil like a fly in amber, and smiled as his eyes widened in amazement.

Have you any idea what a thing like that is worth?

Yes, I was flattered in my vanity. A little lonely too, perhaps; glad to talk to this man who knew my language, who could name the herbs in a
terrine
as he tasted it and who told me I was too good for this place, that it was a crime…. Perhaps I dreamed a little. I should have known better.

The article came a few months later. Someone brought it to me, torn out of the magazine. A photograph of the
crêperie
, a couple of paragraphs.

“Visitors to Angers in search of authentic gourmet cuisine may head for the prestigious Aux Délices Dessanges. In so doing they would certainly miss one of the most exciting discoveries of my travels down the Loire….” Frantically I tried to remember whether I had told him about Yannick. “Behind the unpretentious façade of a country farmhouse a culinary miracle is at work.” A great deal of nonsense followed about “country traditions given a new lease of life by this lady’s creative genius”—impatiently, with a rising sense of panic I scanned the page for signs of the inevitable. A single mention of the name Dartigen and all my careful building work might begin to crumble….

It may seem I’m exaggerating. I’m not. The war is vividly remembered in Les Laveuses. There are people here who still don’t speak to
each other. Denise Mouriac and Lucile Dupré, Jean-Marie Bonet and Colin Brassaud. Wasn’t there that business in Angers a few years ago, when an old woman was found locked in a room above a top-floor flat? Her parents had shut her there in 1945, when they found out she’d collaborated with the Germans. She was sixteen. Fifty years later they brought her out, old and mad, when her father finally died.

And what about those old men—eighty, ninety, some of them—locked away for war crimes? Blind old men, sick old men sweetened by dementia, their faces slack and uncomprehending. Impossible to believe that they might once have been young. Impossible to imagine bloody dreams inside those fragile, forgetful skulls. Smash the vessel, the essence evades you. The crime takes on a life—a justification—of its own.

“By a strange coincidence, the owner of Crêpe Framboise, Mme. Françoise Simon, just happens to be related to the owner of Aux Délices Dessanges…”

My breath stopped. I felt as if a flake of fire had blocked my windpipe and suddenly I was underwater, brown river clutching me under, fingers of flame reaching into my throat, my lungs….

“…our very own Laure Dessanges! Strange to say that she hasn’t managed to find out many of her aunt’s secrets. I for one much preferred the unpretentious charm of Crêpe Framboise to any of Laure’s elegant (but all too meager!) offerings.”

I breathed again. Not the nephew, but the niece. I had escaped discovery.

I promised myself then that there would be no more foolishness. No more talking to kind food writers. A photographer from another Paris magazine came to interview me a week later, but I refused to see him. Requests for interviews came by the post, but I left them unanswered. A publisher wrote to me with an offer to write a book of recipes. For the first time Crêpe Framboise was deluged by people
from Angers, by tourists, by elegant people with flashy new cars. I turned them away by the dozen. I had my regulars, my ten to fifteen tables. I could not accommodate so many people.

I tried to behave as normally as I could. I refused to take advance bookings. People queued on the pavement. I had to engage another waitress, but otherwise I ignored the unwelcome attention. Even when the little food writer returned to argue—to reason with me—I would not listen to him. No, I would not allow him to use my recipes in his column. No, there was to be no book. No pictures. Crêpe Framboise would stay as it was, a provincial
crêperie
.

I knew that if I stonewalled for long enough they would leave me alone. But by that time the damage was done. Now Laure and Yannick knew where to find me.

Cassis must have told them. He had settled in a flat near the center of Paris, and though he had never been a good correspondent he wrote to me occasionally. His letters were filled with reports of his famous daughter-in-law, his fine son. Well, after the article and the stir it caused, they made it their business to find me. They brought Cassis with them, like a present. They seemed to think we would be moved, somehow, at seeing each other again after so many years, but though his eyes watered in a rheumy, sentimental sort of way, mine stayed resolutely dry. There was hardly a trace of the older brother with whom I had shared so much; he was fat now, his features lost in a shapeless dough, his nose reddened, his cheeks crack-glazed with broken veins, his smile vacillating. In place of what I once felt for him—the hero worship of the big brother who in my mind could do anything, climb the highest tree, brave wild bees to steal their honey, swim
right across
the Loire at its broadest point—there was nothing but a faint nostalgia colored with contempt. All that was such a long time ago, after all. The fat man at the door was a stranger.

At first they were clever. They asked for nothing. They were concerned for me living alone, gave me presents—a food processor, shocked that I didn’t already have one, a winter coat, a radio—offered
to take me out…. Even invited me to their restaurant once, a big barn of a place with gingham-print
faux
-marble tables and neon signs and dried starfish and brightly colored plastic crabs wreathed in fisherman’s netting on the walls. I commented, rather diffidently, on the décor.

“Well,
Mamie
, it’s what you’d call
kitsch
,” explained Laure kindly, patting my hand. “I don’t suppose
you’re
interested in things like that, but believe me, in Paris, this is very fashionable.” She leveled her teeth at me. She has very white, very large teeth, and her hair is the color of fresh paprika. She and Yannick often touch and kiss each other in public. I have to say it all rather embarrassed me. The meal was…modern, I suppose. I’m no judge of such things. Some kind of salad in a bland dressing, lots of little vegetables cut to look like flowers. Might have been some endive in there, but mostly just plain old lettuce leaves and radishes and carrots in fancy shapes. Then a piece of hake (a nice piece, I have to say, but very small) with a white wine shallot sauce and a piece of mint on top—don’t ask me why. Then a sliver of pear tartlet fussed over with chocolate sauce, dusted sugar, chocolate curls. Looking furtively at the menu, I noticed a great deal of self-congratulatory stuff along the line of “a
nougatine
of assorted candies on a mouthwatering bed of wafer-thin pastry, bound with thick dark chocolate and served with a tangy apricot
couli
s.” Sounded like a plain old
florentine
to me, and when I saw it, it looked no bigger than a five-franc piece. You’d have thought Moses brought it down from the mountain, to read what
they’d
put about it. And the prices! Five times the price of my most expensive menu, and that was without the wine. Course, I didn’t pay for any of it. But I was beginning to think that all the same, there might be a hidden price in all this sudden attention.

There was.

Two months later came the first proposal. A thousand francs to me if I would give them my recipe for
paëlla antillaise
and allow them to put it on their menu.
Mamie Framboise’s paëlla antillaise
, as mentioned in
Hôte & Cuisine
(July 1992) by Jules Lemarchand. At first I thought
it was a joke.
A delicate blend of freshly caught seafood subtly melded with green bananas, pineapple, muscatels and saffron rice
…. I laughed. Didn’t they have enough recipes of their own?

“Don’t laugh,
Mamie
.” Yannick was almost curt, his bright black eyes very close to mine. “I mean, Laure and I would be
so
grateful….” He gave a wide, open smile.

“Now don’t be coy,
Mamie
.” I wished they wouldn’t call me that. Laure put her cool bare arm around me. “I’d make sure everyone knew it was
your
recipe.”

I relented. I don’t actually mind giving out my recipes; after all, I’ve given enough out already to people in Les Laveuses. I’d give them the
paëlla antillaise
for nothing, plus anything else they took a shine to, but on condition that they left
Mamie Framboise
off the menu. I’d had one narrow escape. I wasn’t going to court more attention.

They agreed so quickly to my demands and with so little argument. And three weeks later the recipe for
Mamie Framboise’s paëlla antillaise
appeared in
Hôte & Cuisine
, flanked by a gushing article by Laure Dessanges. “I hope to be able to bring you more of Mamie Framboise’s country recipes soon,” she promised. “Till then, you can taste them for yourself at Aux Délices Dessanges, Rue des Romarins, Angers.”

I suppose they never imagined that I would actually read the article. Perhaps they thought that I hadn’t meant what I’d told them. When I spoke to them about it they were apologetic, like children caught out in some endearing prank. The dish was already proving extremely successful, and there were plans for an entire
Mamie Framboise
section of the menu, including my
couscous à la provençale
, my
cassoulet trois haricots
and
Mamie’s Famous Pancakes
.

“You see,
Mamie
,” explained Yannick winningly. “The beauty of it is that we’re not even expecting you to do anything. Just to be yourself. To be
natural
.”

“I could run a column in the magazine,” added Laure. “‘Mamie Framboise Advises,’ something like that. Of course,
you
wouldn’t need to write it.
I’d
do all that.” She beamed at me, as if I were some child who needed reassurance.

They’d brought Cassis with them again, and he too was beaming, though he looked confused, as if this was all a little too much for him.

“But I told you.” I kept my voice level, hard, to keep it from trembling. “I told you before. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

Cassis looked at me, bewildered. “But it’s such a good chance for my son,” he pleaded. “Think what the publicity might do for him.”

Yannick coughed. “What my father means,” he amended hastily, “is that we could
all
benefit from the situation. The possibilities are endless if the thing catches on. We could market Mamie Framboise jams, Mamie Framboise biscuits…. Of course,
Mamie
, you’d have a substantial percentage…”

I shook my head. “You’re not listening,” I said in a louder voice. “I don’t
want
publicity. I don’t want a percentage. I’m not interested.”

Yannick and Laure exchanged glances.

“And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” I said sharply, “that you might just as easily do it
without
my consent—after all, a name and a photograph’s all you
really
need—then listen to this. If I hear of one more so-called Mamie Framboise recipe appearing in that magazine—in
any
magazine—then I’ll be on the phone to the editor of that magazine that very day. I’ll sell him the rights to every recipe I’ve got. Hell, I’ll
give
them to him for free.”

I was out of breath, my heart hammering with rage and fear. But no one railroads Mirabelle Dartigen’s daughter. They knew I meant what I said too. I could see it in their faces.

Helplessly, they protested:
“Mamie—”

“And stop calling me
Mamie!”

“Let me talk to her.” That was Cassis, rising with difficulty from
his chair. I noticed that age had shrunk him; had softly sunk him into himself, like a failed soufflé. Even that small effort caused him to wheeze painfully.

“In the garden.”

Sitting on a fallen tree trunk beside the disused well I felt an odd sense of doubling, as if the old Cassis might pull aside the fat-man’s mask from his face and reappear as before, intense, reckless and wild.

“Why are you doing this, Boise?” he demanded. “Is it because of me?