The Hundred-Foot Journey (13 page)

“You won’t believe what I saw in the kitchen.”

Mallory swallowed a forkful of yogurt and rice and okra and fish. “They’ll have the health inspectors in there shortly. The boy spilled—”

But Mallory did not finish the sentence. She looked down at her plate, her brow knitted. She took another forkful, chewing methodically, letting the flavors sensually roll across her tongue. Her fingers leaped across the table and dug into Monsieur Leblanc’s forearm.

“What is it, Gertrude? Good God. You look awful. What is it? Too hot?”

Madame Mallory trembled, shook her head in disbelief.

She took another forkful. But now all uncertainty, all shreds of hope, drained away and she was left with the awful truth.

It was there.

Madame Mallory dropped her fork with a clatter
. “Ah, non, non, non,”
she moaned.

“For God’s sake, Gertrude, tell me, what is wrong? You’re frightening me.”

Never before had Monsieur Leblanc seen such a terrifying look. It was, he thought, the picture of someone who had lost her reason for living.

“He has it,” she hissed. “He has it.”

“What? He has what? Who has what?”

“The boy,” she croaked. “The boy has what . . . Oh, the injustice of life.”

Mallory brought her napkin up to her lips to muffle the squeaks involuntarily popping out of her mouth.

“Oh. Oh.”

Diners at the other tables turned to look at Madame Mallory and she suddenly became aware she was an object of fascination. Gathering all her inner strength, she sat up straight, patted her bun of hair, a frozen smile plastered across her face. Heads slowly went back to their own food.

“Didn’t you taste it?” Mallory whispered.

Her eyes were ablaze, as if cayenne pepper and curry had internally set her afire. “Crude, yes, but there. Under all the fire, hidden, brought out by the cool yogurt. There, yes, distinctly there. It’s in the point and counterpoint of tastes.”

Monsieur Leblanc slapped his napkin down on the table. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Gertrude? Now, speak clearly.”

But Madame Mallory, to his utter amazement, lowered her head and began to weep into her napkin. Never before—never in their thirty-four-year partnership—had he seen her cry. Let alone in public.

“Talent,” she said through the muffled clutch of her napkin. “Talent that cannot be learned. That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along in a chef once a generation. Don’t you understand? He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an
artist
. A
great artist
.”

Unable to contain herself anymore, Madame Mallory burst into heartfelt sobs, great wracking gasps of pain that filled the restaurant and brought the entire room to a standstill.

Papa ran over. “What? What matter wit’ her? Too hot?”

Monsieur Leblanc begged their apologies, paid the bill, pulled the distraught chef up by the elbows, and half dragged the weeping woman back across the street to her restaurant.

The church dog howled.

“Non, non,”
she wailed. “I can’t bear my guests to see me like this.”

Leblanc managed to get her up the back stairs of Le Saule Pleureur, up the winding servants’ stairway to her attic rooms, where the wretched woman collapsed on to the sofa.

“Leave me—”

“I’ll be just downstairs if you need—”

“Get out! Just get out! You don’t understand. No one understands.”

“As you wish, Gertrude,” he said quietly. “Good night.”

He gently eased shut her door. But in the darkened room Mallory suddenly missed Leblanc’s kind presence, and she turned to the shut door, her mouth agape. But it was too late. Leblanc was gone. And the elderly woman, all alone, threw her face down on the sofa, and sobbed like a teenager.

Mallory slept poorly that fateful night of Maison Mumbai’s opening, flopping about her bed all night like a distressed fish. Her sleep was a montage of horrid visions, of giant copper vats in which a mysteriously delicious food simmered. It was, she realized with a gasp, the long-searched-for Soup of Life and she had to have its recipe. But no matter how she circled and circled, how she tried to get a foothold on the pots’ smooth sides, she was unable to taste the
potage
. She kept on sliding down and landing in a heap on the floor, a Lilliputian, too small to learn the cauldron’s great mystery.

Mallory shook herself awake when it was still dark, when the first sparrows twittered in her beloved willow tree outside her window, the whiplike branches now covered in a seasonal
gelée
.

Mallory rose stiffly and went about her dark room with a stiff-legged determination. She violently brushed her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror without looking at herself—at the jowls of age, the bitterness around the brows. She folded her white bosom into a wire bra, dropped a navy blue wool dress over her head, and gave her hair a couple of violent yanks with a steel brush. In no time she was clattering down the attic stairs and banging on Monsieur Leblanc’s door.

“Get up. It’s time for the shops.”

In his blackened room, under a cocoon of warm duvet, an exhausted Monsieur Leblanc rubbed his face. He turned his creaky neck toward the luminous alarm clock.

“Are you mad?” he yelled through the door. “My God, it’s only four thirty. I went to bed just a few hours ago.”

“Only four thirty! Only four thirty! Do you think the world waits for us? Get up, Henri. I want to be first at the shops.”

We arrived in the town bleary-eyed but triumphant at seven thirty that morning, later than usual because the family celebrated the successful opening into the early hours. Our first stop, as always, was Monsieur Iten, the fishmonger’s shop smelling tartly of pickled herring. Several customers stood in line before us, and we took our place in line, Papa trying out his pidgin French on the wife of Lumière’s sawmill manager.

“Maison Mumbai. Bon, nah?”

“Pardon?”

It was our turn. “Good morning,” bellowed Papa. “What special ting can you offer us today, Monsieur Iten? Everyone loved Hassan’s fish curry last night.”

Monsieur Iten was a lurid red, as if he had been drinking, and he stood stiff-legged at the back of the shop.

“Monsieur Haji,” he slurred. “No fish.”

“Ha, ha. I like a little joke.”

“No fish.”

Papa looked down at the trays of silvery salmon, at the Brittany crabs with their claws rubber-banded together, at the ceramic dish of marinated Norwegian herring.

“Wah dis? Fish, no?”

“Fish, yes. Sold fish.”

Papa looked around and the other villagers backed away from him, studying their feet, sticking fingers into string bags.

“What going on here?”

We left the shop—empty-handed—and made our way across the square to the markets. Villagers who had dined at our restaurant just the night before lowered their heads and avoided our looks. Sullen mumbles returned our greetings. At every stall we were met with the same cold response. That particular gourd or that cabbage or that tray of eggs was “with regret” already sold. We stood alone in the center of the market, ignored, ankle-deep in purple tissue and wilted lettuce leaves.

“Haar,” Papa exhaled, as he saw the gray loden coat of Madame Mallory suddenly disappear around a corner stall.

I tugged at Papa’s elbow and made him look at Madame Picard’s wind-seared face, a twisted mask of loathing riveted at the spot where we had just seen the disappearing tail of the town’s famous chef.

Widow Picard turned in our direction and gestured with her filthy hand for Papa and me to follow her behind the canvas flap of her stall. “That bitch,” she hissed, letting go of the flap. “Mallory. She forbid us to sell to you.”

“How?” Papa asked. “How can she stop you from selling us tings?”

“Pff.”
The Widow Picard waved her hand in the air. “That woman’s got her nose in everyone’s business. She knows everyone’s secrets. I overheard her promising to report Monsieur and Madame Rigault—such a nice elderly couple—to the tax authorities. Just because they might not ring up every centime they sell. Imagine. Such a terrible, terrible woman.”

“But why she hate us?” Papa asked.

Madame Picard spat a thick wad of phlegm into a heap of discarded cabbage leaves. “Who knows?” she said, shrugging her shoulders and rubbing her hands together to stay warm. “Probably because you’re foreigners. You don’t belong here.”

Papa stood rigid for a few seconds and then abruptly left. He didn’t even say good-bye. Wanting to make up for his rudeness, I profusely thanked Madame Picard for her help. She pressed two bruised pears into my hand. Said she’d like to help more but she couldn’t. “She got me, too, you know.”

Madame Picard spat again, reminding me of the old crones of Bombay.

“Watch out, boy. She’s evil, that one.”

I caught up with Papa in the town parking lot, his great weight making the Mercedes sag as he dropped himself into the driver’s seat and pensively leaned over the wheel. Papa did not rage, just looked immensely sad as he stared out into the parking lot and the Alps beyond. And that was more upsetting to me than anything else he could have done.

“What, Papa?”

“I am thinking of your mother. These people, we cannot hide from them. Yaar? You agree? These people lived on the Napean Sea Road. And now we find them here in Lumière, too.”

“Oh, Papa.”

I was afraid the depression of Southall was about to return, but my shaky voice seemed to stir Papa from his melancholy, for he turned toward me with a smile as he started the engine.

“Hassan. Don’t worry. We are Hajis.”

He placed his immense hand on my knee and squeezed it until I yelped.

“This time we don’t run.”

His arm was around the back of my seat while he sent the car lurching backward onto the road, the other cars behind us honking furiously. And there was cold steel in his voice, when he put the Mercedes in drive and we roared down to the light.

“This time we fight.”

Papa drove us to Clairvaux-les-Lacs, the provincial city seventy kilometers away. We spent the entire day negotiating with suppliers, crossing back and forth across the cobblestone backstreets, and playing one fruit-and-vegetable wholesaler against another.

I never saw Papa so brilliant an operator—so charming, so ruthlessly determined to bend the will of others, and yet so generous in making them feel they had won.

We bought a refrigeration truck, secondhand, and hired a driver. Late morning we called Maison Mumbai and my father ordered my sister to feed the lunch crowd; he said I’d be back in time to take charge of the evening shift. After a consultation at the local branch of Société Générale and wiring funds for the truck, Papa and I loaded the back of our dilapidated Mercedes with haunches of mutton, baskets of shellfish and pike, orange mesh sacks of potato and cauliflower and
mange tout
.

We never missed a beat.

No customer would have even suspected we had had difficulties.

The following morning Madame Mallory flung open the door of her restaurant, breathed deeply, and felt good. She smelled the snow that now dusted the tops of the Jura rock faces overlooking Lumière, and everywhere rhinestone frost, not yet burned off by the morning sun, glittered theatrically back at her. St. Augustine was finishing a peal of late-morning bells as a mature stag suddenly made a dash across a silvery field to the safety of the pine forests. Hunting season. It reminded her to go see Monsieur Berger about her haunch of venison, already hanging in his shed.

It was just as she was basking in this cold-morning beauty that a truck rumbled down the road. She heard the sound of its gears grinding into low, and she turned her head to follow the rattle. The truck mounted the curb into the old Dufour estate, the large gold lettering garishly leaping from its back.

MAISON MUMBAI
.

“Ah, non. Non.”

Hot-orange-and-pink Urdu poems squiggled across the truck’s sides. Strips of black crêpe hung from the fenders.
HONK PLEASE
, read an English sign attached to the back door.
BEWARE
, said another,
MOTHER’S PRAYERS ARE WITH US
.

The driver jumped from a front seat fringed with tassels. He snapped open the back doors, revealing to the world an entire cooler of high-quality lamb and poultry and onion sacks.

Madame Mallory slammed the door shut with such force Monsieur Leblanc jumped, a blotch of ink splattering across the accounts.

“Gertrude—”

“Oh, leave me alone. Why haven’t you done those accounts yet? Honestly, it’s taking you longer and longer. Maybe we should get a younger man in to keep the books.”

The chef did not wait for a response, or, indeed, look to see how her remark had cut Monsieur Leblanc to the quick. Instead, Mallory barreled down the hall, through the dining room, slamming open the kitchen door.

“Where is the terrine, Margaret? Let me taste it.”

The sous chef, just twenty-two years old, handed Madame Mallory a fork and gingerly slid over to the master chef the
cassata
-like brick of spinach, langoustine, and pumpkin. The elderly woman concentrated, smacked her lips as she let the flavors dissolve on her tongue.

“How long have you been with me, Margaret? Three years?”

“Six years, Madame.”

“Six years. And you still do not know how to make a proper terrine? It’s almost unbelievable. This terrine tastes like a baby’s bottom. It’s tasteless, mushy, horrible.” She swept the offending dish off the counter and into the trash.

“Now do it right.”

Margaret, choking back tears, dipped below the counter to retrieve another glass dish.

“And you, Jean-Pierre, don’t look so shocked. Your daube has become unacceptable. Just unacceptable. The meat should be so tender it shreds with a fork—your daube is bitter, burnt. And look, look how you’re doing that. Where did you learn that? Not from me.”

In her eagerness to get across the kitchen, Madame Mallory pushed young Marcel out of the way, and the apprentice stumbled, gashing his arm painfully on the sharp edge of the steel stove.