The Hundred-Foot Journey Page 11

  “And what of it?” she mocked. “Aren’t you the mayor of this town? Aren’t you meant to preserve our way of life? You shouldn’t be encouraging these foreigners. It’s a disgrace. Why are you eating there?”

  “Because, Gertrude, the food is excellent. A nice change.”

  My heavens. Like he’d hit her. Madame Mallory let out a horrible squawk, and then turned abruptly, fleeing back to the safety of Le Saule Pleureur.

  It was most curious that the very things Madame Mallory hated most about Maison Mumbai—the hysteria, the lack of professionalism—now took root in her own impeccably run restaurant. Chaos overwhelmed the endlessly rehearsed rituals of the two-star inn, and Mallory, although she would never have admitted it, had only herself to blame for this turn of events.

  Margaret, the sensitive sous chef, spent the evening kissing the crucifix around her neck and trembling as she went about her duties. Jean-Pierre was still stewing over Mallory’s claim he had “no feel for game,” and throughout the evening he cursed a blue streak and violently kicked the stove’s steel side panels with his wooden clogs. And young Marcel was so rattled he thrice dropped plates when the kitchen’s swinging doors suddenly slammed open.

  Nor were things much better out front. The wine steward was terrified Madame Mallory might find another stain on his tunic, and that evening he took unusual pains to stay spotless, pouring wine from as great a distance as possible from the table, his bottom unattractively stuck out into the aisle. And when he aerated wine in a glass, he swirled the wine in the crystal with too much nervous energy, sloshing the precious amber out onto the floor, much to the guests’ annoyance.

  “Merde,” said Le Comte de Nancy, swiveling in his seat at the latest metallic boing coming from the kitchen. “Monsieur Leblanc. Monsieur Leblanc. What the hell is going on in the kitchen? The noise is impossible. The plate smashing in the back. Like some Greek wedding.”

  That night guests innocently stepped over the threshold of Le Saule Pleureur, expecting, like always, to be whisked away in a soufflé of fine dining. Instead, they were met at the door by a wild-eyed Madame Mallory tugging at their elbow. “Have you been across the street?” she demanded of Madame Corbet, owner of an award-winning vineyard two villages down.

  “Across the street?”

  “Come on. Come on. You know what I am talking about. The Indians.”

  “The Indians?”

  “I don’t want you in my restaurant if you’ve been across the street. I repeat, have you been across the street?”

  Madame Corbet nervously looked around for her husband, but she couldn’t see him, as he and Monsieur Leblanc had walked on ahead into the dining room.

  “Madame Mallory,” said the elegant vintner. “Are you ill? You seem rather feverish this evening—”

  “Ah, pff.” Mallory waved the woman away, disgusted. “Take her to the table, Sophie. The Corbets are incapable of telling the truth.”

  Luckily for Madame Mallory, at that moment a bread boy bumped the aisle-hogging wine steward, and that bump in turn jogged pouring wine all over Le Comte de Nancy’s arm. It was the count’s roars and curses that prevented Madame Corbet from hearing Mallory’s insulting and intemperate remark.

  Shortly after ten thirty p.m. Monsieur Leblanc acknowledged to himself the evening was in the toilet. Two guests were so insulted by Madame Mallory’s harsh questioning at the door, they immediately turned and left. Other diners picked up on the electrical charge in the air, the stress that crackled through the service, and they complained bitterly to Monsieur Leblanc how they were unsatisfied by the evening’s fare.

  Enough, Leblanc decided. Enough.

  He found Madame Mallory in the kitchen, standing over Jean-Pierre as he prepared a dessert of fennel ice cream and toasted figs with nougatine. She had just grabbed the duster of powdered sugar from his hand. “This is one of my specialties,” she raged. “You’re ruining it. Look, like this. Like this. Not like that—”

  “Come,” said Leblanc, taking Mallory firmly by the elbow. “Come now. We must talk.”

  “Non.”

  “Yes. Now.” And Leblanc forced the chef out back, into the fresh night air.

  “What, Henri? You see I’m busy.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see what you are doing?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you doing to the staff? Is it this unnatural obsession with the Hajis? You’re acting like a madwoman. You’ve got everyone on edge. You even insulted your own customers, Gertrude. My God. You know better than that. What are you doing?”

  Mallory placed a hand on her chest as cats hissed somewhere out in the night. In her eyes nothing was worse than disrupting a customer’s dining experience, and she was disgusted with herself. She knew she was out of control. But even so, admitting she was wrong never came easily to Madame Mallory, and the two old culinary comrades stood tensely in the dark glaring at each other until Mallory exhaled, a deep release of breath that told Leblanc everything would be all right.

  She slipped a wisp of gray hair under her black velvet hair band.

  “You’re the only person who could say such a thing,” she finally said, tartness still in her voice.

  “You mean tell you the truth.”

  “All right, now. I heard you.”

  Mallory took the proffered cigarette, and the flame of his lighter flickered in the damp evening air.

  “I know I am acting strange. But, mon Dieu, every time I think of that revolting man and his boy in the kitchen, I just see—”

  “Gertrude, you’ve got to get ahold of yourself.”

  “I know. You’re right, of course. Yes. I will.”

  The two smoked silently in the night. An owl hooted in the fields; the sound of a distant train at the other end of the valley rolled out across the evening. It was so serene and calm that for the first time that day Madame Mallory felt herself come back to earth.

  Her patch of earth.

  At that precise moment, however, Uncle Mayur cranked up the outside speakers of our restaurant, and Lumière’s evening filled with twanging sitars and the mesmerizing drumming of a ghazal, punctuated with the tinkling of finger cymbals. Every dog in the neighborhood joined in by baying.

  “Ah, non, non. Those bastards.”

  Mallory slipped through Leblanc’s grasp, crashed through the back door, and within minutes she was on the phone to the police. Leblanc shook his head.

  What could he do?

  Mallory quickly discovered a call to the police was not going to take care of her problem. Apparently, the police no longer had jurisdiction over noise; noise complaints were now handled by the brand-new Department of Environment, Traffic, and Ski Lift Maintenance.

  The next day—like a shot—Mallory was down at the Town Hall. After a great deal of incomprehensible hemming and hawing, the young man running the new bureaucracy admitted he indeed could, with the proper evidence, launch proceedings against Maison Mumbai. The problem was he didn’t have enough financial resources to gather the evidence during a night patrol. The department could only investigate noises between the hours of nine a.m. and four thirty p.m.

  You can imagine. Madame Mallory gave the poor man such a tongue-lashing that he instantly agreed to lend Mallory the noise-measuring equipment. She herself, under strict guidelines, could record the nocturnal decibels emerging from our restaurant.

  And so, one dark night, Mallory and Leblanc crept out the back of Le Saule Pleureur, lugging the cumbersome equipment across the street into a field that lay adjacent to our restaurant. Monsieur Leblanc fumbled with the battery-operated machinery while he sank up to his ankles in spongy moss. Mallory, meanwhile, was the lookout, peeking through the holly hedge that marked our perimeter, scrutinizing the brilliantly lit windows of Maison Mumbai and the French doors leading out to the garden.

  A saggy canvas tarp was strung over the flagstone patio, secured by wires and metal spikes. Diners occupied three garden tab
les, huddled around large portable heaters spitting flames, fiery cones that looked like the back ends of jet engines. As Uncle Mayur passed through the back door, lit plate warmers, and poured wine, the hissing industrial heaters made his skin glow blue and red in the dark. The two offending speakers hung from the wall, and Kavita Krishnamurthy was singing loudly over the roar of the jet-engine heaters.

  “There,” said Monsieur Leblanc. “It’s running.”

  The needle ratcheted wildly across the white tape and Mallory, finally, smiled in the dark.

  * * *

  We had no idea what they were up to, buried as we were in hard work and long hours. Mallory’s strategy of intimidation was starting to pay off. The heavy traffic that so cheered us on opening night fell off quite rapidly, and by the end of the week we were lucky to fill five tables. Mukhtar was beaten by bullies at the local school and chased down the town’s side streets to the taunts of “Curry-head, curry-head, curry-head.”

  A few village families were kind to us. Marcus, the mayor’s son, rang to ask if I would care to go boar hunting with him. I heartily agreed, of course, and that Sunday, the morning of my day off, Marcus swung by the restaurant to pick me up in his open-topped Jeep. He was very chatty, not like so many of the locals.

  “We only shoot the mature boar,” he yelled above the rushing wind, “the ones around three hundred pounds each. Iron rule. We’re a cooperative and we divide the big animals equally so each of us walks away from a kill with a couple of pounds of solid meat. The meat is a little tough and bitter, but that is easily taken care of during the cooking.”

  Marcus drove us through several valleys, south at first, and then east into the mountains. We went up logging roads and back down dirt tracks, always in the thick of forest, until at last we came across a string of cars lined up in ditches along the side of a mountain. Marcus pulled the Jeep in behind a battered Renault 5 badly parked under a chestnut tree.

  You had be a local to know where we were. It was wild, dense, and foreboding, the kind of primitive wood one doesn’t commonly see in Europe. Marcus slung his Beretta over his back, and we plunged into the woods, up a muddy path pasted with leaves.

  I first smelled the birch smoke before I saw the crackle through the thicket. Some forty men in waxed jackets, corduroy knickerbockers, and woolen socks stood around a fire, their deer rifles and shotguns stacked against the trees behind them. A battered Land Rover, splattered with mud, had made it all the way up to the clearing on an abandoned loggers’ track, and behind the vehicle beagles and sad-eyed bloodhounds from the South of France sat in a large dog cage fashioned from a cart.

  The unshaven men, I saw, were mostly from Lumière and the valley’s surrounding farms, a democratic assembly of bankers and shopkeepers briefly social equals during this late autumn ritual of the boar hunt. They looked up at our arrival—a few called out good-natured greetings—before returning to the roasting of sausages and veal chops on the birch fire.

  A rough-looking fellow told a joke about a woman with big breasts and the others roared with laughter as they slapped their sizzling meats between wads of country bread. A bottle of cognac was pulled from a jacket and the flask’s smooth glass flashed in the light as it was passed around, spiking plastic cups of steaming coffee.

  Feeling awkward, I went off to inspect the caged dogs, as Marcus knelt by the fire and cooked our minute steaks. Monsieur Iten came to stand by my side, quietly whittling a piece of birch as he explained how the best dogs were gored by a boar once a season and had to be sewn up. And as he talked—about how the hunt master had been out since the early hours searching the forest floor for fresh boar tracks and plotting the day’s hunt and should be back shortly—I sensed someone new had joined the hunters, for a roar of greetings rose with the hot-air crackle of the bonfire.

  When we turned around, Madame Mallory, a cracked shotgun resting in the crook of her arm, was standing directly opposite me on the other side of the fire, her feet solidly and squarely apart. I tensed when I spotted her, that familiar look of imperialism now under a Tyrolean hat, but she was calmly talking with the gentleman to her side. And although she was the only woman among this circle of rough-looking men, she did not at all seem uncomfortable, but laughed alongside the others. It was I who felt ill at ease, for though she must have known I was standing there, she never looked directly at me or acknowledged my presence in any way.

  And I remember how the light of the fire suddenly seemed to smooth her skin in a kind of illusory face-lift, and how, for a brief moment, I caught a glimpse of Madame Mallory as she might have been—light of heart, hopeful, butter-skinned. But in that tremulous, insecure light, I also saw how she could so easily go the other way, and a moment later, she did. For the fire’s flicker suddenly cast shadows over her, horribly exaggerating the jowls of her face, a slashing and scarring across the eyes, and I saw the cruelty that lurked there, too, all tightly bound under that feathered Tyrolean hat.

  The master of the hunt, walkie-talkie squawking in his hand, came suddenly through the woods with the three men who were the “beaters.” I’m not sure what transpired then—there was much gesticulating and heated exchanges and veal chops being waved in the air to make a point—but suddenly we were all on the march, through the woods and up the sides of mountains, leaves and rubble cascading down the raked slopes behind us.

  A sweaty hour later the hunt master began depositing us on a high ridge deep in the forest, tapping a hunter every thirty yards or so. At his touch, the hunter fell to his belly in the crinkle-leaf carpet, and it appeared to me, as one hunter after another fell off behind us, the hunt master was dropping human pebbles across the forest floor so he might remember his way back to the camp.

  We were tapped as the rough track bent back at a turning, and Marcus immediately took off his jacket and quietly loaded his Beretta with a single twelve-bore slug. And he told me, just with his eyes and a nod, to lie down in utter silence. Which I did, turning my head briefly to watch the hunt master continue on his journey, the walkie-talkie connecting him to the beaters now silenced. I followed the silly bobbing of Madame Mallory’s hat and feather, until the master tapped her, and she, like us, suddenly disappeared into the forest floor, but higher up the ledge.

  And there we sat in monotonous silence, for some time, on our bellies, peering over the ridge at the mountainside dropping below us.

  The air suddenly filled with the cry of the beaters down below, the baying of their dogs, together moving up the mountain, driving all forest game before them up to our deadly gauntlet.

  Marcus concentrated intensely on a faint track and slight clearing below us, his Beretta at his shoulder. I heard then the faint tinkling of a dog’s bell and the patter of its paws across a forest floor layered in dry leaves. And then a different sound, what seemed to me, in my ignorance, the heavy thump of hooves, running in panic.

  The red fur stopped abruptly, sensing danger. Marcus, experienced, instantly relaxed and at this movement the fox bolted from the clearing. What we had been waiting for came then from the clear blue sky above—the single blast of a gun rolling through the hills like a small explosion.

  And that was it. The master of the hunt let out his familiar cry. The hunt was over.

  Back at the camp Madame Mallory stood proudly by her kill and held court. The boar hung by its hind hooves from the branches of an oak tree, its blood periodically tapping the forest floor. And I remember how a feverish Mallory, with each returning hunter, told and retold how she bagged the animal as it came through the woods.

  I could not take my eyes from this strange fruit hanging before me, with its neat hole, the size of a dumpling, gaping tidily in the animal’s chest. And to this day I remember that little snout-face: the small protruding tusks that forced the top lip to curl up, making the boar appear as if it had been highly amused by a witty remark heard at the moment of death. But mostly I remember the eyes with the long lashes, closed so tightly shut against the world, so prettily dead.
And now when I think back on it, perhaps it was the boar’s size that so unsettled me, so sickened the young man already well accustomed to the bloody and unsentimental endings of the kitchen. For this boar, hanging undignified from its hindquarters before me, was just a baby, not more than forty pounds in weight.

  “I want nothing to do with this,” I overheard a furious farmer telling the master of the hunt. “It’s a disgrace. A sacrilege.”

  “I agree, but what do you want me to do?”

  “You’ve got to say something to her. It’s not right.”

  The hunt master took a swig of cognac before stepping forward to censure Madame Mallory for violating the club’s rules. “I saw what happened,” he said, manfully hitching up his trousers. “It is simply not permissible what you did. Why did you not shoot the mature boars when the colony moved before you?”

  Mallory took her time to answer. Someone who didn’t know our history might even have thought it was innocent, the way she seemed to nonchalantly glance over the hunt master’s shoulder to look directly at me for the first time that day, a faint smile tugging the corners of her lips.

  “Because, my friend, the young, I find their flesh so tasty to eat. Don’t you agree?”

  Chapter Nine

  Papa received the registered letter on the following Tuesday. It came as I wandered out of the kitchen to take a look at the reservations for the evening. Auntie was doing her nails in crimson polish, and she used her elbow to shove the ledger around so I could read it. It was bleak. Just three out of thirty-seven tables booked.

  Papa sat at the bar, rubbing his bare foot with one hand, the other hand sorting through the mail.

  “What this say?”

  I slung a kitchen towel over my shoulder and read the letter he was rattling at me. “It says we are in violation of the town’s noise code. We must shut down our garden restaurant by eight p.m.”

  “Wah?”

  “If we don’t close down the garden restaurant we’ll be taken to court and fined ten thousand francs a day.”

  “It’s that woman!”