Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина
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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 Cr^epe 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 Cr^epe 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. Cr^epe Framboise would stay as it was, a provincial cr^eperie.
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 d'ecor.
“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 coulis.” 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 pa"ella antillaise and allow them to put it on their menu. Mamie Framboise’s pa"ella antillaise, as mentioned in H^ote amp; 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 pa"ella 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 pa"ella antillaise appeared in H^ote amp; 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 D'elices 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 `a la provencale, 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.