Shadow Play (13 page)

I sometimes wondered if Bernardo would stop by again, since he knew where I lived. But he never came, and no one
in that neighbourhood seemed to recognize the description. I waited to be contacted, but no one called apart from Gustavo, who knew nothing beyond his immediate duty of settling me. One day Hamilton, a regular who spent most mornings at the store and moved afterwards to the bar, asked me if I was a writer. I asked stupidly what had given him that impression. He pointed to my open diary and added that writers come to faraway places to be undisturbed. That was when I heard myself replying that actually I'd be happy to find some kind of employment. I said anything would do, as long as they understood that I was still a beginner with the language.

J. was a town full of men past their prime, either returned from long years working in the great cities of the southeast, or the fathers of children who had now moved here. There were a few young men who seemed to be employed for part of the day, but spent a lot of time idling in groups. Hamilton took me along to meet Auguste, the chef who owned the triangular restaurant that ended in a pillar and formed the southern tip of the city. He was French: I learnt later that he'd arrived here after his first divorce, only to end up staying well past his second. He needed a waiter who could work Friday and Saturday evenings because, I heard, that was the problem with young men ‘everywhere': ‘they all want the tips and their wages at the end of the week, but they stop coming when you tell them they have to work when everyone else is having fun.'

Well, Auguste and I hit it off from the beginning, most of all because I had no trouble working while everyone else was having fun. Efficiency was his single criterion for warming to his employees; as he never tired of repeating, ‘I don't care if your team isn't winning or your wife isn't the woman she used to
be two years ago, as long as you do the work I pay you for.' He led us by example – he was in the kitchen at eight-thirty on a Monday morning, when he changed into a chef's suit, and the next time anyone saw him in ‘civilian' clothing was on Saturday evening after closing the restaurant. During the week he walked home down the main avenue with a jacket over his whites.

We chatted on the slow nights and in the bar opposite us after work, along with Noel, his best friend, chauffeur and imperturbable commis-chef, and Nelson, the one-time boxer (about whom more in a while) who manned the kitchen sink. Noel's previous life as a well-paid computer programmer in São Paulo (a true pioneer, he seemed, as he listed for me the number of everyday innovations he'd taken part in designing) had changed the day his first wife left him after fifteen years: one day, four years into his second marriage, he got into a car and just kept driving north. He met Auguste and liked the conditions in his kitchen, and a month had already gone by when his wife telephoned with an ultimatum: either he returned at once or the marriage was over. Noel's exact words were the Portuguese equivalent of ‘Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn'.

He carried in his wallet an old photograph of himself in which he resembled James Dean standing by a motorbike, and he still sauntered into work with the same leather jacket slung over his shoulder. Working a few feet away from the burly Nelson as he clanged and bashed the pots together, Noel the former programmer was as delicate-fingered, precise and unconscionably slow at preparing entrées and desserts when there were thirty-five people outside waiting for their supper as he was for a table of four. Sometimes Nelson turned away from his dishes and hummed the theme music from
Chariots of Fire
as he mimed in slow-motion the care with which Noel arranged five leaves of salad, oblivious in his zone of perfect calm to the growing concern on all our faces.

Nelson had grandchildren and had worked under Auguste since the time he first moved to Brazil from the royal palace of Sweden where, as we were constantly reminded, two hundred and forty kitchen staff rotated in three daily shifts of eighty. In fact, Auguste let slip no opportunity to remind us of the Olympian standards of efficiency and expertise to which he had once been accustomed. Among his favourite examples was the occasion when his services were lent to the new Russian state as a gesture of friendship, and he had assumed charge of a historic banquet in St Petersburg. But he'd steadfastly refused to serve the hors d'oeuvres because he hadn't been warned about the immense distance between the kitchen and the dining hall, that would have wreaked havoc on the eighty individual soufflés he had prepared. This was after he'd flown his entire shopping with him in a specially chilled hold from Paris, having calculated every ingredient and unforeseen requirement down to the wildest of emergency scenarios: all except the two hundred yards from kitchen to table.

No amount of pleading about the delicate demands of diplomacy and the possibility of an international incident could outweigh the threat to his hard-earned reputation; this was Auguste's breaking point – the perfect surface of each soufflé. And so Yeltsin and his new cabinet had been kept waiting with one lie after another while elite KGB men took off their shades and suits and rolled up their sleeves to hurriedly set up a chamber next to the hall as a working area.

We heard stories about the visits of Baroness Rothschild and two American presidents, and how ungratifying it was to feed
Greta Garbo who sent back course after course barely tasted. But all this crashed to a meaningless nothing when Auguste lost the custody battle after his first divorce. Between the day the appeals judge in Paris decided that he was to be allowed visiting rights once every second Sunday and could take his daughter away for just two weeks a year, and the morning he stepped off the plane in São Paulo, all Auguste remembered was wandering around the Gare du Nord and the tenth arrondissement with twenty francs in his pocket for what seemed a day and a night, thinking only if he should walk into a boulangerie and spend it on this or that. He was too low-spirited to drink. Still more twists, a wedding, and a couple of years later he was here, on the nervous opening night of the city's first French restaurant in seventy years.

But what was lost was lost forever, not just as a father, but also as a proud professional. Even though many of the province's most powerful people were our devoted clients, including the Governor, several judges on the High Court bench, two editors, and a police commissioner who saw to it that certain key supplies were flown in directly from Europe, as unhindered and under-taxed as possible, and even when they insisted on summoning Auguste out of the kitchen to shake the maestro by the hand, he would permit no one any degree of illusion. For as long as I knew him, he maintained that he could only ever operate here at about twenty per cent of his capabilities.

‘Leave aside the matter of quality ingredients,' he held forth to guests standing between tables, ‘to achieve anything more than this, I need a minimum of six fully-trained staff working under me, whereas what I have are basically three amateurs.' (That meant us: in this context, ‘amateur' was a euphemism not far above outright abuse). ‘I mean, I could surprise you one
day when it was quiet, doing everything myself and preparing dishes the like of which you may never have seen before, at least not on this continent. But what happens when you bring your friend in on a Saturday night when the restaurant is full, promising him what you tasted on a Monday? Then both of you leave disappointed and I lose two clients forever. So I have to create sustainably, according to what is possible, not according to what I am capable of.'

He had similar irremediable qualms about the limitations of our wine list, because he had to order second-hand through the brochures of suppliers in São Paulo, rather than travelling himself to tasting sessions and vineyards in France. Still, even in these degraded, depleted surroundings, we had a few ongoing stories of our own, our little entertainments. For instance, there was the retired Judge who lunched over ten times a month with his mistress, but only on birthdays and anniversaries with his wife. Yet, on those rare latter occasions, it didn't matter that we'd seen him only two days ago; Auguste and I would both exclaim what a pleasure it was to host them after all these months, and make a big fuss about the unacceptable injustice of such long absences when everyone we asked informed us that they were both in town. No one was ever sure whether our productions fooled anybody, but Judge Carvalho always seemed pleased enough to leave us fifty reais under his glass of Armagnac.

Then there was Madame Grace Duvalier who had reverted to her maiden name after seeing off two husbands in fifteen years. She'd arrived from France as the Anglo-French bride of a young mining director who was still remembered with affection in these parts because of his unprecedented degree of concern
for the lives and working conditions of his men. Unfortunately, it led him to be buried alive when the roof collapsed during one of his visits underground. The considerably older successor they shipped out shared nothing of his predecessor's socialistic temperament and, perhaps understandably after what had happened, resumed the time-honoured practice of keeping a healthy and disdainful distance between himself and the physical circumstances of his minions. Hence it had been deemed remarkable how rapidly the recently widowed Madame Piquaut had succumbed to the charms of someone so distinct from her ex-husband in character. Perhaps she had wanted to make certain that no spouse of hers in future would ever be tempted by any dangerous inclinations. But mosquitoes here bite the rich with as much relish as the poor and make no distinction between socialist and bourgeoisie, and after twelve happy years together, Madame had lost M de Balincourt to malaria.

All this tragedy had obviously taken its toll, and even though Madame frequently confessed that Auguste's restaurant was the only sanctuary left to her, where she could retire from the bright, hurtful light of the deadly ‘tristes tropiques' into her grief and her memories, she often added in the same breath that every detail here also tormented her because of its associations with Hubert and that she frequently had nightmares set in this restaurant. To which Auguste responded, once he was back in the kitchen, that it was odd how many of
his
nightmares also featured her in the restaurant.

Her entire temperament seemed to have become confused by her losses: she visited us five times a week even though she could barely drop her guard for a moment, racked as she was by her constant worries about our hygiene. She turned the
handle of every door with her own tissues, and informed us vividly that she never let herself touch the seats in the toilet with her bare skin. She didn't trust our linen or our towels and followed me around the restaurant, reporting every stain she had noticed. Careful not to wound our feelings, she often drew the significant distinction between her complete confidence in us and her general mistrust of the outside environment. Which meant, she assured us, that she would have used everything in our private kitchens without a moment's hesitation, but we had to understand this was a public establishment visited by one and twenty strangers we didn't know or control. No matter how stringent our twice-daily cleaning standards, who could ever be sure where our other clients had put their hands before they washed them? Besides, she could reel off an entire list of mutant germs that, according to her, survived the strongest detergent. Especially after Hubert's death, she insisted, she couldn't be careful enough.

She sent back plates when she claimed to have detected a tiny smudge invisible to any other naked eye, and held up each item of cutlery against the light. One day, Auguste would have stabbed her but for Nelson's extraordinary strength acquired from his boxing days, when she began a meal after unwrapping silver she'd brought with her in her handbag. It took all of my impassive diplomacy to suggest that perhaps we could save Madame the trouble of carrying these back and forth each day, by storing them in a special case behind the bar.

She often announced she was gathering her courage before making a decision to return to Europe, but one afternoon Noel fed Auguste some crazy idea that this time she was out to bury
him
. ‘She's run out of directors now, because they've been scared
off by her track record. And who's the only other Frenchman left in the city? I tell you, it's either you or her; both of you will never leave Brazil alive. How frequently does she enter the kitchen trying to be alone with you; how often does she stay after everyone else has left, and what about all the times she wants you to invite her home for dinner?'

At first Auguste laughed him off and concentrated on his simmering velouté, but Noel continued enumerating his evidence of Madame's intentions in so dead-pan and grave a manner that even I began turning over the possibility in my head. Auguste would have rushed straight out, grabbed the faux filet off her plate and banned her from the restaurant forever if Nelson hadn't suggested a much smoother idea, in which we only had to initiate events and then stand back and watch them unfold to their inevitable conclusion.

Senhor Dom Viceinte ‘Joe Louis' Moreira da Lima lived up to all one's expectations of the gallant old-time gangster: white suits, silk ties, silk handkerchiefs, the occasional pair of two-toned shoes. He was an enormous man of quick temper and eccentric generosity who, true to form, never sat with his back to the front door and hated above all things to have a soiled plate in front of him once he'd finished a course, and then to be kept waiting for any length of time between courses.

I wasn't allowed to attend to him on the first couple of occasions he dined during my apprenticeship: I was instructed to wait at the bar and watch Auguste closely. He was always escorted by two bodyguards – who sat two tables away from him – and a lady, one out of a local pool of three companions that
he maintained (who never visited the restaurant with anyone else, though they sometimes came alone); and we knew in advance since there was at least one large photograph in the papers whenever he arrived in town. His countrywide renown might have extended from Foz do Iguaçu to Manaus, but here especially he was the most famous local boy ever to have made the big time. In fact, he began as a boxer who went on to become champion of Brazil, and he got his nickname from his lifelong idolization of Joe Louis.