The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel (2 page)

The doge, clad in his cumbersome brocades and with his handkerchief pressed firmly to his nose, sat back in his chair and watched the corpse with small, critical eyes. Absently, he adjusted his sly red cap so that the blunt peak at the back stood up, like a middle finger pointed at God.

CHAPTER II
T
HE
B
OOK OF
B
EGINNINGS

T
he dead peasant had been an invited guest, but I, a street orphan, gained entry to the palace through the kindness of my maestro. I owe him, and all my teachers, everything. Without teachers, humankind would be sitting in a cold, dark, clammy cave, picking nits and wondering how Grandfather started his legendary fire.

I met my maestro when I was fourteen or fifteen, but how could I know my true age? I don’t know the date of my birth, though it hardly matters now. The peasant’s murder occurred many years ago, in the year of our Lord 1498, the year the chef saw me stealing a pomegranate from a fruit stall in the Rialto and rescued me from my squalid life on the street.

I remember that pomegranate well—the leathery red skin, the fleshy weight of it in my hand promising wine-sweet clusters of ruby fruit. As I lifted it off the pile, I imagined the satisfying crunch, the release of tangy perfume, the juices glazing my lips and running down my chin. Ah, that biblical fruit with its poignant umbilical tip, choice of the gods and food of the dead. I clasped it to my breast and ran.

But the chef stepped into my path and grabbed me by the ear,
saying, “That’s not the way, boy.” He took away my pomegranate—indeed I thought of it as mine—and he returned it to the vendor. My disappointment was spiked with anger, but before I could react, the chef said, “I’ll feed you in the palace kitchen. But first you have to wash.”

Marrone
. To eat in the doge’s palace I would have washed every lice-infested orphan, every suppurating leper, and every diseased prostitute in every poverty-ridden
calle
of Venice. I mumbled,
“Sí, signore.”

“Andíamo.”
He kept a firm hold on my ear as we walked through the Rialto. We passed a baker from whom I’d often stolen bread, and the man gave a self-satisfied grunt, no doubt thinking I was finally off to be punished. We passed the fishmonger from whom I’d recently stolen a smoked trout, and the man raised his scaling knife to show me its wicked edge. We wended our way through crowds of shoppers who glanced at me and then nodded at the chef as if to say, “Good. You caught one of the rascals.”

We passed some of my scruffy and begrimed compatriots, who watched us from shadowed corners with suspicious eyes. Being escorted off the street by a well-dressed man could be either very good or very bad. I might be headed for a warm meal given freely out of charity, or I might be in for some cruel abuse reserved for boys like me whom no one would miss. I winked at my friends to suggest that I’d run into a bit of luck, but I wasn’t nearly so confident as I was hungry.

In a back courtyard of the palace, I undressed and washed with harsh lye soap in a wooden tub of cold water. As I sat shivering in the tub, the chef lathered my matted hair and shaved my head. He said, “There’s no place for lice in my kitchen.”

“As you wish,
sígnore
.” I remembered his promise of food.

I recall a moment of panic when, as I sat naked and shaved in the wooden tub, he touched the dark brown birthmark on my forehead. He followed its outline too lovingly, and his hand lingered on
my face a moment too long. Having encountered men who enjoyed the company of boys in intimate ways—and having more than once twisted out of their sweaty hands—I drew my head back sharply, afraid, but ready to be belligerent. I searched his face for a hint of the predatory mien I’d learned to recognize on the street, but no, it was an open face with intelligent eyes, mild as milk.

The chef withdrew his hand and resumed a businesslike air. “Scrub,” he said. “Behind your ears and between your toes.” He burned my clothes right there in the courtyard and stamped out the embers, saying, “
Boh
. Filth.” He gave me clean woolen pantaloons and a coarsely woven tunic of white cotton. The feeling of clean clothing on my freshly washed body made me squirm with pleasure as he led me inside.

The palace’s busy kitchen was redolent of bay laurel and thyme, and it had three fireplaces, each of them large enough to hold a grown man standing upright. The chef ordered me to sit on a three-legged wooden stool in a corner, and he gave me a slab of yellow cheese and a slice of fresh bread with a thick, chewy crust. It had been a long time since I’d eaten cheese without spots of mold or ragged edges chiseled by a rat’s teeth. I sat on the stool with my shaven head bent low over my food as I gobbled it down. Marco always said, “If you get a free meal, eat fast before they take it away.” I crammed my mouth full; my cheeks bulged like melons so that I could barely chew. Still, I stuffed in more.

The chef touched my shoulder. “Slow down, boy,” he said. “Everything has its own time.”

As I gorged, I scanned the kitchen. Perhaps I could find something to steal on my way out—some tasty bit to take to my friends Marco and Domingo, a spoon to slip under my shirt and sell for a few coppers, or maybe an onion to trade for a slice of meat. But the precise choreography of a well-run kitchen captured my attention. A corps of about a dozen cooks in immaculate white jackets moved about the room with grace and purpose. That kitchen
buzzed like a hive of efficiency—clean and fragrant and well lit by daylight flooding in from high windows on two sides of the long room. The nimble cooks stepped around scarred wooden chopping blocks heaped with vegetables and bearing ceramic bowls of meat marinating in pungent liquids.

The baker, who I later came to know as Enrico the Gossip, kneaded a raisin-studded dough as flour puffed up around him, a culinary wizard in a magic cloud. Enrico worked near a brick oven with an arched top, and that day he used his long-handled wooden paddle to pull out a shiny golden loaf with an intense perfume so intoxicating I had to stifle a moan.

Of course, Giuseppe was there, too—that mean, churlish, round-shouldered drunk—and he sneered at me as he swept the floor. I knew him from the Rialto; he was the brother of a fishmonger widely respected for the high quality of his product. I ignored Giuseppe that day just as I did in the Rialto, not yet understanding how bitterly he resented my presence in the kitchen.

I turned my attention to a fireplace with rows of glistening game hens turning lazily on rotisseries. Even with my stomach comfortably full, my mouth watered at the sight of so much meat, rubbed with spices, browning, and dripping fat. The seductive sight of poultry roasting and the smell of bread baking blended with sounds of knives chopping, pots bubbling, and pans sizzling. The sensory glut verged on erotic.

In another fireplace, an iron pot, hanging over the fire, sent up twisting wisps of steam, and I wondered what culinary masterwork simmered there. I imagined thick white-bean soup or savory rabbit stew or fresh vegetables tumbling in burbling chicken broth, dishes I’d heard of but had never tasted.

At the far end of the kitchen, a steep, narrow stairway led up to the dormitory where I would sleep—although, sitting on that stool, frantically devouring my bread and cheese, I never would have dreamed it. I assumed the chef was a kind man who fed street
orphans from time to time, and I expected to be sent on my way at any moment.

As I sucked the last bits of cheese from my teeth, I noticed a stone cistern near the back door. Before my tenure in that kitchen expired, I would carry hundreds of sloshing buckets to that cistern. The adjacent wooden door led out to the courtyard where I’d bathed, and from there out to the carnivorous city. It struck me as odd that a simple door was the only thing that stood between the kitchen’s world of plenty and my own world of want.

On the other side of the cistern there was another door—closed that day—which I would come to know as the door to the chef’s notorious garden, an assemblage of queer plants that spooked the cooks and contributed to my maestro’s reputation for eccentricity.

The chef’s modest desk faced the length of the kitchen, allowing him to survey his domain at a glance. In coming days, I would observe him at that desk, writing menus and planning banquets. Always the
artiste
, adept and original, he seldom consulted a recipe from the crowded bookshelves behind him. The books were dusty with disuse, but my maestro, a guardian of knowledge, loved to collect them. That day he stood near his desk, hands on his hips, monitoring the kitchen and calling greetings to the maids and charwomen coming and going through a swinging service door.

He said, “
Buon giorno
, Belinda,” and a disheveled girl hauling a pail of sudsy water smiled at him; “
Come stai
, Teresa?” and a gray-haired chambermaid, slack faced and worn as an elbow, shrugged as she shuffled by.

As I watched the parade of uniformed women lug mops and trays in and out the door, the majordomo interrupted the drab procession with a fabulous entrance. He swooped in with his head thrown back at an imperious tilt, his prominent chin thrust forward, one soft hand holding out his gorgeous satin robe and the other swishing a silk fan with a fussy flourish. He wore beaded slippers with curled toes. Oh, those calamitous shoes.

The majordomo’s theatrical presence held me spellbound, but the cooks, accustomed to the grand sight of him, paid no attention. Only one cook, Dante, paused while salting the eggplant and attempted a wry little smirk, but his heart wasn’t in it. I would soon discover that the majordomo appeared in the kitchen almost every day, and the cooks were impervious to his glamour. That day, he wore delicious robes of peacock blue embroidered in salmon and trimmed in gold braid. As he swept past me, I found myself enveloped in a strong scent of lilac. The majordomo clucked a question at the chef—something about that day’s sauce or soup; I don’t remember, so dazzled was I by the sight of him—then pursed his lips and fluttered his fan while he listened to the reply. He chirped, “As you wish,” and made a grand, slightly indignant exit, as if to punish the rest of us for being ordinary.

With the majordomo gone, the chef turned his attention to me. I picked the last crumbs off my shirt, wishing I were invisible so I might linger in that safe haven, but when he saw that I’d finished eating, the chef brought me a brown lumpish thing he called a potato. I’d never before seen that exotic New World vegetable, but I immediately liked its solid heft and its earthy smell. He gave me a utensil I came to know as a peeling knife, showed me how to use it, and told me to get to work.

And so it was. I peeled, swept, carted away garbage, carried water (extraordinary amounts of water), stacked wood, stoked the fires, and scoured heavy pots, all in return for food and a straw pallet in the servants’ dormitory. It took several days to comprehend the miraculous fact that the chef—his name was Amato Ferrer—had taken me for his apprentice.

Giuseppe, the disgruntled sweeper, understood my good luck before I did. As an apprentice I outranked him, and the miserable
ubriacone
couldn’t bear it. Whenever he passed by me, he whispered,
“Bastardo,”
or shot me the evil eye with his index finger and pinky stabbing in my direction. Behind the chef’s back, he tripped me
with his broom, scattered my neatly stacked wood, threw vegetable peelings on my clean dishes, and carried garbage back into the kitchen to make me look lazy.

Still, I ignored him. For the first time since infancy, I ate three meals a day and slept indoors every night. I would become a cook, but it would not have mattered to me if the chef had been a cobbler or a fisherman. He fed me and offered to teach me a trade; it was more than I had expected from life. Seduced by luxury and afraid to offend, I dared not complain about Giuseppe or inquire into the chef’s motives. I did his bidding and ate his food, and I counted myself blessed.

However, I did miss Marco, and I struggled with guilt for the inexplicable fortune that had favored me and excluded him. At first, I hoped there might be work in the kitchen for both of us, but it soon became clear that I had secured the only job to be had. I redeemed myself by stealing food for him at every opportunity. Early each morning, before the cooks arrived, I gathered leftovers that wouldn’t be missed, wrapped them in oilcloth, and hid them behind the cistern until late in the evening, when I took out the garbage. Marco sometimes waited outside the courtyard, hungry and anxious, and when he wasn’t there, I left the package behind a trash pail. It was always gone the next morning.

I also fed scraps to my faithful cat, Bernardo, who had grown fat and sleek since I rescued him as a starving kitten. After my first week in the kitchen, Marco brought him to me, saying, “Here’s your pesky cat. You can’t expect me to feed him.” Although Bernardo often disappeared, in the mysterious way of cats, he always came back to eat and to sleep under my arm in the dormitory. Chef Ferrero tolerated him for my sake.

In those early days, I flattered myself that Chef Ferrero chose me because he thought me exceptional, because he saw the signs of a keen mind or appreciated the deftness of my quick, pickpocket fingers. Now, so many years later, I know that his choice had more
to do with his faith in the human capacity to transcend adversity, as well as his wish for a son and his need for an heir—especially his need for an heir.

And the chef’s timing was not capricious. In those days, a rumor was exciting Venice like a tickling sea breeze from the east. Everyone from the servant classes to the aristocracy was whispering about an old Byzantine book said to contain the formulas of ancient sorcerers. It was told that the book, thought to have been lost in antiquity, was actually hidden somewhere in Venice. I would eventually come to understand how the urgency created by this rumor spurred the chef to take an apprentice.