The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel (3 page)

The rumors enthralled everyone. I recall one conversation, overheard early in my apprenticeship, that catapulted me into a feast of fantasies involving the object of my desire,
la mía bella
Francesca. One afternoon, Enrico huddled near the brick oven with the vegetable cook, Dante. They held their heads canted toward each other at a tense angle and stood with their arms folded tightly across their chests. Enrico whispered out of the side of his mouth, and Dante appeared captivated. Teresa—Enrico’s gossiping counterpart and the palace’s other conduit of news—loitered within earshot.

Always mindful of new developments around me, I busied myself stacking wood in their vicinity so I could listen to their conversation. Having lived by my wits on the street, eavesdropping seemed as natural as breathing, and every bit as necessary.

Enrico said, “The book could have a formula for turning lead into gold.”

“Boh.”
Dante sounded mildly disappointed. “Alchemy is a myth. Anyway, the ones who want that book are already rich. No, it must have to do with manipulating people. Formulas for controlling minds or melting hearts.”

“Melting hearts? You mean a love potion?
Boh
. What good is that?”

Dante raised an authoritative finger. “A man will tell his deepest secrets to a woman who befuddles him with desire.” He nodded knowingly. “There’s no better spy than a temptress. A man in love is at a disadvantage.”

Enrico thought this over, then said: “That’s true. To be besotted is to be vulnerable. But there must be more than a love potion. Otherwise, why would the old doge want the book? Maybe there’s a formula to prolong life.”

“Forever?”

“Who knows?”

Dío mío
. The idea of a love potion that I might share with Francesca left me cockeyed and bedeviled. Of all the spectacular secrets attributed to the fabled book, I believed a love potion would certainly be its most valuable.

Everyone believed the book held whatever he or she wanted most. Francesca was the only thing I wanted, but other people wanted other things. Love, riches, and immortality—these were the lusts that would lead us into imbroglios of mistrust and disaster.

The web of secrets began with the peasant’s murder, which I did not hesitate to report to the chef. He knew that I spied on the doge, and he approved. He felt it could be instructive for me to observe noble behavior and polite customs, particularly at the table. He always said, “Tell me how you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

For him, the preparation of food was a tool to illuminate the mysteries of life. I can still see him whisking a froth of egg whites in a copper bowl held in the crook of his arm. He hummed to the tinny rhythm of his stroke until the viscous slush transmuted into a mound of snow. “You see,” he said, waving his whisk like a wand, “magic!” He pointed the whisk at me. “Never forget, Luciano: Animals feed, but men dine.” He spread his meringue on a buttered parchment, saying, “That’s why we call men of refinement men of taste.”

Under Chef Ferrero’s tutelage, I began to glimpse the value of refinement. Among other things, it seemed to lend a man the power to attract a certain type of woman, like the chef’s well-bred wife, Rosa. I was curious about women, but I’d never been with one because the street girls all demanded money for the tiniest of favors. Marco was as curious as I, but he pretended not to care. Marco, who was bitter about the mother who had abandoned him and kept his twin sister, often said, “Women,
boh
! A necessary evil.”

I didn’t think women were evil, just inaccessible. My beloved Francesca lived in a convent, cloistered and untouchable, and yet I clung to hope. Francesca had been relegated to the convent by circumstance, but I could tell by her brazen curiosity in the Rialto and the careless way she allowed strands of blond hair to escape her novice’s veil that she did not take her novitiate seriously. Indeed, I would soon discover that under her habit she was lush as a plum and saucy as sin. My youthful optimism allowed me to believe she would leave the convent and marry me if I could offer her a gentrified life.

But my transformation from street urchin to prospective husband would take time. The gritty cunning of the streets was embedded in me. It showed in my furtive walk, my rough speech, and my wary eyes. Eager to become a gentleman worthy of Francesca’s notice, I observed palace life surreptitiously and cataloged my discoveries. On my weekly half day off, I entertained Marco and Domingo with pantomimes of the highborn. I dabbed the corners of my mouth with an imaginary napkin and I pranced over bridges with my shoulders thrown back and my chin thrust out. I executed a flamboyant bow to Domingo, saying, “By your leave, my lord.” I flapped my hand at Marco, saying, “Bring my gondola, boy.” For them it was a game; for me it was a rehearsal of my future life as a gentleman chef.

However, first I had to serve my apprenticeship to Chef Ferrero’s satisfaction. After I saw the doge pour his amber fluid into
the dead man’s throat, I ran down the service stairs, two at a time, anxious to tell the chef about the murder. To my surprise, he didn’t gasp or clutch his chest or even widen his eyes. He sighed and sat at a well-floured table carelessly pressing his elbows into a mound of dough.

“Are you sure, Luciano? Was the man truly dead?”

“Yes, Maestro.”

“Other states can be mistaken for death.”

“Maestro, he was poisoned. I saw his eyes. Dead as stone.”

“Oh,
Dio
.” The chef put his head in his hands. “It’s begun.”

CHAPTER III
T
HE
BOOK OF
L
UCIANO

M
emories spawn more memories, and recalling those early days with the chef always pulls me further back to a time of wider possibility—indeed, time now feels like a cone of narrowing possibilities. My earliest memory is of a broad, coal-black face framed by gold hoops swinging from elongated earlobes. The whites of her eyes were yellowed, but her teeth were dazzling white. She had big teeth, and big bones that bulged under the scuffed black skin of her knuckles and elbows, the rough knobs of a hardworking woman.

La Canterina—The Songstress—was not her real Nubian name, but rather the name the girls gave her for the way she sang her moody African
canzoni
as she worked. La Canterina made the house run. She cooked the meals and scrubbed the floors and boiled the stained linens. At night, she put on a fresh blue turban and a clean apron to serve wine to the men in the
piano nobile
, where they drank and laughed with the girls. She tidied the bedchambers after each use, emptied the cloudy water in the washbasins, and poured fresh water into the pitchers. La Canterina brought the girls steaming hot rose-hip tea when they woke at noon. She took her breakfast
much earlier, in the kitchen with me—hot tea for her, warm milk and bread slathered with honey for me.

I don’t know how old I was when the nun brought me to the brothel, but La Canterina said a big man could have held me in one hand. I often begged for the story, and I can still see her briskly folding bedsheets while she recited it for me. “Your legs were still bent up like a frog’s, your cry was no more than a kitten’s, and you flailed your tiny arms like a blind man.” At this juncture she would tsk and shake her head. “Scrawny. Pathetic. Another burden in this heavy life.”

Sometimes she’d pause and lay down a half-folded sheet, and her voice would soften. She’d say, “I couldn’t send you back.” She’d straighten her shoulders and snort righteously as she whisked the wrinkles out of the sheet. “Not that the
strega
would have taken you back anyway.”
Strega—
witch. Sometimes La Canterina rolled the
r
—
strrrrega—
curling the bow of her thick upper lip with contempt. She’d snap the sheet and go on. “Her
strega
face was pinched and small, like her heart. The
strega
said, ‘We’d hoped it was a girl for us to raise in virtue. But it’s a boy,
boh
.’ The
strega
dumped you in my arms and dusted off her hands. She said, ‘They all end up here sooner or later, so here he is.’ And she calls herself a Sister of Charity.
Strrrrega
.” La Canterina would snort one last time and walk off with the laundry, her high buttocks swinging in time to some lugubrious Nubian ballad.

La Canterina talked tough, but when one of the girls gave birth to a baby boy and left him, naked and squirming, on the kitchen table, La Canterina swaddled him in a soft towel and hummed to him as he sucked on the tail of her milk-soaked apron. When she saw me watching, she smiled and said, “He’s ours now.” She named him Bernardo—who knows why—and she doted on him for the one week of his life. When she discovered him dead in the drawer that served as his cradle, her wails brought the girls to the kitchen. The dim-witted young mother took her baby from La Canterina’s
arms and shook the limp little body. When he didn’t respond she dropped him into the garbage pail and went back to work. La Canterina unwound her turban to wrap the little fellow, and I will never forget how stricken and vulnerable she looked leaving by the back door, bare headed and clutching the shrouded bundle to her breast.

When I was big enough to pull a chair up to the cupboard in order to reach the jar of sweetmeats she kept on a high shelf, La Canterina started putting me out every day after breakfast, like a pet. She said, “You can’t blame the girls. They say, ‘Take in one, take in twenty,’ and this isn’t an orphanage.” She shoved me gently out the back door, saying, “The less they see of you the better. Anyway, you need to learn how to take care of yourself.” She touched the birthmark on my forehead and traced its uneven outline with a fingertip. The birthmark covers one quarter of my forehead above my left eye, and to this day it’s still a deep nut-brown. She muttered, “Dark skin, even that little patch, is an omen of sorrow. You might as well know it.”

The first time she put me out, I huddled outside the back door and whimpered all morning. When I became hungry, I picked through the brothel’s garbage pail and found fresh food scraps wrapped in oilcloth, just enough to quiet my belly. I ate, and then I curled around the pail for my nap. La Canterina let me go on that way, day after day, always making sure there was a wrapped meal tucked into the garbage pail.

Soon, I began letting myself out. I wandered the streets in widening circles, curious about the world. I was not the youngest on those streets crawling with cats and orphans, and I was more fortunate than most because after dark, while the girls were busy with their customers, La Canterina took me inside to sleep in her bed.

She promised me a cherry tart for my birthday, a date she had chosen at random and traditionally celebrated by baking something special. I remember my selfish disappointment when I found
her too weak on that birthday to rise from her bed to bake my tart. Soon after that, I came home one night and she was gone. A new woman with thick finger pads and rancid breath shooed me away from the door. That night I slept outside the brothel’s back door. The thing I recall missing most was La Canterina’s scent, a warm mix of baking and fresh ironing and womanhood—a distinctive blend I would not encounter again until I met Francesca. The following day there was no food wrapped in oilcloth.

I grew up on streets swarming with merchants of every stripe and sailors from every country. Venice has always been an international port of fevered comings and goings, and never more so than in those days. It was a clearinghouse for the goods of the world. The Far East supplied bolts of brocaded silk; Egyptian merchants sold chunks of alum for dying wool; Muslim traders brought brilliant violet dyes made from lichen and insects. In the Rialto you could buy sturdy iron implements from Germany, tooled leather from Spain, and luxurious furs from Russia. Goods streamed in from every part of the known world: spices, slaves, rubies, carpets, ivory. … In little Venice, improbably afloat on a cusp of the Adriatic, all the treasures of the world were on display, and everything had a price.

I loved to dally on the docks and dream about stowing away aboard the biggest ships. I watched them glide out to sea, their sails plumped with a hopeful wind, their hulls full of goods to trade in far-off places. I imagined myself in the hold, tucked snugly between soft sacks of Florentine wool and rocked to sleep by the waves. Living out-of-doors, I didn’t know yet that dark, enclosed spaces made me uncomfortable.

My dreams were sculpted by blades of sea wind and the sharp smell of salt air, by flapping gulls and brawny sailors singing high up in the rigging, by water slapping at ship hulls and impatient cart horses stamping on the cobbles. It was in that time and place of unlimited possibility that I met Marco. He was older than I by a
year or two, an impressive difference to a small boy. I clung to my ragamuffin mentor and imitated his streetwise manner of swagger and bluff. The chef became my maestro, but Marco was my first teacher.

Marco taught me the art of bumping into a woman preoccupied with thumping melons and dipping my light fingers into her purse. He taught me how to slip my small hand into a gentleman’s pocket while barely skimming the fabric, catch a coin between two fingers, and slide it out, all in the course of walking by. We made a good team at the food stalls—one of us distracted the merchant while the other made off with a loaf of bread or a wedge of cheese. Marco taught me all this and more, but above all he taught me that when you see the
Cappe Nere
you walk away no matter what prize you have to sacrifice. The
Cappe Nere—
the Black Capes—were the secret police of the Council of Ten.

The existence of the
Cappe Nere
was no secret—they strode around Venice in distinctive short black capes that concealed stilettos and pistols—but no one talked openly about their casual cruelty and their far-reaching power as henchmen of the all-powerful Council of Ten. Even the doge answered to the Council, and everyone knew that if the
Cappe Nere
knocked on your door, those ten ruthless men had unpleasant business with you. If you were foolish, you fell on your knees and begged for mercy. If you were sensible, you flew out of your back door and boarded the first ship out of Venice.