The Hundred-Foot Journey (14 page)

Madame Mallory bore down on Jean-Pierre and the roasting pan, aggressively snapping large tongs. And this unsettled the staff even more, for the tongs were from her personal cooking utensils—kept locked in a leather case under the main counter—and they meant business.

“Guinea fowl need to be turned, turned every seven minutes, so the juices flow through the meat. I’ve been watching how you work. You manhandle the birds. You’re so rough, like a farmer. You have no feel for game. You must be delicate. See? Look how I do it. Can you manage that, you imbecile?”

“Oui, madame.”

Madame Mallory stood in the middle of her kitchen, her large bosom heaving, her face mottled with red blotches of rage. And the staff stood frozen in the glare of her majestic fury.

“I want perfection. Perfection. And anyone who doesn’t deliver what is expected of him will be terminated.” Mallory picked up a terra-cotta dish and smashed it on the floor. “Like that. Like that. Do you understand? Marcel, clean that up.”

Madame Mallory blew out of the kitchen, pounding up the wooden stairs to her attic rooms. For a few minutes, as the smoke cleared, the survivors in the kitchen found they were too shocked to speak, too stunned to fully comprehend what had just happened.

Luckily for them, however, Madame Mallory’s attention was suddenly focused elsewhere. She pounded furiously back down the stairs and this time shot out the front door. “What are you doing?” she screeched across the forecourt.

The mayor, crossing the street, stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly with his shoulders hunched up about his ears.

“Gertrude, damn it, you scared me!”

“Why are you slinking about like that?”

“I’m not slinking.”

“Don’t lie to me. You were going into that place for lunch.”

“And what of it?”

“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 tables, 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.