Hunting and Gathering

The boss was getting irritated. It wasn’t going fast enough. It was going too fast. It wasn’t hot enough. It was overcooked. “Concentrate, gentlemen, concentrate!” he said, again and again.

  The more the activity at her own station seemed to taper off, the busier it got on the other side. It was really something to watch. She saw how they were sweating and rubbing their brows on their shoulders the way cats tend to do. Especially the fellow who was in charge of the rotisserie: he was bright scarlet and sucked on a bottle of water between each trip he made with his poultry. (Funny things with wings, some much smaller than a chicken and others twice as big.)

  “We’re dying in here . . . How hot is it now, do you reckon?”

  “No idea. Over there by the stove must be at least a hundred, hundred and fifteen maybe? Those are the hardest jobs, physically. Here, take that over to the dishwasher. Be careful not to disturb anyone.”

  Camille stared wide-eyed at the mountain of pans, baking trays, stew pots, stainless steel bowls, sieves and frying pans which stood piled in enormous dishwashing basins. Not a single white person around either, and the little guy she turned to merely took the implements from her hands, nodding his head. He obviously didn’t speak a word of French. Camille stopped for a moment to gaze at him: every time she found herself face to face with someone who’d been uprooted from the other end of the earth, the little lights of her dime-store Mother Teresa self began to flash frenetically: where was he from? India? Pakistan? and what sort of life had he led to end up here? today? what boats? what trafficking? what hopes? at what cost? what had he had to give up, what were his fears? and the future? where did he live? with how many people? and where were his children?

  When she understood that her presence was making him nervous, she left again, shaking her head.

  “Where’s he from, the dishwashing guy?”

  “Madagascar.”

  She had been wrong.

  “Does he speak French?”

  “Of course! He’s been here for twenty years!”

  Give it a rest, Mother Teresa.

  She was tired. There was always some new thing to peel, chop, clean or put away. What a shit job . . . How did they manage to put up with it? What was the point of people stuffing their guts like this? They were going to burst! Two hundred and twenty euros, how much was that? Almost 1,500 francs. Shit. Think what else they could do with that money. If they were clever they could afford a little trip. To Italy, for example. Sit down at a sidewalk café, drift off to the conversation of those pretty girls raising their little cups of thick, black, too-sweet coffee to their lips and, surely, chatting about the same rubbish as girls do across the world.

  All the sketches, all the squares and faces and indolent cats and marvels you could have for that price. Books, records, even clothes: they could last a whole lifetime, whereas this . . . In a few hours, everything would be over, put away, digested, and evacuated.

  She was wrong to reason like that, and she knew it. She had begun to lose interest in food as a child, because mealtimes were synonymous with suffering. Moments that weighed heavily on a little girl who was an only child, and a sensitive one at that. A little girl alone with a mother who smoked like a chimney and tossed onto the table a meal prepared without a shred of tenderness. “Eat up! It’s good for you!” proclaimed her mother, as she lit another cigarette. Or, alone with both her parents, Camille would look down at her lap as much as possible so as not to be caught in their net: “Hey, Camille, you miss your daddy when he’s not here, don’t you? Isn’t that right?”

  Then it was too late. She’d lost any pleasure in food. Besides, there came a time when her mother didn’t even prepare anything anymore. Camille had developed her slight appetite the way others became covered in acne. Everybody had questioned her about it, but she’d evaded their inquiries. They had never managed to call her out on it because she was a sensible child . . . She wanted nothing to do with their miserable world, but when she was hungry, she ate. Of course she ate; otherwise she wouldn’t be here. But without them. In her room. Yogurt, fruit, granola, while she was doing other things. Reading, dreaming, drawing horses or copying out songs by Jean-Jacques Goldman.

  Fly me away . . .

  Yes, she knew her own weaknesses, and she would be wrong to judge those who were fortunate enough to enjoy sitting around a dinner table. But still . . . 220 euros for one meal, not even including the wine? That was just foolish, no?

  At midnight, the boss wished them a happy New Year and came to serve them all a glass of champagne:

  “Happy New Year, mademoiselle, and thank you for your ducks. Charles told me the customers were delighted. I knew they would be, alas. Happy New Year, Monsieur Lestafier. Get rid of some of your bad temper in 2004 and I’ll give you an increase . . .”

  “How much, boss?”

  “Ah! Don’t get carried away! It is my great respect for you which will increase!”

  “Happy New Year, Camille. Shall we . . . do you . . . should we kiss?”

  “Sure, sure, of course, a kiss!”

  “What about me?” said Sébastien.

  “And me,” added Marc. “Hey, Lestafier! Get back to your instrument, there’s something boiling over!”

  “Oh yeah, Ducon? Well, uh, she’s done now, no? Maybe she can sit down?”

  “Good idea. Come into my office, young lady,” added the boss.

  “No, no, I want to stay here until the end. Give me something to do.”

  “Well, now we’re just waiting on the pastry chef. You can help him decorate.”

  She assembled wafers as thin as cigarette paper, crisped, crimped, creased in a thousand different ways; she played with flakes of chocolate, orange peel, candied fruit, arabesques of coulis and marrons glacés. The pastry boy watched her, clapping his hands together. “You’re an artist! This is one artist!” he said, over and over. The chef viewed such extravagance differently: “Well, okay, because it’s this evening, but making things look pretty isn’t the point. We don’t cook to make things look pretty, for Christ’s sake.”

  Camille smiled as she topped the crème anglaise with a red coulis.

  Alas, no, it wasn’t enough just to make things pretty. Something she knew all too well.

  At around two o’clock there was a sudden lull in the storm. The chef reached for his bottle of bubbly and some of the chefs had removed their toques. They were all exhausted but were making one last effort to clean their stations and get out of there as quickly as possible. Miles of transparent film were unrolled to wrap everything, and the cold stores were a scene of pushing and shoving. There was a whole lot of commentary on the service and analysis of their performance: what they’d screwed up and why, whose fault it was, how the produce had been. Like athletes still gunning, they couldn’t relax, and used the last of their strength to scrub down their stations the best they could. Camille thought it must be a way for them to work out their stress, and do themselves in, once and for all . . .

  She helped out right to the end. Hunched over, cleaning the inside of a cold store.

  Then she leaned against the wall and watched the flurry of young men around the coffee machine. She watched as one man wheeled along an enormous cart laden with sweet confections, chocolates, marshmallows, jams, miniflutes, almond sponge fingers and so on. She felt like smoking a cigarette.

  “You’ll be late for the party.”

  She turned around and saw an old man.

  Franck was trying to look upbeat, but he was exhausted, drenched, slumping over, gaunt; his eyes were red and his features drawn.

  “You look ten years older . . .”

  “Could well be. I’m dead on my feet. I didn’t sleep well and anyway I hate doing this sort of banquet. The same dish over and over. You want me to drop you off at Bobigny? I have a second helmet. I just have to finish my orders and we can go.”

  “No. I don’t feel like going anymore. They’ll all be wasted by the time I get there. The fun part is getting drunk together—oth
erwise it’s sort of depressing.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going home too. I can hardly stand up.”

  Sébastien interrupted: “We’re just waiting for Marco and Kermadec, you wanna meet up afterwards?”

  “No, I’m beat, I’m going home.”

  “What about you, Camille?”

  “She’s beat too—”

  “Not at all,” she interrupted. “Well, I am, but I still feel like going out.”

  “You sure?” asked Franck.

  “Well, yeah, we have to welcome the new year, don’t we . . . so that it will be better than the last one, no?”

  “I thought you hated parties.”

  “I do, but this is my first good resolution: ‘In 2003, I was quite mild, but in 2004 I’ll go wild!’ ”

  “Where are you going?” asked Franck with a sigh.

  “Ketty’s.”

  “Oh no, not there, you know damn well—”

  “Okay, what about La Vigie, then?”

  “Not there either.”

  “What a pain you are, Lestafier. Just because you claim to have laid all the waitresses for miles around, now there’s nowhere we can go! Which one was it at Ketty’s? The fat one with the lisp?”

  “She didn’t have a lisp!” Franck protested.

  “No, when she was drunk she talked normally but when she was sober, she did lisp, actually . . . Anyway, she doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the redhead?”

  “The redhead doesn’t either. Hey, what d’you care, anyway, you’re with her, aren’t you?”

  “He is not with me!” protested Camille.

  “Well, uh, you guys work it out between yourselves, the rest of us are going to meet up when the others have finished.”

  “Do you want to go?” asked Camille.

  “Yes. But I’d like to take a shower first.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait for you. I’m not going back to the apartment, otherwise I’ll collapse.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Earlier on, you didn’t kiss me.”

  “Here you go,” she said, giving him a little peck on the forehead.

  “That’s it? I thought in 2004 you were going to go wild.”

  “Have you ever kept a single one of your resolutions?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  44

  MAYBE because she was not as tired as they were, or because she held her alcohol better, it was not long before Camille had to order something besides beer to keep up with them. She felt like she had gone ten years back in time, to an era when she could still take certain things for granted . . . Art, life, the future, her talent, her lover, her place, her own little heaven here on earth and all that crap.

  Well, it wasn’t so unpleasant . . .

  “Hey, Franck, you not drinking tonight or what?”

  “I’m dead tired.”

  “C’mon. Aren’t you on vacation now too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m getting old.”

  “C’mon, have a drink. You’ll sleep tomorrow.”

  He held out his glass without much conviction: no, he wouldn’t sleep tomorrow. Tomorrow he’d go to Time Regained, the SPCA for old folks, to eat crap chocolates with two or three abandoned grannies who’d play with their dentures while his own granny would look out the window and sigh.

  Nowadays he had a pain in his gut from the moment he took the exit from the freeway.

  He decided not to think about it, and emptied his glass in one gulp.

  He stole sideways glances at Camille. Her freckles would surface and disappear depending on the time of day; it was a very strange phenomenon.

  She’d told him he was handsome and now she was chatting up that big tall lump . . . whatever . . . all the same, he thought, with a sigh of disgust.

  Franck Lestafier was feeling down.

  He even felt a bit like crying.

  And so what? What’s wrong with you?

  Where should I start? A shit job, a shit life, a grandma out west and a move coming up. Sleeping again on a rotten sofa bed, losing an hour at every break. No more seeing Philibert. No more teasing him to teach him to take a stance, talk back, get mad, or get his way, for Chrissake. No more calling him my big cotton candy bunny. No more coming up with ways to set aside a nice doggy bag for him. No more impressing the girls with his king-of-France bed and his princess bathroom. No more hearing Philou and Camille talk about the war in 1914 as though they’d lived through it themselves, or about Louis XI as if they’d just had a pint with him. No more waiting for Camille to come in, or lifting his nose as he opened the door to sniff the air for cigarette smoke, a sign that she was already there. No more jumping on her sketchbook the minute her back was turned to see the day’s drawings. No more going to sleep with the floodlit Eiffel Tower as his nightlight. And then he’d have to stay in France, sweat off two pounds with every service and put them back on again in beers afterwards. And go on obeying. Always. All the time. That’s all he ever did: obey. And now he was stuck until . . . Go on, say it, until when, say it! Well, yeah, that was it. Until she passes away. As if he could only ever get his life together at the cost of greater suffering . . .

  Fuck, I’ve had enough, all right? Can’t you get off on someone besides me now? Don’t you believe me when I say I’ve had enough?

  My boots are full of shit, boys, so go and look somewhere else and see if I’m there. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it. I’ve done my bit.

  She kicked him under the table.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Happy New Year.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m going to bed. Ciao.”

  45

  CAMILLE didn’t stay long. They weren’t exactly Foucault’s crowd, those guys. They spent their time going on about how shitty their job was . . . and with good reason. And then Sébastien began to hit on her. If he’d wanted a chance to sleep with her, he should have been nicer to her that morning, asshole. That’s how you could tell which ones would be good in bed: the boys who were nice to you even before they thought of getting you horizontal.

  She found him curled up on the sofa.

  “You asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “In 2004, I’ll take to the floor,” he moaned.

  She smiled: “Well-done . . .”

  “I’ve been trying for ages to come up with a decent rhyme. I thought of, in the year 2004, I’ll be greener than before, but you’d have thought I was going to throw up on you.”

  “What a wonderful poet you’re turning into.”

  He fell silent. He was too tired for this.

  “Put on some of that nice music we were listening to the other day . . .”

  “No. If you’re already sad, it won’t help things.”

  “If you put on your Castafiore, will you stay a little bit longer?”

  “Length of one cigarette.”

  “I’m game.”

  And Camille, for the one hundred and twenty-eighth time that week, put on Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Hang on, I’ll tell you. The Lord rewards his friends while they sleep.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I dunno,” he yawned. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “That’s funny, that’s what you said the other day about Dürer. But it’s not something you have to learn! It’s just beautiful, that’s all.”

  “No, all the same. Whether you agree or not, it’s still something you learn.”

  She said nothing.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “No. Well, yes. When I hear this kind of music, or go into a beautiful church or see a painting that moves me, an Annunciation for example, my heart fills up so much that I get
the impression I believe in God, but that’s wrong: it’s Vivaldi I believe in. Vivaldi, or Bach, or Handel or Fra Angelico . . . Those are the gods. The other one, the guy with the white beard, he’s just a pretext. For me that’s his only quality anyway: he was great enough to inspire all the rest of them, to inspire all those masterpieces.”

  “I really like it when you talk to me. It makes me feel more intelligent.”

  “Stop.”

  “No, really.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink.”

  “No. Not enough, actually.”

  “Listen, this bit, isn’t this beautiful, too? It’s more cheerful. That’s what I like about masses: the joyful moments, like the Glorias and all that, come and fish you back out just after those moments that make you sink. Like in life.”

  A long silence.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No, I’m watching the end of your cigarette.”

  “You know, I—”

  “You what?”

  “I think you should stay. I think that everything you said about Philibert’s potential reaction if I were to leave holds true for you too. I think he’d be really unhappy if you left, and by the same token you’re just as accountable for his fragile equilibrium.”

  “Uh, can you run that last sentence by me again?”

  “Stay.”

  “No. I—I’m too different from you two. You shouldn’t mix up rags and napkins, as my grandma would say.”

  “Okay, we’re different, that’s true, but how different? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems we make up a good team of lame ducks the three of us, no?”

  “You said it.”

  “And besides, what does that mean, different? Okay, so there’s me and I don’t even know how to boil an egg, but I spent the entire day in your kitchen, and you who hardly listen to anything but techno, here you are falling asleep to Vivaldi. That’s bullshit, your business about rags and napkins. The thing that prevents people from living together is their stupidity, not their difference. On the contrary, without you I’d never have been able to recognize a purslane leaf.”