Little Culinary Triumphs Read online

  “Ouch. Her hip?”

  “Among other things,” he nodded, making a face.

  Marta Pires spent several weeks in the hospital, wrapped in plaster from head to foot for multiple fractures, an enormous bandage on her skull. But the worst of it was that she nearly lost her right eye: in her fall, she landed on the ergonomic hollow handle of the squeegee, which then neatly slotted itself into her eye socket with a disgusting little suction noise: shlup. She’d been carried out on the ambulance stretcher with her work tool still planted in her eye and the window spray clasped in both hands like a big automatic pistol. She refused to let it go, and sprayed the paramedics more than once, straight in the eyes, with terrifying precision for such impaired vision and with twin fractures of the wrists. No doubt she believed she was aiming at Antoine Lacuenta, against whom she was chanting some sort of voodoo incantation in her Creole dialect from Cape Verde. At the hospital, given her refusal to cooperate, the emergency physician had to knock her out with a defibrillator in order to perform first aid.

  “Actually, for all that you’ve been going on about local products and recycling . . . You do realize that the clothes you are wearing were surely not made in France, but by some malnourished children in Bangladesh?”

  As she said it, an evil thought gladdened her: child labor was an abomination, of course, but sometimes, when she thought of certain adolescents . . . Those twins on the sixth floor who came tearing down the stairs, screaming whenever they could, at night, or at dawn on Sunday. Or Aurélien’s friends: they were incapable of either a hello or a smile when they stomped grumpily through the living room on their way to sprawl in his room and shout and wail like lunatics. When they reemerged after a few hours, they again looked sullen and morose, and muttered a vague sort of goodbye, dragging their feet. If they found the front door it was by radar; they never looked up from behind their long, dubious bangs, and they left in their wake the sickly sweet effluvia of sleep and grime. Then there had been those kids at the garage sale: she pictured the little gang in the hell of a Chinese textile factory (toxic dyes, danger of mutilation and burns) or of an open-air quarry in Katanga (carcinogenic particles, landslides), and a faint smile crept onto her lips.

  “On the contrary, my briefs were manufactured in France,” replied Antoine Lacuenta, outrage in his voice.

  Before Sandrine had time to realize what was happening, he had plunged his hand into his pants. He hunted around for a few seconds in front, then behind, before tugging out the stretch of cloth where the label was sewn. He stood up to show her, but with a placating little wave of the hand Sandrine asked him to sit back down. She really didn’t need to see more. Given the size of the patch of cloth spilling out of his jeans, she got the unpleasant sensation that the rest of his underwear must be compressing him left, right, and center, or at least be very closely acquainted with the crack between his buttocks. A shudder went through her, and with a wriggle on her chair she checked that her own underwear was where it should be. Antoine Lacuenta sat back down without readjusting his clothes, the label still plain to see: either the damage was not as significant as she’d imagined, or he was used to such discomfort. Or maybe he enjoyed it? The man was definitely weird.

  “Everything else—I wear only secondhand clothes,” he continued, with a shrug. “Flea market, Salvation Army, discount stores, garage sales . . . There’s plenty to choose from. And no need to go broke. Because in my situation . . . ”

  With his index finger he pointed first to his hoodie (Abercrombie), then his T-shirt (Diesel) and his jeans (Levis), enumerating the price he’d paid for each: 15, 10, and 25 euros. All three seemed to be in good condition, as far as she could tell, with just enough of a patina to look trendy. The computer that dozed perpetually in her brain suddenly woke up: to dress a teenager in those brands for such a sum would be a sign of real talent. Maybe this client wasn’t as warped as he’d initially seemed, or maybe he was simply such a nutcase that he’d become interesting. In the end, her day was not totally wasted. You could even say that the week was starting to look positive. All morning she’d dealt with jobseekers of no interest, very drab in comparison to this Antoine Lacuenta. An accountancy director who’d just been fired for the fifth time, to start with, then a woman in her fifties who was hoping for a position as executive secretary after twenty-five years spent battery rearing her brats. The woman went away again sniffing into her handkerchief after Sandrine pointed out that her computer skills could not match even those of an average high school student.

  “Do you have any good tips for buying Converses or Reeboks?” she asked, out of curiosity.

  “Discount places, consignment stores, church fairs, I have loads of addresses all over the place. Even sample sales for the fashion press, if you’re interested,” he added, almost confidentially, leaning across the desk with a slight, sardonic smile.

  She took no notice: Sandrine Cordier was incorruptible.

  “Now it’s clearer to me why, before Manosque, you worked at the treatment plant in Fougères-sur-Somme,” she continued, a touch more professional, trying not to notice the label still sticking out of his jeans. “Recycling, sorting, sustainable development . . . You must have been in your element there, no?”

  “Well, at least I felt like I was doing something useful, something that was in keeping with my values.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I worked in both collection and treatment. Dipping into every aspect of a trade is a very healthy principle. To start with, going around in the dump trucks with colleagues, picking up paper and newspapers on Tuesdays and glass on Fridays. Heavy stuff once a month. Alternately I did sorting at the site. You cannot imagine all the stuff that people throw out. Enough to furnish entire apartment buildings—toys, bicycles, appliances that are just missing a screw . . . ”

  “But you didn’t want to stay? Because of the salary maybe, or the status? To end up a garbage collector when you have a degree in history and geography, that’s not exactly upwardly mobile . . . ”

  “Oh, upwardly mobile! Typical petit bourgeois way of looking at things,” sniffed Antoine Lacuenta with scorn. “I couldn’t care less about status and I don’t need much money to live on, especially as I do a lot of bartering. No, it was because of the trucks.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I had my interview, the site director explained that before long the entire fleet of vehicles would be shifting to electric, or hybrid at the very least. The community of communes also communicated on the topic . . . We had a fascinating conversation about carbon footprints and renewable energy, and this convinced me to take the job. Six months later the fleet was still running on diesel and no one said a thing about electric or even hybrid vehicles. But I didn’t give up: with some comrades from the union we got the word out, and I even tried get them to come out and march . . . ”

  “And you were let go after a little . . . accident? Another one?”

  Sandrine Cordier looked up from the file and stared at him, frowning.

  This guy really was a fraud.

  Antoine Lacuenta shrugged and sighed. It was boring, going back over the past, a waste of time. But oh well, the little ferret would get her money’s worth.

  “After the elections, the president of the community of communes came to meet us at the end of one of our rounds. He insisted on climbing up on the dumpster to take a closer look at our working conditions, but above all he wanted a grandstand for making his speech. Like all politicians, he told us what he thought we wanted to hear. I asked him about clean-energy vehicles, and he avoided the question, I don’t think he ever had any intention of talking with a garbageman, he was more the type who acts condescending around the proletariat. I got closer to ask him for an explanation, to remind him of what he’d pledged, but he obstinately refused to answer me and wouldn’t even make eye contact. I made a gesture that was maybe a little sudden, he was startled, and he
tripped on the running board . . . ”

  “Ouch. His ankle, I suppose?”

  “Not only,” sighed Antoine.

  Philippe Petitjean had fallen headfirst into the giant dumpster just as one of the employees, at his request, had switched on the mechanism. The dumpster was full of household waste, which softened his fall, but he got his head stuck in a huge metal can which turned out to be a dog food container. The compactor continued its descent as the workers looked on, aghast. You have to realize, most of them had never seen an accident of this nature. Then the site director virtually flew across the five meters separating him from the truck, shouting and gesticulating as if he were performing a haka. He had scored with the security system, as if he were making a desperate try in rugby, for the beauty of the gesture, just as the ref was blowing the whistle. For a few fateful seconds Philippe Petitjean lay crosswise on his stomach, his arms trapped in a quicksand of refuse, his left leg beneath the enormous rollers while his right was making a sort of desperate, useless crawling movement in an effort to climb up the pile of garbage.

  He’d roared like a boar, his cries muffled and distorted by the dog food can, but all he succeeded in doing was further stunning himself with his makeshift helmet. By the time they finally managed to get him out of there, his left leg was dangling at strange angles at both the knee and the ankle, sort of like a folding yardstick that’s been badly . . . folded. The firefighters had to liberate him from the can in several stages, and initially they only opened the bottom so he could breathe. The rusty metal left him with a souvenir, a pretty little festoon all along his forehead, cheeks, and chin. One of his eyelids had nearly been sliced off and for the rest of his life it would droop lower than the other one, and this earned him thereafter the sympathetic and most appropriate nickname Fido. Since the incident his main political opponent had gotten into the habit of barking at him whenever they met. Petitjean was a good sport: in response he growled and bared his teeth.

  Still, the town councilor’s accident had not been without its usefulness, so to speak. On removing him from all the refuse, the firefighters had been dismayed and astonished to discover that the dumpster was filled with practically nothing but cans of pet food and extra-large, used, disposable diapers. The garbage round had been curtailed that day because of the councilor’s visit, and the last call had been at a retirement home a mile or two from there. Now, other than five sorry, balding, little poodles, whose teeth were no longer in any condition to indulge in culinary fantasies, the establishment housed no four-legged friends. A health inspection control was ordered. Pet food, it turned out, had been the main ingredient of most of the meals for years: pâté forestier, meatballs in gravy, Shepherd’s pie, paupiettes, spaghetti Bolognese, stuffed vegetables, ravioli, moussaka, chili con carne, goulash, and even brandade.

  Moreover, most of the cans of pet food had expired at least eight years earlier, the date on which the Lithuanian manufacturer had gone out of business; at that point the retirement home had bought six tons of supplies for a song. It had all been stockpiled in a labyrinth of underground caves dug by the Germans during World War II, a gigantic rabbit warren underneath the garden at the retirement home that everyone had forgotten about. Among other things, the scandal had helped to shed light on the unusually high number of deaths from botulism at the institution, something that had hitherto been a complete mystery. Not a very nice story at all now, was it, particularly for a three-star retirement home accredited by the Social Security, with all the local upper-crust politicians serving on the board.

  APPLE TURNOVER

  Psst, Guillaume!”

  In spite of his considerable corpulence, the man speaking in a hushed voice managed to weave his way between the trolleys and piles of boxes cluttering the windowless little room, to reach Guillaume Cordier’s desk. Cordier was struggling with an antediluvian computer that was reluctant to reboot. He looked up for a moment before dipping back behind his screen and the unsteady piles of cardboard folders stacked on either side of him.

  “Hey, Marc, how’s it going? I’ve got a bug here, sorry, I can’t leave the keyboard, what with all these pathetic shortcuts.”

  “Yeah, sure, fine. Don’t worry about the bug, the entire network is down. The IT people are overwhelmed with calls and I took the opportunity to get away, they’ll think I’ve gone to help out somewhere.”

  “So I can leave the keyboard? Grrr, fucking stupid machine . . . Have you got time for a coffee? I have some left over from the marketing meeting this morning.”

  Two thermoses, some paper cups, and a basket of sorry-looking mini Danishes stood on a wheeled cart next to the desk. He poured two coffees and nudged one toward his visitor.

  “Say, things are going well, by the looks of it. Usually the admins make off with everything at the end of a meeting. How are you getting on?”

  “I’m getting on.”

  “I nearly forgot, you’re in good hands at home, aren’t you, you pig,” chortled Marc, before swallowing his coffee in one go. “Yuck, your joe is lukewarm. Next time, call me when you get the thermoses so we can drink it when it’s hot, okay? Already it’s not the best in the world. Anyway, I came to see if you’ve got anything new?”

  “Bah, not much, well, depends what you’re looking for. Is it for you or for Isa? Maybe as a gift?”

  “A gift, easier said than done; it’s for my mother-in-law, we’re having supper at her place tonight and it always softens her up a bit if I bring her one of those women’s magazines, some fashion thing, maybe she won’t make her usual remarks about how many glasses of wine I’ve had. Whatever you have will do, some cooking or knitting thing, that’s fine, too.”

  “It’s a bit slack at the moment, to be honest: I don’t have the new monthlies yet, and almost no more weekly women’s magazines. Let me just have a look.”

  Guillaume Cordier took a key ring from his pocket and unlocked the three heavy padlocks of a big metal locker behind his desk. It was a veritable safe, filled with newspapers and magazines carefully piled on the shelves or stored in hanging files. Labels on the edge of each shelf specified the categories: women’s, news, leisure, etc. Guillaume rummaged delicately in the pile of women’s magazines and took out the Elle from the previous week, along with Psychologies Magazine and Gala.

  “This one is usually a hit, isn’t it, full of celebrities and stuff like that?” asked Marc, pointing to Gala.

  “It’s ideal for your mother-in-law, it’s what I’d take for mine.”

  In fact, his own mother-in-law, a retired teacher and die-hard militant feminist, had nothing but deep revulsion for women’s and celebrity magazines; for her he reserved the more highbrow Télérama.

  “One euro twenty,” he said. “Otherwise, if you want something more intellectual, there’s Psychologies Magazine. It’s more expensive, two sixty, because of the little guidebook they give you. Hey, I just noticed the theme: ‘Natural Medicine through the Rectum.’ There must be an audience. I guarantee it’s never been read, it’s still in the shrink-wrap.”

  “If I take both, could you throw in the rugby paper for the same price?”

  “I swear, you want to clean me out, Marc . . . Print media is really suffering already, or didn’t you know? The price of paper keeps going up, competition with the Internet, crisis in advertising . . . That’s not even half of it! Just because I’m not an official distributor doesn’t mean I don’t have my own little code of ethics, you know. Out of respect for my suppliers I can’t set my prices too low.”

  “Yeah, really! You’ve got a margin of one hundred percent. And it’s a good thing your little code of ethics is little, because if your suppliers found out, I think they’d really shove it up your rectum,” added Marc with an obscene gesture that was not devoid of imagination. “And besides, I’m sure you’ve already read all the rugby news, no? You’ve recouped the cost once already, as it were?”

  “Okay,
then, since it’s you,” sighed Cordier. “Three euros eighty for all three.”

  Marc rummaged in his pocket and slid two two-euro coins across the desk, while Guillaume put the magazines into a big manila envelope. He pocketed the four euros and went back to fiddling on his keyboard.

  “Hey, my change?”

  “Sorry, no small stuff. Have a mini croissant instead?”

  He held out a basket half full of pastries drooping on a smeared paper napkin. Up close they looked both dry and greasy. Some even looked like they must have been handled, or nibbled, then put back in such a way that any takers would notice only too late, once they’d already picked them up. A fat fly was dozing beneath a croissant and flew away with a buzz of annoyance when its improvised hammock was dismantled.

  “Man, has the marketing budget gone down or what. Before, it was regal, but now . . . They entertain clients with this stuff? Are you sure these were fresh this morning?”

  “If you don’t want any, don’t force yourself,” said Guillaume, his eyes glued to the screen, as he began to reach for the basket. “I have takers who are ready to pay top price up in accounting and purchasing, you know.”

  The IT man was quicker: with one fat hand he grabbed a mini apple turnover, then changed his mind and pinched a soggy pain au chocolat as well. He swallowed both at once, before Guillaume had time to react.

  “They’re already practically inedible, I’m doing you a favor,” he said with his mouth full, as he turned away with his manila envelope under his arm.

  T-BONE STEAK

  Marcel Lacarrière looked at the fruit of his loins with a heavy heart. Maybe it was always like this, after all, for “children with aging parents,” as they used to say back in his day. He was already older than forty-five when he’d become a father, his genetic material was probably already deliquescent . . . The fact remained that thirty-two years later, he could not help but feel a twinge of bitterness at the thought that his only son had neither his mother’s beauty (a magnificent Swedish model twenty years his junior, from whom he was long divorced), nor his business acumen, nor even a shred of intelligence. Nada. The fairies had not done their job properly, they’d gotten muddled after a rather boozy evening, or maybe those naughty girls had been bribed by the competition: the little boy had inherited both his father’s considerably unprepossessing looks and his mommy’s brains. A basically very banal mixture that Marcel Lacarrière had encountered all his life among any number of people he’d had to deal with. But it was hardly an asset for the future CEO and principal shareholder of a little press enterprise. Particularly in the middle of an economic crisis and the digital revolution.