The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais

Author:Richard C. Morais
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Food, Contemporary Fiction, Cooking
ISBN: 9781439165669
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-07-06T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

My room at Le Saule Pleureur was at the top of the house, down the narrow hall from Madame Mallory’s flat. In winter, my monk’s cell was intensely cold; in summer, it was unbearably hot and stuffy. The bathroom was down a half flight of stairs at the end of the hall.

That day when I moved to Le Saule Pleureur, I found myself standing alone, for the first time, in the attic room that was to be my home for the years to come. It smelled of old people and a long-ago-sprayed bug treatment. A gaunt Christ on a crucifix was gushing blood from his wounds, and the emaciated figure hung, with a small mirror, on the wall directly above my bed. A dark-wood closet, with two ancient cedar hangers hanging inside, seemed to glower malevolently from the corner of the room, opposite the narrow cot. There was hardly enough space to turn around in; a portico high up on the wall looked out on the gabled roof outside but did little to alleviate the close space.

I set my suitcase down. What had I done?

I was—I don’t mind admitting it—completely rattled by the austere room, so Catholic and foreign to my upbringing, and a voice in my head, half-hysterical, urged me to dash back to the safety and comfort of my cheerful bedroom in Maison Mumbai.

But a book on the bedside table caught my eye and I stepped forward to examine it. It was a fat tome with yellowed pages and ornate illustrations depicting different butchering cuts on every kind of livestock from cattle to rabbit.

An unsealed envelope was slipped inside its pages.

The handwritten note, from Madame Mallory, was a formal welcome to Le Saule Pleureur and stated, in her old-fashioned penmanship, how much she looked forward to having me as a student in her kitchen. She urged me to work hard and absorb as much as possible in the coming years; she was there for me and would help me any way she could. To start our adventure, she said, I should study this Lyon butcher’s treatise with utmost care.

Her letter hit just the right note, and a manly voice inside my head suddenly and roughly said, Get on with it and stop acting the damn fool. So I made sure Madame Mallory and Leblanc had closed the door firmly behind them, before locking it tight. Reassured I couldn’t possibly be disturbed, I stood on the cot and took down the frightening crucifix, hiding it deep in the back of the closet, totally out of sight. And then, finally, I unpacked my bag.

There was a dream that repeatedly visited me during those early days of my apprenticeship, which now, looking back, seems quite significant. In this dream I was walking alongside a large body of water when suddenly an ugly, primordial fish from the water’s deep, flat and round with a bull head, crawled up the beach using its fins as primitive feet, pushing itself with a great deal of effort out of the water and onto dry land.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.