Five Quarters of the Orange Read Online Free Page A

places my mother speaks of her trees as if they are living people— Stayed up all night with Belle Yvonne, she was so sick with cold . And though she only ever seems to refer to her children by abbreviation— R-C, Cass and Fra —my father is never mentioned. Never. For many years I wondered why. Of course, I had no way of knowing what was written in the other sections, the secret sections. My father—what little I knew of him—might never have existed.

5.
    T hen came the business with the article. I didn’t read it myself, you understand; it came in the kind of magazine that seems to view food simply as a style accessory— This year we’re all eating couscous, darling, it’s absolutely de rigueur —while for me food is simply food, a pleasure for the senses, a carefully constructed piece of ephemera, like fireworks, hard work sometimes, but not to be taken seriously, not art , for heaven’s sake, in one end and out the other. Anyway, there it was one day, in one of these fashion magazines. “Travels down the Loire,” or some such thing, a famous chef sampling restaurants on his way to the coast. I remember him too: a thin little man with his own salt and pepper pots wrapped in a napkin, and a notebook on his lap. He had my paëlla antillaise and the warm artichoke salad, then a piece of my mother’s kouign amann , with my own cidre bouché and a glass of liqueur framboise to finish. He asked me a lot of questions about my recipes, wanted to see my kitchen, my garden, was amazed when I showed him my cellar with its shelves of terrines and preserves andaromatic oils (walnut, rosemary, truffle) and vinegars (raspberry, lavender, sour apple), asked where I trained and seemed almost upset when the question made me laugh.
    Perhaps I said too much. I was flattered, you see. Invited him to taste this and that. A slice of rillettes , another of my saucisson sec . A sip of my pear liqueur, the poiré my mother used to make in October with the windfall pears, fermenting already as they lay on the hot ground, gloved with brown wasps so that we had to use wooden tongs to pick them up…. I showed him the truffle my mother had left me, carefully preserved in the oil like a fly in amber, and smiled as his eyes widened in amazement.
    Have you any idea what a thing like that is worth?
    Yes, I was flattered in my vanity. A little lonely too, perhaps; glad to talk to this man who knew my language, who could name the herbs in a terrine as he tasted it and who told me I was too good for this place, that it was a crime…. Perhaps I dreamed a little. I should have known better.
    The article came a few months later. Someone brought it to me, torn out of the magazine. A photograph of the crêperie , a couple of paragraphs.
    “Visitors to Angers in search of authentic gourmet cuisine may head for the prestigious Aux Délices Dessanges. In so doing they would certainly miss one of the most exciting discoveries of my travels down the Loire….” Frantically I tried to remember whether I had told him about Yannick. “Behind the unpretentious façade of a country farmhouse a culinary miracle is at work.” A great deal of nonsense followed about “country traditions given a new lease of life by this lady’s creative genius”—impatiently, with a rising sense of panic I scanned the page for signs of the inevitable. A single mention of the name Dartigen and all my careful building work might begin to crumble….
    It may seem I’m exaggerating. I’m not. The war is vividly remembered in Les Laveuses. There are people here who still don’t speak toeach other. Denise Mouriac and Lucile Dupré, Jean-Marie Bonet and Colin Brassaud. Wasn’t there that business in Angers a few years ago, when an old woman was found locked in a room above a top-floor flat? Her parents had shut her there in 1945, when they found out she’d collaborated with the Germans. She was sixteen. Fifty years later they brought her out, old and mad, when her father