Cooking for Picasso (4 page)

Finally admitted to the inner sanctum, Ondine quietly wheeled her bicycle up to the new
Patron
's villa—a sprawling, peach-colored two-story affair with large windows, pale blue shutters, and a terracotta-colored tiled roof. The downstairs shutters were closed, but the ones on the second floor were thrown open to admit the breeze, and a gauzy white curtain fluttered ghostlike in one.

She parked her bicycle at the side of the house, where an irregular slate path led to the kitchen door. She unhooked the hamper and clambered up a short flight of stone steps. With her free hand she turned the brass doorknob. It, too, was unlocked.

Feeling strangely excited yet apprehensive, Ondine gave the door a push.

Then she stepped over the threshold, and went inside.

T
HE
P
ATRON'S
HOUSE WAS SILENT
and cool, for, being made of stone and stucco, it still held the chill of last night's damp spring air. The kitchen was rather rustic, with wide, irregular floorboards that creaked as Ondine crossed them, carefully carrying the heavy metal hamper to a round wooden table in the center of the room.

“Zut!”
she grunted, glancing around to get her bearings. In the far corner was a narrow black stove with its pipe angling out a bit crazily to its chimney. An icebox stood against the opposite wall.

She threw back the lid of her food hamper. Her mother had wisely folded an apron atop everything. Ondine tied it on, then lit the stove. The
bouillabaisse
was in a compact cooking pot with a fitted lid, so she carried it straight to the stove just as it was to keep it warm on a low heat. Everything else was in various containers which she unpacked now, along with the striped pitcher.

So far Ondine had not heard a single sound from anywhere else in the villa.

Perhaps he'd gone out for a walk, or to visit somebody. It never occurred to her that anyone might be sleeping past sunrise, let alone noon. As she acquainted herself with his kitchen, Ondine saw that a swinging door led to the rest of the house. She pushed it open and peered in.

A dimly lighted dining room held an oblong table ringed by high-backed chairs, with a vase of dusty dried flowers standing rather forlornly in the center. There was a chest of drawers that served as a sideboard, decorated with a long lace runner.

“It looks as if no one has had a meal in here for a thousand years,” Ondine observed with a slight feeling of panic. Where did he want his lunch served? Her mother hadn't given instructions. She did not want to presume that the
Patron
would deign to dine in the kitchen, even though it was cheerier there.

Beyond this room was a small parlor with upholstered chairs arranged around a low table before a fireplace. As Ondine darted quickly through the darkened parlor she felt like a fish swimming in deep waters, curiously flitting through a sunken ship. At the far end was an open, arched doorway leading to the front door's foyer and a stairway to the second floor.

She drifted to the foot of the stairs and cocked her ear to listen. Still not a sound from above. Was nobody home? Could he have forgotten their arrangement?

A narrow hall ran alongside the stairway and led straight to the back of the villa, where a door opened onto a fenced yard, beyond which were a neighbor's flower fields. The only other room on this main floor was a little one at the back of the house. Its door was wide open, and Ondine stepped in to see if it would serve for lunch.

It was just a narrow study with a writing table, chair, telephone, lamp. Upon the table was a Parisian newspaper, and a big brown envelope addressed to
M. Ruiz
which had already been opened. Spilling out of this pouch was a scattering of smaller envelopes addressed to
Picasso,
apparently being forwarded from Paris, a postmark which made the package look important.

Ondine suddenly understood. “He doesn't want our postman to see the name Picasso and then go blabbing all over town. And he's right; the postman is the biggest gossip in the village!” Her
Patron
had taken great pains to conceal his identity. “Who
is
this Picasso?” she wondered.

She noticed a writing pad left out on the table, bearing a note scrawled in dramatic flourishes of thick inky lines. A pen lay beside it. The letter looked unfinished, for he had not signed off with either name—Picasso or Ruiz—as if he'd grown bored with the whole undertaking.

The message was written in Spanish. Recalling what her mother had said about using her convent training, Ondine could not resist testing herself now, haltingly parsing it out. It was addressed to someone with the Spanish name of
Jaime
Sabartés
and seemed to be a peculiar kind of progress report:

I relax at last, I am sleeping eleven or twelve hours a day. You can assure Miss Gertrude Stein that I no longer write poems. Instead, I find myself singing, which is so much more satisfying than all the other arts. Olga and her wretched divorce lawyers can't sue me for possession of half of the musical notes I sing, now can they?

Also, I received your parcel of rags, hurrah! So now I can clean my brushes, should I ever pick them up again! But what do you think? Perhaps I will give up painting entirely for my new singing career, and I'll become a Spanish Caruso.

“Why would he ask for rags to be sent from Paris?” Ondine mused. “What kind of man can't go out and buy rags for himself? Come to that, why doesn't he just tear up an old shirt?”

Well, this
Patron
obviously did not have a wife looking after him. In fact, he'd mentioned divorce lawyers. Nobody that Ondine knew had ever gotten a divorce; it was a mortal sin.

But surely it was a sin to snoop around, too. She returned to the dining room and realized that it had seemed unwelcoming simply because it was so dark from the closed shutters. She flung them all open, allowing the bright spring sunlight to illuminate the room. The front garden's scents breezed in, chasing away the mustiness. Now she could see that this room had its own cozy Provençal charm.

“Much better,” Ondine nodded approvingly. “Good thing
Maman
told me to bring flowers,” she added under her breath, removing the old, dusty ones. She filled the vase with water and added her fresh bunch of daffodils. She stepped back to survey the effect; they brightened the whole room considerably.

Just then she heard a distinct thump overhead that made her jump. The spell was broken—she was no longer an adventurous fish swimming through a sunken ship, but a delivery girl who was supposed to serve. Ondine froze, and heard more creaking—yes, someone was moving about upstairs. She waited for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Nothing yet.

But he could come down here any minute, hungry. Perhaps he'd heard her walking around and noticed the enticing scent of the food warming on the stove, which was now wafting through the house.

Quickly she hurried back to the kitchen and carefully poured wine from the pigskin bladder into the tall pitcher she'd brought. Her mother had been clever to include it, for with its brightly painted vertical pink-and-blue stripes, it looked so cheerful in the simple dining room.

Ondine returned to the stove, lifted the lid to check the
bouillabaisse,
then carried the pot to the dining-room table and placed it on a trivet she'd found in the sideboard. The broth and the fish were to be eaten separately, so she laid out a soup dish containing slices of bread that had been dried but not toasted, over which he could ladle the broth; while the seafood had its own special plate.

Mindful of her father's warning to make everything satisfying for this Monsieur Picasso or Ruiz or whoever he was, Ondine arranged the meal's dishes in an appetizing semi-circle around the main plate so that everything was within easy reach. She found a nutcracker in the kitchen and a small wicker bowl in which she put some unshelled nuts and fresh fruit.

Now it was time for her to leave the man in peace to eat his lunch. She should go. She knew this, and yet, there was something so playful about the
Patron
's funny little letter that it infected her own lively spirit; and when she found a blank tablet and pencil on the kitchen counter, she could not resist quickly scribbling a note, in French since he evidently read Parisian newspapers, and she wasn't confident enough to compose Spanish grammar:

We hope that this lunch meets with your approval. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to improve our service. We shall return for the dishes and will tidy up afterwards. Bon appétit.

O
NDINE PROPPED THE
note beside the fruit bowl. Then she slipped out the kitchen door, hopped on her bicycle and pedaled rapidly away from the house without a backward glance.

She loved the feeling of how much lighter the bicycle was now without the food hamper. Turning out of Monsieur Picasso's street, she steered back onto the bigger road with its high-walled villas on both sides. At the top of this steep hill with its extraordinary view, she felt a sudden thrill in that brief, suspended moment before takeoff, poised between the bright sky hanging above her and the wide sea stretching beyond the harbor below.

Then she took the plunge, coasting down, down, down the hill—yet it felt more like a wonderful upward lift, as if she'd taken flight like a bird. Picking up more speed, it seemed that her flying hair and skirt were wings that might just carry her up, up and away to the great wide world beyond.

“Hooray!” Ondine cried aloud, feeling weightless and fearless and free.

But when she arrived at the farmers' market on the other side of town to pick up new flowers as her mother instructed, she felt her spirits quickly plummet back to earth under the sharp gazes of the farmers' wives who presided over the spring harvests that their customers had eagerly awaited. The florist's stall was a riot of bright color, and the fruit and vegetables were piled high in perfect pyramids.

“
Bonjour
Ondine!” the butcher's stout wife called out, eyeing her speculatively.

“
Bonjour
Ondine!” the red-haired flower vendor chirped as Ondine pulled up to her stall.

“Where have you been on your bicycle today?” demanded the skinny fruit-seller.

“A new
Patron,
” Ondine said neutrally, nodding in the general direction of the villas. Too late, she realized that there were so few holiday renters at this time of year that any visitor was bound to be news to this gaggle of gossips.

“You mean that Spaniard at the top of the hill?” the fruit-seller said, handing Ondine a small blood-orange to eat. “I hear he's got a lady-friend down here that he sees on the weekends. But what does he do with the rest of his time?”

The florist, reaching in among her blooms to pull out the delicate daffodils that Ondine pointed to, said conspiratorially, “He's a suspicious character; no one ever sees him during the day, but my brother Rafaello says he keeps his lights burning well past midnight!” Rafaello was a policeman who patrolled the neighborhood at odd hours and, after years of seeing the darker side of human nature, habitually viewed most people as potential criminals.

“Mark my words, that new tenant is a bank robber, hiding out with his loot!” the butcher's wife agreed. “I ask you—who else rents a whole house off-season all to himself, with no family?”

The others also found voluntary solitude so incomprehensible that they quickly retreated to the
terra firma
of their usual gossip about which local girls might get engaged this spring. Sooner or later, everyone became the subject of their wagging tongues.

“Don't worry, Ondine,” piped up the little
fromagère,
arranging creamy mounds of cheese in appetizing rows on a wooden board. “Your day will come to marry and have children. The wheel turns.”

“The wheel turns!” the others echoed wisely.

Ondine paid for her flowers and hastily pedaled away. She knew that those women didn't really mean to be so hurtful, but all they could imagine was that Luc had met a bad end or else found another girl wherever he was. Ondine had tried not to even consider such possibilities. Now something about their pragmatic marketplace chatter had revived her doubts about her own judgment, even today.

What if the
Patron
was displeased with the note she'd just left for him? A girl like Ondine—especially while serving such an important person—simply did not speak unless spoken to; so she should never have had the audacity to write to him.

“Why did I do it?” she fretted as she reached the café. She'd even inadvertently invited him to criticize her mother's cooking if he wanted to! Her father would be furious if he found out.