Field Note #34: Cassoulet
Sitting here, now, at the Café du Commerce, my father looks at me and out of nowhere says, “We’re on the rock face.” I’m confused; his statement seems wrong. I thought we were sitting in sunshine on a pleasant French street about to order cafés au lait. Well, if thinking is wishful (it is) and if poetic license allows (it does), we are. And so, yes, that’s us beneath a Pastis umbrella, talking about rien en particulier, waiting patiently for our coffees to arrive.
There’s a boulangerie across the road, and a charcuterie where boudins blanc hang on hooks and a jolly bonhomme in bloodied apron works the meat slicer. And next door, a quaint little pâtisserie has rainbow macarons in its window and creamy Dacquoises in its display case. There’s a queue at the boulangerie, of course; you don’t get bread like this anyoldwhere.
It’s a pleasant picture to be sure. But it’s as far a cry from accurate as we are from Metropolis. Case in point, there are no umbrellas at the Café du Commerce because there are no pavements to put tables on, and the only signs of life in this ‘town’ are the Citroëns Ami 6 (and their drivers) as they blitz through to more vibrant lunch spots.
But (seriously now), it’s just shy of 10 a.m. and my father and I wait on the step. And (seriously now), at 10 o’clock, we’re not there for coffee, we’re there for lunch. The sun doesn’t shine, it beats. It beats on the roofs and it beats on the street, it beats on the forever shuttered shutters.
“We’re on the rock face,” my father says again. I look sideways at him. His forehead is burning and his face twists up like he’s chewing on a citron (sans ‘ë’!). Little prickles of panic shoot from my feet to my scalp; my father needs his bottle – actually his carafe – and he needs it now. If Madame doesn’t open up soon, I don’t know what.
But soon enough she comes and we bust in at the door like it’s Nudie Night at the Folies Bergère. My father’s the first to find a seat, pancakes down on it like it’s a game of musical chairs he’s playing. He needn’t have rushed; we are eerily alone in the Cafe du Commerce, which is really someone’s front room cleared of easy chairs and television, and reconfigured as a barebones dining shed. There are doilies on the tables, mismatched cutlery, and in the doorway to the kitchen, a fly curtain swings. But a sublime Vermeerish (yes, I know, Dutch not French) light falls in through the high windows and it ought to feel nice here.
The Café du Commerce is roughly four square roods away from our ‘village.’ We come because it’s the only place we know to get helpings of food hefty enough to stop up any feelings we have about anything. But Commerce is a blazing misnomer. A) there’s not a sou of business happening here and B) this, far more precisely, is the Café du Cassoulet. It’s always (and only) cassoulet here. Which is good because we always want sausage and we always want beans. We always want lardons, and we always want lard. Even if it’s 90 degrees outside, and 96 within, we always want those things to eat.
“I’d like the cassoulet s’il vous plait,” I say superfluously to the Madame who comes, as a matter of course, to take our order. Why do we do this?
“Cassoolay paw moi o see,” pidgins my father, wondering the same.
But first, we need wine.
“Could you bring the wine now?” I say. “I mean now. Could you bring it NOW?” My exterior’s calm, but it’s a ruse; on the inside I’m Shirley MacLaine hopping around a nurses’ station. “GIVE MY FATHER THE SHOT!!!”
So the chest of his t-shirt is speckling with sweat and at last he’s quaffing wine like it’s electrolytes. He needs three hands because he also needs to be ripping bread. And he needs eyes in the back of his head so he doesn’t have to keep flinging round to see if Madame is emerging from the kitchen yet.
When she finally does, she staggers. She comes like a thirsty person from the desert. Her legs buckle beneath the weight of two enormous bowls.
“Eh voila, Monsieurdames,” she says as she lowers them carefully in front of us.
And then we have something to talk about. I say: “Mmm, these beans!” He says, “Gorgeous sausage.”
I say, “Lovely lamb shanks.”
I wonder if he’s going to revisit his earlier comment – if he will elucidate on what I, of course, know to be true: that we are scrabbling, he and I, for our footing; groping for something – anything – to hold on to. Because in this dark, without our guiding star, we don’t know which way is up.
AB - 25.2.23