Cooking for Picasso Read Free Page A

eat.”
    Madame Belange pinched her daughter on the arm. “Do you hear me, Ondine?”
    “Ouch!” Ondine protested. She’d been listening attentively and felt she didn’t deserve that. But her exhausted mother sometimes just ran out of words, and punctuated the urgency of her commands with a quick slap if anyone in her kitchen asked too many questions. Madame Belange, in her own youth, had never witnessed mothers and daughters having the luxury of time to indulge in searching, philosophical chats. Children were like baby chicks whom one loved the way a mother hen did—you fed them, kept them warm, taught them how to fend for themselves, and pecked them with a nudge in the right direction whenever they wandered astray.
    Madame Belange repeated, “Go in quietly, prepare the food, lay it out, and leave. Do not call out to him or make noise. Later, you’ll go collect the dishes, without making a sound.”
    Ondine had a terrible urge to burst out laughing at these absurd orders to skulk around like a thief. But her mother was so very serious that Ondine recognized the weight of her responsibility.
    “I understand,
Maman,
” she said, although her curiosity was thoroughly piqued now.
    “Take the daffodils from the dining room with you. Afterwards, on your way home, stop by the market to buy new flowers for the café,” her mother said in a low voice, digging into her apron pocket for a few coins. “Here.” Then, with her elbow, she gave her daughter a shove. “Go!”
    Ondine dutifully went through the swinging doors that led to the formal dining room, which was reserved for the night meal only. Breakfast and lunch were always served outside on the front terrace, rain or shine, since there was a sturdy white-and-grey awning that could be cranked overhead and withstood most bad weather.
    The Café Paradis occupied the first floor of a limestone house that was the color of a honey praline. Ondine’s family lived in the rooms above the café. The second floor had a master bedroom for her parents, and a smaller bedroom for occasional overnight lodgers. Her two older brothers once occupied that guest room, but both were killed in the Great War and now slumbered in the town cemetery, near their infant siblings who’d been lost to scarlet fever before Ondine was born. The third and topmost floor had only one slope-roofed room, originally made for servants, where Ondine had slept all her life.
    She crossed the silent dining room with its gleaming hardwood floor, mahogany chairs and tables and dark-panelled walls. Opposite the bar were a gilt-edged mirror and a framed replica of a Rembrandt masterpiece painted in 1645 called
A Girl at a Window
.
    “Bonjour,”
Ondine said to the girl in the picture for luck, as she’d done ever since she was a child.
    The painting was as mysterious as the
Mona Lisa;
and indeed many art experts—including some of the café’s patrons—argued over who Rembrandt’s
Girl at a Window
might have been. An aristocrat, because of her gilded multi-strand necklace and the detailed trim on her blouse? A servant, because of her flushed cheeks and rolled-up sleeves? Or a whore brazenly displaying a bit of bosom as she leaned on her elbows gazing out her window?
    Ondine had always loved this picture, for the model’s luminous round eyes seemed to see everything, as if you, too, had caught her interest when you passed below her in the street. But now she seemed to say slyly,
I know what you dream of.
Think you’ve got what it takes to conquer the Great World?
    Ondine made a quick check of her own image in the nearby mirror. She herself was no woman of mystery, but her skin was pale gold, her eyes a warm chestnut-brown, and from her morning exertions her cheeks and lips were pleasingly flushed. Yet the most noticeable thing about Ondine was her very long, dark hair that flowed in luxurious, silky waves. A boy once told her that these marvellously undulating twirls and curls were like punctuation marks