Cooking for Picasso Read Free Page B

for all the intelligent questions and lively ideas dancing in her head.
    The boy was named Luc, and they had fallen in love—the first real, sweet love for both of them. He’d been orphaned when he was fourteen, which ended his schooling, so he worked hard for the fisherman who hired him; and when Luc came to the back door of the café to deliver a box of neatly laid out, glistening silvery fish, he often had a little gift for Ondine—a seashell, an Alpine strawberry plant, a painted wooden necklace that a sailor had sold him from some far-off, exotic country.
    In return, Ondine sneaked food to him, usually some savory
tartelettes
made of her best pastry and whatever nourishing bits of meat and vegetables that she could find. Luc was always hungry, yet he showed his gratitude not by wolfing down what she gave him, but by eating slowly, deliberately, reverentially. Ondine loved to place food into his strong, confident hands and then watch him lift it to his eager mouth.
    But her father insisted that a man must have enough money in the bank to support a woman before taking her as his bride; so sweet Luc went off to work on one of the merchant ships that came and went in the harbor at Antibes.
    On the night before he sailed, Luc made a daring climb up the café’s narrow wrought-iron balconies and stole into her attic bedroom for a farewell night of love. Up until then, Ondine and Luc had only traded kisses and caresses when they went for long walks at secluded spots in the woods and meadows of Parc de Vaugrenier; but on this last night, poignantly mindful that anything might happen to Luc, they clung to each other, and Ondine finally discovered what all the fuss about love was about.
    Somehow, after the first surprise of the rude intimacy of it, the whole thing seemed innocent and natural and cozy. They slept sweetly until the birds woke her before dawn, and the sight of Luc lying there beside her was like finding a Christmas present on her pillow.
    “I’ll come back for you,” he promised, kissing her tenderly before he climbed right back out her window. “Once I’ve made a success of myself, imagine how proud your father will be to have me for his son-in-law!” he added boldly, to bolster his courage as well as hers.
    That was two years ago. Luc’s early letters were short on words, and long in coming, bearing only old news because not every port of call had a postal service. Then the letters stopped entirely. Few people in the town of Juan-les-Pins believed that Luc was even alive anymore, much less coming home.
    Ondine could hardly grasp the fact that he was really gone. She became so mournful that her father, who’d expected the nuns to teach his daughter obedience—not art and music and foreign languages—ordered her to forget Luc and concentrate on the more useful arts of cooking, sewing and most of all, serving. “And if we are lucky enough to find you a husband,” her father said sternly, “you will use all your mind and heart to make him happy. Do you understand?”
    Ondine couldn’t imagine any man but Luc as her husband. Yet by now she’d learned the modest art of fake compliance, with bowed head and lowered lashes, like the image of the Madonna.
    “Yes, Papa,” she’d demurred.
    But, just as at the convent, her inmost thoughts were still her own.
    —
    D RAWING AWAY FROM the mirror now, Ondine pulled the daffodils from a vase and wrapped them in a cloth napkin to take with her to the villa.
    “
Bonjour,
Papa!” she called out as she reached the front of the dining room, where sunlight spilled in narrow, angular stripes from the long windows. Her father sat alone at a corner table, counting up last night’s till for today’s bank deposit. Most of Ondine’s childhood memories of him involved the tallying of money with his old-fashioned adding machine. He was a handsome, pleasant man who enjoyed his neighbors and customers and the hubbub of a busy life, but when he circulated among his guests