The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel Read Free Page B

mouth with an imaginary napkin and I pranced over bridges with my shoulders thrown back and my chin thrust out. I executed a flamboyant bow to Domingo, saying, “By your leave, my lord.” I flapped my hand at Marco, saying, “Bring my gondola, boy.” For them it was a game; for me it was a rehearsal of my future life as a gentleman chef.
    However, first I had to serve my apprenticeship to Chef Ferrero’s satisfaction. After I saw the doge pour his amber fluid intothe dead man’s throat, I ran down the service stairs, two at a time, anxious to tell the chef about the murder. To my surprise, he didn’t gasp or clutch his chest or even widen his eyes. He sighed and sat at a well-floured table carelessly pressing his elbows into a mound of dough.
    “Are you sure, Luciano? Was the man truly dead?”
    “Yes, Maestro.”
    “Other states can be mistaken for death.”
    “Maestro, he was poisoned. I saw his eyes. Dead as stone.”
    “Oh, Dio .” The chef put his head in his hands. “It’s begun.”

CHAPTER III
T HE BOOK OF L UCIANO
    M emories spawn more memories, and recalling those early days with the chef always pulls me further back to a time of wider possibility—indeed, time now feels like a cone of narrowing possibilities. My earliest memory is of a broad, coal-black face framed by gold hoops swinging from elongated earlobes. The whites of her eyes were yellowed, but her teeth were dazzling white. She had big teeth, and big bones that bulged under the scuffed black skin of her knuckles and elbows, the rough knobs of a hardworking woman.
    La Canterina—The Songstress—was not her real Nubian name, but rather the name the girls gave her for the way she sang her moody African canzoni as she worked. La Canterina made the house run. She cooked the meals and scrubbed the floors and boiled the stained linens. At night, she put on a fresh blue turban and a clean apron to serve wine to the men in the piano nobile , where they drank and laughed with the girls. She tidied the bedchambers after each use, emptied the cloudy water in the washbasins, and poured fresh water into the pitchers. La Canterina brought the girls steaming hot rose-hip tea when they woke at noon. She took her breakfastmuch earlier, in the kitchen with me—hot tea for her, warm milk and bread slathered with honey for me.
    I don’t know how old I was when the nun brought me to the brothel, but La Canterina said a big man could have held me in one hand. I often begged for the story, and I can still see her briskly folding bedsheets while she recited it for me. “Your legs were still bent up like a frog’s, your cry was no more than a kitten’s, and you flailed your tiny arms like a blind man.” At this juncture she would tsk and shake her head. “Scrawny. Pathetic. Another burden in this heavy life.”
    Sometimes she’d pause and lay down a half-folded sheet, and her voice would soften. She’d say, “I couldn’t send you back.” She’d straighten her shoulders and snort righteously as she whisked the wrinkles out of the sheet. “Not that the strega would have taken you back anyway.” Strega— witch. Sometimes La Canterina rolled the r — strrrrega— curling the bow of her thick upper lip with contempt. She’d snap the sheet and go on. “Her strega face was pinched and small, like her heart. The strega said, ‘We’d hoped it was a girl for us to raise in virtue. But it’s a boy, boh .’ The strega dumped you in my arms and dusted off her hands. She said, ‘They all end up here sooner or later, so here he is.’ And she calls herself a Sister of Charity. Strrrrega .” La Canterina would snort one last time and walk off with the laundry, her high buttocks swinging in time to some lugubrious Nubian ballad.
    La Canterina talked tough, but when one of the girls gave birth to a baby boy and left him, naked and squirming, on the kitchen table, La Canterina swaddled him in a soft towel and hummed to him as he sucked on the tail of her