Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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Lumière

Chapter Five

The old woman staring down at me from the window across the street from so many years ago, that first day we moved into the Dufour estate, that face belonged to Madame Gertrude Mallory. The story I tell is God’s truth, even if I did not witness every event firsthand; the fact is many of the details of my own story were revealed to me only years after the fact, when Mallory and the others at long last told me their version of events.

But this you must know: Madame Mallory, across the street from the Dufour estate, was an innkeeper from a long line of distinguished hoteliers, originally from the Loire. She was also very much the culinary nun, a chef who had lived alone in the attic rooms above Le Saule Pleureur for thirty-four years by the time we arrived in Lumière. Just as the Bach family turned out classical musicians, so, too, the Mallorys had reared generation after generation of great French hoteliers, and Gertrude Mallory was no exception.

At the age of seventeen, Mallory was sent to the best hotel school in Geneva to continue her education, and it was there she acquired a taste for the rugged mountain range along the French and Swiss border. An awkward, sharp-tongued young woman with little talent for making friends, Mallory spent her spare time hiking alone through the Alps and the Jura, until one weekend she discovered Lumière. Shortly after her graduation an aunt died and left Mallory an inheritance, and the young chef promptly converted her windfall into a large house in this mountain outpost, remote Lumière perfectly suiting her taste for the austere life of the kitchen.

And there she went to work. Over the next decades Mallory diligently applied her first-rate education and stamina for long hours in the kitchen, building what cognoscenti eventually considered one of France’s finest small country hotels—Le Saule Pleureur.

She was a classicist by education and instinct. A rare collection of cookbooks consumed her private attic rooms from floor to ceiling, an archive that grew like a fungus above and around her good pieces of furniture, such as the seventeenth-century gueridon or the Louis XV–style walnut bergère armchair. The book collection was, it must be said, of international renown, built discreetly over thirty years by simply applying her good eye and a modest amount of money to the nation’s book bins and country auctions.

Her most valuable book was an early edition of De Re Coquinaria by Apicius, the only surviving cookbook of ancient Rome. On her days off Mallory frequently sipped chamomile tea and sat alone in her attic flat with this rare document on her lap, lost in the past, marveling at the sheer range of the Roman kitchen. She so admired Apicius’s versatility, how he could handle dormice and flamingos and porcupines just as easily as pork and fish.

Of course, even though most of Apicius’s recipes were quite incompatible with modern palates—relying as they did on sickening doses of honey—Mallory did possess an inquisitive mind. And as she also had a taste for testicles, particularly a fighting bull’s criadillas prepared Basque-style, Madame Mallory inevitably and most memorably re-created for her guests Apicius’s recipe for lumbuli—lumbuli being the Latin for the testicles of young bulls that the Roman chef stuffed with pine nuts and powdered fennel seed, then pan-seared in olive oil and fish pickle before roasting in the oven. Well, that was the kind of chef Mallory was. Classical, but challenging, always challenging. Even of her guests.

The De Re Coquinaria, of course, was only the oldest cookbook in her library. The collection rolled right through time, documenting century after century of changing culinary tastes and epochs, ending finally with the handwritten 1907 version of Margaridou: The Journal of an Auvergne Cook, and that simple countrywoman’s recipe for the classic French onion soup.

But it was precisely this rigorous intellectual approach to cuisine that made Madame Mallory a chef’s chef, a master technician much admired by the other leading chefs of France. And it was this reputation among the cognoscenti that one day prompted a national television station to invite Mallory up to Paris for a studio interview.

Lumière was a rather provincial outpost, so it was not surprising Madame Mallory’s television debut became a local event, villagers all across the valley tuning in to FR3 to watch their very own Madame Mallory rattle off fascinating culinary facts on air. And as the villagers sipped rough marc in the town’s bars or in the comforts of farmhouse parlors, a flickering Mallory up on the box explained how, during the nineteenth century’s Franco-Prussian War, starving Parisians survived the long Prussian siege of their capital by eating dogs, cats, and rats. There was an amazed roar when Madame Mallory explained that the 1871 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, quite simply the text of classic French cuisine, recommended skinning and gutting rats found in wine cellars—so much more flavorful. It further advised, the chef haughtily informed the television audience, rubbing the rat in olive oil and crushed shallots, grilling it over a wood fire made from smashed wine barrels, and serving it with a Bordelaise sauce, but Curnonsky’s recipe, of course. Well, you can imagine. Instantly Madame Mallory was a minor celebrity across all France, not just in little Lumière.

The point is, Mallory never relied on her family connections but had, in her own right, earned her place among France’s culinary establishment. And she took seriously the responsibility that came with this elite position, tirelessly writing letters to the papers when it was necessary to safeguard France’s culinary traditions from the meddling of the EU bureaucrats in Brussels, so eager to impose their ridiculous standards. In particular it was her cri du coeur in defense of French butchering methods—printed in the radical booklet Vive La Charcuterie Française—that was so much admired by the nation’s opinion makers.

And that was why the space around Mallory’s priceless collection of antique cookbooks was stuffed with framed awards and letters of appreciation, from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Baron de Rothschild and Bernard Arnault. The flat simply reflected a lifetime of considerable achievement, including a letter from the Élysée Palace on the occasion of her Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

There was, however, still one small bit of unoccupied wall in her crowded top-floor flat, a bald spot just above her favorite red leather armchair. In this corner of her quarters Mallory hung her most prized possessions, two gilt-framed articles, each clipped from Le Monde. The article on the left announced her first Michelin star, in May 1979. The article on the right, dated March 1986, announced her second star. Mallory had reserved an empty space on the wall for the third article. It had not come.

And there we are. Madame Mallory reached her sixty-fifth birthday the day before we arrived in Lumière, and that evening her loyal manager, Monsieur Henri Leblanc, along with the rest of Le Saule Pleureur’s staff, gathered in the kitchen at closing to present her with a cake and to sing happy birthday.

Mallory was furious. She sharply told them there was nothing to celebrate and they should stop wasting her time. And before they could grasp what had happened, Mallory was stomping up Le Saule Pleureur’s darkened wooden staircase to her private rooms in the attic.

That night, when she passed through her sitting room on her way to bed, Madame Mallory once again saw the empty space on the wall, and a parallel bit of emptiness opened up in her heart. She took this ache into her room, sat on the bed, and involuntarily gasped at the thought that suddenly thrust itself into her head.

She would never get her third star.

Mallory could not move. Finally, however, she undressed silently in the dark, the stiff girdle peeling off her like an avocado skin. She shrugged on her nightgown and passed through to the bathroom for the usual bedtime rituals. She brushed her teeth violently, gargled, and lathered anti-wrinkle creams into her face.

An elderly woman’s pale face stared back. The digital clock in her bedroom flipped a minute shingle loudly.

The realization came then, so big and ugly and monstrous she closed her eyes and brought a hand to her mouth. But there it was. Unavoidable.

She was a failure.

Never would she rise above her current station in life. Never would she join that pantheon of three-star chefs. Only death awaited her.

Madame Mallory could not sleep that night. She stalked the attic, wrung her hands, muttered bitterly to herself about the injustices of life. Bats flitted through the night outside her window snatching bugs, while a lonely dog on the other side of the church cemetery howled its anguish, and together the beasts seemed to perfectly articulate her lonely torment. But finally, in the early hours, unable to stand the pain any longer, Madame Mallory did something she had not done in many, many years. She got down on her hands and knees. And she prayed.

“What . . .” she whispered into her clasped hands, “what is the reason for my life?”

The only sound was emptiness. Nothing.

Shortly thereafter the exhausted woman crawled into her bed, at long last entering a kind of unconscious state among the tangle of her sheets.

Le Saule Pleureur was closed for lunch the following day, so the exhausted Madame Mallory uncharacteristically allowed herself to stay in bed later than usual. She thought it was the pigeon cooing on her windowsill that woke her. But it fluttered away and she finally heard the yelling, the strange voices, the commotion rising up from the street, and Mallory rose stiffly from her bed and crossed the room to the little attic window.

And there we were: ragged Indian children hanging from the Dufour estate’s windows and turrets.

She couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on. What was this she was seeing? Diesel-belching Mercedes. Yellow and pink saris. A ton of tatty luggage and boxes stacked up in the cobblestone courtyard, Mummy’s gray Storwel closet still tied to the roof of the last car.

And in the middle of this courtyard, my bearlike father raising his arms and yelling.

Chapter Six

What blissful early days. Lumière was one big adventure—of unexplored cupboards and attics and stables, of lumberyards and pastry shops and trout streams farther afield—and I remember it as a joyous period that helped us forget our many losses. And Papa, too, was finally restored to himself. For restaurant work was his center, and he immediately commandeered a rickety desk just inside the main doors, burying himself in the details of remaking the Dufour estate in his Bombay image. In no time at all the halls were filled with local craftsmen—plumbers and carpenters—with their tapes and tools and hammering noise, and it was once again the fever of Bombay re-created in this tiny corner of provincial France.

My first real sighting of Madame Mallory was perhaps a week or two after we had moved in. I was strolling through the headstones of the neighboring cemetery, furtively smoking a cigarette, when by chance I glanced over at Le Saule Pleureur. I instantly spotted Madame Mallory on her knees, bent over her rock garden, gloves and spade in hand, humming to herself. The damp stones to her left were warming up under the surprisingly strong morning sun, and trails of steam rose from the rocks, disappearing in the air.

Behind the chef stood the glorious granite slabs of the Alps, bottle green pine forests broken by patches of pasture and hardy cows grazing. Madame Mallory pulled her weeds vigorously, as if it were some satisfying form of therapy, and I could hear, even from where I stood, the violent sound of tearing roots. But I also saw, in the softness of her round face, the woman was calm and at peace tending to her corner of earth.

Right then the stable door across the road slammed open with a mighty bang. Papa and a roofer with a ladder suddenly emerged from the door’s shadows and they hobbled over to the front of the house. The roofer secured the ladder against the guttering while Papa roared, waddled back and forth across the courtyard in his armpit-stained kurta, and by sheer heckling backseat-drove the poor roofer up the ladder.

“No, no,” he yelled. “The gutter over there. Over there. Are you deaf ? Yaaar. That one.”

The tranquillity of the Jura was shattered. Madame Mallory wrenched her head sideways, her eyes rooted on Papa. She was squinting under the straw garden hat, her liver-colored lips pressed tightly together. I could see she was both horrified and strangely mesmerized by Papa’s grotesque size and vulgarity. But the moment passed. Mallory lowered her eyes and pulled off her canvas gloves. Her quiet gardening moment was ruined, and, clutching her basket, she wearily climbed back up the stone steps to the inn.

Her back was to the street when she hesitated after unlocking the front door, just as a particularly virulent burst of Papa’s roars rolled across the forecourt. From where I was standing, off to the side, I saw the look on her face as she paused before her door—the lips pursed in utter disgust, the face a mask of icy disdain. It was a look that I would see many times again as I made my way through France in the coming years—a uniquely Gallic look of nuclear contempt for one’s inferiors—but I will never forget the first time I saw it.

Then, bang, the slam of the door.

The family discovered the local pain chemin de fer—rough and gnarled and tasty—and this “railroad” bread immediately became our new sauce-mopping favorite. Papa and Auntie were constantly asking me to pick up “just a few more” loaves at the boulangerie, and on one such foray, cutting back from the town center with the crusty bread wrapped in paper under my arm, through the back alleys where the wealthy watch merchants once kept their horses, I casually glanced over a stone-and-stucco wall.

It was, I quickly realized, the back view of Le Saule Pleureur. The small hotel’s garden was quite long and deep, almost a field, and it gently sloped down a hill to where I stood. The verdant property was filled with mature pear and apple trees, and against the far wall there stood a fruit-drying shed made of rough Lumière granite.

The boughs of the trees were bent with heavy brown Bosc pears, ready for the picking, and autumn bees were buzzing drunkenly around the sugar-filled fruit. But there were also tidy rows of boxed herbs under glass next to bow-shaped beds of wildflowers and patches for cabbages and rhubarb and carrots, all neatly embroidered by a flagstone path that ambled through the garden’s fertile plots.

Down at the bottom of the garden, a compost heap stood in the moist corner to the left, while an iron-and-copper tap in the shape of a nymph gurgled water into a heavy stone trough off to the right, next to a bench and yet another ancient and majestic willow tree.

I stopped in my tracks. Madame Mallory was again in her garden, this time up at the top of her field, just before it began to roll downhill. She sat upright at a long wooden table, next to who I assumed was one of her sous chefs, for both women wore peacoats over kitchen whites.

I could not, not at first, see their faces because both had their heads down as they worked briskly and professionally at the table filled with bowls and platters and utensils. But I could see there was something in Madame Mallory’s hand, which she promptly dropped into a bowl. Then, without pause, she reached down with her other hand into the rough wooden crate sitting on the flagstone between the two of them. From the crate, Mallory pulled what to me looked like a bizarre form of spiky hand grenade. I later discovered it was an artichoke.

I watched the famous chef expertly trim the vegetable’s leaves with a pair of scissors, the smart snips of her flashing tool ensuring each ragged leaf of the artichoke was symmetrically aligned and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, like she was tidying up after nature. She then picked up one of the lemons that had been cut in half, and doused each of the artichoke wounds—wherever she had snipped a leaf—with a generous squirt of lemon juice. Artichokes contain an acid, cynarin, and this neat trick, I later learned, prevented the sap-oozing leaves from discoloring the vegetable around its wound.

Next, Madame Mallory used a heavy and sharp knife to cleanly take off the top of the artichoke with a firm downward crunch of the blade. For a few seconds her head was down again, as she plucked some pink, immature leaves from the plant’s center. Picking up a new utensil, she cut at the inner artichoke and elegantly scooped out the thicket of thistle fuzz called the choke. You could see the satisfaction in her face when she finally and surgically removed the soft prize of the artichoke’s heart and set it aside in a bowl of marinade, already heaped with succulent and mushy cups.

It was a revelation. Never before had I seen a chef take such meticulous artistic care, particularly not with something as ugly as this vegetable.

St. Augustine’s bells chimed noon. The crate was almost empty, but the young sous chef at Chef Mallory’s side was trailing the older woman, not quite as quick as her maîtresse. Madame Mallory, studying her sous chef, abruptly held out the small knife she herself had been using and said, not unkindly, “Margaret, use the grapefruit knife. It’s a trick Maman taught me. The bent blade makes it much easier to remove the choke.”

There was something in Madame Mallory’s gravelly voice—not quite maternal, no, but still strongly suggestive of a kind of culinary noblesse oblige and duty to pass the techniques of the kitchen on to the next generation—and it was that inflection that instantly made me sit up.

As it did the young chef, who lifted her head, to gratefully take Madame Mallory’s grapefruit knife. “Merci, madame,” she said, in a voice that, as it wafted down to me with the wind, seemed redolent of fresh red berries and cream.

It was my first good look at Margaret Bonnier, Le Saule Pleureur’s quiet sous chef. She was clearly just a few years older than myself, and wore a no-nonsense bob of blond hair, just the right length to tuck behind the ears that were rather modishly studded with silver earrings. Her dark eyes were set deep in pale skin, like pearls inside oyster-sized cheeks red from both the sharp wind and the sturdy Jura stock that was her genetic makeup.

My unabashed staring was interrupted at that moment by Le Saule Pleureur’s portly apprentice, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre, its darkly handsome chef de cuisine, both emerging from the side of the building and carrying the staff’s noontime meal, to be gobbled down before the restaurant opened for lunch less than thirty minutes hence. The platter Jean-Pierre held was steaming in the wind, a flat steel tray of minute steaks and frites, while Marcel carried cutlery and a glass salad bowl of butter lettuce and chives.

Chef Mallory instructed the apprentice to take the artichokes and their hearts back into the kitchen, while Margaret expertly set the wooden table with the cutlery and napkins and plates, along with glass tumblers, a vin rouge, and a carafe of cold Jura well water. As Jean-Pierre leaned in to place the tray at the table’s center, Margaret’s tapered hand, elegant like a pianist’s but scarred by oven burns, darted forward, her long fingers pinching a yellow-golden fry. She brought the shoestring frite up to her lips, her teeth delicately biting off its tip, her face lit by a smile provoked by something Jean-Pierre had just said.

The church clock chimed quarter after noon.

I turned to continue on home and to our family lunch of Madras mutton, but as I walked back to the Dufour estate, my heart was fluttering and filled by what I had just witnessed, a scene that instantly brought forth pictures of Mummy and steaks and frites and Café de Paris, Bombay memories all richly coming back to me in the streets of that alpine village.

But then, suddenly, a gust of wind came rushing down the mountain, and in one fell swoop these old memories of Mummy and Mother India were swept away, and in their stead stood an entirely new sensation, tremulous at first, but then growing in intensity with each passing step. What came to me in that wind, so long ago, was an intense yearning triggered by the sights and smells of French food intermingled with the musty aroma of women. Perhaps it was something seeded in childhood, but at that moment it crossed over into something else, something more grown-up.

*   *   *

A few days later, Papa abruptly ordered the entire family out into our courtyard. Even the timid French boy Papa hired as a waiter was forced out, nervously wiping a wineglass on his apron as he stood among us.

The roofer and Umar, up on ladders above us, yanked at pulleys and swung wrenches around bolts. Suddenly, as we stood openmouthed at their feet, staring up, a large placard arose over the iron Dufour gates.

“There,” yelled Umar, high up on the ladder.

MAISON MUMBAI, written in massive gold letters on an Islamic green background, filled the entire billboard.

Such yelling. Such joy.

Hindustani classical music blared out scratchily over makeshift speakers Uncle Mayur had set up in the garden. And that, or so I was later told, was the final straw. Le Saule Pleureur staff, all the way downstairs in the kitchen, heard the shrieks of disbelief coming from the attic. Monsieur Leblanc hastily put down the phone as Madame Mallory flew past his office on the second floor, and he went to the top of the landing to watch his maîtresse below him furiously rummage through the chinoise stand for her umbrella. It did not look at all good to Leblanc. A kind of African warrior’s shield and spear secured a knot of iron hair to the back of Mallory’s head.

“This is too much, Henri,” she said, finally wrenching the unwieldy umbrella out of the stand. “Did you see that placard? Hear that plinky-plinky music? Quelle horreur. Non. Non. He can’t do such a thing. Not on my street. He’s destroying the ambience. Our customers. What will they think?” But before Leblanc could reply, Chef Mallory was out the door.

Madame Mallory did not do the decent thing. She did not cross the street and talk directly with Papa, try to reason with him. She never tried in any way to make us feel welcome. No, her first impulse was to crush us under her heel. Like we were bugs.

What precisely happened was this: Madame Mallory marched down to the mayor’s office. Of course, everyone in Lumière was afraid of the sharp-tongued chef, so, not surprisingly, Mallory was immediately ushered into the Town Hall’s boardroom.

And there we should have met our demise. But clever people were always underestimating Papa. He was sharp, sharp as a filleting knife. Papa assumed politics in a small French town were little different from politics in Bombay—all was greased by the oil of commerce—and so his first move in Lumière was to put the mayor’s brother, a solicitor, on a hefty retainer. Nothing so crude as what transpired up on Malabar Hill, but just as effective.

“Tell that man to stop,” Mallory imperiously ordered the mayor. “That Indian. Have you seen what he is doing? He’s turned that beautiful Dufour mansion into a bistro. An Indian bistro! Horrible. I can smell that oily cooking all up and down the street. And that placard? Mais non. This is not possible.”

The mayor shrugged. “What do you want me to do?”

“Shut him down.”

“Monsieur Haji is opening a restaurant in the same zone as you, Gertrude. If I shut him down I have to shut you down as well. And his lawyer won permission from the Planning Committee for the placard. So, you see, my hands are tied. Monsieur Haji has done everything correct.”

“Mais non. This is not possible.”

“But it is,” continued the mayor. “I can’t close him down without justification. He is acting completely within the law.”

Her parting remark, I understand, was singularly unpleasant.

Our first face-to-face with la grande dame took place three days later. Mallory arose at six every morning. After she ate a light breakfast of pears and buttered toast and strong coffee, Monsieur Leblanc drove her to Lumière’s markets in the beaten-up Citroën. You could set your watch by their ritual. Promptly at six forty-five Monsieur Leblanc retired with the newspaper Le Jura to Café Bréguet, where some of the locals were at the bar and already on the day’s first ballon of wine. Meanwhile, Mallory in her gray flannel poncho and wicker baskets on each arm made her way from market stall to market stall, buying fresh produce for the day’s menu.

Mallory was a magnificent sight to behold, pounding the streets like a workhorse, each of her hard breaths exploding in white smoke. The bulk orders—a half dozen rabbits, perhaps, or fifty-kilo sacks of potatoes—were delivered by van to Le Saule Pleureur no later than nine thirty a.m. But the chanterelles and the delicate Belgium endive and perhaps a paper cone of juniper berries, they went into the baskets hanging from Mallory’s meaty arms.

On that particular morning, just weeks after we arrived in town, Mallory as usual started her shopping at Iten et Fils, the fishmonger that occupied a white-tiled corner shop on Place Prunelle.

“What’s that?”

Monsieur Iten bit the corner of his mustache.

“Eh?”

“Behind you. Move. What’s that there?”

Iten stepped aside and Madame Mallory got her first good view of a cardboard box on the counter. It took just a second before she knew the claws waving in the air belonged to crayfish scrabbling over one another.

“Wonderful,” said Mallory. “I haven’t seen crayfish in months. They look fresh and lively. Are they French?”

“Non, madame. Spanish.”

“Never mind. I’ll take them.”

“Non, madame. Je regrette.”

“Pardon?”

Iten wiped a knife on a tea towel.

“I’m sorry Madame Mallory, but he just came in and . . . and . . . bought them.”

“Who?”

“Monsieur Haji. And his son.”

Mallory squinted. She couldn’t quite comprehend what Monsieur Iten had just said. “That Indian? He bought these?”

“Oui, madame.”

“Let me get this straight, Iten. I have come to you—and before you, to your father—for over thirty years, every morning, and bought your best fish. And now you are telling me, at some godforsaken hour, an Indian came in here and bought what you knew I would buy? Is that what you are telling me?”

Monsieur Iten looked down at the floor. “I am sorry. But his manner, you see. He is very . . . charming.”

“I see. So what, then, are you going to offer me? Yesterday’s moules?”

“Ah, non, madame, please. Don’t be like that. You know you are my most valued customer. I . . . I have here some lovely perch.”

Iten scurried over to the cooler and took out a silver tray of striped perch, each the size of a child’s palm.

“Very fresh, see? Caught this morning in Lac Vissey. You make such lovely perch amandine, Madame Mallory. I thought you would like these.”

Madame Mallory decided to teach poor Monsieur Iten a lesson and she blew out of the shop like a winter storm. Still furious, she marched up to the open-air market in the square, her heels grinding into the rubbery carpet of discarded cabbage leaves.

At first Mallory flew through the two rows of vegetable stalls like a bird of prey, her eyes darting about over the shoulders of housewives. The vendors saw her but knew it was unwise to say a word during her first sweep through the market, unless they wanted a vicious tongue-lashing. Her second cruise through, however, one was permitted to engage her, and each farmer did his best to attract the famous chef to his produce.

“Bonjour, Madame Mallory. Lovely day. Have you seen my Williams pears?”

“I did, Madame Picard. Not very nice.”

The vendor next to Madame Picard guffawed.

“You are wrong,” called Madame Picard, sipping a thermos cup of milky coffee. “Wonderful flavor.”

Mallory turned back to Madame Picard’s stall and the other vendors turned their heads to see what would happen next.

“What’s this, Madame Picard?” snapped the chef. Mallory took the top pear off the pyramid and tore off its small sticker proclaiming WILLIAMS QUALITÉ. Under the sticker, a small black hole. Mallory did the same to the next pear, and the next.

“And what’s this? And this?”

The other vendors laughed as the red-faced Madame Picard rushed to restack her pears.

“Hiding worm holes under ‘quality’ stickers. Disgraceful.”

Madame Mallory turned her back on the Widow Picard and walked to a stall at the far end of the first row, where a shrunken white-haired couple in matching aprons and looking rather like salt-and-pepper shakers stood behind the counter.

“Bonjour, Madame Mallory.”

Mallory grunted a good-morning and pointed to a basket of waxy purple orbs on the floor at the back of the stall.

“I’ll take the aubergines. All of them.”

“I am sorry, madame, but they are not for sale.”

“They’ve been sold?”

“Oui, madame.”

Mallory felt a tightening in her chest. “To the Indian?”

“Oui, madame. A half hour ago.”

“I’ll take the zucchini, then.”

The elderly man looked pained. “I am sorry.”

For a few moments Mallory was unable to move, to speak even. But suddenly, from the far end of Lumière’s markets, a booming voice in accented English rose majestically above the general din.

Mallory’s head jerked toward the sound of the voice, and before the elderly farmer couple could recover, Mallory was barging through the early morning market crowd, her baskets bunched in front like a snowplow, forcing the other shoppers out of her way.

Papa and I were at the edges of the market bidding for two dozen red and green Tupperware bowls. The trader—a tough Pole—was holding firm, and Papa’s approach to such obstinacy was to roar his price at an ever-louder decibel. The final touch was the menacing pacing back and forth in front of the stall, intimidating other potential customers from coming forward, a tactic I had seen him use to devastating effect in the markets of Bombay.