In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. In December, the month during which family celebrations are being prepared, she wanted to know how you live in your grandparent/child relationships. The “News from you” section offers an excerpt chosen from your responses.
Fifteen years before her death, on November 24, 2014, at three o’clock in the morning, Marie-Laure got up in her bed, on the same date, at the same time and, with this confidence that never ceased to disconcert me, she declared “I know what I’m going to do. This year, for New Year’s Eve, I will make grandmother’s chestnut cake.
During the week that followed, until the wee hours of the night, sitting in her pillows, among the turned over books, pell-mell on the bedspread, Marie-Laure studied recipes, compared them, appropriating the best of one or the other. She said: “I think better while walking”. And went out at night to distribute to stray cats, in the alleys, meals on cardboard plates. In the early morning of a Sunday, I heard him return from his tour. She had brought back croissants. She sat down next to the pillow, handed me a bowl of coffee. From her Mona Lisa smile, I guessed she was celebrating a secret victory. “I understood everything, she told me, in that calm tone that preceded her tempests, I now see how to go about it with this festive dessert. »
Like all those who came from elsewhere, she had recreated—especially in her kitchen—this ideal country she left on April 27, 1960 when she boarded the liner that would take her from Le Havre to Montreal. His France would now only exist preserved in his heart, like a paraffin-sealed jam. On each return to Europe, she would rail against this France which had dared to change its face without asking her opinion. She had left to leave, at twenty, she said it in these words, left to leave.
The year of his arrival, the newly born ballpoint pen had dethroned the Sergent-Major pen to execute the upstrokes and downstrokes of school notebooks, but it would be necessary to wait for his first return to France, five years after his arrival in Canada. , to see the propeller plane replacing the boat of the great Atlantic crossings.
Anyone who came from afar would find spices, coffee, olives and cheeses on Boulevard Saint-Laurent to feed the clandestine refugees in their suitcases. Still had to find it, this chestnut flour. In vain she paced the boulevard, rummaged, questioned the Italians for the oil and the coffee, the Greek for the herbs, the Jewish fishmonger, the Poles, the Portuguese couple for the fruits, the Anatolian for the bulk and the North- African for chickpeas and semolina, it was in vain. Chestnut flour could not be found. “You’ll have to make your own flour, my little lady,” the pastry chef told her. “You’ll have to grind your chestnuts!” And that’s what she did.
I will never forget the first try. She served it to us, dressed in chocolate, on a porcelain tripod, placed on a lace of paper. It was at little Laure’s, whom she had loved before me; it was to join her that she had crossed the Atlantic. In three strides on the emergency gangway, one entered his lodgings. Aside from the colors, the furnishings, our little animals, her birds, our drawings on the walls, Laure’s apartment was the mirror of ours, inversely identical.
Little Laure and I had never tasted anything so delicious, but Marie-Laure, big Laure, didn’t give us time to tell. Our protests were without appeal. Before we could take another bite, she picked up the dessert she had spent her day on and tossed it in the trash. “It’s not bad, she says, but it’s not my grandmother’s chestnut cake. »
The second try, the third and also the fourth would meet the same fate. It lasted five days. She started over, starting from the beginning each time. Day and night. Six days after this first tea party, she presented us with a fifth incarnation of her cake. Intimidated by so much authority and determination, I no longer dared speak out, nor did Laure, for that matter. This time, however, was the right one. This dessert was sublime. Brandishing her fork, nodding her head, she savored her wonder, her face beaming. ” Here ! This is the cake I was looking for. »
“What you are tasting is the cake that Grandmother served us on Monday, December 31, 1945, for the first New Year’s Eve after the war. Who knows where she had unearthed chestnuts, butter, eggs and chocolate in this devastated Normandy. »
“I was five years old,” she added. The same age as this war. We were born on the same day. Like twins, we would share, this bastard and I, throughout my life, a language and noises and rages and a gibberish of language that only we would understand. Nobody had celebrated anything for five years. “It was my first Christmas, my first New Year’s and my first tree decorated with the animals and the cookie stars. We were gathered around Mama’s big bed, who had returned from the camp, blind and, yes, pregnant with Françoise, whom she would have such a hard time loving. Sitting in her pillows in the only heated bedroom upstairs, above Grandma’s laundry. Did I ever tell you that I have the same name as my grandmother? Her name was Laure, too. »
On the maps of the psyche, our secrets cannot be found, because no road is traced to get there. So many times in my four decades with her have I asked her why she hadn’t told me this or that before. As if we could get to the end of someone. Amused, but cavalier, she was capable of slinging and quips; she answered me: “Because before you, my darling, no one ever asked me to talk about it.” These stories only interest you. I even suspect that you feed on them and maybe even like them more than me. »