After that, I didn’t see him for four years. Or rather, I didn’t see him the way we used to see each other before La Belle Saison: no boat trips on the shimmering waters of the Lac Daumesnil, no nocturnal cinema in Bastille, no swimming in the pool at Buttes-Chaumont, no lazing in the park, no evenings spent sprawled on a couch listening to music at his place or mine. If I wanted to have a moment alone with him, the only way was to turn up at the restaurant at the end of the dinner shift, between midnight and one, when the last clients were standing on the doorstep, congratulating him—It’s art, Mauro! Lucullus Mauro! We’ll come back every week, Mauro!—though without convincing him to leave his kitchen and chat with them; no, all he did was stick his head out and, wiping his hands on his apron, look at them, nodding with his chin while his lips articulated an inaudible Thanks. The dishwasher finished up, the commis chef put on his leather jacket, Jacques tidied the bar, Mauro poured himself a coffee and finally offered me a flat cheek: How are you? So I would sit on one of the stools and start to tell him; Mauro would ask for news about certain people, the gang of six and Mia, his ex-girlfriend—when I talked to him about Mia, something still seemed to light up in his eyes—but other than that, he spoke little, just monosyllables and half smiles, and after ten minutes he would turn on the computer to place orders at the grocery store on Rue de Charonne, clicking on multicolored files, typing in quantities of Gariguette strawberries or red kuri squash, so my words drowned slowly in the bluish light of the screen, until finally I would fall silent. One night, I ended up telling him softly: Okay, you’re not listening, I’m going to leave, but he shuddered, as if shocked by an electric current, and put a hand on my arm and said loudly: Stop—I’m shattered, can’t you see?
He calls me back six months later, one day in June 2012: We’re selling. I’m dumbstruck: Shit, I thought it was going really well—“the rising star in eastern Paris,” “a quirky cuisine far from the usual gastronomic poseurs,” “instant, perfect, essential cooking”—and then I heard him laugh. Don’t worry, it is going really well—too well, in fact. His voice sounds clear, less muffled than in my memory. He suggests we meet up, and one hour later we are sitting face-to-face in a bar in Butte-aux-Cailles, where I remind him that the last time I saw him during daylight hours was on New Year’s Day three years ago: I was looking after a funny dog, which I walked as best I could near the Bastille. Mauro’s not exactly glowing with health, admittedly, and the whites of his eyes are a little yellow, but all the same he is no longer the pale, paper-skinned ghoul who has spent half of the last three years on his feet inside a forty-foot-square cubbyhole. So, tell me. A Perrier with a slice of lemon. I’m quitting. I’ve had enough. I’m beat. Bushed. Spent. Dog tired. Worn-out. Shattered. Drained. Exhausted. Out on my feet. Totally burned out. Listen, I’m fucked. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m dead.
I’m dead.
Fatigue. For four years, he’s been tired. His back, his neck, his joints. Everything aches, all the time. He’s forgotten how it feels to be healthy; no longer knows what it’s like to live inside a well-rested, pain-free, unstressed body; he’s forgotten how it feels to be cheerful, to have free time, to live life with a hint of uncertainty. He tells me about his days spent chained to the daily running of the restaurant, to the control of the regular operations, to the perfection of a methodology capable of improving the meals he cooks; he describes the mental fatigue that mounts surreptitiously as his solitude intensifies, the solitude he feels with Jacques, with the commis chef and the dishwasher, that unshareable solitude of the boss, the chef.
I can tell he’s getting carried away now; his flow of words accelerates, he bangs the table with his index finger as he describes the rhythm of work, the unflagging tempo that devours the morning, devours the evening—That’s the hardest thing: no evenings off, you know what I mean? I haven’t had an evening off in four years!—leaving just a few meager hours in the afternoon, a dead time that you could do something good with, but alone, because at that time of day everyone else is working, so you go upstairs to take a nap and you come back down when it’s time to start work again, and on Sundays you sleep in, you stay in bed much too late, you just lie there, feeling groggy, because you’re way too exhausted to do anything much with your time, so you hardly even leave the neighborhood, and little by little the boundaries of your life shrink: the neighborhood, the passageway, La Belle Saison, the micro-kitchen where he keeps banging into things, until finally his entire life is reduced to the surface of that countertop. I saw again Mauro’s studio apartment above La Belle Saison, the low-ceilinged room where he’d thrown a large mattress on the floor, where his clothes piled up, where the computer sat on top of a stack of unopened boxes of books; I saw again the orange sodium light that filtered through the permanently drawn curtains. Mauro lived in his workplace—I realized this suddenly—and what had, to begin with, seemed so practical—this little apartment, a convenience that would spare him so much time wasted on transport, yeah, he was so lucky—this little room had ultimately deprived him of any way of decompressing, had robbed him of a buffer between his workplace and his home, had stolen from him those tiny cracks, those hazy intervals, that can open up cavities of daydreams in the hardened concrete time of each day.
I’m dead. He laughs, leaning back in his chair, in front of me, hands crossed behind his head, eyes closed, dead. And four short words burst out of his mouth: I want a life. I observe him. Nearly thirty. Perhaps he’s tormented by the idea of his youth rushing past him, wearing him down; perhaps he feels he is sacrificing himself to cooking, just as high-level athletes sacrifice themselves to sports—and we will never see it from close enough, that abstinence, that discipline, that suffering, the control of the body and the emotions that animate it, the mental life simmering carefully like milk over a fire, never boiling or spilling over, this order that is imposed on them and that they impose on themselves at twenty years old, this dark heroism straining toward glory. It couldn’t go on like that forever, La Belle Saison. A gnawing logic, the logic of economics, the logic of business, demands, implacably, that you must grow if you do not want to perish; this logic insinuates itself into his life, like a current of cold air at the bottom of the ocean, before finally shattering when it collides with his youth. Recently—but was this because he was tired?—he’d felt that he was struggling to keep reinventing the dishes, varying the compositions using the same piece of meat without altering his methods, and suffering ever more from the restrictions of space—a general sensation of compression, obstacles, endless repetition. So he dropped out of the race; he folded. In doing this, he exploded the structure of time that bound up his existence.