Switzerland, 1969
71. ONCE THEY RECEIVE the deposit from the Brazilian festival, Mansour finally has real money to send to Mama in Switzerland. She pays off a good chunk of her debts and prepares to close on the estate where she will open her restaurant. She buys the first sets of tablecloths and dishes but delays her excitement. She knows that money doesn’t solve everything. She’s tried this once before.
After Mansour left for New York, Mama had started to save for her restaurant more seriously. She’d gone to the Swiss countryside, where she’d heard rent was cheaper and the visa paperwork didn’t take too long. Working in restaurants during the day, she’d made dinners to sell at night, staying up late in the kitchen of the boarding house she lived in and the dishwasher girl who she’d just sent for. She’d wrap meals in dish towels and carry them to neighbors, people she’d consider kind so long as they were willing to pay for her product at the price she’d set. She convinced herself that she didn’t care if she had to leave food on the back steps or pass it through a narrow slit in the back door, only seeing the pale hand of the purchaser. Her cooking gave her a decent living and kept her out of domestic work, which was paramount, because with a father of noble lineage, she had vowed never to do domestic work.
With her savings, she was soon able to rent the lobby of their boarding house every Wednesday night for three hours, which gave her enough room to serve twenty guests at a time. She’d been ecstatic to design a menu of her favorite homemade dishes: soupou kanje, thieboudienne. She would make simple versions for her European patrons, ensuring that most of the spices could be locally supplied. She’d called the lobby Les Mercredis de Mama Ndoye, which she wrote across the tops of the handwritten menus, crafted with expensive pens and pretty translucent paper. She’d watched over the dishwasher as she folded and refolded napkins that first night.
“You’re a boss now, Mama,” the girl said.
Mama had done her makeup for the first time in years. She’d worn a pair of black capris she’d bought for the occasion. She’d even painted her nails red.
In the weeks prior, she’d made invitations—sixty or so—and sent them to the neighbors, who had always eaten her dinners, pinning them to the dishcloths that covered their meals. That night, she’d waited by the banister. Her sisters roamed the room, looking back at her every few minutes to share in her nervousness and excitement.
The first hour, they’d had no customers. Mama had sneaked under the stairs and cried. She’d hidden there until she heard her sister speaking to someone unfamiliar and crept out to see three diners spread cautiously across the room. No one else had come.
After hours, once the sisters had sullenly migrated back to their room, Mama had gone out to the backyard of the boarding house alone and broken the three diners’ dishes. The three china bowls and three plates had spread across the rocky ground of the back alley, each shatter a sound that she’d found pathetic, unsatisfying.
From where she’d stood, she could see a black silhouette in the window of a nearby house, one belonging to a family that she’d invited. The woman, Emma, had been buying Mama’s dinners twice, sometimes three times, a week. Mama supposed it was her in the window. The light around her figure was golden, the candle close enough to the curtain to show the details of her hair. After a moment, she had blown the flame out and disappeared.
The next day, Mama had soaked her eyes with the juice of a white onion, worried that their heavy redness signified something greater than a consequence of crying through the night. God, she thought, had given her a mouth sore overnight: whenever she thought of confronting those she’d invited and had not seen the night before, she’d just bite the sore and cause herself enough pain to keep quiet.
Winter in the mountains could not be avoided with tricks of any kind. It changed daily life, complete with unhurried and giant sheets of cold wet air hovering over the ground. But this year, Mama had not noticed the arrival of the cold. In preparation for her Wednesday dinners, she’d forgotten to buy herself proper shoes. The morning after her failure, she slipped and fell on the way to deliver her evening meal to Emma’s house.
She’d been angry enough, at first, to walk straight to the front door, but she thought of the mouth sore, the pain of which had actually begun to numb because of the cold, and it was in forbearance, in obedience, that she’d chosen to walk around to the back. There she’d encountered a wide and glistening patch of ice and collapsed onto the ground.
She’d lain on her back. The plates of food, which now rested on her stomach, had been luckily spared from the fall. She winced, the back of her head throbbing and hot on the ice. She lay there for a while, watching the snow thicken around her. It had been hard to see her hand, which she lifted up in front of her eyes as the moving white settled around her, separating her from the rest of the world. She’d sat up, found her footing, and finally marched up to the front door.
“I’m coming,” Emma had called from another room, deep in the house.
When she’d opened the door, she had her baby on her hip, and her hair was tied down with a rag.
Mama had swallowed. She could taste blood above her lip, felt it dripping down from her nose. Both women waited.
“Your food, ma’am.” She’d lifted the wrapped dinner, holding it up high to Emma’s face so that their eyes might meet. Face-to-face, hand-to-hand, for the first time.
“Just leave it on the steps,” Emma said, closing the door in Mama’s face.
Stunned, Mama knocked again.
“Just leave it there,” Emma had shouted from inside the house, firm this time.
Mama had knocked still. She’d knocked and knocked until others could hear.
An old man yelled at her from outside a house nearby. “Get away from there before I call the police.”
“Just shoot her!” another woman shouted through an open window.
Mama wiped the salty blood coming from her nostrils with her sleeve and kept pounding, her frozen knuckles unable to feel how hard she was hitting the door, the splinters sliding into her skin.
She’d heard a shot, then a whisper, as a bullet pierced the icy air above her. She couldn’t see it, but she saw the way it parted the fog. It had brought her back to her senses, gave her a clearer picture of things. She could see something of the narrow street. The fur-shrouded pale faces of the small gathering crowd. The streak of her blood on Emma’s door.
She’d retreated, walking down the steps backward, her whole body shaking as if her legs were melting into the cold. The ice seemed thicker on the ground than it had been before, and she’d struggled to walk.
A policeman and the crowd of onlookers watched her slow steps down the ice patch.
Mama had walked the two blocks home and rested in the living room alone, until the landlady came and covered her with a blanket and called the dishwasher girl down to get her.
The night before closing on the estate, this memory comes back to Mama, in all of its detail, and she cries even more than she’d cried before. She vows to leave the past behind her, as she’s left so many other painful things behind, and she promises herself that this time will be different. That with a place of her own, life will be new.