Cooking for Picasso Read Online Free PDF Page A

what her mother had said about using her convent training, Ondine could not resist testing herself now, haltingly parsing it out. It was addressed to someone with the Spanish name of
Jaime
Sabartés
and seemed to be a peculiar kind of progress report:
I relax at last, I am sleeping eleven or twelve hours a day. You can assure Miss Gertrude Stein that I no longer write poems. Instead, I find myself singing, which is so much more satisfying than all the other arts. Olga and her wretched divorce lawyers can’t sue me for possession of half of the musical notes I sing, now can they?
    Also, I received your parcel of rags, hurrah! So now I can clean my brushes, should I ever pick them up again! But what do you think? Perhaps I will give up painting entirely for my new singing career, and I’ll become a Spanish Caruso.
    “Why would he ask for rags to be sent from Paris?” Ondine mused. “What kind of man can’t go out and buy rags for himself? Come to that, why doesn’t he just tear up an old shirt?”
    Well, this
Patron
obviously did not have a wife looking after him. In fact, he’d mentioned divorce lawyers. Nobody that Ondine knew had ever gotten a divorce; it was a mortal sin.
    But surely it was a sin to snoop around, too. She returned to the dining room and realized that it had seemed unwelcoming simply because it was so dark from the closed shutters. She flung them all open, allowing the bright spring sunlight to illuminate the room. The front garden’s scents breezed in, chasing away the mustiness. Now she could see that this room had its own cozy Provençal charm.
    “Much better,” Ondine nodded approvingly. “Good thing
Maman
told me to bring flowers,” she added under her breath, removing the old, dusty ones. She filled the vase with water and added her fresh bunch of daffodils. She stepped back to survey the effect; they brightened the whole room considerably.
    Just then she heard a distinct thump overhead that made her jump. The spell was broken—she was no longer an adventurous fish swimming through a sunken ship, but a delivery girl who was supposed to serve. Ondine froze, and heard more creaking—yes, someone was moving about upstairs. She waited for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Nothing yet.
    But he could come down here any minute, hungry. Perhaps he’d heard her walking around and noticed the enticing scent of the food warming on the stove, which was now wafting through the house.
    Quickly she hurried back to the kitchen and carefully poured wine from the pigskin bladder into the tall pitcher she’d brought. Her mother had been clever to include it, for with its brightly painted vertical pink-and-blue stripes, it looked so cheerful in the simple dining room.
    Ondine returned to the stove, lifted the lid to check the
bouillabaisse,
then carried the pot to the dining-room table and placed it on a trivet she’d found in the sideboard. The broth and the fish were to be eaten separately, so she laid out a soup dish containing slices of bread that had been dried but not toasted, over which he could ladle the broth; while the seafood had its own special plate.
    Mindful of her father’s warning to make everything satisfying for this Monsieur Picasso or Ruiz or whoever he was, Ondine arranged the meal’s dishes in an appetizing semi-circle around the main plate so that everything was within easy reach. She found a nutcracker in the kitchen and a small wicker bowl in which she put some unshelled nuts and fresh fruit.
    Now it was time for her to leave the man in peace to eat his lunch. She should go. She knew this, and yet, there was something so playful about the
Patron
’s funny little letter that it infected her own lively spirit; and when she found a blank tablet and pencil on the kitchen counter, she could not resist quickly scribbling a note, in French since he evidently read Parisian newspapers, and she wasn’t confident enough to compose Spanish grammar:
We hope that this lunch meets with