The Belly of Paris Page 16

  Now it was time for Gavard to introduce Florent to the group, especially Charvet. He presented them to each other as fellow teachers and very capable men who would understand each other. But apparently Gavard had earlier let slip some indiscretion, for they all shook hands tightly, squeezing fingers in the manner of Masonic lodge brothers. Even Charvet was almost friendly.

  “Did Manoury pay you in small change?” Logre asked Clémence.

  She said that he had and showed a roll of one- and two-franc bills. Charvet looked at her and watched her movements as she rerolled the bundles of bills one by one in her pocket.

  “We'll have to settle up,” he said in a half whisper.

  “Sure, this evening,” she murmured. “I'd think this is about even. I had lunch with you four times, didn't I? But last week I loaned you a hundred sous.”

  Florent, surprised, turned his head away so as not to intrude. Clémence, removing the last roll from view, took a sip of her grog, leaning against the glass paneling as she listened to the men talk politics. Gavard had again picked up the newspaper and was reading fragments of the speech from the throne that morning at the opening of Parliament, in a voice he tried to make sound comical. Charvet began to have fun at the expense of the official language. He didn't spare a line. They were particularly entertained by the sentence “We have every confidence, gentlemen, that, supported by your light and the conservative sentiments of the country, we shall succeed in increasing the public prosperity day by day.”

  Logre stood up and pronounced this sentence, mimicking the emperor's drawling voice by speaking through his nose.

  “Isn't it great, this prosperity,” said Logre. “Everyone's starving to death.”

  “Trade is bad,” said Gavard.

  “And what in the world is it supposed to mean, ‘supported by your light’?” continued Clémence, who prided herself on her literary background.

  Even Robine released a little snicker from the depth of his beard. The conversation began to heat up. The group took on the Corps Législatif, tearing it apart. Logre did not let up. To Florent he was exactly the same as when shouting fish prices at the auction, his jaw stuck out, his waving hands hurling words into midair, and the posture of a snarling animal; he served up politics the way he would a tray full of sole.

  Charvet, on the other hand, grew colder and quieter amid the pipe and gas fumes that were now filling the little room. His voice became dry and razor sharp, whereas Robine gently nodded his head without ever removing his chin from the head of his stick. Then Gavard turned the conversation toward women.

  “Women,” Charvet declared authoritatively, “are the equal of men and being so ought not to inconvenience men with the daily affairs of life. Marriage is a partnership in which everything should be divided in half. Isn't that so, Clémence?”

  “Of course,” the young woman answered with her head against the paneling, looking into space.

  Florent noticed Lacaille the grocer and Alexandre the fort, the friend of Claude Lantier. The two men had been at the other table of the little room, apparently belonging to a different world from the other gentlemen. But at the mention of politics their chairs had drawn nearer until they became part of the group. Charvet, in whose eyes they represented “the people,” tried to indoctrinate them with his political theories, whereas Gavard played the prejudice-free shopkeeper, clinking glasses with them. Alexandre was a handsome cheerful giant who seemed like a happy child. Lacaille, embittered, already gray-haired, his shoulders stooped by his endless walking in the streets of Paris, sometimes cast a suspicious glance at all this bourgeois complacency, at Robine's good shoes and fine coat. Each of them was brought a small glass, and the conversation continued, more heated and tumultuous than ever, now that the social order was complete.

  That evening, through the half-open door of their section, Florent glimpsed Mademoiselle Saget standing at the counter. She had pulled a bottle from under her apron and was watching Rose fill it with a great deal of black-currant liqueur and a touch of eau-de-vie. Then the bottle vanished back under her apron and Mademoiselle Saget, her hands hidden, chatted in the bright light of the counter in front of the mirror where bottles and jars hung like Viennese lanterns. In the evening all the crystal and metal gave the place a warm glow. The elderly woman, standing there in the gaudy light in her black skirt, looked like a strange large insect.

  Florent noticed that Mademoiselle Saget was trying to entrap Rose in a conversation and cunningly suspected that she had noticed him through the half-open door. Since he had started working at Les Halles, he had seen her every time he took a step, dawdling in one of the covered streets and usually accompanied by Madame Lecœur and La Sarriette, the three of them studying him and completely confounded when he had become an inspector. But this particular evening Rose did not want to converse with the old lady, for she finally turned around, apparently planning to approach Monsieur Lebigre, who was playing piquet7 with a customer at one of the bronze tables. Sneaking softly along, Mademoiselle Saget at last managed to install herself beside the partition, where she was noticed by Gavard, who detested her.

  “Would you close the door, Florent?” he said harshly. “Can't we have a little privacy?”

  On leaving at midnight, Lacaille whispered a few words to Monsieur Lebigre. As Lebigre shook his hand, he slipped him four five-franc coins without anyone noticing. “Remember,” he said in his ear, “that we'll need twenty-two francs to pay tomorrow. The person who loaned the money wants it back in full. And remember that you still owe three days with the cart. And you have to pay it all off.”

  Then Monsieur Lebigre wished all of them a good night. He was going for a good night's sleep, he declared with a yawn that showed his large teeth, while Rose looked at him deferentially. He gave her a little shove and told her to turn off the gas in the little room.

  Gavard stumbled and nearly fell on the sidewalk. But with a laugh he said, “Oh, darn, I should have supported myself on someone's lights.”

  That made everyone laugh, and on that note they parted. Florent returned to lean against the glass paneling where he could still feel the silence of Robine, the outbursts of Logre, and the icy enmity of Charvet.

  Even later, when he finally got home, he still did not go to bed. He liked his attic, this girl's room where Augustine had left bits of ribbon, sweet and frilly female things. A few hairpins were still on the mantel, along with gilded cardboard boxes of buttons and hard candies, some pictures clipped from publications, empty jars of lotion still smelling of jasmine. In the drawer of the sad white wood table were needles, thread, a prayer book, a tattered old copy of The Guide to Dreams.8 A yellow-dotted white summer dress hanging forgotten on a hook. Behind a water pitcher on the board that served as a dressing table there was a large stain from a spilled bottle of lotion. Florent might have been miserable in a woman's dressing nook, but this room, with its narrow iron bed, the two caned chairs, even the faded gray wallpaper, gave a sense of simple innocence, a sense of an awkward, childish girl. The whiteness of the curtains, the juvenile gilded boxes, the book on dreams, the clumsy coquettishness of the walls—it was all somehow refreshing, taking him back to his own youthful dreams. It would have been better had he not known Augustine with her frizzy hair, so that he could imagine himself in the room of a sister, a lovely girl whose budding womanhood shone in all the little things around him.

  Another great pleasure of this room in the evening was to lean out the window, which cut a narrow balcony into the roof. It was enclosed by a tall iron balustrade where Augustine was cultivating a pomegranate plant in a window box. Since the weather had turned cold, Florent had taken the plant in at night and kept it by the foot of the bed. He would remain at the window for several minutes, deeply inhaling the fresh air from the Seine that blew in above the buildings on the rue de Rivoli. Below, the confusion of roofs of the Les Halles market spread into the grayness. They looked like sleeping lakes on which occasional lit windows cast the glow of a silvery r
ipple. In the distance the roofs of the meat market were dark shadows on the horizon. He delighted in the enormous stretch of sky before him, the great expanse of Les Halles, which seemed, amid Paris's strangled streets, like a faint vision of a seashore, the still, gray bay barely moving against the distant rolling tide. He would lose himself in this every night and imagine a new coastline. It saddened him to reflect on the eight wretched years he had spent away from France, but he nevertheless enjoyed the reflection. Then, shivering, he would pull the window shut. Often as he stood in front of the fireplace removing his collar, he was disturbed by the photo of Auguste and Augustine. As he undressed, he studied their bland smiles, standing there hand in hand.

  The first few weeks in the fish market were extremely hard. He had run into the open hostility of the Méhudin family, which put him at odds with the entire market. The Beautiful Norman was determined to have her vengeance on Beautiful Lisa, and her cousin was the anointed victim.

  The Méhudins came from Rouen. Louise's mother still told the story of how she had come to Paris with a basket of eels and had been in the fish business ever since. She had married a toll collector who later died, leaving her with two young daughters. It was she who had originally, with her ample hips and a wonderful ripeness, worn the nickname “the Beautiful Norman,” which her daughter had inherited. Today, she was a squat, shapeless sixty-five-year-old matron; the dampness of the fish market made her voice hoarse and gave her skin a bluish hue. A sedentary life had made her flabby and thick-waisted, and a rising tide of blubber from her bosom forced her head back. She had never been willing to renounce the fashions of her youth and still wore her flower-print dress, her yellow kerchief, and the turbanlike headgear once customary for fishmongers, which matched her loud voice and fast gestures as she stood, hands on her hips, a litany of standard market vulgarities flowing from her lips.

  She missed the Marché des Innocents, reminisced a lot about the ancient rights of the women of the old market, told stories about brawls with police inspectors, described visits to the court in the times of both Charles X and Louis-Philippe, dressed in silk and carrying a large bouquet. Mère Méhudin, as she was called, was the long-standing standard-bearer of the Sisterhood of the Virgin at Saint Leu. For church processions she wore a dress and a tulle9 bonnet with satin ribbons and held high in her chubby fingers the fringed banner embroidered with the image of the Mother of God.

  Mère Méhudin, according to neighborhood gossip, must have earned a large fortune, although this was evident only on holidays, when she appeared with solid gold jewelry around her neck, arms, and waist.

  Later, her two daughters quarreled. The younger one, Claire, a lazy blonde, complained of the viciousness of her sister, Louise, saying in a leaden voice that she would never submit to being her sister's maid. Since this was going to end up with the girls coming to blows, the mother separated them. She gave Louise her stall in the fish market, and Claire, whom the smell of skates and herring gave coughing fits, set up a booth in the freshwater fish section. Although the mother then claimed to be retired, she would go from one stall to the other, getting involved with sales and continually annoying the daughters with her crude way of dealing with customers.

  Claire was an unusual creature, very soft and yet somehow always fighting with everyone. She listened only to herself, people said. She had a dreamy, virginal face but a silent determination, an independent spirit that drove her to live by herself, never accepting anything from other people, exhibiting great righteousness one day and infuriating unfairness the next. Some days she would throw the market into chaos by suddenly raising or lowering her prices without explanation. By the time she reached thirty, her delicate build and fine skin, which the water in the tanks seemed to keep forever fresh, her small and undistinguished face, and her agile limbs would all thicken like those of a saint who had stepped down from a stained-glass window and was degraded by the company of market vendors. But at twenty-two she was a Murillo, to use Claude Lantier's term, among the carp and eels—a Murillo, however, with disheveled hair, clunky shoes, and badly cut dresses that rendered her shapeless. She was not a coquette and showed her contempt when Louise, all festooned in ribbons and bows, teased her about her clumsily knotted scarf. It was said that the son of a wealthy shopkeeper in the neighborhood had angrily taken off on a long trip after failing to get one word of encouragement from her.

  Louise, the Beautiful Norman, was of a gentler nature. She had been engaged to marry a worker in the grain market, but the unlucky young man had died when a falling sack of flour broke his back. Seven months later Louise had given birth to a large baby boy. In the Méhudin circle, she was regarded as a widow. Her mother would sometimes say in conversation, “When my son-in-law was alive …”

  The Méhudins were powerful. When Monsieur Verlaque had finished training Florent for his new position, he advised him to appease certain vendors if he wanted life to be bearable, and he was even so helpful as to share little tricks of the trade such as at which violations to wink, at which to fake extreme displeasure, and under what circumstances he should accept a small gift. A market inspector is both a policeman and a government official, maintaining both order and cleanliness and resolving in a conciliatory manner any disputes between vendors and customers. Florent, who was soft at heart, wore an artificial sternness when exercising his duties and generally overplayed his part. His somber nature, the result of long suffering, and his outcast mentality worked against him.

  The Beautiful Norman's strategy was to find a way of dragging Florent into an argument. She swore that he wouldn't keep his job fifteen days.

  “I'm telling you,” she said to Madame Lecœur, whom she ran into one morning. “If that fat Lisa thinks we want any of her leftovers … We have better taste than she does, and he's just awful, that man.”

  After the auction, when Florent would begin his rounds, taking mincing steps along the dripping alleyways, he could clearly see the Beautiful Norman watching him and laughing defiantly. Her stall, in the second row on the left, near the freshwater fish section, faced rue Rambuteau. She would turn, never taking an eye off her victim, belittling him to her neighbors. And when he passed in front of her, slowly examining the stone slabs, she pretended to be uncontrollably amused, slapping the fish as she turned her jets of water on full blast and flooded the passage. But Florent remained impassive.

  Inevitably, one morning war broke out. That day, when Florent arrived at the Beautiful Norman's stall, he smelled an unbearable stench. There on the marble slab were a magnificent salmon, cut into and showing its rosy flesh, some creamy white turbots, a few conger eels stuck with black pins to mark their sections, a few pairs of soles, some red mullets, some sea bass, a fine display of fresh fish. But in the midst of all these fish with clear, gleaming eyes and bright red gills lay a large skate, reddish with dark spots, extraordinary in its exotic markings, but unfortunately rotten. Its tail was falling off, and the bones on the wings were sticking through the skin.

  “You have to throw this skate away,” said Florent, walking up to her.

  The Beautiful Norman emitted a little chuckle. Florent looked up and saw her standing against a bronze lamppost that held the gaslight for the stalls in her row. She seemed very large because she was standing on boxes to keep her feet out of the puddles. Her lips were pursed, her hair set in tight curls, her head held at a devious slant, slightly lowered, and her hands a little too red against her white apron—and Florent thought she looked even more beautiful than usual. He had never before seen her so decked out in jewelry Long pendants hung from her ears, she wore a chain around her neck, there was a brooch, and an imposing collection of rings on two fingers of her left hand and one right-hand finger.

  Since she continued looking slyly at Florent and not answering him, Florent said, “Did you hear me? You have to get rid of that skate.”

  But he hadn't noticed Mère Méhudin sitting in a chair, like a pile in a corner. Now she got up, ready for combat, and, plan
ting her fists on the marble slab, insolently said, “And why does she have to throw out this skate? I don't suppose you're going to pay her for it.”

  Then Florent understood. The other market women began to snicker. He could feel a revolt building around him, and one wrong word would set it off. So he held himself in, picked up the waste bucket from under the slab, and dumped the skate in himself. Mère Méhudin had already planted her fists on her hips, but the Beautiful Norman broke into a vicious laugh as Florent sternly marched off amid jeers that he pretended not to hear.

  Every day there was a new trap, and he had to stalk the alleys with the caution of someone in enemy territory. He was splattered with water from the sponges used to clean the slabs. He slipped and nearly fell on scraps deliberately placed in his path. Even the porters bumped the back of his neck with their baskets. One morning when he hurried to intercede between two women who were about to come to blows, he had to duck to avoid being slapped in the face by dabs that were being tossed overhead, which led to much laughter. Florent believed that the two women had conspired with the Méhudins. But his former trade as a teacher had taught him the patience of an angel. He knew how to maintain a magisterial coolness, even if anger was rising within him and his whole being shook with a sense of humiliation.

  The waifs of rue de l'Estrapade had never had the ferocity of the women of Les Halles, the relentlessness of these huge women whose bellies and bosoms bobbed with the glee of giants whenever they could trick him in any way. They stared him down with their red faces. In the inflections of their hoarse voices, the swaying of their hips, the flips of their hands, he could read the obscenities being hurled at him. If Gavard had been confronted with these impudent and redolent females, he would have been perfectly comfortable, whacking a few posteriors here and there if they got too close. But Florent, who had always been intimidated by women, felt increasingly lost in a nightmare in which giant women of prodigious charms and enormous breasts surrounded him with their husky naked wrestler arms.