The Belly of Paris Page 17

  Among these savage women, Florent had one friend. Claire unabashedly declared that the new inspector was a good man. When he passed by, amid the abuse of the others, she smiled at him. She stood nonchalantly in her stall, her blond curls falling around her temples and neck, her dress on crooked. He usually saw her there, her hands submerged in the tanks, moving the fish from one tank to another, taking pleasure in repositioning the little copper dolphins that shot streams of water from their mouths. The streams of water gave her the quivering grace of a bather at the water's edge, albeit a sloppily dressed one.

  One morning she was especially friendly. She called the inspector over to show him a huge eel that had amazed the entire market at the morning auction. She lifted the grating that she had cautiously placed over the basin. The eel, resting on the bottom, appeared to be asleep.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Watch this.”

  She put her naked arm into the water, a slightly skinny arm with silken skin revealing the blue of her veins. As soon as the eel felt her touch it began rolling itself in knots, filling the narrow tank with its glittering green rings. When it calmed down, Claire pestered it some more with the tips of her fingernails.

  “It's huge,” Florent felt obliged to say. “I've hardly ever seen such a beauty.”

  Claire admitted that at first she had been afraid of eels. Now she had learned how to tighten her grip so they could not slide away. She reached into the next tank and pulled out a smaller eel. The eel wriggled on both sides of her tightly closed hand. It made her laugh. She threw it back in, took another one, and stirred up the tank, agitating the mass of serpents with her slim fingers.

  She stopped a minute to chat about business, which was not going well. The grain merchants down the way in the covered street were hurting them. Her bare arms were still dripping, refreshed by the coolness of the water. Large drops of water were falling from her fingers.

  “Oh,” she suddenly said, “you have to take a look at my carp too.” She lifted off another grating and with both hands grabbed a carp that was lashing with his tail. She looked for a smaller one that she could hold with one hand. Its sides puffed out a little with each gasp. She decided that it would be funny to force her thumb into its panting mouth.

  “It won't bite,” she said with a soft laugh. “It's not mean … It's like crayfish. They don't scare me at all.”

  She had already plunged her arm back into the water and pulled up from a section chaotic with activity a crayfish that had grabbed her little finger with its claw. She shook it for a moment, but it seemed that the crayfish squeezed too hard, because her face turned red and she broke off its claw with an angry blow, all the while still smiling.

  “On the other hand,” she said, trying to conceal her outburst, “I'd never trust a pike. He'd cut my fingers like a knife.” She pointed at an area on the scrubbed board where pikes were laid out sorted by size next to bronze-colored tench and piles of gudgeon. By now her hands were coated with slime from the carp, and she held them over the fish. She seemed enveloped in the scent of spawn, the thick scent that rises from reeds and water lilies when fish, dreamy in the sunlight, discharge eggs from their bellies. Still smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron. Her face had a peaceful cold-blooded look from the thrill she felt when playing heartlessly with river creatures.

  Claire's friendliness was only a small consolation for Florent. Whenever he stopped to chat with her, it provoked even cruder treatment from the others. Claire would only shrug her shoulders and say that her mother was an old bat and her sister was worthless. The unfairness of the way the market people treated the new inspector outraged her. But the war grew more bitter every day. Florent longed to quit. He would not have lasted twenty-four hours were he not afraid of appearing cowardly to Lisa. He worried about what she might say or think. She was always up to date on the great battle of the fishmongers versus their inspector because it echoed throughout Les Halles and each move was discussed and interpreted by everyone in the neighborhood.

  In the evening, after dinner, Lisa would often say, “Well, I'd bring them to their senses pretty quickly if it were me. They're a bunch of women I wouldn't touch with a pole, the sluts. That Norman is the lowest of the low. I'd give her my boot. You need to show them who's in charge, Florent. You deal with it completely wrong Take charge, Florent, and they'll get in line fast.”

  The latest crisis was particularly bad. In the morning the maid of Madame Taboureau, the baker, went to the fish market to find a brill. After watching her wandering around for a few minutes, the Beautiful Norman sidled up to her.

  “Come over and see me, I'll take care of you. Do you want a pair of soles? Maybe a beautiful turbot?”

  When she finally did come over and started to examine a brill, wearing the sour face customers use when they are trying to lower the price, the Beautiful Norman went on, “Feel the heft of this,” and she put the brill, wrapped in a thick sheet of yellow paper, into the woman's hand.

  The maid, a meek little woman from the Auvergne, felt the weight in her hand, opened the gills, still wore the sour face, and said nothing. Then, in a reluctant tone, she asked, “How much is this?”

  “Fifteen francs,” the Beautiful Norman answered.

  The other woman quickly put the fish back on the slab. She seemed anxious to escape, but the Beautiful Norman detained her. “What's your price?”

  “No, it's too expensive.”

  “Make an offer anyway.”

  “If you want. How about eight francs?”

  This seemed to wake up Mère Méhudin, who gave a menacing chuckle. What did people think, that they stole the fish? “Eight francs for a brill of that size? We'll give you one, sweetie, just to keep your skin soft at night.” The Beautiful Norman turned away as though offended. The servant twice offered nine francs and then went up to ten.

  After that it seemed the maid was really going to walk away, so the Beautiful Norman said, “All right, give me the money.”

  The maid stood in front of the stall, chatting amicably with Mère Méhudin. Madame Taboureau was so difficult. She was having a lot of people to dinner tonight, cousins from Blois, a notary and his wife. Madame Taboureau's family was very respectable. Even she herself, the wife of a baker, had a good education.

  “Can you clean it for me?” she asked, interrupting her own story.

  With the thrust of a finger the Beautiful Norman gutted the brill and tossed the entrails into a bucket. She slid a corner of her apron into a gill to remove a few grains of sand. Then she placed the fish in the maid's basket herself.

  “There it is, honey, to be presented with my compliments.”

  But after a quarter of an hour the maid ran back, red in the face. She had been crying, and her little body shook with anger. She threw the brill on the slab and showed a long gash across the belly that cut the flesh to the bone. A flood of disjointed words poured from her throat, which was still constricted from crying.

  “Madame Taboureau doesn't want it. She said she couldn't serve it. And she said I was an idiot who let everyone rob me. Look at it! It's ruined! I didn't turn it over. I trusted you … Give me back my ten francs.”

  “You can look at the merchandise before you buy it,” the Beautiful Norman answered calmly.

  Then, since the maid was about to raise her voice again, Mère Méhudin got up and said, “Why don't you shut your mouth? We don't take back fish from people's homes. Who's to say you didn't drop it and damage it yourself?”

  “Me! Me!” She was choking on her words. Then she started crying. “You're a couple of thieves, yes, two thieves. Madame Taboureau warned me.”

  Then matters grew even worse. Mother and daughter, wild with anger, fists raised, hurled abuses. The little maid, lost and confused, trapped between a hoarse voice and a screeching one and batted back and forth like a ball, sobbed ever louder.

  “Get out of here! Your Madame Taboureau ought to be half as fresh as this fish is. Are we supposed to patch it up for her?�
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  “A whole fish for ten francs! That's enough out of you!”

  “How much did those earrings cost? I bet you earned that lying on your back.”

  “You bet she did. She probably works the corner of rue de Mondétour.”

  The market guard fetched Florent, who arrived at the height of the quarrel. The pavilion was in revolt. The fishmongers, who would tear at each other over two sous' worth of herring joined ranks when challenged by a customer. They chanted a popular song: “The baker's wife has pots of gold that cost her almost nothing.” They were stamping their feet, egging on the Méhudins, as if urging dogs to attack, and some, from the other end of the alley, jumped out of their stalls, as though they were about to leap at the little maid's hair. And the maid was lost, drowning in the enormity of her mistreatment.

  “Give the young lady back her ten francs,” Florent ordered sternly when the situation was explained to him.

  But Mère Méhudin was in a state. “As for you, you little nothing, I am going … the hell with it. This is how I'm giving back the ten francs.” As she spoke she hurled the brill with all her might at the little maid from Auvergne, and it smacked her full in the face. Her nose started bleeding as the brill became unstuck and fell to the ground with the sound of a wet dishcloth. Florent was enraged by the brutality of this act. The Beautiful Norman became frightened and stepped back as he shouted, “I'm suspending you for eight days! I'll have your license suspended, do you hear me?”

  Booing broke out behind him, but he spun around with such a menacing look that the fishmongers tried to look innocent. After the Méhudins gave back the ten francs, he had them close up their stall immediately. The mother suppressed her anger. The daughter remained silent and pale. She, the Beautiful Norman, driven from her stall! Claire said in her calm voice that it served them right, which almost brought the two sisters to blows at home on rue Pirouette.

  After eight days, when the Méhudins came back to the market, they were correct, pulled in, very curt with an icy anger. They found the market calm and orderly. From that day on, the Beautiful Norman nurtured thoughts of terrible vengeance. She felt that the blow had come from the hand of Lisa. She had run into her the day after the fight, and Lisa had held her head so high that she vowed to make her pay for that look of triumph.

  Endless debates took place in the market with Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecœur, and La Sarriette. But when they were at last worn out by tales of Lisa's carryings-on with her cousin and hairs found in Quenu's andouilles, they couldn't really go any further with it. She was looking for some cruel blow that would strike her rival in the heart.

  The Beautiful Norman's child was growing up wild in the fish market. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn't emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time his favorite game when his mother wasn't looking was to build walls and houses of herring. He also had play soldiers arranging gurnard on the marble slab in opposing front lines, pushing the fish against one another, battering their heads into one another, while imitating trumpets and drums with his lips, after which he would throw all the fish back into a pile and pronounce them all dead. Later, he started hanging around his aunt Claire's stall for the purpose of gathering pike and carp bladders, which popped when he smashed them on the ground. That was great fun for him.

  At the age of seven, he ran through the alleyways, crawled under the stalls, clambered over the tin-lined boxes, and was the spoiled pet of the fish women. Whenever they showed him something new to amuse him, he would clap his hands and stammer, “That's so muche!”10 The word “muche” stuck to him: “Come over here, Muche.” “Over there, Muche.” It was what everyone called him. He turned up in every cranny, in the recesses of the auction office, between stacks of baskets, among buckets of fish guts. He was like a rosy white barbel gliding through deep water. He was drawn to running water like a small fish. He splashed through puddles in the alleys and stood under drips from tables. Often he would surreptitiously turn on a faucet to have the pleasure of a stream of water. But most of all, when his mother went to find him in the evening, she knew to look by the springs beneath the cellar stairways. She would lead him away, soaked, his skin blue, and his shoes, even his pockets, filled with water.

  The seven-year-old Muche was a solid little boy pretty as an angel and crude as a wagon driver. He had curly chestnut hair, beautiful soft eyes, and a sweet, innocent-looking mouth out of which came language that even a policeman wouldn't use. Raised amid the trash of Les Halles, he could recite the vocabulary of the fish trade with his hands on his hips just like Mère Méhudin when she was angry. So “slut” and “whore” and worse danced off his tongue in a sweet, crystalline voice fit for a boys' choir. He tried to make his voice sound gruff even though he looked the smiling babe in the Virgin's arms. The fish women laughed until they cried, which so encouraged him that he would not say more than two words without belching out “goddamn it.” But there was something lovable about him, the way he didn't understand his own vulgarity and the breezes and strong smells of the fish market kept him healthy. He recited his repertoire of curses with deep pleasure, as though they were prayers.

  Winter was coming, and Muche was bothered by the cold. As soon as the chill set in, the inspector's office became his hangout of choice. It was located at the left-hand corner of the pavilion on the rue Rambuteau side. It was furnished with a table, a filing cabinet, an easy chair, two other chairs, and a heating stove. For Muche the attraction was the stove. When Florent, who adored children, saw the small child, his legs dripping wet, staring longingly from the window, he invited him to come in. His first conversation with the boy shocked him. It was in front of the stove, and the boy said in his gentle voice, “I'll just warm up my paws, okay? It's goddamn freezing out there.”

  Then after a laugh he said, “My aunt Claire looks a little off this morning. Hey, mister, is it true that you warm her feet for her at night?”

  Florent was both shocked and fascinated by this waif. The Beautiful Norman remained curt to him but said nothing about her son visiting him. Florent took this as permission to receive him and encouraged him to come visit in the afternoons, thinking he could civilize the child a bit. It was almost as though his brother, Quenu, had become small again and they were in their room on the rue Royer-Collard once again. It was Florent's nature to be at his happiest with some young person who would never grow up, whom he could go on teaching forever, and through whose innocence he could feel love for mankind.

  On the third day of his relationship with Muche he brought an alphabet primer to work, and he was thrilled to note a great deal of intelligence in the boy. Muche learned his letters with the quick mind characteristic of Paris street urchins. The boy found the alphabet tremendously entertaining.

  He also found many other amusements in Florent's office. The stove remained the grand attraction, an object of endless pleasure. It was good for cooking potatoes and chestnuts, but that got a bit dull. Then he stole some gudgeons from his aunt Claire, which he roasted one by one by hanging them on a string in front of the roaring mouth of the fire. He ate these delicacies without bread. One day he tried a carp, but he could not get it to cook and it sent out such a foul odor that he had to open the window and door. When the smell became too strong, Florent threw the fish out into the street. But most of the time he just laughed. After about two months, Muche could write fairly well.

  At night the boy talked his mother's head off about his adventures with his good friend Florent. His good friend Florent had drawn him pictures of trees and of men in huts. His good friend Florent waved his hand like this when he said that people are better off if they know how to read. Eventually the Beautiful Norman came to feel almost an intimacy with this man she dreamed of strangling. She made Muche stay home on
e day so that he could not go see the inspector, but he cried so hard that the next day she gave in.

  Despite her broad build and air of toughness, she did not have a strong will. When the boy came home and told her how warm and cozy the office had been and his clothes were dry, she felt a vague gratitude, a satisfaction in knowing that he was protected, his feet in front of a warm fire. Later, she was moved when the boy read her a passage from a torn piece of newspaper wrapped around a slice of eel. Slowly she began to realize, though never admitting it, that Florent was not such a bad man. She respected his education and had a growing curiosity to look at him more closely and see what he was about. Then, suddenly, she told herself that some pretext to get closer to Florent was part of her plan to exact revenge. Wouldn't it be fun to befriend Florent and turn him against that fat Lisa?

  “Does your good friend Florent ever talk about me?” she asked Muche one morning while dressing him.

  “No, he doesn't,” Muche answered. “We just have fun.”

  “Well, you can tell him that I have no more bad feelings toward him and I very much appreciate his teaching you to read.”

  From then on the child was sent each day to the inspector with a message and back to his mother with a friendly message from the inspector, answers and requests that the boy repeated without understanding. He could have been entrusted with the most sensitive communications. But not wishing to appear shy, one day the Beautiful Norman went to the inspector's office and sat herself down on the second chair while Florent was giving Muche his writing lesson. She was very sweet and complimentary, and Florent ended up more embarrassed than she was. When Florent said that he was afraid they might not be able to go on giving lessons in his office, she invited him to come to her house in the evening. She also mentioned payment, but he blushed and insisted that he wouldn't come over if there were any mention of that. So the Beautiful Norman resolved that she would give him fresh fish.