The Belly of Paris Page 18

  And so there was peace. The Beautiful Norman even took Florent under her protection. But even without this, the new inspector was becoming accepted in the market. The fish women decided that he was better than Monsieur Verlaque, despite his spooky-looking eyes. Mère Méhudin shrugged, keeping her grudge against “the big beanpole,” as she liked to refer to him unkindly.

  One morning Florent stopped by Claire's freshwater tanks with a smile. Claire dropped the eel she was holding and turned her back, so angry her face was red. Florent was so surprised that he asked the Norman about this.

  “Just forget it,” she said. “She's crazy. She always wants to do the opposite of everyone else. She just does it to make me mad.”

  The Norman was triumphant. She strutted around her stall, more coquettish than ever, with elaborate hairstyles. Running into Beautiful Lisa one day, she returned her look of disdain. Then she burst into laughter right in her face. The certainty that she would drive the mistress of the charcuterie into despair by winning over her cousin gave her a happy, melodious laugh, a laugh from the diaphragm that rose up and jiggled her plump neck. On a whim she decided to dress Muche fancily with a little Scotch jacket and a velvet bonnet. Muche had never worn anything but a worn-out old shirt. By an unfortunate coincidence, at about the same time, he had renewed his interest in the water faucets under the stairs. The ice had melted, and the weather was mild. So he gave his Scotch jacket a bath, turning the faucet on full and letting the water run down his arm from his elbow to his hand. He called this game “gutters.” When his mother found him, he was with two other strays watching two little white fish, which he had stolen from his aunt Claire, swimming around in his hat, which he had filled with water.

  For almost eight months Florent lived in Les Halles, in a constant state of sleepiness. After seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office. He enjoyed the bare little room. Here he found a quiet refuge, far from the world, amid the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him and isolating him. But little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and a mental emptiness. And the putrid smells of the fish market started to nauseate him. Gradually he was disintegrating. His vague distress was turning into raging anxiety.

  All his days were the same, passed among the same sounds and smells. In the morning the shouts of the auction rang in his ears like distant bells. Sometimes when some of the fish deliveries were delayed, the auction would continue until late. On such days he stayed in the pavilion until noon, disturbed at every interval by arguments and fights that he tried to resolve fairly. It could take hours to dispatch some petty crisis that consumed the entire market. He would pace up and down amid the pushing and shouting of the selling, slowly strolling the alleys, occasionally stopping at a fish stall along rue Rambuteau. There were a great pile of shrimp, red baskets of little cooked langoustines11 with their tails curled under, and live lobsters crawling on the marble as they died. He would watch affluent men in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fish women and eventually leaving with a cooked lobster wrapped in a newspaper stuffed in a coat pocket. Farther away he would recognize the neighborhood women, their heads bare, always shopping at that hour at the movable stalls, where the less deluxe fish were sold.

  Sometimes his attention would be drawn to a well-dressed lady dragging her lacy petticoats over damp stones, a maid with a white apron following behind. He would follow her at a distance and watch how the fish women would shrug off her haughtiness. The bedlam of baskets, leather bags, and hampers, the frenzy of skirts swirling through damp alleys, held his interest until lunchtime. He was happy to be around running water and breezes that blew, as he passed the bitter odor of shellfish and the biting smell of salt fish. He always finished his inspection at the cured fish—cases of pickled herring, Nantes sardines on beds of leaves, rolled salt cod, which made him dream of distant voyages in need of these salted provisions—all displayed by fat, dull saleswomen.

  Then, in the afternoon, Les Halles would calm down and get sleepy, and Florent would retire to his office, make out his reports, and enjoy the best hours of the day. If he went out and crossed the fish market, he would find it nearly deserted. The crushing, the pushing, the commotion of ten in the morning had vanished. The fish women sat behind their stalls, leaning back and knitting, while a few late housewives stalked around, casting sideways glances at the remaining fish, looking slowly, with thoughtful eyes and pursed lips, calculating the cost of dinner.

  Finally twilight came, with the sound of boxes being moved. The fish was iced down for the night, and then, after watching the gates being closed, Florent left and seemed to carry the fish market with him, in his clothes, his beard, his hair.

  For the first few months he had not been bothered by the penetrating odor. It had been a harsh winter; the ice had turned the alleys into mirrors and icicles had formed lacy edgings on the tables and water faucets. In the morning little heaters had to be lit under the faucets to get water. The frozen fish had twisted tails, dull and hard like unfinished metal, and when you snapped one, it made a ringing sound like a sheet of iron. The pavilion remained in this sorry state until February, deserted and wrapped in a spiky shroud of ice. But come the thaw, the milder months, the fog and rain of March, the fish also softened, drowning in the melt, the smell of rot blending with the dull scent of mud wafting in from the streets, still only an unpleasant hint in the air, tempered by the humidity clinging to the ground. But in the blazing June afternoons, a foul stench rose up and the air was weighted with a hazy pestilence. The upper windows of the market were opened and enormous gray canvas shades were drawn to block the burning sky. A rain of fire fell on Les Halles and heated it like an oven, and there was not a breath of air to sweep away the fishy smell. Steam rose from the stalls.

  Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. He had experienced smells this bad before, but not associated with the stomach. His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish, which decayed at the first sign of warm weather. They filled him with their powerful odors, suffocated him. The smells alone gave him indigestion. Even shutting himself in his office, he could not escape this discomfort, for the insidious odor crept through the woodwork of the window and door. When the sky was gray and heavy the little room was dark and the day was like a long twilight in a fetid swamp. He often felt attacks of anxiety in which he had a strong urge to walk, and then he would descend into the cellars by the broad stairway in the middle of the pavilion. In the stuffiness down there, in the dim light of sporadic gas lamps, he found the pure, cool water to be refreshing. He would stand in front of the large tank where the stock of live fish was kept and listen to the continual melody of streams of water falling from each corner and then spreading into a broad stream that glided beneath the grating of the locked tanks in a soft, endless flow. This underground spring, this stream rippling the shadows, calmed him.

  In the evenings he enjoyed the beautiful sunsets that silhouetted the frilly steelwork of the pavilions black against the red glow of the sky, the evening light of five o'clock, the dust drifting in the last sunbeams, pouring in through the windows, through the shutters. It was like a luminous but cloudy window on which pillars like thin fishbones, the elegant curve of the girders, the geometrical patterns of the roof were drawn with Chinese ink. Florent feasted his eyes on the glowing parchment and recalled his old dream of a colossal machine with cogs and levers and balances, only half visible in the burning embers of a dark oven. Every hour the changing light would alter the shape of Les Halles—the forceful blue sky of morning, then the
black shadows of noon, the flames of a setting sun that died in the gray ashes of dusk. But on the flaming-sky evenings, when the stink rose, crossing the bright beams of sunlight like warm smoke, he was again shaken by an ill feeling and his dreams would go awry, and he would imagine giant ovens where human fat was being melted down.

  Nor was he comfortable in this vulgar neighborhood, among crass people whose every word and gesture seemed to have absorbed the smell of the place. He tried to be open-minded and avoid false modesty, but these women embarrassed him. He felt comfortable only around Madame François, whom he happened to see again. She was very pleased to see that he had a good job and that he was happy and out of trouble, as she put it, and that touched him. But Lisa, the Beautiful Norman, and all the others worried him with their laughter. There was no irony in the way Madame François laughed. She had the laugh of a happy woman who enjoyed the good fortune of others. And she was just as tough, she worked a hard job—even harder in the frost of winter or the rain.

  Florent saw her some mornings when it had been raining hard since the day before. Between Nanterre and Paris the cart wheels had sunk up to the axle in mud, and Balthazar was encrusted in it up to his belly. She would take pity on him and wipe him down with old aprons.

  “These animals are very fragile,” she said. “It takes nothing for them to get sick. Oh, my poor old Balthazar. When we were crossing the pont de Neuilly it was raining so hard I thought we were going to fall into the Seine.”

  Balthazar went to the stable at an inn, but Madame François stayed out in the downpour to sell her vegetables. The road had become a sea of liquid mud. The cabbage, the carrots, the turnips, were pelted by gray water, drowned in the muddy deluge that rushed down the sidewalk. There was no trace of the dazzling greens that were there on a clear morning. The market men huddled in their heavy coats and cursed the market authorities, who, after looking into the matter, had decided that rain did not harm vegetables and therefore there was no need to build a shelter for them.

  Those rainy mornings depressed Florent. He thought about Madame François and always slipped away for a brief exchange with her. She was never melancholy. She shook herself like a poodle and declared that she was used to such weather and, after all, it was not as though she were made of sugar and would melt in a few raindrops. But he made her duck under one of the covered ways for a few minutes and often took her to Monsieur Lebigre's for a mulled wine together. When she looked at him warmly with her tranquil face, he was charmed by the healthy smell of the fields that she carried with her into the foul air of Les Halles. She smelled of the earth, the hay the fresh air and wide-open sky.

  “My boy you must come to Nanterre,” she said, “and see my garden with borders of thyme everywhere. My God, Paris has an evil smell.”

  Then she was off, dripping wet. Florent always felt rejuvenated when he left her. He resolved to try to use work to fight off his depression. He was a very methodical man, and once he had devised a plan for the allotment of his time, it became an obsession. He locked himself away two nights a week to work on an exhaustive study of Cayenne. He found his little room to be an excellent place to work. He lit his fire, checked that the pomegranate at the end of the bed was doing well, then sat down at the little table and worked there until midnight. He had pushed the prayer book and the book on dreams back in the drawer and little by little filled the drawer with his notes, memos, and manuscript pages.

  The work on Guiana barely made progress because he was constantly distracted by other projects, plans for grand, ambitious projects that he sketched out in a few lines. He drafted a plan to reform the administrative system of the markets, a scheme for transforming the fees the city charged for produce as it entered Paris into a tax on sales at the market. He also devised an improved system for provisioning the poorest neighborhoods and a humanitarian law— the idea was still not fully formed—for managing the food that arrived each day in a way that would guarantee a minimum of nutrition to every Paris household. Sitting there bent over the table, immersed in these weighty issues, his figure cast a dark shadow on the gentle little garret. And sometimes a finch Florent had rescued one snowy day in the market would mistake the lamplight for daybreak and interrupt the silence with its chirp, the only interruption in the scratching noise of Florent's pen on paper.

  As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics. He had been through too much not to make it his life's preoccupation. If things had gone differently, he might have been a very good provincial schoolmaster, content in the peace of a small town. But having been treated like a savage animal, he felt marked by exile to engage in some great struggle. His depression was a result of his years of yearning in Cayenne, the bitterness he felt due to having suffered so deeply for no reason, and the vows he had secretly made to avenge people who had been beaten and justice that had been trampled underfoot. The giant market with its mountains of food had hastened the crisis. To Florent it was a metaphor for some satiated, gluttonous beast, a bloated Paris wallowing in fat and propping up the empire. He felt surrounded by oversize bosoms and bloated faces, which continually attacked him for his thinness and his unhappy face. It was the belly of shopkeepers, the belly of ordinary people puffing themselves up, celebrating in the sunshine, declaring that everything was for the best, since passive people had never been so well fattened.

  As Florent had these thoughts he clenched his fist, ready for the struggle, angrier about his years of exile than he had been since his return to France. He was overtaken by hatred. He often put down his pen and began to dream. The dying fire cast a hot light on his face, the lamp smoked, and the finch fell back asleep on one foot with his head tucked under a wing.

  Sometimes, at eleven o'clock, Auguste, seeing the light under the door, knocked on his way to bed. Impatiently Florent would open the door. The charcuterie apprentice would sit down in front of the fire, barely speaking and never explaining why he had come. All the while, his eyes would remain fixed on the picture of Augustine and himself all dressed up. Florent decided that he liked to come to the room because it used to be occupied by his girlfriend. One day Florent asked him if he was right.

  “Well, maybe,” answered Auguste, surprised by discovering this about himself. “I never thought of that before. I came to see you without really knowing why … Well, if I tell Augustine, she'll laugh … when you're going to get married, you don't think about such things.”

  When he was feeling talkative, his singular theme was the charcuterie he was going to set up with Augustine in Plaisance. He seemed so perfectly certain that everything would work out exactly the way he planned it that Florent couldn't help but feel a certain respect for him, albeit mixed with irritation. The young man was resolved. Though every bit as stupid as he looked, he went straight for his goal and would probably attain it without problems.

  Once Florent had had one of these visits from the young apprentice, he could not settle back to work again until he admitted the thought “What a dummy this Auguste is.”

  Every month Florent went to Clamart to see Monsieur Verlaque. These visits were almost a pleasure for Florent. The poor man still hung on, to the amazement of Gavard, who had predicted six months at most. Every time Florent went, the sick man told him that he was feeling much better and was hoping to go back to his job. But the days slipped by, and Verlaque had serious relapses. Florent would sit by his bed, chat about the fish market, and try to cheer him up. He would place the fifty francs he paid him every month on the pedestal table, and though it was prearranged, the former inspector would invariably protest and seem not to want to take the money. Then they would change the subject and the coins would remain on the table.

  When Florent left, Madame Verlaque would accompany him to the front door. She was a small, kindly woman with a tearful manner. Her only conversational subject was the expenses incurred from looking after her husband: the high price of chicken broth, red meat, Bordeaux, medicine, and the doctor. Florent was embarrassed by this sad conversation,
and for the first few visits, he failed to grasp its meaning. But finally, since the poor woman was always crying and carrying on about how happy they had been when her husband had brought home his full salary of eighteen hundred francs a year, he meekly offered to give her a regular sum, which her husband was not to know about. But she turned down the offer, paradoxically insisting that the fifty francs was enough. Yet during the month, she would regularly write to Florent, calling him their “savior.” In her small, fine handwriting, she would manage to fill three pages with meek pleas for the loan of ten francs, and she did this often enough that most of Florent's hundred and fifty francs made its way to Verlaque. Her husband doubtless knew nothing of this, though the wife kissed Florent's hands. But this charity gave Florent great pleasure, and he concealed it as though it were a prohibited act of self-indulgence.

  “That Verlaque is making a fool of you,” Gavard sometimes said. “He's living easy now that you are paying all the bills.”

  Finally one day Florent said, “We've worked it out. I'm only giving him twenty-five francs from now on.”

  After all, Florent didn't have any needs. He got his room and board free from the Quenus. He needed only a few francs so that he could go to Monsieur Lebigre's some evenings. Little by little his life became set like a clock. He worked in his room, continued his lessons with Muche twice a week between eight and nine o'clock, left one night free for Beautiful Lisa so as not to anger her, and passed the rest of his time in the glass-paneled room with Gavard and his friends.

  When he went to the Méhudins', he kept a professorial distance. He liked the old house on rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed the bland odors of the cooked-vegetable seller. Large pans of spinach and sorrel were cooling in the little backyard. Then he climbed a dark, greasy staircase with worn, warped steps twisted at frightening angles. The Méhudins occupied the entire second floor. Even after they could afford it, the mother always refused to move, despite the pleas of her daughters, who dreamed of life in a new house on a wide, handsome street. The old woman could not be moved on this issue. She said that she had lived there and intended to die there. Besides, she was perfectly happy in her dark closet, leaving the more spacious bedrooms for Claire and the Beautiful Norman. The Norman, by right of being the older, had taken the room with a street view, the largest and best. Claire, annoyed by this, refused to take the adjoining room overlooking the yard and instead insisted on staying across the landing in little more than a garret, which she did not even have whitewashed. She maintained her independence by having a separate key, and whenever she was displeased she could lock herself in her room.