The Belly of Paris Page 26

Beautiful Lisa remained cool and collected. Her lips were pursed, and her bosom was back to the mute round shape of a belly. The heavy sounds of Les Halles were rumbling overhead. The sounds of the street came through the grates on rue Rambuteau and cut through the thick basement silence.

  She reflected on how it was only the sheer power of her arms that had saved her. She shook off a few feathers that were still stuck to her skirt. Then, afraid to be found there, she left without looking at Marjolin. She was relieved to be lit by sunlight from the grates as she climbed the stairs.

  Perfectly calm and a little pale, she went back to the charcuterie.

  “You were gone a long time,” Quenu said.

  “I couldn't find Gavard. I looked everywhere,” she said calmly. “We'll have to have the leg of lamb without him.”

  She refilled the crock of saindoux and cut off some chops for her friend Madame Taboureau, who had sent her maid to pick them up. The blows of the cleaver reminded her of Marjolin down in the basement. But she felt no guilt. She had behaved as a decent woman should. She wasn't going to upset herself for a ragamuffin like that. She had her husband and daughter to think of.

  But when she looked at Quenu, she did notice the coarseness of the reddish skin on the back of his neck and his clean-shaven chin as rough and wrinkly as knotty wood. The neck and chin of the other one had seemed like pink velvet.

  It was better not to think about such things. She was never going to touch him again. He imagined things that were not possible. It had been a little treat that she had allowed herself and now regretted—children grew up much too fast these days.

  As the color came back to her cheeks, Quenu thought she was looking “pretty damn good.” He sat down next to her at the counter and said, “You ought to go out more often. It agrees with you. Maybe we should go to the theater some evening to the Gaîté,9 where Madame Taboureau saw that play she liked.”

  Lisa smiled and said, “We'll see.” Then she disappeared again.

  Quenu thought about how nice it had been of her to run after that fellow Gavard. He did not notice her go upstairs. She went to Florent's room with the key that hung on a nail in the kitchen. She couldn't count on the poultry man now, so she hoped to find some clue in Florent's room. She paced slowly, looking at the bed, the mantel, peering into every corner. The window that led to the narrow balcony was open, and the budding pomegranate plant was bathed in the golden dust of sunset. It occurred to her that it was as though the shopgirl had never left the room and had slept there the night before. There was no male scent to the room. This surprised her. She had expected to find some suspicious locked boxes or trunks. She fingered Augustine's summer dress, still hanging on the wall.

  Finally she sat at the table and started reading a piece of paper half filled with writing. The word “revolution” turned up twice. Frightened, she opened the drawer. It was full of paper. But, faced with this not-very-well-concealed secret in this sad light-wood table, her honesty got the better of her. She lingered for a moment over the papers, trying to read them without actually touching them. And then a finch, the sunlight suddenly striking its cage, let out a shriek, and Beautiful Lisa shuddered. She closed the drawer. It was very bad, what she was doing.

  Standing by the window, she was wondering if she should ask the advice of that wise man, the Abbé Roustan, when she noticed a group of people on the street below gathered around a stretcher. Though it was nearly nightfall, she could clearly make out Cadine in the center of the crowd, in tears, while Florent and Claude, their feet covered in white dust, were on the sidewalk discussing something in great agitation. Surprised that they were back already, she hurried down the stairs.

  She had barely made it to the counter when Mademoiselle Saget came in and said, “It's that poor Marjolin. They just found him in the cellar with his head split open … Don't you want to come look, Madame Quenu?”

  She crossed the street to see Marjolin. The young man lay stretched out and pale with his eyes closed, one lock of his hair caked with blood. The crowd agreed that it wasn't a big thing, that the fault was his, the ne'er-do-well, the way he was always carrying on in the cellars. They guessed that he must have tried to jump over one of the slaughtering blocks, one of his favorite games, and he'd fallen and smacked his head on the stone. Pointing at the crying Cadine, Mademoiselle Saget murmured, “She probably shoved him. They're always together in some corner.”

  Revived by the fresh air, Marjolin opened his startled eyes wide. He looked up at everyone, and then, running across Lisa's face bent over him, he smiled sweetly with a humble, submissive look. It was as though he did not remember what had happened. Lisa was relieved and said that he should be taken to the hospital immediately. She would visit him there with cookies and oranges. Marjolin's head fell back, and the stretcher was carried away. Cadine followed it with her tray still hanging from her neck, the little bouquets of violets on the carpet of green moss catching her warm teardrops. But, burning with grief, she gave no thought to her flowers.

  As Lisa was going back to the charcuterie, she overheard Claude exchange a handshake with Florent and bid him good-bye, saying, “The damn brat, he ruined my day. Still, we had a hell of a good time, didn't we?”

  Claude and Florent had returned weary but happy. They carried with them the pleasant scent of open air. By daybreak that morning Madame François had already sold all her vegetables. The three of them went to get her wagon at the Compas d'Or on rue Montorgueil. Even in the center of Paris this was a foretaste of the countryside. Behind Restaurant Philippe,10 whose ground floor was done in gilded wood, was a farmyard, bustling and dirty, redolent with the smell of hot dung and fresh straw. Clusters of chickens were pecking at the soft ground. Stairways, balconies, and broken roofing were green with mold and leaned against the house next door. At the back, under a crudely made shelter, Balthazar was waiting, already harnessed and eating oats from a bag tied to his halter. He trotted slowly down rue Montorgueil, pleased to be returning to Nanterre so soon. But he wasn't hauling an empty cart. Madame François had made an arrangement with the company that cleaned Les Halles. Twice a week she carted off a load of leaves pitchforked from the trash heaps scattered around the streets of the market. It made excellent compost.

  In very little time the cart was loaded to overflowing. Claude and Florent stretched out leisurely on the thick bed of greens. Madame François took the reins and Balthazar shuffled off at his slow pace, his head slightly bowed with the effort of pulling so many people.

  The outing had been planned for a long time. The woman liked the two men and laughed easily and promised them an omelette au lard11 the likes of which could not be found in that “pigsty called Paris.” They savored this lazy day, not yet lit by the sun. Far away, Nanterre was a paradise that they were about to enter.

  “I hope you're comfortable,” said Madame François as she turned into rue du Pont-Neuf.

  Claude swore that it was “as soft as a bridal bed.” The two of them lay there on their backs, arms folded behind their heads and gazing up at the sky, where the stars were beginning to lose their glow. They kept silent as they rolled along rue de Rivoli, waiting until there were no more buildings in sight. They just listened to the kind woman in the front talking in a soft voice to Balthazar. “Don't strain yourself, my old friend. We're not in any hurry. We'll get there eventually.”

  Along the Champs-Elysées, where the painter saw only the tops of trees on both sides and a broad green swath of the Tuileries Garden at the end, he woke up and began talking to himself. As they passed rue de Roule, he looked down the street and could see one of the side doors to Saint Eustache, which could be seen from a long distance under the giant curve of one of the covered alleyways. He kept returning to the subject of the church as he spoke, seeing it as a point of great symbolic value.

  “It's an odd juxtaposition,” he said. “That section of the church framed in the avenue of cast iron. One kills the other. Iron will kill off stone, and the time is near … Flore
nt, do you believe in coincidences? I don't think it was merely a desire for symmetry that brought one of Saint Eustache's rosette windows into alignment with Les Halles like this. Don't you see the message? It's modern art, realism or naturalism—whatever you want to call it—springing up in the face of the old art. Don't you think so?”

  Since Florent didn't answer, he went on, “This church is an architectural bastard. It houses the death throes of the Middle Ages together with the baby gurgles of the Renaissance. Have you noticed the kind of churches they build nowadays? They could be anything—a library, an observatory, a pigeon coop, barracks, but certainly no one could be persuaded that God dwells in them. The masons of the Lord are dead, and the wise would stop building these ugly stone carcasses in which no one can live … Since the beginning of the century only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it, Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its rosette window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life. That's what I think anyway, my good friend.”

  Madame François laughed. “You know, Monsieur Claude, whoever made your tongue certainly earned their money. Balthazar is turning his ears to listen to you. Giddyap, Balthazar!”

  The wagon slowly made its way along. The avenue was deserted at this hour of the morning, with its empty steel chairs lining both sides and its lawns broken up by bushes in the bluish shadows of the trees. At the traffic circle a man and a woman on horseback passed them at an easy trot. Florent, who was using a bundle of cabbage leaves for a pillow, was still staring up at the sky, where the rosy light of morning was spreading. From time to time he closed his eyes to let the morning freshness cool his face. He was so happy to be leaving Les Halles and moving into clean air that he could barely listen to what was being said.

  “It's fine for those who want to encase art in a toy box,” Claude continued after a brief silence. “It's a big thing now to say that art cannot live with science. The products of industry kill poetry. Then all those fools start crying into their flowers as though anyone were trying to harm them. It nauseates me. I would love to answer those idiots with art that was truly outrageous. It would feel good to upset them. You know what my best work has been so far, the one that gives me the greatest satisfaction when I look back? This is a great story … Last year on Christmas Eve, I was staying with my aunt Lisa, and that moronic apprentice—you know him— Auguste, was busy arranging the window display. He was driving me absolutely crazy with the way he was doing the window. I insisted that he step back and let me try to do it, like it was a painting. It had all the powerful colors—the red of stuffed tongues, the yellow of jambonneaux, blue paper shreds, pink where things had been cut into, green from sprigs of heather, and most especially the black of boudin, a spectacular black that I have never been able to capture again. And then the caul fat, the sausages, the andouille, the breaded pigs' feet, gave me a subtle range of grays.

  “So I made a virtual work of art. I took the platters and the dishes, canning jars and crocks. I carefully placed the colors in an astonishing still life bursting with color, ingeniously running up and down the color scale. Hungry flames shot out of the red tongues, and the boudin mingled with the clear tones of sausage, hinting at a colossal bellyache. You see, I had painted the gluttony of Christmas Eve dinner,12 the midnight hour for overeating, the gorging of stomachs inspired by the singing of carols.

  “Above, a giant turkey was showing its white breast, marbled under the skin by the dark splotches of truffles. It was both barbaric and very fine, like a vision of a belly but with a touch of cruelty, such an outburst of parody that a crowd gathered around the window, troubled by this brightly burning display of colors. When my aunt Lisa came out of the kitchen, she panicked, thinking for an instant that I had somehow set all the fat in the shop on fire. The turkey struck her as particularly obscene. She threw me out and had Auguste go back to arranging the window and displaying his stupidity. Those backward creatures will never grasp the power of a touch of red next to a touch of gray … Oh, well, that was my masterpiece. I've never done better.”

  He fell silent, smiling and withdrawing into his reminisces. The wagon reached the Arc de Triomphe. Gusts of wind raced through the open expanse, blowing through all the streets that emptied into the enormous plaza. Florent sat up and inhaled the first scents of country grass. He turned his back on Paris and strained for a glimpse of country meadows. When they came up to rue de Longchamp, Madame François pointed out the spot where she had picked him up. That turned him introspective. He studied her pensively. She seemed so healthy and calm with her slightly outstretched arms working the reins. She was more beautiful than Beautiful Lisa, with a kerchief over her head, her ruddy complexion, and her look of plain, outspoken kindness. When she clicked her tongue softly, Balthazar perked up his ears and picked up his step.

  When they got to Nanterre, the cart turned left down a narrow lane running between walls and stopped at a dead end. It was what she called the end of the world. First the cabbage leaves had to be unloaded. Claude and Florent did not want to bother the garden boy who was busy planting lettuce. They each took a pitchfork and started hurling the load onto the compost heap. It was fun. Claude particularly liked the compost. Vegetable peelings, Les Halles mud, the trash from that giant table, still alive and being returned to the place where new vegetables would grow to warm a new generation of turnips and cabbage. They grew into beautiful produce that was laid out on Paris pavements. Paris rotted everything and sent it back to the earth, which tirelessly revived life from the dead.

  “Look,” said Claude, thrusting in his pitchfork one last time, “there's a stump of cabbage I recognize. This is at least the tenth time it's sprouted back in that corner by the apricot tree.”

  That made Florent laugh, but he became serious again very soon, walking slowly around the garden while Claude sketched the stable and Madame François prepared lunch. The garden was a long strip of land divided down the middle by a path. It rose gradually and at the top, if you looked up, you could see the stumpy barracks of Mont-Valérien. Lush hedges separated the garden from other plots of land. Thick tall walls of hawthorn drew a green curtain around the garden so impenetrable that of all the neighboring land, only Mont-Valérien gave a curious glance into Madame François's domain. This unseen countryside offered peace. Between the four hedges the May sunlight struck the entire length of the garden, warming it in a silence that buzzed with insects. Certain cracking noises and gentle sighs made it seem that you could hear the vegetables growing. The beds of spinach and sorrel, the rows of radishes, turnips, and carrots, the tall potato plants and cabbages, formed regular lines along the black earth, shaded green by tree branches.

  Farther away were lettuce, onion, leeks, and celery in rows as tidy as soldiers on parade. The peas and beans were beginning to unfurl their thin stems, creeping up the forest of sticks that by June would become stalks thick with leaves. There was not one weed in sight. The garden looked like two parallel carpets, green patterns on a reddish background, carefully brushed each morning. Borders of thyme made gray fringes on the two sides of the path.

  Florent paced back and forth in the perfume of sun-warmed thyme. He was deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. Now he delighted in finding them where they belonged, living peacefully in the earth, their every limb thriving. The cabbages looked stout and prosperous, the carrots were merry, and the lettuces were lined up in lazy nonchalance. The Les Halles that he had left that morning seemed to him to be a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.

  His st
eps began to slow down, and he rested a while in Madame François's garden, as though resting from a long march through deafening noise and foul smells. The ruckus and the sickening humidity of the fish pavilion began to leave him. He was reborn in the fresh air. Claude was right: everything in Les Halles was in the throes of death. The earth was life, the eternal cradle, the health of the world.

  “The omelette's ready!” Madame François shouted.

  With all three seated in the kitchen, the door open to the sun, they ate so merrily that Madame looked at Florent with wonder, saying with every mouthful, “How you've changed. You look ten years younger. It's that vile Paris that makes you so somber. But now I see some sunlight in your eyes. You see, it's no good to live in big cities. You ought to come live here.”

  Claude laughed, insisting that Paris was wonderful. He stood by his city down to its very bricks, but he also had a fondness for the countryside. In the afternoon Florent and Madame François were alone in the garden. They were seated on the ground in a corner that was planted with fruit trees, and had a serious chat. She gave him advice with a sense of friendship that seemed tender and maternal. She asked him a thousand questions about his life and his plans for the future. She told him that she was always available if he needed her. He was very moved by this. No woman had ever spoken to him in this way. To him she was like a robust healthy plant that had grown the same way as her vegetables in the garden. He thought of the fair women of Les Halles, of the Lisas and the Normans, like dubious meat that had been dressed for the window. Here he inhaled into his lungs a few hours of complete well-being, free of the food smells that had driven him mad. He was resuscitated in the countryside like the cabbage that Claude said kept sprouting back from the ground.

  At about five o'clock they said their good-byes to Madame François. They wanted to walk back. She went with them to the end of the lane and for a moment held Florent's hand in hers. “If you ever get sad, come and see me,” she said softly.