The Belly of Paris (23 page)

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 one 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.

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 langoustines
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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.