The Belly of Paris (34 page)

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 lard
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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 … Florent, 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,
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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 steps 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.

For a quarter of an hour Florent walked in silence, already growing sad, telling himself that he was leaving his health behind him.
The route to Courbevoie was whitened by dust. They both enjoyed hiking the long distance, their thick shoes ringing on the hard earth. With every step little clouds of dust rose behind them. The rays came at an angle across the avenue, stretching out their two shadows, distorting them so that their heads stretched to the other side and hopped along the opposite sidewalk.

Claude, swinging his arms loosely, took long, regular strides and enjoyed watching their shadows, happily lost in their sway, which he further exaggerated by putting his shoulders into the rhythm.

Then, as though suddenly waking from a dream, he asked, “Do you know ‘The Battle of the Fat and the Thin’?”

Florent, caught by surprise, answered no. Claude excitedly praised this series of prints, pointing out favorite parts: the Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy; then the Fat, seated at the table, cheeks overflowing, drive away a Thin who had the audacity to approach humbly, looking like a bowling pin among bowling balls.

Claude saw in these drawings the entire drama of mankind, and he took to classifying all people into the Thin and the Fat, two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow plump and jolly. “You can bet,” he said, “that Cain was a Fat and Abel a Thin. And since that first killing, there have always been hungry Fats sucking the blood out of scanty eaters. It is a constant preying of the stronger on the weaker, each swallowing his neighbor and then finding himself swallowed in turn … So you see, my friend, watch out for the Fat.”

He fell silent for a moment, gazing at their two shadows as the setting sun stretched them ever longer. Then he murmured, “You and I, we belong to the Thin, you see. Tell me if people with flat stomachs like ours take up much sunlight.”