The Belly of Paris (19 page)

But what struck Florent most was a fresh breeze, a whiff of the sea, that he recognized, bitter and salty. He recalled the Guianese coast and the fine days of his crossing. He half imagined staring at some bay in high tide with its algae baking in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the strong breath of the sea. All around him, the fresh fish smelled good, with a sharp, bitter perfume that disturbed the appetite.

Monsieur Verlaque coughed. The dampness was going through him, and he wrapped himself more tightly in his muffler. “Now,” he said, “we're going to go by the freshwater fish.”

This pavilion, next to the fruit market, was the last one before rue Rambuteau. On either side of the auction space were circular tanks divided into compartments by iron gratings. Brass faucets in the shape of swans spouted thin streams of water. And the compartments were full. There was a tangled swarm of shrimp, constantly moving carp with black backs, and tangles of eels perpetually knotting and unknotting themselves. Monsieur Verlaque was taken by a stubborn coughing bout. The dampness was milder here, and there was a soft scent of rivers and of tepid water asleep on the sand.

That morning, a huge quantity of crayfish had arrived in crates and baskets from Germany. The market was also flooded with whitefish from England and Holland. Some workers were unpacking shiny carp from the Rhine, all bronzed in beautiful rust-colored metallic, each scale like a piece of cloisonné enamel; others with huge pike, the coarse iron gray brigands of the water with long, protruding savage jaws; or magnificent dark tench,
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red copper stained with the blue green of corroded copper. Amid the glow of metallic skins, the baskets of gudgeon,
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perch, and trout—the dull flat-netted fish—took on a brilliant white appearance, the steel blue of their backs gradually fading away to the soft transparency of their bellies, and the fat snow white barbel
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providing the shimmer to this vast still life.

Bags of young carp were being gently emptied into the tanks; the carp flipped over, then remained still for an instant before darting away and disappearing. Little eels were dumped from their baskets in a clump and fell to the bottom of the boxes like a single knot of snakes, while the big ones, thick as a child's arm, raised their heads and then slid under the water, slick as snakes hiding in the brush. Meanwhile, the rest of the fish, whose agonizing death in the soiled wicker trays had been lasting the entire morning, at last perished with great silent gasps every few seconds, opening their
mouths as though trying to suck in the humidity from the air amid the shouts and cries of the auction.

But Monsieur Verlaque had brought Florent back to the saltwater fish, where he walked him around and explained intricate details to him. Along three sides of the pavilion, where there were desks for nine salesmen, the crowd surged with swaying heads, and clerks appeared above them, perched in high chairs from which they marked entries in their ledgers.

“Are all these clerks working for the same salesmen?” Florent asked. In reply, Monsieur Verlaque took a detour along the sidewalk outside, which led him to one of the enclosures used for auctioning. He explained to him how the large office made of yellow wood, stained in splotches and stinking of fish, was staffed. At the top of the glassed-off room, the municipal fee collector took notes on the sale prices of the different lots of fish. A little lower down, seated on raised chairs with their wrists resting on high little desks, were two women clerks who monitored the transactions on behalf of the salesmen. At each end of a stone table in the front of the office was an auctioneer who brought out the straw trays and stated prices per lot or per fish, while above him the women clerks, pen in hand, waited to hear the final prices. Monsieur Verlaque showed Florent the cashier, a fat old woman outside the enclosure, shut up in another yellow wooden office, arranging piles of coins.

“You see,” said Monsieur Verlaque, “there's a double control, the Prefecture of the Seine and the Prefecture of Police. The latter licenses the salesmen and maintains the right of supervision over them, while the local prefecture has an interest in the transactions since they are taxable.”

He continued in his cold, feeble voice, explaining the competing interests of the two prefectures. But Florent was barely listening; his attention had been drawn to one of the female clerks in front of him on a high chair. She was a tall, brown-haired woman of about thirty with big black eyes and a great deal of composure. She wrote with outstretched fingers, like a young woman who had been carefully instructed.

But his attention was again diverted by the bellowing of the auctioneer holding a magnificent turbot.

“I hear thirty francs! That's thirty francs! Thirty francs … at thirty francs!”

He repeated these words in various voices, up and down a strange scale of notes with abrupt changes. Hunchbacked, with a crooked face and disheveled hair, he wore a huge blue apron with a bib. With eyes aflame and arms outstretched he shouted, “Thirty one! Thirty-two! Thirty-three! Thirty-three fifty! Thirty-three fifty!”

Then he paused to catch his breath and, turning the tray, shoved it farther over on the table. The women fish sellers bent forward and gently touched the turbot with their fingertips. Then the auctioneer began again, hurling figures at the buyers with a thrust of his hand and responding to the most subtle sign of a bid—a finger raised, an eyebrow arched, lips beginning to purse, an eye winking—and this with such a jumble of words and such speed that Florent, completely incapable of following it, felt uneasy when the hunchback, in a singsong voice like that of a priest chanting a psalm, said, “Forty-two! Forty-two! The turbot is sold at forty-two francs!”

It was the Beautiful Norman who made the final bid. Florent recognized her in the line of women selling fish pressed against the iron rail around the auction space. It was a cool morning. There was a row of fur stoles above the assortment of large white aprons, covering the plentiful stomachs and bosoms and formidable shoulders. With her bun twisted high on her head, adorned with curls, and her white, delicate flesh, the Beautiful Norman showed off her lacy bow amid the tangle of locks covered with dirty kerchiefs, the red noses of heavy drinkers, the scornful mouths and faces like cracked pottery.

The Beautiful Norman, for her part, recognizing Madame Quenu's cousin, was surprised to see him and started gossiping about him to the women around her.

The roar of voices became so loud that Monsieur Verlaque gave up on his explanations to Florent. Nearby, men were calling out
deluxe fish with prolonged shouts that sounded as though they came out of bullhorns. One man bellowed out, “Mussels! Mussels!” in such a loud, hoarse voice that it vibrated the roofs of the market. Some of the bags of mussels were dumped upside down, the shellfish poured into hampers, while other bags were emptied with shovels. An unending parade of straw trays with skates, soles, mackerel, eels, and salmon were carried back and forth to the cackling cries of pushing fish women getting louder and louder and leaning so hard on the iron rails that they were starting to creak under the weight. The auctioneer, the hunchback, now in his stride, protruded his jaw and flailed the air with his thin arms. And then, as though driven wild by the avalanche of numbers that shot from his mouth, he leaped onto a stool, where, with his twisted mouth and his hair flying behind him, he could wrench nothing more from his parched throat than unintelligible hisses. Meanwhile, up above, a little old man, his voice muffled in a collar of fake astrakhan,
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the collector of municipal fees, sat with nothing but his nose showing from beneath a black velvet cap. The tall brown-haired clerk, with flashing eyes in her calm face, slightly reddened by the cold, sat on a high wooden chair, peacefully writing, apparently undisturbed by the commotion of the hunchback, who seemed to ripple the edges of her skirts.

“That man Logre is fantastic,” Monsieur Verlaque said softly with a smile on his face. “He's the best auctioneer in the market. He could sell a pair of shoe soles as a pair of choice flounder.”

Then he and Florent went back into the pavilion. Passing by the fresh fish auction where there was less passion to the bidding, Monsieur Verlaque explained that river fishing in France was not doing well. The auctioneer, a light-haired, sorry-looking man without hand gestures, was auctioning off some lots of crayfish and eels in a monotonous voice while his helpers kept him in supply by scooping out the tanks with short-handled nets.

Meanwhile, the horde gathering around the sales desk was still growing. Monsieur Verlaque conscientiously served as Florent's instructor, elbowing a path, guiding his successor through the most crowded sections where the major retailers congregated, quietly
waiting for the best fish and loading the porters' shoulders with tuna, turbots, and salmon they had bought. At ground level the street merchants were divvying up the herring and dabs they had bought together. And there were a few upper-middle-class gentlemen, small property owners who had come at four in the morning from the far corners of the city in search of one truly fresh fish but had ended up with an entire lot bid down to them, forty or fifty francs' worth of seafood, and were spending their day trying to sell off the ones they could not use. From time to time some rough shoving would break out in one corner of the crowd or another. A saleswoman who had gotten too pressed in would push her way free, raising her fists and cursing ferociously. Then the crowd would re-form tightly. Florent, feeling suffocated, announced that he had seen enough and now he understood everything he needed to know.

While Monsieur Verlaque was helping him extricate himself, they found themselves face-to-face with the Beautiful Norman. She stood with her feet planted firmly in front of them and asked, with her regal air, “Is it definite, Monsieur Verlaque, that you're leaving us?”

“Yes, yes,” said the small man. “I'm going to rest in the country, in Clamart. It seems that the smell of fish is bad for my health … By the way, here's my replacement.”

With that he turned to show her Florent. The Beautiful Norman nearly choked. As Florent walked away, he thought he could make out her whisper to the women nearby, “Now we're going to have some fun, I think.”

The saleswomen were beginning to set up their stalls. There was a great rush of water from the faucets at the corners of the marble slabs. There was a gurgling sound, the hiss of jets of water sloshing along the edges of the tables with a line of drops rolling down with the hush of a stream, slopping into the alleys where little rivers coursed, filling holes and indents, turning them into miniature lakes and then into a thousand tributaries that ran downhill to rue Rambuteau. A haze, a dust cloud of rain, rose up, refreshing Florent's face, a breath of sea air, the air both bitter and salty, that
he remembered well. He once more saw, in the fish that were being spread out, opalescent pinks, brilliant corals, and milky pearls, all the colors and pastels of the sea.

This first morning left him feeling uncertain. He already regretted having given in to Lisa. Ever since his escape from the fatty repose of the sleepy kitchen, he had been accusing himself of cowardice with such vehemence that he almost wept. But he could not go back on his word. He was intimidated by Lisa and could picture the curl of her lips, the silent reproach on her beautiful face. She seemed too imposing a woman and far too confident to argue with. Fortunately Gavard had given him a comforting idea. On the evening of the day on which Monsieur Verlaque had given him his tour, Gavard pulled him aside and explained to him hesitantly that “the poor devil” was not happy. Then, after tearing into the miserable government that worked its people to death without even assuring them the means to die well, he suggested that it would be a charitable thing to donate part of his salary to the former inspector. Florent agreed enthusiastically.

It was so perfectly fair. After all, he was supposed to be a temporary replacement for Monsieur Verlaque. Besides, Florent ate and slept at his brother's and didn't need anything. Gavard added that fifty francs out of a monthly salary of one hundred fifty francs would seem quite generous and added in a low voice that he wouldn't have to give it for very long because the man was consumptive to his bones. It was agreed that Florent would arrange everything with Verlaque's wife so as not to upset her husband.

This largesse made Florent feel better about the position, and he could now take it on as a way of helping someone else, reestablishing himself in his customary role. But he made the poultry dealer swear not to tell anyone about the arrangement, and Gavard, who was a bit afraid of Lisa, kept the secret.

Now the entire charcuterie was happy. Beautiful Lisa was very warm toward her brother-in-law. She made sure that he got to bed early so that he would get up good and early and she would have a hot breakfast waiting. And now that he wore his official braided cap, she was no longer embarrassed to be seen chatting with him in
the doorway. Quenu, thrilled by all these positive signs, sat at the evening table between his wife and his brother, more content than ever. Dinner often continued until nine o'clock, with only Augustine manning the shop. They lingered over their digestion with neighborhood gossip and Lisa's opinionated judgments on the politics of the day. Florent was made to tell how things had gone at the fish market that day.

Bit by bit Florent succumbed and developed a taste for the stable life. The light yellow dining room's middle-class tidiness softened him whenever he crossed its threshold. Beautiful Lisa's care wrapped him in a warm comforter and softened both his body and mind. It was an atmosphere of mutual esteem and serenity.

But Gavard thought that things at the Quenu-Gradelles' were just a bit too sleepy. He forgave Lisa her fondness for the emperor because, he said, you cannot argue politics with women and the beautiful charcuterie woman was, after all, an honest person who managed her business well. Personally, he preferred to spend his evenings at Monsieur Lebigre's, where he had a circle of friends who shared his views. When Florent was named fish inspector, Gavard began to corrupt him, taking him away for hours, arguing that now that he had established himself he should start living the bachelor's life.