The Belly of Paris (33 page)

She walked into the stall. Gavard rented two compartments, which he had made into a little chicken range by removing the partition. The larger birds—geese, turkeys, and ducks—were waddling around in bird droppings. The three shelves above had flat open boxes full of hens and rabbits. The chicken wire was thick with dust and festooned with cobwebs, so that the stall appeared to be furnished with gray blinds. Rabbit urine had corroded the lower panels, and white splashes of bird droppings spotted the board.

But Lisa did not want to hurt Marjolin by showing any more disgust. She stuck her fingers into the little cages and expressed sympathy for the wretched hens cooped up in a space too small for them even to stand up in. She petted a duck that was cowering in a corner with a broken leg. Marjolin told her that they were planning to kill it tonight in case it died during the night.

“But what,” she asked, “do they do for food?”

He explained that poultry won't eat in the dark. The merchants have to light a candle and wait there until they are finished.

“It's fun,” he continued. “I stand there holding a light for hours. You should see the way they peck at each other. Then, when I cover the candle with my hand, they're all left with their necks sticking out, as though the sun had set. But you can't simply leave them a light and go away. One woman, Mère Palette—you know her— nearly burned the whole place down the other day. A hen must have knocked a candle onto some straw.”

“Oh well,” said Lisa, “that's not too bad, if they have to have their chandeliers lit for each meal.”

That made him laugh. She had stepped out of the stall, wiping her feet and lifting her skirt slightly to keep it out of the filth. Marjolin blew out the candle and shut the door. She was afraid to walk in the dark with this large boy at her side and went ahead of him so that she wouldn't end up with him in her skirts again. When he caught up to her, she said, “I'm glad I saw it. You'd never guess some of the things that are under Les Halles. Thank you for showing me. I have to go now—quickly. They'll wonder what happened to me at the shop. If you see Monsieur Gavard, tell him that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible.”

“But he's probably at the slaughterhouse,” he said. “We could go see, if you want.”

She did not answer, overcome by the warm air that hit her face. It was turning her pink, and her stretched bodice, usually lifeless, was starting to heave. It worried her for some reason, made her feel anxious, to hear Marjolin's quickening footsteps behind her. He was panting. She stood aside to let him pass her. The village with its darkened rows was still asleep. Lisa noticed that her companion was taking the long way around. When they came out, opposite the railway line, he said that he wanted to show her the tracks, and they stood there a moment looking at the wide planks of fencing. He offered to lead her along the track, but she declined, saying that it was not worth the trouble. And she had a good idea of what it looked like from where they were.

On the way back they ran into Mère Palette in front of her storage. A frenzy of wings and paws could be heard inside. After she untied the last knot the long necks of the geese acted like springs and flipped open the cover. The frightened geese made their escape, their heads plunged forward with a whistling and a quacking that filled the darkness of the cellar with cacophonous music. Lisa could not help laughing, despite the exclamations of the old poultry seller, who in her despair was cursing like a wagoneer while dragging by the neck two geese she had managed to recapture.
Marjolin had run off to catch a third goose. He could be heard scrambling through the rows, outwitted by the bird but enjoying the chase. Then there was the sound of a scuffle at the far end, and he returned carrying the goose. Mère Palette, an old, yellowing woman, clutched the bird in her arms and held it against her stomach in the classical pose of Leda.
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“I'll tell you,” she said, “you should have been there … the other day I got into it with one of them. I had my knife on me, and I slit its throat.”

Marjolin was winded. When they got to the stone blocks where the slaughtering was done, the light was better and Lisa noticed that he was soaking with sweat and his eyes had a glow she had never seen before. Usually he lowered his eyes in her presence like a girl. She found him particularly handsome the way he was, with his broad shoulders and large pink face framed by his mop of light-colored curls. She looked at him pleasantly, with that look of appreciation that can be offered risk-free to boys who are too young. He was starting to feel shy again.

“As you can see, Monsieur Gavard is not here and you are wasting my time,” she said.

He explained to her, in rapid words, the process of slaughter, the five enormous stone slabs, that went down the side of rue Rambuteau under the yellow lights of the gas burners. At one end a woman was bleeding chickens, which led Marjolin to comment that she was plucking the poultry while it still had some life in it, which made it easier to pluck. Then he wanted her to take handfuls of feathers from the stone slabs. There were piles of feathers everywhere. He explained that they were sorted and sold for as much as nine sous a pound depending on the quality. He also told her to sink her arms into the large baskets of down. Then he turned on the water faucets installed in every pillar.

His deluge of facts was relentless. The blood ran along the benches and made puddles on the flagstones. Every two hours cleaners came and scrubbed away the blood stains with thick brushes. When Lisa leaned over the opening of the drain, there was another lengthy explanation, this time of how the water flooded
the cellar through this hole on rainy days. One time it had actually risen a foot and they'd had to move all the poultry to the other end of the cellar, where it sloped upward. Recalling the outcry of the panicking animals made him laugh all over again.

But after that he ran dry unable to think of another point of interest. Then he remembered the ventilator. He led her down to the end, and when she looked up, as instructed, she saw inside one of the corner turrets a ventilation pipe by which the foul air escaped. Then Marjolin fell speechless in this pestilent stinking corner with the alkaline crudeness of guano. But he seemed alert, even invigorated. His nostrils quivered and his breathing grew heavy, as though he were regaining his nerve. For the past quarter hour he had been in the basement with Beautiful Lisa, intoxicated by the warmth and scent of live animals. He was no longer the shy young thing; the scent of chickens had put him in heat under the vaulting of the black, shadowy ceiling.

“You know,” she said, “you're a nice boy to have shown me all this. When you come to the charcuterie, I'll give you something.”

She held his chin in her hand, the way she often did, and did not notice that he was no longer a little boy. Actually, she was a little affected, stirred by this stroll through the basement, and she was savoring a gentle emotion—nothing inappropriate and of no real significance. Maybe she inadvertently left her hand just a little longer than usual under his young chin that was so supple to the touch.

For whatever reason, responding to this caress, his instincts took over, and, shooting a glance out of the corners of his eyes to make sure that no one was watching, he summoned his strength and threw himself on Beautiful Lisa with the force of a bull. He grabbed her by the shoulders, and he pushed her backward into a basket of feathers, where she tumbled in a heap, her skirts up to her knees.

He was going to take her, the same way he had taken Cadine, with the brutality of an animal sating himself, when without making a sound but pale from the suddenness of the assault, Beautiful Lisa sprang out of the basket in a single bound. Raising her arm the
way she had seen them do in the slaughterhouse, with her fine female fist she knocked Marjolin unconscious with one blow between the eyes. He fell over backward and cracked his head against the corner of a stone slab. At that very moment a rooster let fly in the darkness a long raucous crow.

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,
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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,
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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.