The Belly of Paris (45 page)

“So what,” said Cadine brazenly. “He's not unhappy. He likes being kissed. Because he's afraid of the dark now. Aren't you? You're afraid.”

She had pulled him to his feet. He rubbed his hands across his face as though groping for the kisses she had placed there. He stammered that he was afraid. “Besides, I came here to help him. I was force-feeding the pigeons.”

Florent looked at the poor creatures. On the planks surrounding the coops were uncovered boxes. Pigeons were jammed into them with mottled feathers and stiff legs. From time to time a shudder ran through the feathers and the bodies huddled even more tightly together, a chaotic chatter rising out of the boxes. Cadine had a pot next to her full of water and seeds: she filled her mouth and, one by one, blew the seeds into the birds' beaks. They choked and squirmed, then fell backward white-eyed into the darkness of the box, knocked senseless by the forcibly swallowed food.

“The poor innocents,” said Claude.

“Too bad for them,” said Cadine when she finished. “They're a lot better off after they've been well stuffed. You'll see, in a couple of hours we'll make them swallow saltwater, these birds over here. That will make their meat white and delicate. Two hours after that, they'll be bled. But if you want to see bleeding, there's some over there all ready to go. Marjolin was just about to do them.”

Marjolin was carrying about fifty pigeons in a box. Claude and Florent followed him. He settled himself on the floor by one of the faucets, putting the box next to him and placing a fine screen on a wooden frame in a deep zinc tray. Then he began. He moved the knife quickly in his fingers, grabbing pigeons by the wings, knocking them out with a blow on the head from the knife handle, then sticking the blade into the throat. The pigeons shuddered for an instant, and their feathers rumpled as he laid them out in rows, their heads stuck out on the screen over the zinc tray into which, drop by drop, their blood fell. All of this was done in an even rhythm— the whack of the handle on the smashed little skull in measured time with the hand that took the live birds on one side and the hand that placed the dead ones on the other side.

Marjolin was going ever faster, enjoying the slaughter, crouching with gleaming eyes like a huge salivating mastiff. Finally he started laughing and sang, “Tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac,” accompanying the rhythm of his knife with the clicking of his tongue, making the sound of a head-grinding mill. The pigeons hung like swatches of silk.

“So you think that's funny, you big dummy,” said Cadine, laughing
too. “They look so funny, those pigeons, when they pull in their head between their shoulders and the neck is gone. They're mean little things anyway. They'd bite you if they could.”

Marjolin laughed even louder at an ever more feverish pace. She added, “No matter how hard I try, I can't do it as fast as he does. One day he bled a hundred in ten minutes.”

The wooden frame was filling up, and they could hear the blood dropping into the zinc tray below. Then Claude by chance looked at Florent and saw how pale he had turned. He hurried him out and made him sit on the top step by the street.

“Look at you,” Claude said, clapping his hands. “There you go, fainting like a woman.”

“It's the smell of the cellar,” said Florent, feeling a little ashamed.

The pigeons, force fed seeds and then saltwater and then slashed in the throat, reminded him of the pigeons of the Tuileries strutting in their satin gowns over the grass, yellow with sunlight. He pictured them cooing on the marble arm of the ancient wrestler amid the great silence of the garden, while under the dark shadows of chestnut trees a little girl played with a hoop. It was then that his bones iced over, when he saw that huge blond animal conducting his massacre, stunning with the handle and stabbing with the blade in the depths of the fetid cellar. Then he felt himself falling, his legs buckling and his eyelids fluttering.

“What the hell!” Claude said when Florent came to. “You wouldn't make much of a soldier. I have to say, whoever sent you to Guiana must have been some character to imagine you were dangerous. If you ever got involved in an uprising, my old friend, you wouldn't dare to fire your pistol, you'd be too afraid you might kill someone.”

Florent got up without answering. He had become very somber, and there were worry lines across his face. He walked away, leaving Claude to go back down into the cellar. On his way back to the fish market he once more went over his plan of attack and the armed groups that would invade the Palais Bourbon. In the Champs-Elysées the cannon would roar, the gates would be smashed down;
there would be blood on the steps and skulls smashed against the columns. A fleeting image of the battle passed through his mind. He saw himself in the thick of it, pale, unable to look, his face hidden in his hands.

Crossing rue du Pont-Neuf, he thought he saw the pale face of Auguste at the corner of the fruit market, walking along, his neck outstretched. He seemed to be looking for someone, his eyes round with some extraordinary imbecilic emotion. Suddenly, he disappeared, running back toward the charcuterie.

“What was that about?” Florent wondered. “Did I scare him?”

That morning there had been serious events at the Quenu-Gradelles'. At sunrise Auguste had run to his mistress in great excitement with the news that the police had come to arrest Florent. Then, stammering even more, he gave a muddled account of how Florent had already left, no doubt to escape arrest. Beautiful Lisa, uncorseted and in her camisole, unfazed, hurried upstairs to her brother-in-law's room, where she took the photo of the Norman after a quick look around to make sure there was nothing to implicate any of them. On her way down, she ran into the police on the second floor. The police inspector asked her to go with them. They spoke in hushed voices for a few moments, and he and his men went into the bedroom, advising her to open the shop as on a normal day, so that no one would suspect anything. The trap was set.

The only thing worrying Lisa in this entire episode was the blow it would be to poor Quenu. That was partly because she feared he would burst into tears as soon as he found out that the police were there. Because of this she made Auguste promise not to say a word about it. Then she went back upstairs to put on her corset and to make up some story for her husband to explain the commotion. A half hour later she was standing at the doorway of the charcuterie, coiffed and corseted, her face pink and smooth. Auguste was calmly working on the window display. Quenu appeared outside for a minute, yawning and trying to wake up in the fresh morning air. There was nothing to give away the drama that was about to unfold upstairs.

But the police inspector himself had tipped off the entire neighborhood when he had visited the Méhudin household on rue Pirouette. He had remarkably detailed notes. In the anonymous letters sent to the prefecture, it had been established that Florent frequently slept with the Beautiful Norman. Could he be hiding there? The commandant, accompanied by two policemen, went over and pounded on the door in the name of the law. The Méhudins had barely gotten up. The old woman opened the door, at first in a rage and then more calm, even snickering when she understood the situation. Pulling up her clothes, she sat down and told her visitors, “We are respectable people with nothing to fear. You can search the house.”

Since the Norman was slow to open her door, the inspector had it knocked down. She was dressing. Her upper body was bare, her splendid shoulders showing, an undergarment clasped in her teeth. This violent, unexplained entrance infuriated her. She dropped the garment and was about to attack the men in her shift, reddened by anger and not embarrassment. The inspector, faced with this large, naked woman, stepped forward to protect his men, repeating in an icy voice, “In the name of the law! In the name of the law!”

Then she fell into a chair, sobbing, overtaken by emotion at feeling so helpless and not understanding what was expected of her. Her hair had come undone, her shift did not even come down to her knees, and the policemen were casting sideways glances for a better view. The inspector tossed her a shawl that he found hanging on the wall. She didn't use it. She started crying even harder, watching the police roughly searching her bed, smacking the pillows, running their hands down the sheets.

“What have I done?” she finally stuttered. “What are you looking for in my bed?”

The inspector said the name “Florent,” and since the old woman had remained in the doorway of the room, the Norman shouted, “It's her doing, the old battle-ax!” and tried to lunge across the room at her mother.

She would have pummeled her. But she was restrained and
forcibly wrapped in her shawl. She struggled and managed to get out in a strangled voice, “What do you think I am? This Florent has never been in my room, do you understand? There's nothing between us. They're trying to smear my name in the neighborhood. But let just one of them come here and say it to my face. Then you'll see. Then you can send me to prison, I don't care. And Florent? I can do better than him. I can marry anyone I want and drive whatever woman sent you here crazy.”

She was calmed by her torrent of words. Then her wrath turned to Florent for causing all this. She turned to the inspector and justified herself. “I didn't know, Monsieur. He looked so gentle, he fooled us. I didn't want to listen to the gossip—they're all so malicious. He came to give the child lessons, and then he left. Sometimes I fed him, and often I gave him a good fish as a gift. That's all. But that's the last time I'll let myself be used for my kindness.”

“But surely he gave you some papers to keep for him?” the inspector asked.

“No, I swear he didn't. I wouldn't care. I'd give you the papers. I've had it, you know? I don't enjoy watching you search through my things. Enough, it's pointless.”

The police, who had examined every piece of furniture in the room, now wanted to go to the little nook where Muche slept. For a few minutes now, the child, awakened by the commotion, had been crying, no doubt thinking that someone had come to slit his throat.

“This is my child's room,” said the Norman, opening the door.

Muche, completely naked, ran up and threw his arms around her neck. She calmed him down and put him in her own bed. The police came out of his room very quickly. The inspector had just decided to leave when the child, still crying, whispered in his mother's ear. “They're going to take my exercise books! Don't let them have my exercise books!”

“Ah, that's right! There are the notebooks. Wait, I'll give them to you, just to show you I have nothing to hide. Look, his writing is in
here. You can hang him for all I care, and it won't be me who cuts him down.”

She handed over Muche's notebooks with the writing samples. But the child got up from the bed in a rage, biting and scratching his mother, who shoved him down with a smack. He began to scream. At the doorway, Mademoiselle Saget was stretching her neck. She had come in, finding all the doors open, and asked Mère Méhudin if she could be of some help. She watched and listened and felt bad for these women without defenders. Meanwhile, the inspector was reading the handwriting specimens with great seriousness. Words such as “tyrannically” and “liberticide” and “anti-constitutional” and “revolutionary” made him frown. Then he read the sentence “When the hour strikes, the guilty shall fall.” He tapped the page and said, “This is serious, very serious.”

He gave the exercise books to one of his men, and then he was gone. Claire, who up to this point had not appeared, opened the door and watched the men leave. Then she entered into her sister's room for the first time in a year. Mademoiselle Saget seemed to be very friendly with the Norman; she was fussing over her, pulling the ends of the shawl to make sure she was well covered, and letting her discharge her anger with great sympathy.

“You're a complete coward,” Claire said, facing her.

The Norman rose to her feet, furious, and let the shawl slip off.

“You lying snitch!” she shouted. “Say that again!”

“You're a complete coward,” the young woman repeated in an even more sneering tone.

Then the Norman swung her arm all the way from behind and smacked Claire in the face so hard that she turned horribly pale as the Norman jumped on her and dug her fingernails into her neck. They wrestled a moment, pulling each other's hair, trying to strangle each other. The younger sister, frail as she was, violently pushed the older one with such superhuman strength that they both crashed into the wardrobe, shattering the mirror. Muche was sobbing, and the mother was shouting for Mademoiselle Saget to help separate them. But Claire pulled herself away, saying, “Coward,
coward. I'm going to warn that poor man that you have betrayed him.”

Her mother blocked the doorway. The Norman grabbed her from behind. With the help of Mademoiselle Saget, the three pushed her back into her own room, where they managed to double-lock the door, despite her furious struggle. She kicked at the door and smashed everything in the room. Then they could hear only a rapid scraping noise, the sound of iron against plaster. She was unhinging the door with the point of her scissors.

“If she'd had a knife, she would have killed me,” said the Norman, looking for clothes to put on. “You'll see, someday that jealousy of hers will do her in. And nobody can open that door. She'd stir up the whole neighborhood against us.”

Mademoiselle Saget had hurried down the stairs. She arrived at the corner of rue Pirouette just as the inspector was returning to the alley by the Quenu-Gradelles'. She understood what was going on and went into the charcuterie, her eyes glowing with such intensity that Lisa made a sign to be quiet, pointing toward Quenu, who was hanging strips of petit salé. When he returned to the kitchen, the old woman whispered about the drama that had just unfolded at the Méhudins'.

Leaning across the counter, her hand resting on a dish of larded veal, Lisa listened with the happy face of a victorious woman. But then a customer came in to ask for pigs' feet, and she turned to wrap them carefully.

“Personally, I don't wish any harm to the Norman,” she said when they were finally alone again. “I like her very much, and have always felt bad that we've had this falling-out. Here, this is the proof that I'm not vindictive. Look what I rescued from the hands of the police. I'm perfectly willing to return it if she comes and asks for it herself.”