The Belly of Paris (7 page)

Florent had stopped at rue de Mondétour, in front of the next to last house on the left. All three stories, each with two shutterless windows neatly covered by white curtains, appeared to be asleep. On the top floor, a faint light could be seen through the curtain moving back and forth.

The shop beneath the overhang seemed to have a tremendous effect on Florent. It was starting to open, a shop with prepared greens. At the far end, shiny bowls could be seen, while on the display shelf in front, round domes and conical towers of spinach and chicory were placed in bowls, each notched in the back to leave space for flat serving spatulas, showing only their white metal handles.

Florent felt as though he had been struck motionless, riveted to the pavement by this sight. He did not recognize the shop. Reading the merchant's name on a red sign, Godebœuf, he felt even more dismayed. With his arms hanging limp at his sides, he studied the cooked spinach with the air of a cursed man.

From the opened window above, a little old woman leaned out and looked up at the sky and then at the market in the distance.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Saget is an early bird,” said Claude, looking up. And he added, turning to Florent, “I once had an aunt living in that house. That place is a nest of gossip. Ah, now the Méhudins are starting to stir. There's a light on the second floor.”

Florent was about to ask Claude a question, but there was something unnerving about him in his baggy, faded overcoat. Florent followed him without saying a word while Claude went on about
the Méhudins. They were fishmongers; the elder woman was superb. The younger one, who sold freshwater fish, resembled a virgin in a Murillo painting, this blonde among all the carp and eels. Then he started asserting, with growing anger, that Murillo was a third-rate painter. Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the street and asked, “So where are you going?”

“At the moment, I'm not going anywhere,” Florent said wearily. “We can go wherever you like.”

As they were leaving rue Pirouette, a voice called out to Claude from the wine shop on the corner. Claude entered, with Florent behind him. They had still taken off the shutters on only one side. The gas burned in the shop's still-sleepy air. A forgotten dish towel and cards from a game the night before were scattered on the table, while a breeze from the wide-open door blew freshness into the stale warm smell of wine. The owner, Monsieur Lebigre, was serving a customer in his long-sleeved waistcoat, with his sloppy beard and fat, even features still pale with sleep. Men with deepset eyes were standing in groups drinking at the counter, coughing, spitting, and trying to wake themselves up with white wine and eau-de-vie.
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Florent recognized Lacaille, whose sack was now bursting with vegetables. He was on his third round with a friend, who was telling a story at great length about the acquisition of a basket of potatoes. Then, after emptying his glass, he went to chat with Monsieur Lebigre in a small glassed-in office in the back where the gas had not yet been lit.

“What'll you have?” Claude asked Florent.

When they had entered, Claude had shaken hands with the man who had called out to him. He was
a fort,
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a handsome young man of no more than twenty-two, clean-shaven except for a trim mustache, with a hearty demeanor, wearing a broad-brimmed chalk-covered hat and a wool scarf with floppy laces for tightening his blue work shirt. Claude called him Alexandre, clapped him on the arm, and demanded to know when they were going back to Charentonneau. Then they reminisced about the great boat trip they had made together on the Marne. That evening they had eaten rabbit.

“So what are you drinking?” Claude asked Florent again.

Florent stared at the counter, feeling embarrassed. At the end were brass-ringed pots of punch and mulled wine, simmering over a gas burner's short blue-and-pink jets of flame. Finally, he admitted that he would love to have a hot drink. Monsieur Lebigre served them three glasses of punch. Near the pots was a basket of little butter rolls that had just been brought in and were still steaming. But the others didn't take any, so Florent just drank his glass of punch. He felt it falling into his stomach like a drizzle of molten lead.

Alexandre paid.

“He's a good guy, Alexandre,” said Claude after the two of them were back on the rue Rambuteau. “He's a lot of fun when we go to the country. He does amazing feats of strength. What a build, the oaf. I've seen him stripped. If he would only pose for me nude in the open air … Now, if you'd like, we could do a little tour through the market.”

Florent followed passively. The glow of light at the end of rue Rambuteau announced daybreak. The great voice of Les Halles grumbled in the distance; the occasional peal of bells
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from some far-off pavilion competed with the rising bedlam. Claude and Florent turned into one of the covered streets between the fish and poultry pavilions. Florent looked up into the vaulted roof overhead, at the glistening wooden beams in between the black iron struts. As they turned onto the main thoroughfare, he imagined being in some unknown town with its various neighborhoods and suburbs, its boulevards and roads, plazas and intersections, all suddenly sheltered from a rainy day by a huge roof dropped into place as though by the whimsy of some giant.

The shadows that lingered in the crevices of the roof multiplied the forest of pillars and expanded the delicate ribbing, the fretwork balconies, the slatted windows. And there, high above the town, nestled in the shadows, was an immense metal jungle, with stems and vines and tangled branches covering this little world that resembled the foliage of an age-old forest.

Some sections of the market were still sleeping behind iron
gates. The butter and poultry stands had long rows of trellised stalls that the gas lighting showed to be deserted. The fish pavilion was opening, and women were scurrying among the white stone slabs, which were littered with baskets and forgotten rags. The noise and activity were slowly picking up over at the vegetables, the fruit, and the flowers. Little by little morning was coming, from the working-class neighborhood, where the cabbage was piled at four in the morning, to the lazy, privileged zone, which began hanging its chickens and pheasants at eight.

The main covered passageways teemed with life. All along the sidewalks there were many produce sellers, including small-scale gardeners from the outskirts of Paris showing their little harvests of vegetable bunches and fruit bundles from the previous night. In the midst of the crowd's incessant comings and goings, carts pulled in under the vaulted roof, the clop of the horses' hooves slowing down. Two of the wagons blocked the intersection, and in order to get around them Florent had to press against some shabby bundles that looked like coal sacks and were so heavy that they bowed the axle of the wagon carrying them. They were damp and gave off a scent of seaweed, and huge black mussels were spilling out of the split end of one sack.

At every step they took, Claude and Florent were forced to stop for something. The seafood was arriving, and, one after another, railroad carts pulled up with tall wooden cages loaded with the bins and hampers that had been shipped by train from the coast. Trying to get out of the way of the fish carts, which were coming with increasing urgency, Claude and Florent practically dived under the wheels of the wagons filled with butter, eggs, and cheese, huge yellow chariots drawn by four-horse teams and decorated with colored lanterns. Workers were bringing down cases of eggs and baskets of cheeses and butter, which they carried into the auction room, where men in caps made entries in notebooks by gaslight. Claude was enthralled by the scene, lost in admiration for the lighting on a group in overalls unloading a cart. Finally they moved on.

Still traveling down the main route, they walked in a heady fragrance
that surrounded them and seemed to follow them. They were in the midst of the cut flower market. On the ground, to the right and left, women sat with square baskets in front of them filled with bunches of roses, violets, dahlias, and daisies. Some bunches were darker, like bloodstains; others brightened into delicate, silvery grays. A lighted candle near one of the baskets gave the surrounding blackness a sudden burst of color, the bright plumage of the daisies, the bloodred of the dahlias, the rich blueness of violets, the brilliant tints of roses. And nothing was more like spring than the tenderness of this perfume on the pavement after the biting breath of seafood and the pungent scent of butter and cheese.

The two men went on their way meandering among the flowers. Out of curiosity they stopped in front of the women selling bunches of ferns and vine leaves, neatly tied-up bundles with twenty-five pieces in each. Then they went down a nearly deserted alley, where their footsteps echoed as though they were in a church. There they found a small cart the size of a wheelbarrow with an undersized donkey hitched to it, which was probably bored because when he saw them, he began braying so loudly that his groans echoed in the great vaulted roofs of Les Halles, which seemed to shake from the sound. The horses answered with neighing, then a stamping and scraping of hooves, a distant fracas that swelled, rolled, and then faded.

In front of Claude and Florent on rue Berger they saw, in the glow of gaslight, bare retail shops, open on one side, with baskets and fruit surrounded by three grimy walls covered with arithmetical calculations scribbled in pencil. As they stood there they saw a well-dressed woman curled up with an air of weary contentment in the corner of a cab that looked misplaced in the procession of carts as it made its way along.

“There's Cinderella heading home without her slippers,” said Claude with a smile.

They chatted now as they went back to the market. Claude, his hands in his pockets, whistled and expounded on his love for this great mountain of food that rose up every morning in the heart of Paris. He roamed the streets every night dreaming of colossal still
lifes, extraordinary works. He had even begun one. He had made his friend Marjolin and that slut Cadine pose, but it was hard. Those damn vegetables and the fruit and fish and meat—it was all too beautiful!

Florent listened to the artist's exuberance with his own belly aching from hunger. It was obvious that it had not occurred to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors. But suddenly he stopped talking and tightened the long red belt that he wore under his greenish coat, an old habit. Then he continued with a sly look.

“And here, this is where I have my breakfast, at least with my eyes, which is better than nothing at all. Sometimes when I forget dinner the night before, I work myself into indigestion the next morning by watching the carts come in here, filled with all sorts of good things. On such a morning I love my vegetables more than ever. Oh, the thing that exasperates me, the real injustice of it, is that those good-for-nothing bourgeois actually eat all this.”

He remembered a dinner that a friend had bought him at Baratte's
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one glorious day. They had had oysters, fish, and game. But Baratte's had gone under and all the carnival life of the old Marché des Innocents was now buried, and everything had been replaced by the huge central market, a steel giant of a new town. “Fools can say what they like, but this was the quintessence of the era.”

At first Florent could not decide if he was criticizing the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its cheerful atmosphere. But Claude was on a rant against romanticism. He preferred his piles of cabbage to the rags of the Middle Ages. And he wound up by denouncing the weakness of an etching he had done of rue Pirouette. “All those grubby old places ought to be torn down and replaced by modern ones.”

“Listen,” he said, stopping. “Look over there in the corner. Isn't that a ready-made painting, infinitely more human than all their beloved pretentious paintings?”

Along the covered street women were selling coffee and hot soup. In a corner a crowd of customers had gathered around a man
selling cabbage soup. The galvanized tin bucket full of broth was steaming on the little heater, whose holes emitted the pale glow of embers. The woman, armed with a ladle, took thin slices of bread out of a cloth-lined basket and dipped yellow cups into the soup. She was surrounded by tidy saleswomen, farmers in overalls, forts with coats stained by the foods they had carried and their backs bent by the weight of the loads, poor ragged drifters—the entire hungry early-morning crowd of Les Halles, eating, scalding themselves, sticking their chins forward so that the trickle from their spoons would not stain their clothes.

And the passionate painter blinked his eyes, thrilled by the scene, looking for the best vantage point, working out the painting's best composition. But the goddamn cabbage soup smelled impressive.

Florent turned his head, unable to watch the customers emptying their soup cups in silence like a cluster of distrustful animals feeding. Claude himself was overwhelmed by pungent steam rising from someone's spoon that struck him in the face.

He tightened his belt, smiling as though he was annoyed. Then, as they continued their stroll, he alluded to the punch Alexandre had bought them, saying in a low voice: “It's a funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat?”

It was daybreak. The houses at the end of rue de la Cossonnerie along boulevard Sébastopol were still black, but above the clean line of their slate roofs, a patch of blue sky framed in the arches of the covered street shone like a half-moon. Claude, who had been bending down to look through some ground-level gratings, peering down into the glimmering gaslight of deep cellars, glanced up at the opening between the pillars, as though studying the dark roofs on the edge of the clear sky. Then he stopped again, this time to inspect an iron ladder, one of those that connected the two levels of roofing. Florent asked him what he was looking at up there.

“It's that bastard Marjolin,” said the painter, not in answer to Florent's question. “You can bet he's lying in some gutter, unless he
spent the night with the animals in the poultry cellar. I need him to do a study.”