The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [116]
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.8
“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