The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [129]
“Do you want to plant some trees?” he suddenly asked. “I can make a beautiful garden.”
“Really! A garden!” said Pauline, struck with admiration.
Since the groundskeeper was nowhere in sight, he had her dig holes in one of the flower beds. She was on her knees, in the middle of the soft soil, spread-eagle, facedown, her sweet pink arms buried to the elbows. For his part, he looked for broken branches to plant as the trees in the garden in the holes Pauline made. The only problem was that he was never satisfied with the depth of the holes and he played the angry boss, scolding her as an incompetent worker.
When she stood up, she was black from head to foot, she had soil in her hair, and her face was smudged. She looked funny, with her arms looking like a coal miner's, and Muche clapped his hands, ordering, “Now we have to water them, or else they won't grow.”
This was their crowning moment. They left the square, scooping up water from the stream in their cupped hands, and ran back to water their sticks. Along the way, Pauline, who was too fat and didn't know how to run, let the water drip from her hands down her skirt, so that by the time she had done six trips, she looked as though she had been bathing in the stream. Muche thought that she was wonderful, now that she was all dirty. He had her sit next to him, under the rhododendron in the garden they had planted. He told her that it was already starting to grow. He held her hand and called her his little wife.
“You're not sorry you came, are you? It's a lot better than just standing on the sidewalk being bored. You see, I know all kinds of games to play in the streets. You'll have to come do this again—but don't say anything to your mama about it. Don't mess it up. If you do say anything, when I go by your place, I'll pull your hair.”
Pauline just kept saying yes. As a crowning touch to his chivalry, he filled the two pockets of her apron with soil. Then he squeezed her hard with that street boy's impulse to be mean. But there was no more sugar, the game was over, and she was beginning to get worried. When he pinched her, she started to cry and said that she wanted to go. This provoked Muche, bringing out his outrageous side, and he threatened not to take her back to her parents. The poor little thing, completely terrified, sighed like the fair maiden at the mercy of her seducer somewhere in an unknown inn. No doubt he would have started beating her to shut her up if a shrill voice, that of Mademoiselle Saget, had not shouted out, “Well, God forgive me if it isn't Pauline! Leave her alone, you nasty little boy!”
The elderly woman took Pauline by the hand, expressing shock at the condition of her clothes. Muche was not in the least bit intimidated. He followed them, laughing in his sly way about his handiwork, saying repeatedly that Pauline had chosen to come with him and it had been her decision to get down on the ground.
Mademoiselle Saget was a regular at the square des Innocents. She spent at least an hour there every afternoon keeping up on the latest gossip on the locals. The square had semicircles of benches end to end on either side. Poor people from the narrow sweltering streets of the neighborhood packed tightly onto the benches, frail, shriveled old women in threadbare bonnets, young ones in camisoles with badly fastened skirts, bareheaded and exhausted and already sagging from poverty, and a few men also, tidy grandfathers, forts with soiled jackets, and suspicious-looking men in black hats, while the footpaths were jammed with children pulling toy carts with wheels missing, filling pails with sand, screaming and biting—a filthy, snot-nosed crowd of kids, swarming in the sun like vermin.
Mademoiselle Saget was so thin that she could always manage to wriggle into a spot on a bench. She listened