The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [58]
“So really,” Pauline replied judiciously “it served my cousin's poor man right to be crying all night.”
Lisa picked up her sewing again, slumping her shoulders. Quenu had not been listening. He had just cut and thrown into the pot a few onion slices that began to crackle in the heat, chirping like crickets on a hot day. It smelled good. When Quenu plunged his big wooden spoon into the pot, they sang all the louder, filling the kitchen with the penetrating scent of cooked onions. Auguste was preparing pork fat. Léon's chopper came down faster and faster, occasionally scraping across the block to gather the sausage meat, which was turning into a paste.
Florent continued, “As soon as they arrived, they took the man to an island called Devil's Island. He found that he was there with other men like himself who had all been taken away from their country. They were all very unhappy. They were made to work like convicts. The gendarmes who guarded them counted them every day to make sure that no one was missing. Later they were left to do as they liked. They were locked up at night in a large wooden building where they slept in hammocks hung from two bars. By the end of a year they were all going barefoot. And their clothes were so ragged that their skin showed. They had built some huts with tree trunks for shelter from the sun, which broiled everything. But the huts could not protect them from the mosquitoes, which covered them with welts and inflammations. It killed a number of them. The rest became yellow, so wretched and lost, with their bushy beards, that they were pitiful to look at.”
“Auguste, hand me the fat!” shouted Quenu. Then he slowly let the chunks slide into the skillet and stirred them with his spoon. The fat melted. An even richer steam rose from the stove.
“What did they get for food there?” asked Pauline, engrossed in the story.
“Wormy rice and bad-smelling meat,” Florent answered, his voice lower. “You had to pick the worms out to eat the rice. If the meat was roasted and very cooked, you could manage to eat it. But if it was boiled it stank so badly, just the smell could make you sick.”
“I'd rather live on dry bread,” said Pauline after mulling the matter over.
Léon, having finished chopping, carried the platter of sausage meat to the square table. Mouton, who had remained sitting, his eyes fixed on Florent as though shocked by his story, had to back off a few steps, which he did clumsily. Then he rolled himself into a ball with his nose by the sausage meat and began purring.
But Lisa could not conceal either her shock nor her disgust: wormy rice and foul-smelling meat seemed scarcely believable obscenities and a disgrace for those who had eaten them. And on her handsome calm face, in the swell of her neck, rose a wave of fear, facing this man who had eaten unspeakable things.
“No, it was not a land of delicacies,” Florent continued, forgetting Pauline, his eyes wandering to the steaming stove. “Every day brought its own annoyances, a continual crushing oppression, a violation of all justice, contempt for all human kindness, that exasperated the prisoners and slowly burned them into a fever of bitter rancor. You lived like animals with the whip forever held over your back. They would have liked to have killed the man. You can't forget such things. It's just not possible. Such suffering cries out for vengeance someday.”
He had lowered his voice, and the lardoons, hissing merrily in the skillet, drowned out the bubbling of the boiling pots. But Lisa heard Florent and was frightened by the determined expression that had suddenly come over his face. She judged him to be a pretender who wore a sweet and gentle mask.
The deadened tone of Florent's voice had enchanted Pauline, who bounced on her cousin's lap, excited by the story.
“And the man, what about the man?” she urged.
Looking at little Pauline, Florent seemed to find himself again, and his sad smile returned.
“Well, the man was not at all happy to be on the island. He had but one idea, to get out and cross the sea to the mainland,