The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [60]
But Lisa wanted to get back to the question of whether it was possible to go three days without food. It wasn't possible. “No! I don't believe it! No one can go three days without eating. When someone says, ‘I'm dying of hunger,’ that's just an expression. You always get something to eat, more or less. You would have to be one of the world's most miserable, a completely abandoned wretch, a lost person …”
She was doubtless going to add something like “worthless rabble,” but after looking at Florent she held back. But the scornful pout on her lips and the hard look in her eyes clearly indicated her belief that only lowly, disreputable people fell into such circumstances. To her, any man who was capable of lasting three days without eating was a dangerous person. After all, honest folk would never put themselves in such a situation.
By now Florent was suffocating. He was seated opposite a stove into which Léon had just tossed several shovelfuls of coal and that was snoring like a choirmaster sleeping in the sun. It was becoming quite hot. Auguste, who had taken charge of the pots of saindoux, was sweating as he watched, and Quenu mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve as he waited for the blood to be ready. The kitchen had an air of indigestion, the sleepiness that follows overeating.
“When the man had buried his companion in the sand,” Florent slowly began again, “he walked off alone straight forward. Dutch Guiana, where he had ended up, is a country of forests carved up by rivers and marshes. The man walked for more than eight days without seeing a dwelling of any kind. All around him he could feel death waiting for him. Though his stomach ached with hunger, he did not dare eat most of the brilliant-colored fruit that hung from the trees. He was afraid even to touch the metallic, glowing berries for fear they were poisonous. For entire days he did not see a glimpse of sky but pushed on under the thick branches of a green cover swarming with living horror. Huge birds flew over his head with roaring flapping sounds and sudden cries that resembled death rattles. Monkeys leaped, and wild animals charged through the brush, bending branches and causing deluges of green leaves to fall, as though a sudden windstorm were blowing through. But more than anything, it was the snakes that turned his blood to ice, when he stepped on a clump of dry leaves and it suddenly moved and he could see little lean heads slithering through monstrous entanglements of roots.
“In some dark, wet crannies, swarming clusters of reptiles suddenly popped out and scurried away—some black, some yellow, some purple, some striped, some spotted, and some looking like dead grass. Then the man would stop, seeking out a rock on which he could escape the mushy earth into which he kept sinking. He would rest there for hours, dreading a boa suddenly appearing in the next clearing, tail coiled and head erect, perched like a giant gold-spotted tree trunk.
“At night he slept in the trees, frightened by the least rustling, imagining he could hear snakes sliding through the darkness. He was drowning in endless leaves. He was gripped by stifling heat as though from a furnace, a dripping humidity, a pestilent sweat infused with the coarse smells of odiferous wood and rank-smelling flowers. And when at last the man made it out at the end of a very long march and saw the sky, he was in front of a series of wide rivers that barred him from going any further. He went down the banks, keeping an eye on the gray backs of caimans and clumps of drifting greenery, until he found safer-looking water and swam across. On the other side, the forest began again. But there were also stretches of vast grassy plains, places covered with thick vegetation, and sometimes far off he could see the reflecting blue of a little lake. The man then took