The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [75]
Among these savage women, Florent had one friend. Claire unabashedly declared that the new inspector was a good man. When he passed by, amid the abuse of the others, she smiled at him. She stood nonchalantly in her stall, her blond curls falling around her temples and neck, her dress on crooked. He usually saw her there, her hands submerged in the tanks, moving the fish from one tank to another, taking pleasure in repositioning the little copper dolphins that shot streams of water from their mouths. The streams of water gave her the quivering grace of a bather at the water's edge, albeit a sloppily dressed one.
One morning she was especially friendly. She called the inspector over to show him a huge eel that had amazed the entire market at the morning auction. She lifted the grating that she had cautiously placed over the basin. The eel, resting on the bottom, appeared to be asleep.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Watch this.”
She put her naked arm into the water, a slightly skinny arm with silken skin revealing the blue of her veins. As soon as the eel felt her touch it began rolling itself in knots, filling the narrow tank with its glittering green rings. When it calmed down, Claire pestered it some more with the tips of her fingernails.
“It's huge,” Florent felt obliged to say. “I've hardly ever seen such a beauty.”
Claire admitted that at first she had been afraid of eels. Now she had learned how to tighten her grip so they could not slide away. She reached into the next tank and pulled out a smaller eel. The eel wriggled on both sides of her tightly closed hand. It made her laugh. She threw it back in, took another one, and stirred up the tank, agitating the mass of serpents with her slim fingers.
She stopped a minute to chat about business, which was not going well. The grain merchants down the way in the covered street were hurting them. Her bare arms were still dripping, refreshed by the coolness of the water. Large drops of water were falling from her fingers.
“Oh,” she suddenly said, “you have to take a look at my carp too.” She lifted off another grating and with both hands grabbed a carp that was lashing with his tail. She looked for a smaller one that she could hold with one hand. Its sides puffed out a little with each gasp. She decided that it would be funny to force her thumb into its panting mouth.
“It won't bite,” she said with a soft laugh. “It's not mean … It's like crayfish. They don't scare me at all.”
She had already plunged her arm back into the water and pulled up from a section chaotic with activity a crayfish that had grabbed her little finger with its claw. She shook it for a moment, but it seemed that the crayfish squeezed too hard, because her face turned red and she broke off its claw with an angry blow, all the while still smiling.
“On the other hand,” she said, trying to conceal her outburst, “I'd never trust a pike. He'd cut my fingers like a knife.” She pointed at an area on the scrubbed board where pikes were laid out sorted by size next to bronze-colored tench and piles of gudgeon. By now her hands were coated with slime from the carp, and she held them over the fish. She seemed enveloped in the scent of spawn, the thick scent that rises from reeds and water lilies when fish, dreamy in the sunlight, discharge eggs from their bellies. Still smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron. Her face had a peaceful cold-blooded look from the thrill she felt when playing heartlessly with river creatures.
Claire's friendliness was only a small consolation for Florent. Whenever he stopped to chat with her, it provoked even cruder treatment from the others. Claire would only shrug her shoulders and say that her mother was an old