The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [81]
For the first few months he had not been bothered by the penetrating odor. It had been a harsh winter; the ice had turned the alleys into mirrors and icicles had formed lacy edgings on the tables and water faucets. In the morning little heaters had to be lit under the faucets to get water. The frozen fish had twisted tails, dull and hard like unfinished metal, and when you snapped one, it made a ringing sound like a sheet of iron. The pavilion remained in this sorry state until February, deserted and wrapped in a spiky shroud of ice. But come the thaw, the milder months, the fog and rain of March, the fish also softened, drowning in the melt, the smell of rot blending with the dull scent of mud wafting in from the streets, still only an unpleasant hint in the air, tempered by the humidity clinging to the ground. But in the blazing June afternoons, a foul stench rose up and the air was weighted with a hazy pestilence. The upper windows of the market were opened and enormous gray canvas shades were drawn to block the burning sky. A rain of fire fell on Les Halles and heated it like an oven, and there was not a breath of air to sweep away the fishy smell. Steam rose from the stalls.
Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. He had experienced smells this bad before, but not associated with the stomach. His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish, which decayed at the first sign of warm weather. They filled him with their powerful odors, suffocated him. The smells alone gave him indigestion. Even shutting himself in his office, he could not escape this discomfort, for the insidious odor crept through the woodwork of the window and door. When the sky was gray and heavy the little room was dark and the day was like a long twilight in a fetid swamp. He often felt attacks of anxiety in which he had a strong urge to walk, and then he would descend into the cellars by the broad stairway in the middle of the pavilion. In the stuffiness down there, in the dim light of sporadic gas lamps, he found the pure, cool water to be refreshing. He would stand in front of the large tank where the stock of live fish was kept and listen to the continual melody of streams of water falling from each corner and then spreading into a broad stream that glided beneath the grating of the locked tanks in a soft, endless flow. This underground spring, this stream rippling the shadows, calmed him.
In the evenings he enjoyed the beautiful sunsets that silhouetted the frilly steelwork of the pavilions black against the red glow of the sky, the evening light of five o'clock, the dust drifting in the last sunbeams, pouring in through the windows, through the shutters. It was like a luminous but cloudy window on which pillars like thin fishbones, the elegant curve of the girders, the geometrical patterns of the roof were drawn with Chinese ink. Florent feasted his eyes on the glowing parchment and recalled his old dream of a colossal machine with cogs and levers and balances, only half visible in the burning embers of a dark oven. Every hour the changing light would alter the shape of Les Halles—the forceful blue sky of morning, then the black shadows of noon, the flames of a setting sun that died in the gray ashes of dusk. But on the flaming-sky evenings, when the stink rose, crossing the bright beams of sunlight like warm smoke, he was again shaken by an ill feeling and his dreams would go awry, and he would imagine giant ovens where human fat was being melted down.
Nor was he comfortable in this vulgar neighborhood, among crass people whose every word and gesture seemed to have absorbed the smell of the place. He tried to be open-minded and avoid false modesty, but these women embarrassed him. He felt comfortable only around Madame François, whom he happened to see again.