A door slammed somewhere below. Pierre stopped and listened carefully for a moment. There was utter silence. Then Pierre took a big wrench and started opening the faucet of the enormous funnel pump that served the reservoir, setting the water in motion. While opening the faucet, he tried to uncork the first test tube with his fingers. The cork was tight, it wouldn’t budge. Exasperated, Pierre clenched it between his teeth.
Uncorking both test tubes, he carefully poured their contents into the wildly splashing larynx of the funnel.
Down below, the water burbled in rhythmic time to the beat of the diesel pistons, a measured rising and falling like the valve of a gigantic heart, forever pumping new supplies of clear, transparent blood into the starving arteries of faraway, slumbering Paris.
Part 2
I
The following day was the 14th of July.
Paris’s intrepid shopkeepers, those who had stormed the Bastille to erect in its place an ugly hollow column “with a view of the city,” twelve bistros, and three brothels for average citizens and one for homosexuals, were throwing a party in their own honor, as they did every year, with a traditional, republican dance.
Decorated from head to toe in sashes of tricolor ribbons, Paris looked like an aging actress dressed up like a country bumpkin to star in some folksy piece of trash at the church fair.
The squares, illuminated with tens of thousands of paper lanterns and light bulbs, slowly filled with the strolling crowd.
With the coming of dusk an unseen switch was flicked, and the gaudy footlights of the streets exploded in a gala show.
On platforms cobbled together from planks, drowsy, grotesque musicians – rightly assuming that a holiday meant a day of communal rest – blew a few bars of a fashionable dance tune out of their strangely warped trumpets every half-hour or so and then rested long and extravagantly.
The gathering crowd, stuffed into the cramped gullies of the streets, thrashed impatiently like fish about to spawn.
Dancing broke out in places. With no space to dance in, the entwined bodies were reduced to a sequence of ritual gestures, soon thereafter performed in the solitude of the only truly democratic institutions, the nearby hotels, which were not observing this holiday of universal equality.
Over it all rose the smell of sweat, wine, and face powder, the ineffable, translucent summertime fog exuded by the surging rivers of crowds.
The smoldering houses endlessly perspired more residents by the dozens. The temperature rose with each passing minute. In the scorching frying pans of the squares the crowd started to bubble like boiling water around the improvised lemonade and menthe glacée booths. Chilled glasses filled with the greenish and white liquids were snatched from one hand to another.
Clearing away the crowd with the oar of a hoarse siren, the packed arks of the tourist companies floated down the streets in regular intervals, bearing aloft on the waves of this flood of democracy chosen couples of the pure and the impure – generally of the same Anglo-Saxon stock – curiously observing the well-fed, tame, and amiable conquerors of the Bastille through their opera glasses and binoculars, in silent, though profound conviction that the whole French Revolution was in actual fact little more than another ingenious concoction of the immortal Cook, a pretext for sumptuous annual celebrations, reckoning on tourists and calculating a margin into the cost of the bus ticket.
Dancers were generally far fewer than spectators, and one disappointed gentleman aptly informed his embarrassed guide that the Parisians didn’t put much enthusiasm into their holidays.
The foreigners’ districts – Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter – were, however, pulling out all the stops for the 14th of July.
Eight jazz bands were scattered about the tight square between La Rotonde and Le Dôme, their sharp cleavers of syncopation quartering the live meat of the night into chopped bars of entrails. The multilingual crowd of Americans, Englishwomen, Russians, Swedes, Japanese, and Jews showed their boundless joy with spasmodic dances, all for the storming of the grand old Bastille.
A few streets down, on dark Boulevard Arago, La Santé Prison was celebrating the holiday in silence, surrounded by a military cordon, with larger-than-usual portions of food. La Santé, to be sure, was not the Bastille, and holiday celebrants could dance without fear, knowing full well that the walls on Boulevard Arago were high and secure, the military detachment well-armed and obedient, and that in a democratic and civilized society certain excesses – though permissible during the era of the ancien régime – could in no way be repeated.
A garland of faded letters hung on the prison frontage, courting passersby with their blackened inscription: “Liberty–Equality–Fraternity,” like a discolored mourning ribbon for the abandoned tomb of the Great French Revolution.
The paper lanterns rocked gently like water lilies on the shiny surface of the night.
Sweaty, ruddy-faced waiters only just managed to keep the cool, clear lemonade flowing to the tables that had miraculously proliferated for the festivities, spilling off the sidewalks and taking possession of the streets.
Above the jazz band, a breathless Negro shattered invisible plates of noise on the heads of the listeners with the motions of a hapless juggler, shaking in cataleptic convulsions over the empty dishes of the cymbals. Sixteen other Negroes hollered their throats raw shouting the magic incantations of faraway continents into the brass speakers of trumpets loud as Jericho’s, confirming with horror that not only were the walls not tumbling down, they seemed to be rising higher in jagged lines of flickering windows.
Cool, crystalline water flowed with a gurgle from thousands of taps like cut arteries, and an exhausted Paris went pale, wilting in the sweltering heat.
The first ambulance was observed at ten o’clock that evening at Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. The crowd, shunted and smothered by the endlessly drifting tour buses, at first mistook it for another bus and greeted it with a scowl. The error was soon recognized, and people swiftly moved aside. The band was just starting up a third Charleston. The dancing continued unabated.
Not twenty minutes later a second ambulance showed up, only to disappear into the black crevice of a neighboring alley. Nobody paid it any mind.
The third, fourth, and fifth arrived just after the second, filling the festive square with the echoes of their ominous sirens.
The first minor turmoil was visible around eleven o’clock. In the middle of the fourth Charleston, one of the dancing couples fell on the slippery asphalt and showed no signs of getting up. They were surrounded by laughter. The pair shook in convulsions. They were brought to the nearest pharmacy. Five minutes later, an ambulance arrived and collected the unfortunate dancers. For the first time someone dropped the word “epidemic,” which clattered like a coin and rolled through the crowd. Nobody believed it, and the dancing resumed.
The next dancing couple to collapse showed strange symptoms of poisoning, and they were picked up from Place de la Bastille. The third from Montparnasse, in front of the veranda at La Rotonde.
A few dozen cases were reported before midnight. More and more mutterings were heard about a strange epidemic. Yet the dancing carried on.
A Negro playing in the jazz band on the terrace of Le Dôme Café crashed spastically onto his drums halfway through a bar, kicking his legs up in the air to comic effect. The amused audience rewarded this new trick with a spontaneous round of applause. But the man did not get up. His face turned skyward, he was dead.