The Place Furstenberg was untouched. Pollo sat upon a bench and admired the symmetrical arrangement of blooming poincianas and round white street lamps: an island of calm, a place privileged to convey the belief and to engender the belief that no time had passed. He clamped his hand over one ear: so Paris was a dream; the patronne had been grateful; life had become marvelous; things were happening; the desperate routine had been broken. For her (for how many others?), things again had meaning; for many (for her too?) there was vision again in existence, vibrations with everything that, unlike life, identifies life. He could see the Monk’s lips moving, his words drowned out by the roar from the spectators and the flagellants. Pollo had no proof that the man with the dead eyes had really said what he was attributing to him now, sitting here on the bench in the Place Furstenberg; he didn’t understand the corollaries to this extremely simple proposition: in Paris, this morning, an ancient woman had given birth, and a patronne had found life enchanting. This average, chubby, adorable patronne with her rosy cheeks and tight-knotted bun; vile, greedy, dull patronne, counting every centime that came into her coffers. What frightening force, what terrible fear, had brought her to this new generosity? Pollo looked at his only hand, at the traces of the grease so obstinately clinging to his palm, congealing in the creases of the lines of life and fortune and love and death. That film he had seen as a child … night, fog, the meaningless profusion of death, the final solution. Pollo shook his head.
“It’s time to be practical. It is mathematically exact that this morning I walked among several thousand spectators. Never before at one time have so many people been able to see the advertisements for the Café Le Bouquet. But it is also true that no one noticed them. My posters could not compete with the spectacle in the streets, and so the day when most people could have received the impact of the publicity so desired by the patron turned out to be the day when fewest people were disposed to be seduced by an advertisement. Neither the number of the crowd nor their lack of interest is my fault. Ergo: it doesn’t matter whether I walk among the crowds or through the most deserted streets.”
Quod erat demonstrandum: Cartesian Pollo. This reflection neither cheered him nor disheartened him. Furthermore, clouds were building up in the west and soon would be speeding to meet the sun, which was traveling in the opposite direction. The beautiful summer day was about to be spoiled. With a sigh, Pollo rose and walked along the rue Jacob, neither too slowly nor too fast, preserving a kind of impossible symmetry, displaying the profile of the sandwich boards in the windows of the antique shops, stopping from time to time to admire some display of trinkets: gold scissors, antique magnifying glasses, famous autographs, miniature dictionaries, little silver bookmarks in the shape of fists, a cloth or a mask worked of feathers with a design of dead spiders in the center. It was so serene on this street that his spirits were almost calm again. But as he saw himself reflected in the shop window he asked: can a one-armed man ever be truly serene? Pollo Mutilatum.
He stopped before an abandoned kiosk exhibiting dusty, yellow newspapers, he read some of the more provocative headlines: Urgent Meeting of Geneticists Called by WHO in Geneva, Madrid Mysteriously Deserted, Invasion of Mexico by U. S. Marines. He realized that the clouds were gathering more swiftly than he had expected and that in the narrow canyon of the rue de l’Université the light and shadow were changing with the regularity of heartbeats. It’s light from the clouds and shadow from the sun, Pollo repeated, or maybe it’s someone making jokes with the old tin pan in the sky. No, it isn’t; that isn’t the smoke from Saint-Sulpice stagnating somehow over the Place Furstenberg. That smoke was filled with ash, but this promises water. Pollo walked down the rue de Beaune to the Seine, murmuring the words of his baptismal poem (for when he was born it was no longer the fashion to baptize with an obsolete saint’s name, but rather to choose a name from a book of poems). This poem had been written by a mad old man who had never learned to distinguish between political treachery and raving humor; he was a man who detested equally mimicry of the archaic and avant-garde ingeniousness, who would not accept a past that had not been nourished in the present or a present that did not comprehend the past, who confused all symptoms with all causes: “Bah! I have sung women in three cities. / But it is all one. / I will sing of the sun. / … eh?… they mostly had gray eyes, / But it is all one, I will sing of the sun.”
There they were, all along the Quai Voltaire, the young women and the old, the fat and the thin, the delighted and the inconsolable, the serene and the distressed, lying on both sides of the street, some propped against the parapets of the quay, others huddled close to the buildings, all alternately illuminated and obscured by the swift play of clouds and July sun. July … murmured Pollo … in Paris everything happens in July, always … if you collected all the calendar pages of all the past Julys, you wouldn’t miss a single gesture, a single word, a single trace of the true face of Paris; July is the anger of the crowds and the love of couples; July is paving stones, bicycles, and a lazy river; July is an organ-grinder, and many beheaded kings; July has the heat of Seurat and the voice of Yves Montand, the color of Dufy and the eyes of René Clair … Pollo Trivia. But this is the first time that a July announces the end of one century and the beginning of another (the first time in my life, I mean … Pollo Pubescent), although deciding whether 2000 is the last year of the old century or the first of the new can lead to confusion and arguments. How far away is December, and the January that will dissipate all doubts and fears!
July, and the sun, that enormous, free, and fervent reflecting ball revealing with every successive blink of its eye that the city is open space, the city is a cave. And if Saint-Germain was all confusion, here, as in Saint-Sulpice, there was only silence punctuated by soft sounds: the marching of bare feet in the Place echoed in soft weeping.
Everywhere the eye could see, from the bridge of Alexandre III in one direction to that of Saint-Michel in the other, women lying on the sidewalks were being assisted by other women. The unique miracle at the house of Madame Zaharia had become the collective miracle of the quays: for here women of all ages, shapes, and conditions were giving birth.
Pollo Phoibee picked his way among these women in labor, trusting somehow that some of them might be in the mood to read the advertisements on the boards thumping against his knees and thighs and, once present contingencies were overcome, find themselves disposed to visit the advertised café. But it is true he had very few illusions along that line. Swathed in sheets, bathrobes, and towels, stockings rolled to their ankles and skirts raised to their navels, the women of Paris were giving birth, preparing to give birth, or had just given birth. Those who had already delivered were eventually removed by the makeshift midwives who had assisted them and who immediately prepared to attend the new arrivals waiting in line along the two bridges. Pollo asked himself: at what moment would the midwives themselves become the ones giving birth, and who would assist them but those who either had delivered or were about to? And if the miracle of Madame Zaharia were not exclusive but generic, would the old women knitting socks and fussing with their peaked caps at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés spectacle already have had their moment, or was it still to come? In any case, all the rooms facing the river had been emptied, and the new mothers, with their babes, were led to them as soon as they had passed the obligatory interval between the birth, the modest celebration of the new arrival, and a brief rest in the open air.