But these administrative details were not what made Pollo uneasy as he threaded his way among the prone figures, repressed moans, and gurgling of infants; it was the glances the birthing women directed at him. Perhaps some, the youngest, might have taken him for the possible father, who surely at that very moment was celebrating with the flagellants at the Church of Saint-Germain; some glances were hopeful, some disappointed, but as is the way with things, the hopeful ones turned into certainty of deception, while the disappointment yielded to false expectation. Pollo was sure that not a single one of those newly born infants was any of his doing; and the women who could see his mutilated arm were also sure, for one can forget or confuse anything except copulation with a one-armed man.
Some infants lay on the maternal breast; others were waved away in anger or fear by their mothers and grudgingly held in the arms of the midwives; the beatitude of some young girls and the resignation of some of the thirty-year-old women, however, were not the common denominator in this new spectacle of Paris-in-July. Many of the young girls of marriageable age, and the more mature, probably married, women, seemed as puzzled as numbers of the elderly among them; their expressions communicated a certain slyness … and amazement. These aged women, some dignified, straight as ramrods, some stooped as a shepherd’s crook, little old ladies until yesterday engrossed in their memories, their cats, their television programs, and their hot-water bottles, those parchment-skinned octogenarians who hobble through the streets grumbling at passers-by, ironclad relics who stand about all day arguing in markets and in stairwells, all of them, all the formidable, the hair-raising, and the dearly beloved female gerontocracy of Paris, smacked their gums and winked their eyes, undecided between two attitudes: whether, in bewilderment, to question, or whether to feign a secret knowledge. Pollo had only to look: he could tell that none of these women knew the father of their infants.
As he advanced along this frontier between astonishment and slyness, some old women reached out to touch our hero’s leg; he sensed that one of the ancient ladies had let it be known to her neighbor that he, the blond, handsome, if slightly crippled young man, was the unacknowledged father of the swaddled infant the old harpy was shaking in the air like a rattle. The chain of gossip was about to form, and its consequences — Pollo suspected with terror — would be unequaled. The scapegoat. The Lynch law. Nuit et brouillard. Fury. Mother Joan of the Angels. The Ox-Bow Incident. Pollo Cinémathèque. The accusing stare of the little old lady paralyzed Pollo; for an instant he imagined himself surrounded by a pack of betrayed women, the old, the mature, and finally the young, all rushing at him, kissing him first, running their fingers through his hair, pinching and scratching him, each convinced that it was with a one-armed man, only with a one-armed man, they had made love nine months earlier, invoking his mutilation as proof of a singular fertility, demanding that he acknowledge his paternity; blind, furious at his every denial, driven by the need for a propitiatory victim, tearing off his clothes, castrating him, ceremonially, communally eating his balls, hanging him from a post, claiming up to the very end that he was the one, when in all sincerity — although with great astuteness — he could only repeat: “I’m just me, just me, a poor crippled young fellow earning a difficult livelihood as a sandwich man for a neighborhood café. That is my one destiny; humbly and gratefully, I swear to you that is my only destiny.”
He had the sang-froid to return the stare of the decrepit old woman who was insinuating that he was the father of her child. Pollo’s stare transfixed the old thing, caused her to frown and sadly shake her head. Weeping and sniveling, chin trembling, she pressed the infant to her raddled lips; stupidity and terror welled in her eyes. For, without actually planning it, as he looked at her, Pollo had willed a single image, one exclusive and overwhelming image, to pass through his mind; and that vision was necessarily the opposite of the present inordinate procreation. In his mind Pollo had projected the film of a row of grease-covered, barefoot men, veiled in smoke, penetrating into the frightful stench of the church watched over by the birds of prey: Saint-Sulpice. And as he projected that image from his mind to his eyes and from his eyes to hers, he added one idea: the final solution … rigorously programmed death. Then he told himself he wasn’t sure of that, that he’d only invented it, merely remembered the unifying symbol of the film; his real intention had been to project to the old woman a terrifying image related to the immediate situation, something emanating from the earth, and pinning her down to the very sidewalk where she lay.
No one will ever know whether Pollo truly communicated anything to the old woman, but that isn’t important. What he wished was not to test his telepathic powers but to free himself from any memory or intuition about Saint-Sulpice, now converted by his imagination and cinematographic memories into a cathedral of crime, a death chamber. He felt relief at having transferred, having bequeathed, the image to the old woman, the image, perhaps the fate, of death. But he wondered, is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young? To some few good men, disorder is the evil. Such simple convictions allow them, in exceptional situations, to find peace where none seems to exist. This concept made Pollo’s head spin: implacable order ruled at Saint-Sulpice — along with an absolute absence of good — whereas terrifying disorder reigned on the Quai Voltaire, but there was no evil there, unless life had adopted the features of death, or death the semblance of life. Facing Pollo across the sidewalk lay the Pont des Arts, an iron structure linking the quays of the Institute to those of the now transparent Louvre. The bridge stretched from the restrained tumult of this open-air maternity ward (it would be raining soon, and then what?) across the boiling, noisy anarchy of the waters. In the midst of all these signs of catastrophe the bridge stood as a lonely landmark of sanity. Impossible to know why the women crowded the other accesses to the quays and ignored this one. Some unknown rule? Free choice? Fear? The fact is that no one was crossing the Pont des Arts; consequently, that bridge shone in solitary stability.
Pollo felt the need to find the dead center of a city thrown off balance, its scale pans tipped by an excess of smoke and blood. He climbed the steps of the bridge, but could not believe his eyes; he could see the Seine, flowing toward the Ile de la Cité that split its waters; he saw the glassy outlines of the Louvre, and the corona of the storm above the truncated towers of Notre-Dame. The transformations which had seemed like ominous portents now seemed insignificant details: mist lay upon the river, veiling the ruined barges; the city’s skyline was once again visible in the crystal-clear air and glowing light, captured in a band of glass and gold between the land and the hovering storm.
A girl was sitting halfway across the bridge. From a distance, against the light (Pollo ascending the steps leading to the Pont des Arts), she was a black dot on the horizon. As he walked closer, Pollo started to fill in the outline with color: the hair caught back in a long braid was chestnut, the long smock violet, and her necklaces green. She was drawing on the asphalt surface of the bridge. She did not look up as Pollo approached, and he added to the description: firm skin delicate as a china teacup, a turned-up nose, and tattooed lips. She was drawing with colored chalk, as hundred of students had done through the years, reproducing famous paintings or inventing new ones to solicit aid from passing pedestrians to pay for their studies, or a trip, or a ticket home. In other times, one of the joys of the city had been to walk across this bridge reading the chalk letters “Thank you” written in all the languages of the world, to hear the clinking coins, and the guitars at dusk accompanying the students’ ballads of love and protest.