The Pig Who Ate Too Well
That summer we were living on the rez-de-chaussée of an old building in Montparnasse. The building was four storeys high, with one apartment on each floor and a fifth in the basement, where the elderly landlady, Madame Chaumier, lived with her Vietnamese pot-bellied pig Rémy. The black pig was about the size of a cocker spaniel, and he had been trained to use a litter-box like a cat. His mouth was fixed in a perpetual grin, and although we knew he couldn’t change his expression, he was so friendly it was easy to believe that he was delighted with the world and everyone in it.
Madame Chaumier did her shopping on Monday mornings, and Rémy went with her, on a leash that matched the elegant green leather collar around his thick neck. The marchand des légumes, the boulanger, the vendeur du vin, and the propriétaire of the Café Ronsard next to the building all made much of Rémy, scratching him between the ears and telling him what a fine pig he was. Only the boucher, a fat man named Lebrun, was less than welcoming. “Madame Chaumier,” he once told her, “it is not normal to have a pig for a pet. Pigs are for eating.”
“Not this pig, Monsieur Lebrun,” Madame Chaumier snapped back. “Give me four lamb chops.” Lebrun shrugged, but as he wrapped the chops in brown paper, he glared at Rémy and muttered under his breath. Madame Chaumier put up with his insolence because his prices were lower than those of the boucher in the next street. But one afternoon, as we were coming back from doing our own shopping, we ran into her outside the building, and she was in tears. “Lebrun wants to eat Rémy, the monster!”
“That would be like eating a child!” Mary said.
“I’m sure he’d eat children, too, if he thought he could get away with it!” said Madame Chaumier.
“Human flesh tastes like pork,” I said, in English.
“How do you know?” Mary asked me.
“Dedan told me.”
“Dedan? Our safari guide in Kenya?”
“Yes. Some of his relatives were Mau-Mau. They ate parts of the British soldiers they killed in battle, if the soldiers died well. A way of honoring a gallant enemy. Not much different than eating the flesh of a bull who dies bravely in the ring.”
“I’m surprised Dedan didn’t eat us,” said Mary.
“We weren’t British soldiers,” I said. “And the rebellion was over.”
“What are you talking about?” Madame Chaumier asked, in French.
“I’m sorry, Madame,” my wife said, in the same language. “We didn’t mean to be rude. My husband was talking about pork.”
“Not in front of Rémy!” Madame Chaumier exclaimed.
“No, of course not,” I said. I bent and scratched the back of Rémy’s neck. “And how are you today, Monsieur Rémy?” Rémy grunted happily.
The pig had belonged to Madame Chaumier’s only grandson, Claude, a soldier in the French army. When he came home on leave from the war in Indochina, he put Rémy, just a piglet then, in a suitcase and smuggled him aboard an airplane. He had intended to reclaim him when his tour of duty was over, but he was killed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. So Rémy became the old woman’s dearest companion, a living memento of Claude.
There were other exotic pets in the quartier. An elegant young dancer from the Paris Opéra Ballet, the mistress of a bank director, glided around with a Bengalese Leopard Cat who wore a leash and collar with studded with diamonds. In an adjoining building there was a capuchin monkey who belonged to a retired governor of French Equatorial Africa. The monkey often escaped from her cage and made her way down to the street, where she gleefully evaded the strenuous efforts of the neighbors to capture her until she got bored and returned home on her own. And a merchant marine officer who kept a pied-à-terre above the Café Ronsard for his shore leaves had a white cockatoo with a long yellow crest-feather who could curse in French, Italian, and Spanish. But Rémy was the favorite.
Being a pig, he was always hungry, and he could eat almost anything. But Madame Chaumier never fed him slops. He had his own bowl, and she shared whatever she ate for lunch and dinner with him. For breakfast he got a croissant and an apple. He tried to stick to that regimen, but like a boozer on the wagon, every so often he slipped. There was the time one of Madame Chaumier’s nieces visited her from Provence, bringing a straw bag of blood-oranges as a present. She left them on the kitchen counter while she and her aunt went to the café for coffee, and when the two women got back, the oranges were gone, peels and all, and so was the straw bag. Shortly after that, a young man who had served with Claude in Indochina got mustered out of the army, and he showed up at Madame Chaumier’s door with a packet of letters she had written to her grandson, a bouquet of roses, and a box of chocolates. While she was reading the letters and weeping, Rémy ate the chocolates.
“I scolded him, of course, but not too severely,” she told us. “At least he left the roses alone. I put them in a vase and placed it on the dining room table. He enjoyed smelling them as much as I did. When they began to fade, I snipped off the thorny stems and put the blossoms in his bowl with a little milk. He slurped them right up.”
But later on, Rémy’s appetite almost killed him. He had the run of the building, and in hot weather the tenants kept their windows and front doors open when they were home, to let the air circulate. Rémy circulated, too, strolling into their apartments looking for back-scratches and treats. On the morning of the fourteenth of July, Mademoiselle Fantine, a shop-girl who lived on the second floor, made six small raspberry tarts which she intended to bring to a Bastille Day party at the home of her boyfriend Felix’s parents. She left the tarts cooling on her kitchen windowsill while she went down to the foyer to see if the mail had come. When she came back upstairs, the tarts were gone, and in their place was Rémy, licking red jam off his snout. Fantine was as fond of Rémy as the rest of us, but this was an outrage. She shrieked with anger, and the startled pig fell out of the window.
That would have been the end of his short, happy life, but he landed on the open umbrella shading one of the Café Ronsard’s outdoor tables. Fortunately, nobody was sitting at the table, for the umbrella collapsed under Rémy’s weight. Monsieur Hugo, the propriétaire, rushed out to see what had happened, but a couple at the next table were already untangling Rémy from the folds of the umbrella. They were regulars at the café, and they’d met the pig many times.
“Usually he walks up to us,” the woman said, “instead of falling out of the sky.”
“A fallen angel,” said her husband.
“What’s that saying? ‘If pigs had wings?’” Mary asked.
“’If pigs had wings, they’d fly away from people who want to eat them,’” I said. “It’s too bad nature made them so delicious.”
“Why are you being cynical?”
“I’m sorry. The writing is not going well,” I told Mary.
“You should write about Rémy,” she said. “Put him in that memoir you’re working on.”
“’A Moveable Feast?’ It’d be like putting him on the menu,” I said. “But maybe I’ll fit him in somewhere. He’s a memorable pig.”
“Is he all right?” Monsieur Hugo asked.
“He seems to be,” the woman said. Rémy was on his feet, looking a little dazed, but he grunted, shook his head, and licked off the rest of the jam.
Madame Chaumier paid for the cost of replacing the ruined umbrella, and Fantine bought some tarts at the boulangerie for her party. That evening Mary and I watched the Bastille Day fireworks from the roof of our building, with all the other tenants. Mary wore a tricolore cockade on her red beret, and we drank champagne. It had been a good day.