by Colette
In the cloakroom they found Alain’s mother and Camille’s parents stamping as if with cold and leaving footmarks the colour of dirty snow on the matting. The cat, seated on the window-sill outside, watched them inhospitably but with no animosity. Alain imitated her patience and endured the ritual of pessimistic lamentations.
‘It’s the same old thing.’
‘It’s hardly any farther on than it was a week ago.’
‘My dear, if you want to know what I think, it won’t be a fortnight, it’ll be a month. What am I talking about, a month? More likely two months before their nest . . .’
At the word ‘nest’, Camille flung herself into the peaceful fray so shrilly that Alain and Saha closed their eyes.
‘But since we’ve already decided what to do! And since we’re actually frightfully pleased at having Patrick’s place! And since it suits Patrick down to the ground because he hasn’t a bean – hasn’t any money – sorry Mummy. We’ll just take our suitcases and – Alley Oop! – straight up to heaven on the ninth floor! Won’t we, Alain?’
He opened his eyes again, smiled into the void, and put her light cape round her shoulders. In the mirror opposite them he met Camille’s black, reproachful look but it did not soften his heart. ‘I didn’t kiss her on the lips when we were alone. All right, very well then, I didn’t kiss her on the lips. She hasn’t had her full ration of kisses-on-the-lips today. She had the quarter-to-twelve one in the Bois, she had the two o’clock one after coffee, she had the half-past-six one in the garden, but she’s missed tonight’s. Well, if she’s not satisfied, she’s only got to put it down on the account . . . What’s the matter with me? I’m so sleepy, I’m going mad. This life’s idiotic; we’re seeing far too much of each other and yet we never see each other properly. On Monday I’ll definitely go down to the shop and . . .’
In imagination, the chemical acidity of the bales of new silk assailed his nostrils. But the inscrutable smile of M. Veuillet appeared to him as in a dream and, as in a dream, he heard words which, at twenty-four, he had still not learnt to hear without dread. ‘No, no, my young friend. Will a new adding-machine that costs seventeen thousand francs pay back its initial outlay within the year? It all depends on that. Allow your poor father’s oldest partner . . .’ Catching sight again in the looking-glass of the vindictive image and handsome dark eyes which were watching him, he folded Camille in both his arms.
‘Well, Alain?’
‘Oh, my dear, let him alone! These poor infants . . .’
Camille blushed and disengaged herself. Then she held up her cheek to Alain in such a boyish brotherly grace that he nearly put his head on her shoulder. ‘Oh, to lie down and go to sleep! Oh, good Lord! Just to lie down and sleep!’
From the garden came the voice of the cat.
‘Me–rrou–wa . . . Rrr–rrouwa.’
‘Hark at the cat! She must be hunting,’ said Camille calmly. ‘Saha! Saha!’
The cat was silent.
‘Hunting?’ protested Alain. ‘Whatever makes you think that? To begin with, we’re in May. And then she’s saying: “Me–rrou–wa!”’
‘So what?’
‘She wouldn’t be saying “Me–rrou–wa” if she were hunting! What she’s saying there – and it’s really rather strange – means a warning. It’s almost the cry calling her little ones together.’
‘Good Lord!’ cried Camille, flinging up her arms. ‘If Alain’s going to start interpreting the cat, we shall be here all night!’
She ran down the steps and, at the touch of old Émile’s shaking hand, two old-fashioned gas-globes, like huge mauve planets, illuminated the garden.
Alain walked ahead with Camille. At the entrance gate, he kissed her under her ear, breathed in, under a perfume too old for her, a good smell of bread and dark hair, and squeezed the girl’s bare elbows under her cape. When she seated herself at the steering-wheel, with her parents in the back, he felt suddenly wide awake and gay.
‘Saha! Saha!’
The cat sprang out of the shadow, almost under his feet. When he began to run, she ran too, leaping ahead of him with long bounds. He guessed she was there without seeing her; she burst before him into the hall and came back to wait for him at the top of the steps. With her frill standing out and her ears low, she watched him running towards her, urging him on with her yellow eyes. Those deep-set eyes were proud and suspicious, completely masters of themselves.
‘Saha! Saha!’
Pronounced in a certain way, under his breath, with the ‘h’ strongly aspirated, her name sent her crazy. She lashed her tail, bounded into the middle of the poker-table and, with her two cat’s hands spread wide open, she scattered the playing-cards.
‘That cat, that cat!’ said his mother’s voice. ‘She hasn’t the faintest notion of hospitality! Look how delighted she is that our friends have gone!’
Alain let out a spurt of childish laughter, the laugh he kept for home and the close intimacy which did not extend beyond the screen of elms or the black, wrought-iron gate. Then he gave a frantic yawn.
‘Good heavens, how tired you look! Is it possible to look as tired as that when one’s happy? There’s still some orangeade. No? We can go up then. Don’t bother, Émile will turn out the lights.’
‘Mother’s talking to me as if I were getting over an illness or as if I were starting up paratyphoid again.’
‘Saha! Saha! What a demon! Alain, you couldn’t persuade that cat? . . .’
By a vertical path known to herself, marked on the worn brocade, the cat had almost reached the ceiling. One moment she imitated a grey lizard, flattening against the wall with her paws spread out; then she pretended to be giddy and tried an affected little cry of appeal. Alain obediently came and stood below and Saha slid down, glued to the wall like a raindrop sliding down a pane. She came to rest on Alain’s shoulder and the two of them went up together to their bedroom.
A long hanging cluster of laburnum, black outside the open window, became a long pale yellow cluster when Alain turned on the ceiling light and the bedside lamp. He poured the cat off on to the bed by inclining his shoulder, then wandered aimlessly to and from between his room and the bathroom like a man who is too tired to go to bed.
He leaned out over the garden, looked with a hostile eye for the white mass of the ‘alterations’. Then he opened and shut several drawers and boxes in which reposed his real secrets: a gold dollar, a signet ring, an agate charm attached to his father’s watch chain, some red and black seeds from an exotic canna plant, a First Communicant’s mother-of-pearl rosary and a thin broken bracelet, the souvenir of a tempestuous young mistress who had passed swiftly and noisily out of his life. The rest of his worldly goods consisted merely of some paper-covered books he had had rebound and some letters and autographs.
Dreamily he turned over these little scraps of wreckage, bright and worthless as the coloured stones one finds in the nests of pilfering birds. ‘Should I throw all this away . . . or leave it here? It means nothing to me. Or does it mean something?’ Being an only child, he was attached to everything which he had never shared with anyone else and for whose possession he had never had to fight.
He saw his face in the glass and became suddenly irritated with himself. ‘Why can’t you go to bed? You look a wreck. Positively disgraceful!’ he said to the handsome fair young man. ‘People only think me handsome because I’m fair. If I were dark, I’d be hideous.’ For the hundredth time, he criticized his long cheeks and his slightly equine nose. But, for the hundredth time, he smiled so as to display his teeth to himself and admiringly touched the natural wave in his fair, over-thick hair. Once again he was pleased with the colour of his eyes, greenish-grey between dark lashes. Two dints hollowed his cheeks on either side of the smile, his eyes receded, circled with mauve shadows. He had shaved that morning but already a pale, stubbly bristle coarsened his upper lip. ‘What a mug! I pity myself. No, I repel myself. Is that a face for a wedding night?’ In the depths of the mirror, Saha gr
avely watched him from the distance.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
He flung himself on the cool expanse of the sheets, humouring the cat. Rapidly, he went through certain ritual litanies dedicated to the particular graces and virtues of a small, perfect, pure-bred Russian Blue.
‘My little bear with the big cheeks. Exquisite, exquisite, exquisite cat. My blue pigeon. Pearl-coloured demon.’
As soon as he turned out the light, the cat began to trample delicately on her friend’s chest. Each time she pressed down her feet, one single claw pierced the silk of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel an uneasy pleasure.
‘Seven more days, Saha,’ he sighed.
In seven days and seven nights he would begin a new life in new surroundings with an amorous and untamed young woman. He stroked the cat’s fur, warm and cool at the same time and smelling of clipped box, thuya and lush grass. She was purring full-throatedly and, in the darkness, she gave him a cat’s kiss, laying her damp nose for a second under Alain’s nose between his nostrils and his lip. A swift, immaterial kiss which she rarely accorded him.
‘Ah! Saha. Our nights . . .’
The headlights of a car in the nearest avenue pierced the leaves with two revolving white beams. Over the wall of the room passed the enlarged shadow of the laburnum and of a tulip-tree which stood alone in the middle of a lawn. Above his own face Alain saw Saha’s face illuminated for a moment. Before it was eclipsed again, he had seen that her eyes were hard.
‘Don’t frighten me!’ he implored.
For, when Alain was sleepy, he became once more weak and fanciful, caught in the mesh of a sweet and interminable adolescence.
He shut his eyes while Saha kept vigil, watching all the invisible signs which hover over sleeping human beings when the light is put out.
He always dreamed a great deal and descended into his dreams by definite stages. When he woke up, he did not talk about his adventures of the night. He was jealous of a realm which had been enlarged by a delicate and ill-governed childhood; by long sojourns in bed during his swift growth into a tall frail slender boy.
He loved his dreams and cultivated them. Not for anything in the world would he have revealed the successive stages which awaited him. At the first stopping-place, while he could still hear the motor-horns in the avenue, he met an eddy of faces, familiar yet distorted, which he passed through as he might have passed through a friendly crowd, geeting one here and there. Eddying, bulbous, the faces approached Alain, growing larger and larger. Light against a dark background, they became lighter still as if they received their illumination from the sleeper himself. Each was furnished with one great eye and they circled round in an effortless gyration. But a submerged electric current shot them far away as soon as they touched an invisible barrier. In the humid gaze of a circular monster, in the eye of a plump moon or that of a wild archangel with rays of light for hair, Alain could recognize the same expression, the same intention which none of them had put into words and which Alain of the dream noted with a sense of security: ‘They’ll tell it me tomorrow.’
Sometimes they disappeared by exploding into scattered, faintly luminous fragments. At other times, they only continued as a hand, an arm, a forehead, an eyeball full of thoughts or as a starry dust of chins and noses. But always there remained that prominent, convex eye which, just at the moment of making itself clear, turned round and exposed only its other, black surface.
The sleeping Alain pursued, under Saha’s watchful care, his nightly shipwreck. He passed beyond the world of convex faces and eyes and descended through a zone of darkness where he was conscious of nothing but a powerful, positive blackness, indescribably varied and, as it were, composed of submerged colours. On the confines of this, he launched into the real, complete, fully-formed dream.
He came up violently against a barrier which gave a great clang like the prolonged, splintering clash of a cymbal. And then he found himself in the dream city, among the passers-by, the inhabitants standing in their doorways, the gold-crowned guardians of the square and the stage crowd posted along the path of an Alain who was completely naked and armed with a walking-stick. This Alain was extremely lucid and sagacious: ‘If I walk rather fast, after tying my tie in a special way, and particularly if I whistle, there’s every chance that no one will notice I am naked.’ So he tied his tie in a heart-shaped knot and whistled. ‘That’s not whistling, what I’m doing. It’s purring. Whistling’s like this . . .’ But he still continued to purr. ‘I’m not at the end of my tether yet. All I’ve got to do . . . it’s perfectly simple . . . is to cross this sun-drenched open space and go round the bandstand where the military band is playing. Child’s play. I run, making perilous jumps to distract attention, and I come out in the zone of shadow . . .’
But he was paralysed by the warm, dangerous look of a dark man in the stage crowd; a young man with a Greek profile perforated by a great eye like a carp’s. ‘The zone of shadow . . . the zone of the shadow . . .’ Two long shadowy arms, graceful and rustling with poplar leaves appeared at the word ‘shadow’ and carried Alain away. During the most ambiguous hour of the short night, he rested in that provisional tomb where the living exile sighs, weeps, fights, and succumbs, and from which he rises, unremembering, with the day.
TWO
THE HIGH SUN was edging the window when Alain awoke. The newly-opened cluster of laburnum hung, translucid, above the head of Saha; a blue, diurnal Saha, innocently engaged in washing herself.
‘Saha!’
‘Me-rrang!’ answered the cat aggressively.
‘Is it my fault if you’re hungry? You only had to go downstairs and ask for your milk if you’re in a hurry.’
She softened at her friend’s voice and repeated the same word less emphatically, showing her red mouth planted with white teeth. That look of loyal and exclusive love alarmed Alain: ‘Oh heavens, this cat! What to do with this cat? I’d forgotten I was getting married. And that we’ve got to live in Patrick’s place.’
He turned towards the photograph in the chromium frame where Camille gleamed as if covered in oil; a great splash of reflected light on her hair, her painted mouth vitrified in inky black, her eyes enormous between two palisades of eyelashes.
‘Fine piece of studio portraiture,’ muttered Alain.
He had quite forgotten that he himself had chosen this photograph for his room; a photograph which bore no resemblance to Camille or to anyone at all. ‘That eye . . . I’ve seen that eye.’
He took a pencil and lightly retouched the eye, toning down the excess of white. All he succeeded in doing was to spoil the print.
‘Mouek, mouek, mouek. Ma-a-a-a . . . Ma-a-a-a,’ said Saha, addressing a little moth imprisoned between the window-pane and the net curtain.
Her leonine chin was trembling; she coveted it so much that she stammered. Alain caught the moth with two fingers and offered it to the cat.
‘Hors-d’œuvre, Saha!’
In the garden, a rake was lazily combing the gravel. Alain could see in his mind the hand that guided the rake; the hand of an ageing woman; a mechanical, obstinate hand in a huge white glove like a policeman’s.
‘Good morning, Mother !’ he called.
A distant voice answered him, a voice whose words he did not try to catch; the affectionate, insignificant murmur was all that he needed. He ran downstairs, the cat at his heels. In broad daylight, she knew how to change herself into a kind of blustering dog. She would hurtle noisily down the stairs and rush into the garden with tomboyish jumps that had no magic about them. She seated herself on the little breakfast table, among the medallions of sunlight, beside Alain’s plate. The rake, which had stopped, slowly resumed its task.
Alain poured out Saha’s milk, stirred a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar into it, then gravely helped himself. When he breakfasted alone, he did not have to blush for certain gestures elaborated by the unconscious wishes of the maniac age between six and seven. He was free to
blind all the ‘eyes’ in his bread with butter and to frown when the coffee in his cup rose above the water-line marked by a certain gilt arabesque. A second thin slice had to follow the first thick slice, whereas the second cup demanded an extra lump of sugar. In fact a very small Alain, hidden in the depths of a tall, fair, handsome young man, was impatiently waiting for breakfast to be over so that he could lick both sides of the honey spoon; an old ivory spoon, blackened and flexible with age.
‘Camille, at this moment, is eating her breakfast standing up. She’s biting at one and the same time into a slice of lean ham squeezed between two rusks and into an American apple. And she keeps putting down a cup of tea without sugar in it on various bits of furniture and forgetting it.’
He raised his eyes and contemplated his domain; the domain of a privileged child which he cherished and whose every inch he knew. Over his head the old, severely pollarded elms stirred only the tips of their young leaves. A cushiony mass of pink silene, fringed with forget-me-nots, dominated one lawn. Dangling like a scarf from the dead tree’s scraggy elbow, a trail of polygonum intertwined with the four-petalled purple clematis fluttered in every breath of wind. One of the standard sprinklers spread a white peacock tail shot with a shifting rainbow as it revolved over the turf.
‘Such a beautiful garden . . . such a beautiful garden,’ said Alain under his breath. He stared disgustedly at the silent heaps of rubbish, timber, and bags of plaster which defaced the west side of the house. ‘Ah! It’s Sunday, so they’re not working. It’s been Sunday all the week for me.’ Though young and capricious, and pampered, he now lived according to the commercial rhythm of a six-day week and felt Sunday in his bones.
