Gigi and the Cat

by Colette

  A white pigeon moved furtively behind the weigela and the pink clusters of the deutzias. ‘It’s not a pigeon; it’s mother’s hand in her gardening glove.’ The big white glove moved just above ground, raising a drooping stalk, weeding out the blades of grass that sprang up overnight. Two greenfinches came hopping along the gravel path to pick up the breakfast crumbs, and Saha followed them with her eye without getting excited. But a tomtit, hanging upside down in an elm above the table, chirped at the cat out of bravado. Sitting there with her paws folded, her head thrown back, and the frill of fur under her chin displayed like a pretty woman’s jabot, Saha tried hard to restrain herself; but her cheeks swelled with fury and her little nostrils moistened.

  ‘As beautiful as a fiend! More beautiful than a fiend!’ Alain told her.

  He wanted to stroke the broad skull in which lodged ferocious thoughts, and the cat bit him sharply to relieve her anger. He looked at the two little beads of blood on his palm with the irascibility of a man whose woman has bitten him at the height of her pleasure.

  ‘Bad girl! Bad girl! Look what you’ve done to me!’

  She lowered her head, sniffed the blood, and timidly questioned her friend’s face. She knew how to amuse him and charm him back to good humour. She scooped up a rusk from the table and held it between her paws like a squirrel.

  The May breeze passed over them, bending a yellow rose-bush which smelt of flowering reeds. Between the cat, the rose-bush, the pairs of tomtits, and the last cockchafers, Alain had one of those moments when he slipped out of time and felt the anguished illusion of being once more back in his childhood. The elms suddenly became enormous, the path grew wider and longer and vanished under the arches of a pergola that no longer existed. Like the hag-ridden dreamer who falls off a tower, Alain returned violently to the consciousness of being nearly twenty-four.

  ‘I ought to have slept another hour. It’s only half-past nine. It’s Sunday. Yesterday was Sunday for me too. Too many Sundays. But tomorrow . . .’

  He smiled at Saha as though she were an accomplice. ‘Tomorrow, Saha, there’s the final trying-on of the white dress. Without me. It’s a surprise. Camille’s dark enough to look her best in white. During that time, I’ll go and look at the car. It’s a bit cheese-paring, a bit mingy, as Camille would say, a roadster. That’s what you get for being “such a young married couple”.’

  With a vertical bound, rising in the air like a fish leaping to the surface of the water, the cat caught a black-veined cabbage-white. She ate it, coughed, spat out one wing, and licked herself affectionately. The sun played on her fur, mauve and bluish like the breast of a woodpigeon.

  ‘Saha!’

  She turned her head and smiled at him.

  ‘My little puma! Beloved cat! Creature of the tree-tops! How will you live if we’re separated? Would you like us to enter an Order? Would you like? . . . oh, I don’t know what . . .’

  She listened to him, watching him with a tender, absent expression. But when the friendly voice began to tremble, she looked away.

  ‘To begin with, you’ll come with us. You don’t hate cars. If we take the saloon instead of the roadster, behind the seats there’s a ledge . . .’

  He broke off and became gloomy at the recent memory of a girl’s vigorous voice, ideally pitched for shouting in the open air, trumpeting the numerous merits of the roadster. ‘And then, when you put down the windscreen, Alain, its marvellous. When she’s all out, you can feel the skin of your cheeks shrinking right back to your ears.’

  ‘Shrinking right back to your ears. Can you imagine anything more frightful, Saha?’

  He compressed his lips and made a long face like an obstinate child planning to get its own way by guile.

  ‘It’s not settled yet. Suppose I prefer the saloon? I suppose I’ve got some say in the matter?’

  He glared at the yellow rose-bush as if it were the young girl with the resonant voice. Promptly the path widened, the elms grew taller, and the non-existent pergola reappeared. Cowering among the skirts of two or three female relatives, a childish Alain surveyed another compact family among whose opaque block gleamed a very dark little girl whose big eyes and black ringlets rivalled each other in a hostile, jetty brilliance. ‘Say “How d’you do . . .” Why don’t you want to say “How d’you do?”’ It was a faint voice from other days, preserved through years of childhood, adolescence, college, the boredom of military service, false seriousness, false business competence. Camille did not want to say ‘How d’you do?’ She sucked the inside of her cheek and stiffly sketched the brief curtsy expected of little girls. ‘Now she calls that a “twist-your-ankle” curtsy. But when she’s in a temper, she still bites the inside of her cheek. It’s a funny thing, but at those moments she doesn’t look ugly.’

  He smiled and felt an honest glow of warmth for his fiancée. After all, he was quite glad that she should be healthy and slightly commonplace in her sensuality. Defying the innocent morning, he called up images designed now to excite her vanity and impatience, now to engender anxiety, even confusion. Emerging from these disturbing fancies, he found the sun too white and the wind dry. The cat had disappeared but, as soon as he stood up, she was at his side and accompanied him, walking with a long, deerlike step and avoiding the round pebbles in the pinkish gravel. They went together as far as the ‘alterations’ and inspected with equal hostility the pile of rubbish, a new french window, devoid of panes, inserted in a wall, various bathroom appliances, and some porcelain tiles.

  Equally offended, they calculated the damage done to their past and their present. An old yew had been torn up and was very slowly dying upside down, with its roots in the air. ‘I ought never, never to have allowed that,’ muttered Alain. ‘It’s a disgrace. You’ve only known it for three years, Saha, that yew. But I . . .’

  At the bottom of the hole left by the yew, Saha sensed a mole whose image, or rather whose smell went to her head. For a minute she forgot herself to the point of frenzy, scratching like a fox-terrier and rolling over like a lizard. She jumped on all four paws like a frog, clutched a ball of earth between her thighs as a fieldmouse does with the egg it has stolen; escaped from the hole by a series of miracles, and found herself sitting on the grass, cold and prudish and recovering her breath.

  Alain stood gravely by, not moving. He knew how to keep a straight face when Saha’s demons possessed her beyond her control. The admiration and understanding of cats was innate in him. Those inborn rudiments made it easy for him, later on, to read Saha’s thoughts. He had read her like some masterpiece from the day, when on his return from a cat-show, Alain had put down a little five-months old she-cat on the smooth lawn at Neuilly. He had brought her because of her perfect face, her precocious dignity, and her modesty that hoped for nothing behind the bars of a cage.

  ‘Why didn’t you buy a Persian instead?’ asked Camille.

  ‘That was long before we were engaged,’ thought Alain. ‘It wasn’t only a little she-cat I bought. It was the nobility of all cats, their infinite disinterestedness, their knowledge of how to live, their affinities with the highest type of humans.’ He blushed and mentally excused himself. ‘The highest, Saha, is the one that understands you best.’

  He had not yet got to the point of thinking ‘likeness’ instead of ‘understanding’ because he belonged to that class of human beings which refuses to recognize or even to imagine its animal affinities. But at the age when he might have coveted a car, a journey abroad, a rare binding, a pair of skis, Alain nevertheless remained the young-man-who-has-bought-a-little-cat. His narrow world resounded with it. The staff of Amparat et Fils in the Rue des Petits Champs were astonished and M. Veuillet inquired after the ‘little beastie’.

  ‘Before I chose you, Saha, I don’t believe I’d ever realized that one could choose. As for all the rest . . . My marriage pleases everyone, including Camille. There are moments when it pleases me too, but . . .’

  He got up from the green bench and assumed the important smile
of the heir of Amparat Silks who is condescendingly marrying the daughter of Malmert Mangles, ‘a girl who’s not quite our type’, as Mme Amparat said. But Alain was well aware that, when Malmert Mangles spoke about Amparat Silks among themselves, they did not forget to mention, sticking up their chins: ‘The Amparats aren’t in silk any more. The mother and son have only kept their shares in the business and the son’s not the real director, only a figurehead.’

  Cured of her madness, her eyes gentle and golden, the cat seemed to be waiting for the return of mental trust, of that telepathic murmur for which her silver-fringed ears were straining.

  ‘You’re not just a pure and sparkling spirit of a cat either,’ went on Alain. ‘What about your first seducer, the white torn without a tail? Do you remember that, my ugly one, my trollop in the rain, my shameless one?’

  ‘What a bad mother your cat is!’ exclaimed Camille indignantly. ‘She doesn’t even give a thought to her kittens, now they’ve been taken away from her.’

  ‘But that was just what a young girl would say,’ Alain went on defiantly. ‘Young girls are always admirable mothers before they’re married.’

  The full, deep note of a bell sounded on the tranquil air. Alain leapt up with a guilty start at the sound of wheels crushing the gravel.

  ‘Camille! It’s half-past eleven . . . Good Heavens!’

  He pulled his pyjama jacket together and retied the cord so hastily and nervously that he scolded himself. ‘Come, come, what’s the matter with me? I shall be seeing plenty more of them in a week. Saha, are you coming to meet them?’

  But Saha had vanished and Camille was already stamping across the lawn with reckless heels. ‘Ah! She really does look attractive.’ His blood pulsed pleasurably in his throat and flushed his cheeks. He was entirely absorbed in the spectacle of Camille in white, with a little lock of well-tapered hair on either temple and a tiny red scarf which matched her lipstick. Made-up with skill and restraint, her youth was not obvious at the first glance. Then it revealed itself in the cheek that was white under the ochre powder; in the smooth, unwrinkled eyelids under the light dusting of beige powder round the great eyes that were almost black. The brand-new diamond on her left hand broke the light into a thousand coloured splinters.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘You’re not ready! On a lovely day like this!’

  But she stopped at the sight of the rough, dishevelled fair hair, of the naked chest under the pyjamas and Alain’s flushed confusion. Her young girl’s face so clearly expressed a woman’s warm indulgence that Alain no longer dared to give her the quarter-to-twelve kiss of the Bois.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she implored, very low, as if she were asking him for help.

  Gauche, uneasy and ill-protected by his thin pyjamas, he made a gesture towards the pink flowering shrubs from whence came the sound of the shears and the rake. Camille did not dare throw herself on his neck. She lowered her eyes, plucked a leaf, and pulled her shining locks of hair forward on her cheeks. But, from the movement of her nostrils, Alain saw she was searching in the air, with a certain primitive wildness, for the fragrance of a fair-skinned, barely-covered body. In his heart he secretly condemned her for not being sufficiently afraid of it.

  THREE

  WHEN HE WOKE up, he did not sit up in bed at one bound. Haunted in his sleep by the unfamiliar room, he half-opened his eyes and realized that cunning and constraint had not entirely left him during his sleep, for his left arm, flung out across a desert of linen sheet, lay ready to recognize, but ready, also, to repel . . . But all the wide expanse of bed to his left was empty and cool once more. If there had been nothing in front of the bed but the barely rounded corner of the triangular room and the unaccustomed green gloom, split by a rod of bright yellow light which separated two curtains of solid shadow, Alain would have gone to sleep again lulled by the sound of someone humming a little Negro song.

  He turned his head cautiously and opened his eyes a trifle wider. He saw someone moving about, now white, now pale blue according to whether she was in the narrow strip of sunlight or the shadow. It was a naked young woman with a comb in her hand and a cigarette between her lips, wandering about the room and humming. ‘What impudence,’ he thought. ‘Completely naked! Where does she think she is?’

  He recognized the lovely legs with which he had long been familiar, but the stomach, shortened by a navel placed rather low, surprised him. An impersonal youthfulness justified the muscular buttocks and the breasts were small above the visible ribs. ‘Has she got thinner, then?’ The solidity of her back, which was as wide as her chest, shocked Alain. ‘She’s got a common back.’ At that moment, Camille leaned her elbow on one of the window-sills, arched her back, and hunched up her shoulders. ‘She’s got a back like a charwoman.’ But suddenly she stood upright again, took a couple of dancing steps and made a charming gestures of embracing the empty air. ‘No, I’m wrong. She’s beautiful. But what a . . . what brazenness; Does she think I’m dead? Or does it seem perfectly natural to her to wander about stark naked? Oh, but that will change!’

  As she turned towards the bed, he closed his eyes again. When he opened them, Camille had seated herself at the dressing-table they called the ‘invisible dressing-table’, a transparent sheet of beautiful thick glass laid on a black metal frame. She powdered her face, touched her cheeks and chin with the tips of her fingers, and suddenly smiled, turning her eyes from the glass with a gravity and a weariness which disarmed Alain. ‘Is she happy then? Happy about what? I certainly don’t deserve it. But why is she naked?’

  ‘Camille,’ he called out.

  He thought she would rush towards the bathroom, hastily covering herself with some hastily snatched-up undergarment. Instead, she ran to the bed and bent over the young man who lay there, overwhelming him with her strong brunette’s smell.

  ‘Darling! Have you slept well?’

  ‘Stark naked!’ he scolded.

  She opened her big eyes comically.

  ‘What about you?’

  Bare to his waist, he did not know what to reply. She paraded for him, so proudly and so completely devoid of modesty that he rather rudely flung her the crumpled pyjama-jacket which lay on the bed.

  ‘Quick, put that on. Personally, I’m hungry.’

  ‘Old mother Buque’s at her post. Everything’s in working order and functioning.’

  She disappeared and Alain wanted to get up and dress and smooth his rumpled hair. But Camille returned, girded in a big bathrobe that was new and too long for her, and gaily carrying a loaded tray.

  ‘What a mess, my dears! There’s a kitchen bowl and a pyrex cup and the sugar’s in the lid of a tin. I’ll get it all straightened out in a day or two. My ham’s dry. These anaemic peaches are left-overs from lunch. Mother Buque’s a bit lost in her electric kitchen. I’ll teach her how to manage the various switches. Then I’ve put some water in the ice compartments of the ‘fridge. It’s a good thing I’m here! Monsieur has his coffee very hot and his milk boiling and his butter hard. No, that’s my tea, don’t touch! What are you looking for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Because of the smell of coffee, he was looking for Saha.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘At last a tender word!’ cried Camille. ‘Very early, my husband. It was a quarter-past eight by the kitchen alarm-clock.’

  As they ate, they laughed a good deal and spoke little. By the increasing smell of the green oilcloth curtains, Alain could guess the strength of the sun which warmed them. He could not take his mind off that sun outside, the unfamiliar horizon, the nine vertiginous storeys, and the bizarre architecture of the ‘Wedge’ which was their temporary home.

  He listened to Camille as attentively as he could, touched at her pretending to have forgotten what had passed between them in the night. He was touched, too, by her pretending to be perfectly at home in their haphazard lodging and by her unselfconsciousness, as if she had been married at least a week. Now that she had something on, he tried to find a way
of showing his gratitude. ‘She doesn’t resent either what I’ve done to her or what I haven’t, poor child. After all, the most tiresome part is over. Is it always like this the first night? This bruised, unsatisfactory feeling? This half-success, half-disaster?’

  He threw his arm cordially round her neck and kissed her.

  ‘Oh! You’re nice!’

  She had said it so loud and with so much feeling that she blushed and he saw her eyes fill with tears. But she bravely fought down her emotion and jumped off the bed on the pretext of removing the tray. She ran towards the windows, tripped over her long bathrobe, let out a great oath, and hauled on a ship’s rope. The oilcloth curtains slid back. Paris, with its suburbs, bluish and unbounded like the desert, dotted with still-fresh verdure and flashes of shining panes, entered at one bound into the triangular room which had only one cement wall, the other two being half glass.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Alain softly.

  But he was half lying and his head sought the support of a young shoulder from which the bathrobe had slipped. ‘It’s not a place for human beings to live. All this horizon right on top of one, right in one’s bed. And what about stormy days. Abandoned on the top of a lighthouse among the albatrosses.’

  Camille was lying beside him on the bed now. Her arm was round his neck and she looked fearlessly, now at the giddy horizons of Paris, now at the fair, dishevelled head. This new pride of hers which seemed to draw strength ahead from the coming night and the days that would follow, was no doubt satisfied with her newly-acquired rights. She was licensed to share his bed, to prop up a young man’s naked body against her thigh and shoulder, to become acquainted with its colour and curves and defects. She was free to contemplate boldly and at length the small dry nipples, the loins she envied, and the strange design of the capricious sex.

  They bit into the same tasteless peach and laughed, showing each other their splendid, glistening teeth and the gums which were a little pale, like tired children’s.