Gigi and the Cat

by Colette

  But Saha was determined to triumph over all obstacles. She accepted the uncertain times of meals and of getting up and going to bed. She chose the bathroom with its cork-topped stool to sleep in and she explored the Wedge with no affectation of wildness or disgust. In the kitchen, she condescended to listen to the lazy voice of Mme Buque summoning ‘the pussy’ to raw liver. When Alain and Camille went out, she installed herself on the giddy parapet and gazed into the abysses of air, following the flying backs of swallows and sparrows below her with a calm, untroubled eye. Her impassiveness on the edge of a sheer drop of nine storeys and the habit she had of washing herself at length on the parapet, terrified Camille.

  ‘Stop her,’ she yelled to Alain. ‘She makes my heart turn over and gives me cramp in my calves.’

  Alain gave an unperturbed smile and admired his cat who had recovered her taste for food and life.

  It was not that she was blooming or particularly gay. She did not recover the iridescence of her fur that had gleamed like a pigeon’s mauve plumage. But she was more alive; she waited for the dull ‘poum’ of the lift which brought up Alain and accepted extra attentions from Camille, such as a tiny saucer of milk at five o’clock or a small chicken bone offered high up, as if to a dog who was expected to jump for it.

  ‘Not like that! Not like that!’ scolded Alain.

  And he would lay the bone on a bathmat or simply on the thick-piled beige carpet.

  ‘Really . . . on Patrick’s carpet!’ Camille scolded in turn.

  ‘But a cat can’t eat a bone or any solid food on a polished surface. When a cat takes a bone off a plate and puts it down on the carpet before eating it, she’s told she’s dirty. But the cat needs to hold it down with her paw while she crunches and tears it and she can only do it on bare earth or on a carpet. People don’t know that.’

  Amazed, Camille broke in: ‘And how do you know?’

  He had never asked himself that and got out of it by a joke: ‘Hush! It’s because I’m extremely intelligent. Don’t tell a soul. M. Veuillet hasn’t a notion of it.’

  He taught her all the ways and habits of the cat, like a foreign language over-rich in subtle shades of meaning. In spite of himself, he spoke with emphatic authority as he taught. Camille observed him narrowly and asked him any number of questions which he answered unreservedly.

  ‘Why does the cat play with a piece of string when she’s frightened of the big ship’s rope?’

  ‘Because the ship’s rope is the snake. It’s the thickness of a snake. She’s afraid of snakes.’

  ‘Has she ever seen a snake?’

  Alain looked at his wife with the grey-green, black-lashed eyes she found so beautiful . . . ‘So treacherous’ she said.

  ‘No . . . certainly not. Where could she have seen one?’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Well, then she invents one. She creates one. You’d be frightened of snakes too, even if you’d never seen one.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been told about them. I’ve seen them in pictures. I know they exist.’

  ‘So does Saha.’

  ‘But how?’

  He gave her a haughty smile.

  ‘How? But by her birth, like persons of quality.’

  ‘So I’m not a person of quality?’

  He softened, but only out of compassion.

  ‘Good Heavens, no. Console yourself: I’m not either. Don’t you believe what I tell you?’

  Camille, sitting at her husband’s feet, contemplated him with her wildest eyes, the eyes of the little girl of other days who did not want to say ‘How d’you do?’

  ‘I’d better believe it,’ she said gravely.

  They took to dining at home nearly every night, because of the heat, said Alain, ‘and because of Saha’ insinuated Camille. One evening after dinner, Saha was sitting on her friend’s knee.

  ‘What about me?’ said Camille.

  ‘I’ve two knees,’ Alain retorted.

  Nevertheless, the cat did not use her privilege for long. Some mysterious warning made her return to the polished ebony table where she seated herself on her own bluish reflection immersed in a dusky pool. There was nothing unusual about her behaviour except the fixed attention she gave to the invisible things straight in front of her in the air.

  ‘What’s she looking at?’ asked Camille.

  She was pretty every evening at that particular hour; wearing white pyjamas, her hair half loosened on her forehead and her cheeks very brown under the layers of powder she had been superimposing since the morning. Alain sometimes kept on his summer suit, without a waistcoat, but Camille laid impatient hands on him, taking off his jacket and tie, opening his collar and rolling up his shirt-sleeves, seeking and displaying the bare skin. He treated her as a hussy, letting her do as she wished. She laughed a little unhappily as she contained her feelings. And it was he who lowered his eyes with an anxiety that was not entirely voluptuous. ‘What ravages of desire on that face! Her mouth is quite distorted with it. A young wife who’s so very young. Who taught her to forestall me like that?’

  The round table, flanked by a little trolley on rubber wheels, gathered the three of them together at the entrance to the studio, near the open bay window. Three tall old poplars, relics of a beautiful garden that had been destroyed, waved their tops at the height of the balcony and the great setting sun of Paris, dark red and smothered in mists, was going down behind their lean heads from which the sap was retreating.

  Mme Buque’s dinner – she cooked food well and served it badly – enlivened the hour. Refreshed, Alain forgot his day and the Amparat office and the tutelage of M. Veuillet. His two captives in the glass tower made a fuss of him. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ he murmured in Saha’s ear.

  ‘I heard you coming!’ cried Camille. ‘One can hear every sound from here!’

  ‘Have you been bored?’ he asked her one evening, fearing that she was going to complain. But she shook her black mop in denial.

  ‘Not the least bit in the world. I went over to Mummy’s. She’s presented me with the treasure.’

  ‘What treasure?’

  ‘The little woman who’ll be my maid over there. Provided old Émile doesn’t give her a baby. She’s quite attractive.’

  She laughed as she rolled up her white crêpe sleeves over her bare arms before she cut open the red-fleshed melon round which Saha was tiptoeing. But Alain did not laugh: he was too taken up with the horror of imagining a new maid in his house.

  ‘Yes? But do you remember,’ he brought out, ‘my mother’s never changed her servants since I was a child.’

  ‘That’s obvious,’ said Camille trenchantly. ‘What a museum of old crocks!’

  She was biting into a crescent of melon as she spoke and laughing, with her face to the setting sun. Alain admired, in a detached way, how vivid a certain cannibal radiance could be in those glittering eyes and on the glittering teeth in the narrow mouth. There was something Italian about her regular features. He made one more effort to be considerate.

  ‘You never see your girl friends nowadays, it seems to me. Mightn’t you perhaps . . .’

  She took him up fiercely.

  ‘And what girl friends, may I ask? Is this your way of telling me I’m a burden on you? So that I shall give you a little breathing space. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  He raised his eyebrows and clicked his tongue ‘tst . . . tst’. She yielded at once with a plebeian respect for the man’s disdain.

  ‘It’s quite true. I never had any friends when I was a little girl. And now . . . can you see me with a girl who’s not married. Either I’d have to treat her as a child or I’d have to answer all her dirty questions: “And what does one do here and how does he do that to you! “ Girls,’ she explained with some bitterness, ‘girls don’t stick together decently. There’s no solidarity. It’s not like all you men.’

  ‘Forgive me! I’m not one of “all-you-men”!’

  ‘Oh, I know that all right,’ she said sadly. ‘Somet
imes I wonder if I wouldn’t rather . . .’

  She was very rarely sad and, when she was, it was because of some secret reticence or some doubt that she did not express.

  ‘You haven’t any friends either,’ she went on. ‘Except Patrick and he’s away. And even Patrick, you don’t really care a damn about him.’

  She broke off at a gesture from Alain.

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about these things,’ she said intelligently. ‘There’ll only be a quarrel.’

  The long-drawn-out cries of children rose from the ground level and blended with the airy whistling of the swallows. Saha’s beautiful yellow eyes, in which the great nocturnal pupil was slowly invading the iris, stared into space, picking out moving, floating, invisible points.

  ‘Tell me, whatever’s the cat looking at? Are you sure there’s nothing, over there where she’s staring?’

  ‘Nothing . . . for us.’

  Alain evoked with regret the faint shiver, the seductive fear that his cat friend used to communicate to him in the days when she slept on his chest at night.

  ‘She doesn’t make you frightened, I hope?’ he said condescendingly.

  Camille burst out laughing, as if the insulting word were just what she had been waiting for.

  ‘Frightened? There aren’t many things that frighten me, you know!’

  ‘That’s the statement of a silly little fool,’ said Alain angrily.

  ‘Let’s say you’re feeling the storm coming, shall we?’ said Camille, shrugging her shoulders.

  She pointed to the wall, purpled with clouds which were coming up with the night.

  ‘And you’re like Saha,’she added. ‘You don’t like storms.’

  ‘No one likes storms.’

  ‘I don’t hate them,’ said Camille judicially. ‘Anyway, I’m not the slightest bit afraid of them.’

  ‘The whole world is afraid of storms,’ said Alain, hostile.

  ‘All right, I’m not the whole world, that’s all.’

  ‘You are for me,’ he said with a sudden, artificial grace which did not deceive her.

  ‘Oh!’ she scolded under her breath. ‘I shall hit you.’

  He bent his fair head towards her over the table and showed his white teeth.

  ‘All right, hit me!’

  But she deprived herself of the pleasure of rumpling that golden hair and offering her bare arm to those shining teeth.

  ‘You’ve got a crooked nose,’ she flung at him fiercely.

  ‘It’s the storm,’ he said, laughing.

  This subtlety was not at all to Camille’s taste, but the first low rumblings of the thunder distracted her attention. She threw down her napkin to run out on the balcony.

  ‘Come along! There’ll be some marvellous lightning.’

  ‘No,’ said Alain, without moving. ‘Come along, yourself.’

  ‘Where to?’

  He jerked his chin in the direction of their room. Camille’s face assumed the obstinate expression, the dull-witted greed he knew so well. Nevertheless, she hesitated.

  ‘But couldn’t we look at the lightning first?’

  He made a sign of refusal.

  ‘Why not, horrid?’

  ‘Because I’m frightened of storms. Choose. The storm or . . . me.’

  ‘What do you think!’

  She ran to their room with an eagerness which flattered Alain’s vanity. But, when he joined her there, he found she had deliberately lighted a luminous glass cube near the vast bed. He deliberately turned it out.

  The rain came in through the open bay-windows as they lay calm again, warm and tingling, breathing in the ozone that filled the room with freshness. Lying in Alain’s arms, Camille made him understand that, while the storm raged, she would have liked him once again to forget his terror of it with her. But he was nervously counting the great sheets of lightning and the tall dazzling trees silhouetted against the cloud and he moved away from Camille. She resigned herself, raised herself on her elbow and combed her husband’s crackling hair with one hand. In the pulsations of the lightning-flashes their two blue plaster faces rose out of the night and were swallowed up in it again.

  ‘We’ll wait till the storm’s over,’ she consented.

  ‘And that,’ said Alain to himself, ‘that’s what she finds to say after an encounter that really means something. She might at least have kept quiet. As Émile says, the young lady speaks her mind straight out.’

  A flickering flash, long as a dream, was reflected in a blade of fire in the thick slab of glass on the invisible dressing-table. Camille clutched Alain against her bare leg.

  ‘Is that to reassure me? We know you’re not frightened of lightning.’

  He raised his voice so as to be heard above the hollow rumbling and the rain cascading on the flat roof. He felt tired and on edge, tempted to be unjust yet frightened to say openly that nowadays he was never alone. In his mind he returned violently to his old room with its white wallpaper patterned with stiff conventional flowers, a room which no one had ever tried to make prettier or ugler. His longing for it was so fierce that the murmur of the inefficient old radiator came back with the memory of the pale flowers on the wallpaper. The wheezy mutter that came from the hollow space below its copper pipes seemed to be part of the murmurs of the whole house; of the whispering of the worn old servants, half-buried in their basement, who no longer cared to go out even into the garden. . . . ‘They used to say “She” when they talked about my mother but I’ve been “Monsieur Alain” since I first went into knickerbockers.’

  A dry crackle of thunder roused him from the brief doze into which he had fallen. His young wife, leaning over him, propped on her elbow, had not stirred.

  ‘I like you so much when you’re asleep,’ she said. ‘The storm’s going off.’

  He took this as a demand and sat up.

  ‘I’m following its example,’ he said. ‘How hot and sticky it is! I’m going to sleep on the waiting-room bench.’

  The ‘waiting-room bench’ was their name for the narrow divan which was the solitary piece of furniture in a tiny room, a mere strip of glass-walled passage which Patrick used for sunbathing.

  ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ implored Camille. ‘Do stay.’

  But he had already slipped out of the bed. The great flashes in the clouds revealed Camille’s hard, offended face.

  ‘Pooh! Baby boy!’

  At this, which he was not expecting, she pulled his nose. With an instinctive reflex of his arm, which he could not control and did not regret, he beat down the disrespectful hand. A sudden lull in the wind and rain left them alone in the silence, as if struck dumb. Camille massaged her hand.

  ‘But . . .’ she said at last, ‘But . . . you’re a brute.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Alain. ‘I don’t like having my face touched. Isn’t the rest of me enough for you? Never touch my face.’

  ‘But you are . . . you really are a brute,’ Camille repeated slowly.

  ‘Don’t keep on saying it. Apart from that, I’ve nothing against you. Just mind you don’t do it again.’

  He lifted his bare leg back on to the bed.

  ‘You see that big grey square on the carpet? It’s nearly daybreak. Shall we go to sleep?’

  ‘Yes . . . let’s . . .’ said the same, hesitant voice.

  ‘Come on, then!’

  He stretched out his left arm so that she could rest her head on it. She did so submissively and with a circumspect politeness. Pleased with himself, Alain gave her a friendly jostle and pulled her towards him by her shoulder. But he bent his knees a little to keep her at a safe distance and fell asleep almost at once. Camille lay awake, breathing carefully, and watched the grey patch on the carpet growing lighter. She listened to the sparrows celebrating the end of the storm in the three poplars whose rustling sounded like the faint continuation of the rain. When Alain, changing his position, withdrew his arm, he gave her an unconscious caress. Three times his hand slid lightly over her head as if accustomed to strok
ing fur that was even softer than her soft black hair.

  SEVEN

  IT WAS TOWARDS the end of June that incompatibility became established between them like a new season of the year. Like a season, it had its surprises and even its pleasures. To Alain, it was like a harsh, chilly spring inserted in the heart of summer. He was incessantly and increasingly aware of his repugnance at the idea of making a place for this young woman, this outsider, in his own home. He nursed this resentment and fed it with secret soliloquies and the sullen contemplation of their new dwelling. Camille, exhausted with the heat, called out from the high and now windless balcony: ‘Oh, let’s chuck everything. Let’s take the old scooter and go somewhere where we can bathe. Shall we, Alain?’

  ‘All right by me,’ he answered with wily promptitude. ‘Where shall we go?’

  There was a peaceful interlude while Camille enumerated beaches and names of hotels. With his eye on Saha who lay flat and prostrated, Alain had the leisure to think and to conclude: ‘I don’t want to go away with her I . . . I daren’t. I’m quite willing to go for a drive, as we used to, and come back in the evening or late at night. But that’s all. I don’t want evenings in hotels and nights in a casino, evenings of . . .’ He shuddered: ‘I need time. I realize that I take a long time to get used to things, that I’m a difficult character, that . . . But I don’t want to go off with her.’ He felt a pang of shame as he realized that he had mentally said ‘her’ just like Émile and Adèle when they were discussing ‘Madame’ in undertones.

  Camille bought road-maps and they played at travelling through a France spread in quarters over the polished ebony table which reflected their two blurred, inverted faces.

  They added up the mileage, ran down their car, cursed each other affably and felt revived, even rehabilitated by a comradeship they had forgotten. But tropical showers, unaccompanied by gales, drowned the last days of June and the balconies of the Wedge. Sheltering behind the closed panes, Saha watched the level rivulets, which Camille mopped up by stamping on table-napkins, winding across the inlaid tiles. The horizon; the city; the shower itself; all took on the colour of clouds loaded with inexhaustible rain.