Gigi and the Cat

by Colette

  ‘In the kitchen,’ thought Alain painfully. ‘My little puma, my cat of the garden, my cat of the lilacs and the butterflies, in the kitchen! Ah! All that’s going to change!’

  He kissed Saha on the forehead and chanted some ritual praises, very low. He promised her couch-grass and sweet acacia flowers. But he found both the cat and Mme Buque artificial and constrained; Mme Buque in particular.

  ‘We may be back to dinner and we may not, Madame Buque. Has the cat everything she needs?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur. Oh yes, indeed, Monsieur,’ said Mme Buque hurriedly. ‘I do everything I possibly can, really I do, Monsieur!’

  The big, fat woman was red in the face and seemed on the verge of tears. She ran a friendly, clumsy hand over the cat’s back. Saha arched her back and proffered a little ‘m’hain’, the mew of a poor timid cat which made her friend’s heart swell with sadness.

  The drive was more peaceful than he had hoped. Sitting at the wheel, her eyes alert, her feet and hands perfectly synchronized, Camille drove him as far as the slope of Montfort-l’Amaurey.

  ‘Shall we have dinner out-of-doors, Alain? Shall we, Alain, darling?’

  She smiled at him in profile, beautiful as she always was in the twilight; her cheek brown and transparent, her teeth and the corner of her eye the same glittering white. In the forest of Rambouillet, she put down the windscreen and the wind filled Alain’s ears with a sound of leaves and running water.

  ‘A little rabbit! . . .’ cried Camille. ‘A pheasant!’

  ‘It’s still a rabbit . . . One moment more and I . . .’

  ‘He doesn’t know his luck, that chap!’

  ‘You’ve got a dimple in your cheek like you have in your photos as a child,’ said Alain, beginning to come to life.

  ‘Don’t talk about it! I’m getting enormous!’ she said, shaking her shoulders.

  He watched for the return of the laugh and the dimple, and his eyes wandered down to the robust neck, free of any trace of the ‘girdle of Venus’, the round, inflexible neck of a handsome white Negress. ‘Yes, she really has got fatter. And in the most seductive way. For her breasts, those too . . .’ He withdrew into himself once more and came up, morosely, against the age-old male grievance. ‘She’s getting fat from making love. She’s battening on me.’ He slipped a jealous hand under his jacket, felt his ribs, and ceased to admire the childish dimple in her cheeks.

  But he felt a certain gratified vanity when they sat down a little later at a famous inn and the neighbouring diners stopped talking and eating to stare at Camille. And he exchanged with his wife the smiles, the movements of the chin and all the rituals of coquetry suitable to a ‘handsome couple’.

  However, it was only for him that Camille lowered her voice and displayed a certain languor and certain charming attentions which were not in the least for show. In revenge, Alain snatched out of her hand the dish of raw tomatoes and the basket of strawberries, insisted that she ate chicken with a cream sauce, and poured her out a wine which she did not care for but which she drank fast.

  ‘You know perfectly well I don’t like wine,’ she repeated each time she emptied her glass.

  The sun had set but the sky was still almost white, dappled with small deep-pink clouds. But night and coolness seemed to be rising as one from the forest which loomed, massive, beyond the tables of the inn. Camille laid her hand on Alain’s.

  ‘What is it? What is it? What’s the matter?’ he said in terror.

  Astonished, she withdrew her hand. The little wine she had drunk gleamed gaily in her eyes in which shone the tiny, quivering image of the pink balloons hung from the pergola.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter, silly. You’re as nervous as a cat! Is it forbidden for me to put my hand on yours?’

  ‘I thought,’ he admitted weakly, ‘I thought you wanted to tell me something . . . something serious . . . I thought,’ he burst out with it, ‘you were going to tell me you were pregnant.’

  Camille’s shrill little laugh attracted the attention of the men at the near-by tables.

  ‘And you were as overcome as all that? With joy or . . . fed-up-ness?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know. What about you? Would you be pleased or not pleased? We’ve hardly thought about it . . . at least, I haven’t. But what are you laughing at?’

  ‘Your face! All of a sudden, a face as if you were just going to be hanged. It’s too funny. You’ll make my eye-black come unstuck.’

  With her two forefingers, she lifted up either eyelid.

  ‘It isn’t funny, it’s serious,’ said Alain, glad to put her in the wrong. ‘But why was I so terrified?’ he thought.

  ‘It’s only serious,’ said Camille, ‘for people who’ve got nowhere to live or who’ve only got two rooms. But people like us . . .’

  Serene, lulled into optimism by the treacherous wine, she smoked and talked as if she were by herself, her thigh against the table and her legs crossed.

  ‘Pull down your skirt, Camille.’

  She did not hear him and went on: ‘We’ve got all the essentials a child needs. A garden – and what a garden! And a dream of a room with its own bathroom.’

  ‘A room?’

  ‘Your old room. We’d have it repainted. And it would be very nice of you not to insist on a frieze of little ducks and fir trees on a sky-blue background. That would ruin the taste of our offspring.’

  He restrained himself from stopping her. She was talking at random, her cheeks flushed, as she stared into the distance, seeing all she was building up. He had never seen her so beautiful. He was fascinated by the base of her neck, like the smooth unwrinkled bole of a tree, and by the nostrils which were blowing out smoke. ‘When I give her pleasure and she tightens her lips, she opens her nostrils like a little horse as she breathes.

  He heard such crazy predictions fall from the reddened scornful lips that they ceased to alarm him: Camille was calmly proceeding with her woman’s life among the wreckage of Alain’s past. ‘Good Lord,’ he thought. ‘How she’s got it all organized. I’m certainly learning something!’ A tennis-court was to replace the great, useless lawn. The kitchen and the pantries . . .

  ‘Haven’t you ever realized how inconvenient they are? And think of all that wasted space. It’s like the garage. I’m only saying all this, darling, so as you should know I think a lot about our real setting up house. Above all, we must be tactful with your mother. She’s so awfully sweet . . . we mustn’t do anything she wouldn’t approve of. Must we?’

  He put in haphazard ‘Yesses’ and ‘Noes’ as he picked up some wild strawberries scattered on the cloth. After hearing her say ‘your old room’, he had been immunized by a provisional calm, a foretaste of indifference.

  ‘Only one thing may make things awkward for us,’ Camille went on. ‘Patrick’s last postcard dated from the Balearic Isles. Do pay attention! It’ll take less time for Patrick to get back from the Balearics than for our decorator to get everything finished. I hope he comes to a violent end, that son of Penelope by a male tortoise! But I shall put on my siren voice: “Patrick, my pet . . .” You know my siren voice makes a tremendous impression on Patrick.’

  ‘From the Balearic Isles . . .’ broke in Alain thoughtfully. ‘From the Balearic Isles.’

  ‘Otherwise practically from next door. Where are you off to? Do you want us to go? It was so nice here.’

  Her brief intoxication was over. She stood up shivering and yawning with sleepiness.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ said Alain. ‘Put on the old coat that’s under the cushion. And go to sleep.’

  A flak of flying insects, bright silver moths and stag-beetles hard as pebbles, whirled in front of the headlights and the car drove back the wing-laden air like a wave. Camille did indeed go to sleep, sitting perfectly upright. She was trained not to encumber the driver’s arm and shoulder, even in her sleep. She merely gave a little forward jerk of her head at every jolt in the road.

  ‘From the Balearic Isles,’ Alain kept repeating to him
self. The dark air, the white fires which caught and repulsed and decimated the flying creatures took him back to the populous threshold of his dreams; the sky with its stardust of exploded faces, the great hostile eyes which put off till tomorrow a reckoning, a password or a significant figure. He was so deep in that world that he forgot to take the short cut between Pontchartrain and the Versailles toll-gate and Camille scolded him in her sleep. ‘Bravo!’ applauded Alain. ‘Good reflex action! Good little faithful, vigilant senses. Ah, how much I like you, how well we get on, when you’re asleep and I’m awake.’

  Their sleeves and their unprotected hair were wet with dew when they set foot in their newly-built street, empty in the moonlight. Alain looked up; nine storeys up, in the middle of the almost round moon, the little horned shadow of a cat was leaning forward, waiting.

  ‘Look I Look how she’s waiting!’

  ‘You’ve got good eyes,’ said Camille, yawning.

  ‘If she were to fall! Whatever you do, don’t call her!’

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ said Camille. ‘If I did call her, she wouldn’t come.’

  ‘For good reason,’ said Alain unpleasantly.

  As soon as he had said it, he was angry with himself. ‘Too soon, too soon! And what a bad moment to choose!’ Camille dropped the hand that was just about to push the bell.

  ‘For good reason? For what good reason? Come on, out with it. I’ve been lacking in respect to the sacred animal again? The cat’s complained of me?’

  ‘I’ve gone too far,’ thought Alain, as he closed the garage door. He crossed the street again and rejoined his wife who was waiting for him in battle order. ‘Either I give in for the sake of a quiet night, or I stop the discussion by giving her a good, hard slap . . . or . . . It’s too soon.’

  ‘Well! I’m talking to you!’

  ‘Let’s go up first,’ said Alain.

  They did not speak as they went up, squeezed side by side in the narrow lift. As soon as they reached the studio, Camille tore off her béret and gloves and threw them across the room as if to show she had not given up the quarrel. Alain busied himself with Saha, inviting her to quit her perilous post. Patient, determined not to displease him, the cat followed him into the bathroom.

  ‘If it’s because of what you heard before dinner, when you came in,’ began Camille shrilly the moment he reappeared.

  Alain had decided on his line and interrupted her wearily: ‘My dear, what are we going to say to each other? Nothing that we don’t know already. That you can’t bear the cat, that you blew up Mother Buque because the cat broke a vase – or a glass – I saw the pieces. I shall answer that I’m extremely fond of Saha and that you’d be just as jealous if I’d kept a warm affection for some friend of my childhood. And so it’ll go on all night. I’d prefer to sleep, thanks very much. Look here, the next time, I advise you to take the initiative and have a little dog.’

  Startled, embarrassed by having nothing for her temper to fasten on, Camille stared at him with raised eyebrows.

  ‘The next time? What next time? What do you mean? What initiative?’

  As Alain merely shrugged his shoulders, she flushed, her face suddenly became very young again and the extreme brightness of her eyes presaged tears. ‘Oh, how bored I am!’ groaned Alain inwardly. ‘She’s going to admit it. She’s going to tell me I was right. How boring!’

  ‘Listen, Alain.’

  With an effort, he feigned anger and assumed a false air of authority.

  ‘No, my dear. No, no, no! You’re not going to force me to finish off this charming evening with a barren discussion. You’re not going to make a drama out of a piece of childish nonsense any more than you’re going to stop me being fond of animals.’

  A kind of bitter gaiety came into Camille’s eyes but she said nothing. ‘Perhaps I was a little hard. “Childish nonsense,” was unnecessary. And as to being fond of animals, what do I know about that?’ A small, shadowy blue shape, outlined like a cloud with a hem of silver, sitting on the dizzy edge of the night, absorbed his thoughts and removed him from that soulless place where, inch by inch, he was defending his chance of solitude, his egotism, his poetry . . .

  ‘Come along, my little enemy,’ he said with disloyal charm, ‘let’s go and rest.’

  She opened the door of the bathroom where Saha, installed for the night on the cork-seated stool, appeared to take only the faintest notice of her.

  ‘But why, but why? Why did you say “the next time”?’

  The noise of running water drowned Camille’s voice. Alain did not attempt to answer. When he rejoined her in the huge bed, he wished her good-night and kissed her carelessly on her unpowdered nose, while Camille’s mouth clung to his chin with a small greedy sound.

  Waking early, he went off quietly to lie down on the ‘waiting-room bench’, the narrow divan squeezed between two walls of glass panes.

  It was there that, during the following nights, he finished off his sleep. He closed the opaque oilcloth curtains on either side; they were almost new but already half destroyed by the sun. He breathed on his body the very perfume of his solitude, the sharp feline smell of rest-harrow and flowering box. One arm extended, the other folded on his chest, he resumed the relaxed, lordly attitude of his childhood sleep. Suspended from the narrow top of the three-cornered house, he encouraged with all his might the return of his old dreams which the lover’s exhaustion had dispersed.

  He escaped more easily than Camille could have wished, constrained as he was to fly on the very spot. Escape no longer meant a staircase descended on tiptoe, the slamming of a taxi door, a brief farewell note. None of his mistresses had prepared him for Camille and her young girl’s eagerness; Camille and her reckless desire. Neither had they prepared him for Camille’s stoical behaviour as an offended partner. She made it a point of honour not to complain.

  Having escaped and lain down again on the waiting-room bench, Alain strained an uneasy ear toward the room he had just left, as his head felt for the hard little cushion he preferred to all the others. But Camille never reopened the door. Left alone, she pulled the crumpled sheet and the silk eiderdown over her, gnawed her bent finger in resentful regret, and snapped off the chromium strip-light which threw a narrow white beam across the bed. Alain never knew whether she had slept in the empty bed or whether she was learning so young that a solitary night imposes an armed vigil. It was impossible to tell, since she reappeared fresh and rather carefully dressed instead of in the bathrobe and pyjamas of the night before. But she could not understand that a man’s sensuality is brief and seasonal and that its unpredictable return is never a new beginning.

  Lying alone, bathed in the night air, measuring the height and the silence of his tower-top by the faintness of the hoots from the boats on the near-by Seine, the unfaithful husband delayed going to sleep till the apparition of Saha. She came to him, a shadow bluer than the shadows, along the ledge outside the open glass pane. There she stayed on the watch and would not come down on to Alain’s chest although he implored her with the words that she knew: ‘Come, my little puma, come along . . . My cat of the tree-tops, my cat of the lilacs. Saha, Saha, Saha.’

  She resisted, sitting there above him on the window-sill. He could see nothing of her but her cat’s shape against the sky, her chin down and her ears passionately orientated towards him. He could never catch the expression of her look.

  Sometimes the dry dawn, the dawn before the wind got up, found the two of them sitting on the east side balcony. Cheek by cheek they watched the sky pale and the flight of white pigeons leaving the beautiful cedar of the Folie-Saint-James one by one. Together they felt the same surprise at being so high above the earth, so alone and so far from being happy. With the ardent, sinuous movement of a huntress, Saha followed the pigeons’ flight and uttered an occasional ‘ek . . . ek . . .’ the faint echo of the ‘mouek . . . mouek . . .’ of excitement, greed, and violent games.

  ‘Our room,’ Alain said in her ear. ‘Our garden, our house.
’

  She was getting thin again and Alain found her light and enchanting. But he suffered at seeing her so gentle and patient. Her patience was that of all those who are wearied out and sustained by a promise.

  Sleep overcame Alain again as soon as daylight had begun to shorten the shadows. Rayless at first and looming larger through the mist of Paris, the sun swiftly shrank and lightened. As it rose, already burning hot, it awoke a twittering of sparrows in the gardens. The growing light revealed all the untidiness of a hot night on balconies and window-sills and in little yards where captive shrubs languished – a garment forgotten on a deck-chair, empty glasses on a metal table, a pair of sandals. Alain hated the indecency of small dwellings oppressed by summer and regained his bed with one bound through a yawning panel in the glass. At the foot of the nine-storeyed building, a gardener lifted his head and saw this white young man leap through the transparent wall like a burglar.

  Saha did not follow him. Sometimes she strained her ears in the direction of the triangular room; sometimes she dispassionately watched the awakening of the distant world on ground level. Someone let out a dog from a small decrepit house. The dog leapt forward without a bark, rushed round and round the tiny garden, and did not recover its voice until it had finished its aimless run. Women appeared at the windows; a maid furiously slammed doors and shook out orange cushions on a flat roof; men, waking regretfully, lit the first bitter cigarette. At last, in the fireless kitchen of the Wedge, the automatic, whistling coffee-pot and the electric teapot clashed against each other; through the porthole window of the bathroom there emerged Camille’s perfume and her noisy yawning. Saha resignedly folded her paws beneath her and pretended to sleep.

  EIGHT

  ONE EVENING IN July, when the two of them were waiting for Alain’s return, Camille and the cat were resting on the same parapet; the cat crouched on all four paws, Camille leaning on her folded arms. Camille did not like this balcony-terrace, reserved for the cat and shut in by two cement partitions which cut off both the wind and all communication with the balcony on the prow.