The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  I am perfectly aware that, in the music-hall world, people make the sign of the cross on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, I knew at once and unerringly why Lise did so at that moment. Weakly, I made a point of avoiding her till the finale. It was easy and I think she deliberately made it easier still. Afterward, fate played into my hands. In honor of the Grand Prix, the management cut out the sketch “Miaou-Ouah-Ouah,” which did not, I admit, deserve any preferential treatment. Months and years went by during which I made a public spectacle of myself in various places but reserved the right to say nothing of my private life.

  When I felt that I wanted to write the story of Gribiche, I controlled myself and replaced it by a “blank,” a row of dots, an asterisk. Today, when I am allowing myself to describe her end, I naturally suppress her name, that of the music hall, and those of the girls we worked with. By such changes and concealments I can still surround Gribiche’s memory with the emblems of silence. Among such emblems are those which, in musical notation, signify the breaking off of the melody. Three hieroglyphs can indicate that break: a mute swallow on the five black wires of the stave; a tiny hatchet cutting across them, and—for the longest pause of all—a fixed pupil under a huge, arched, panic-stricken eyebrow.

  [Translated by Antonia White]

  PART III

  Varieties of Human Nature

  The human face was ever my great landscape.

  The Hidden Woman

  He had been looking at the swirl of masks in front of him for a long time, suffering vaguely from the intermingling of their colors and the synchronized sound of two orchestras too close together. His cowl pressed his temples; a nervous headache was building between his eyes. But he savored, without impatience, a mixture of malaise and pleasure which allowed the hours to fly by unnoticed. He had wandered down all the corridors of the Opéra, had drunk in the silvery dust of the dance floor, recognized bored friends, and wrapped around his neck the indifferent arms of a very fat girl humorously disguised as a sylph. Though embarrassed by his long domino, tripping over it like a man in skirts, the cowled doctor did not dare take off either the domino or the hood, because of his schoolboy lie.

  “I’ll be spending tomorrow night in Nogent,” he had told his wife the evening before. “They just telephoned and I’m afraid that my patient, you know, that poor old lady . . . Can you imagine? And I was looking forward to this ball like a kid. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, a man my age who’s never been to the Opéra Ball?”

  “Very, darling, very ridiculous! If I had known I might never have married you . . .”

  She laughed, and he admired her narrow face, pink, matte, and long, like a thin sugared almond.

  “But . . . don’t you want to go to the Green and Purple Ball? You know you can go without me if you want, darling.”

  She trembled with one of those long shivers of disgust which made her hair, her delicate hands, and her chest in her white dress shudder at the sight of a slug or some filthy passer-by.

  “Oh, no! Can you see me in a crowd, all those hands . . . What can I do? It’s not that I’m a prude, it’s . . . it makes my skin crawl. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Leaning against the balustrade of the loggia, above the main staircase, he thought about this trembling hind, as he contemplated, directly in front of him, on the bare back of a sultana, the grasp of two enormous square hands with black nails. Bursting out of the braid-trimmed sleeves of a Venetian lord, they sank into the white female flesh as if it were dough. Because he was thinking about her, it gave him quite a start to hear, next to him, a little “ahem,” a little cough typical of his wife. He turned around and saw someone in a long and impenetrable disguise, sitting sidesaddle on the balustrade, Pierrot by the looks of the huge-sleeved tunic, the loose-fitting pantaloons, the skullcap, the plaster-like whiteness coating the little bit of skin visible above the half-mask bearded with lace. The fabric of the costume and skullcap, woven of dark violet and silver, glistened like the conger eel fished for by night with iron hooks, in boats with resin lanterns. Overcome with surprise, he waited to hear the little “ahem,” which did not come again. The Pierrot-Eel, seated, casual, tapped the marble balusters with a dangling heel, revealing only its two satin slippers and a black-gloved hand bent back against one hip. The two oblique slits in the mask, carefully covered over with a tulle mesh, allowed only a smothered fire of indeterminate color to pass through.

  He almost called out, “Irene!” but held back, remembering his own lie. Not good at playacting, he also decided against disguising his voice. The Pierrot scratched its thigh, with a free and uninhibited gesture, and the anxious husband sighed in relief.

  “Ah! It’s not her.”

  But out of a pocket the Pierrot pulled a flat gold box, opened it to take out a lipstick, and the anxious husband recognized an antique snuffbox, fitted with a mirror inside, the last birthday present . . . He put his left hand on the pain in his chest with so brusque and so involuntarily theatrical a motion that the Pierrot-Eel noticed him.

  “Is that a declaration, Purple Domino?”

  He did not answer, half choked with surprise, anticipating, as in a bad dream, and listened for a long moment to the thinly disguised voice—the voice of his wife. The Eel, sitting there cavalierly, its head tilted like a bird’s, looked at him; she shrugged her shoulders, hopped down, and walked away. Her movement freed the distraught husband, who, restored to an active and normal jealousy, started to think clearly again, and calmly rose to follow his wife.

  “She’s here for someone, with someone. In less than an hour I’ll know everything.”

  A hundred other purple or green cowls guaranteed that he would be neither noticed nor recognized. Irene walked ahead of him nonchalantly. He was amazed to see her roll her hips softly and drag her feet a little as if she were wearing Turkish slippers. A Byzantine, in embroidered emerald green and gold, grabbed her as she passed, and she bent back, grown thinner in his arms, as if his grasp were going to cut her in half. Her husband ran a few steps forward and reached the couple as Irene cried out flatteringly, “You big brute, you!”

  She walked away, with the same relaxed and calm step, stopping often, musing at the open doors of the boxes, almost never turning around. She hesitated at the bottom of a staircase, turned aside, came back toward the entrance to the orchestra stalls, slid into a noisy, dense group with slippery skillfulness, the exact movement of a knife blade sliding into its sheath. Ten arms imprisoned her, an almost naked wrestler roughly pinned her up against the edge of the boxes on the main floor and held her there. She yielded under the weight of the naked man, threw back her head with a laugh that was drowned out by other laughter, and the man in the purple cowl saw her teeth flash beneath the mask’s lacy beard. Then she slipped away again with ease and sat down on the steps which led to the dance floor. Her husband, standing two steps behind, watched her. She readjusted her mask, and her crumpled tunic, and tightened the roll of her headband. She seemed calm, as though alone, and walked away again after a few minutes’ rest. She went down the steps, put her arms on the shoulders of a warrior who invited her, without speaking, to dance, and she danced, clinging to him.

  “That’s him,” the husband said to himself.

  But she did not say a word to the dancer, clad in iron and moist skin, and left him quietly, when the dance ended. She went off to have a glass of champagne at the buffet, and then a second glass, paid, and then watched, motionless and curious, as two men began scuffling, surrounded by screaming women. Then she amused herself by placing her little satanic hands, all black, on the white throat of a Dutch girl with golden hair, who cried out nervously. At last the anxious man who was following her saw her stop as she bumped up against a young man collapsed on a banquette, out of breath, fanning himself with his mask. She leaned over, disdainfully took his handsome face, rugged and fresh, by the chin, and kissed the panting, half-open mouth . . .

  But her husband, instead of rushing forward and tearing
the two joined mouths away from each other, disappeared into the crowd. Dismayed, he no longer feared, he no longer hoped for betrayal. He was sure now that Irene did not know the adolescent, drunk with dancing, whom she was kissing, or the Hercules. He was sure that she was not waiting or looking for anyone, that the lips she held beneath her own like a crushed grape, she would abandon, leave again the next minute, then wander about again, gather up some other passer-by, forget him, until she felt tired and it was time to go back home, tasting only the monstrous pleasure of being alone, free, honest, in her native brutality, of being the one who is unknown, forever solitary and without shame, whom a little mask and a hermetic costume had restored to her irremediable solitude and her immodest innocence.

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  Dawn

  The surgical suddenness of their break left him stupefied. Alone in the house where they had lived as a quasi-conjugal couple for some twenty years, he was unable, a week later, to bring himself out of his stupor long enough to be sad. He struggled, comically, against the disappearance of ordinary objects, and berated his manservant in a childish manner: “Well, no one’s eaten those collars! And don’t tell me I don’t have any more sticks of shaving soap; there were two of them, there, in the small cupboard in the bathroom! You’re not going to make me believe that I don’t have any shaving soap just because Madame isn’t here!”

  Bewildered at no longer feeling held accountable, he forgot mealtimes, returned home for no apparent reason, went out just to get away, floundering about, half choked, at the end of a rope which the imperious hand of a woman no longer held.

  He called his friends to witness, embarrassed them, offended their sense of reserve as men unfaithful or enslaved. “My good man, it’s unbelievable! Cleverer men than I wouldn’t understand it at all . . . Aline’s gone. She’s gone, that’s it. And not alone, you can bet on that. She’s gone. I could repeat it a hundred times and I still wouldn’t find anything more to say. This sort of thing apparently happens every day to I don’t know how many husbands . . . What can I say? I can’t get over it. I just can’t get over it.”

  His eyes would open wide, he’d raise his arms, and then drop them again. He seemed neither tragic nor humiliated, and his friends ridiculed him a little: “He’s slipping, yes, he’s slipping! At his age, it’s hit him pretty hard.” They talked about him as if he were an old man, secretly pleased at last to belittle this handsome, graying man who had never tasted disappointment in love.

  “His beautiful Aline . . . He thought it was all perfectly natural that at forty-five she suddenly became a blonde, blond like an artificial flower, and that she changed her dressmaker, and her shoemaker. He wasn’t suspicious . . .”

  One day he took a train ride because his manservant had asked him for the week off. “Since there’s less work with Madame not being here, I thought . . .” and also because he was losing more and more sleep, dozing off at daybreak after nights spent like a hunter on the lookout, motionless in the dark, jaws clenched, ears twitching. He left one evening, avoiding the country house he had bought fifteen years earlier and furnished for Aline. He bought a ticket for a large provincial town where he remembered having “spread the good word” and banqueted at the expense of L’Extension Economique.

  “A good hotel,” he told himself, “and a restaurant with good French cooking, and I’m in business. I don’t want this thing to kill me now, do I? So then, off we go. Travel, good food . . .”

  On the way, he saw reflected in the window of the compartment his still-erect figure and the gray brush which hid his relaxed mouth. “Not bad, not bad. I’m not going to let it kill me, by gum! The hussy!” He used no stronger word for the unfaithful woman than this mild, old-fashioned insult, which when spoken by older people is still meant to compliment the rashness of youth.

  At the hotel he asked for the same room as last year. “The round corner room, you know, the one with a nice view of the square”; he dined on cold meat and beer and, as it was nightfall, went to bed. His weariness had led him to believe that sleep would soon reward his flight. Lying on his back, he felt the coolness of sheets which were not quite dry, and calculated in the darkness the half-forgotten place of the big round bay window, judging from two high shafts of bluish light between the drawn curtains. In fact, he was fast asleep in a matter of seconds, and then woke up for good by having unconsciously made room, with a movement of his legs, for her, who, absent now both day and night, returned faithfully under cover of sleep. He woke and bravely uttered the conjuring words: “Come on now, it’ll be daylight soon, take it easy.” The two shafts of blue light were turning rose, and from the square he heard the welcome, hoarse-sounding racket of the iron-hooped wooden buckets and the clip-clop of the horses’ big, patient hooves. “Exactly the same sound as the stables at Fontainebleau, in that villa we’d rented near the hotel. At daybreak we would listen to . . .” He shivered, turned over, and once again sought sleep. The horses and the buckets were quiet now. Other sounds, more discreet, rose up through the open window. He could make out the dense, dull sound of flowerpots being unloaded from a truck, a light sprinkling of water on plants, and the soft thud of big armfuls of leaves thrown on the ground.

  “A flower market,” the sleepless man said to himself. “Oh, no doubt about it. It was in Strasbourg during that trip we made, sunrise brought us a charming flower market, under our windows, and she said she had never seen cinerarias as blue as . . .” He sat up, the better to withstand a despair which flowed over him in steady waves, a new despair, entirely fresh and unknown. Underneath the nearby bridge, oars slapped the sleepy river, and the flight of the first whistling swallows pierced the air. “It’s early morning in Como, the swallows that followed the gardener’s boat, loaded with fruits and vegetables whose smell came in through our window, at the Villa d’Este . . . My God, have some pity . . .” He was still strong enough to blush at the start of a prayer, although the pain of loneliness and memory had left him doubled over on his bed like a man struck in the chest. Twenty years . . . all the dawns of twenty years were pouring out their faint or brilliant rays, their bird cries, their raindrops, on the head of a companion asleep or awake at his side, twenty years . . .

  “I don’t want it to kill me, my God . . . twenty years means something . . . but I had other dawns, before her . . . Yes, let me see, when I was a very young man . . .”

  But he could summon up only the twilights of a poor student, the gray mornings at law school, warmed by skimmed milk or alcohol, mornings in furnished rooms with narrow washbasins or zinc buckets. He turned away from them, called on his adolescence and dawns long past for help, but they came to him, mean and bitter, emerging from a rickety iron bed, prisoners of a wretched time, marked on his cheek with a stinging slap, dragging shoes with spongy soles . . . The abandoned man knew he had no refuge and that he would struggle in vain against the light’s return, that the cruel and familiar harmony of the first hour of the day would sing only one name, reopening the same wound, fresh and new each time; so he lay back and broke down in tears.

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  One Evening

  The moment the gate closed behind us and we saw the lantern in the gardener’s hand dancing in front of us, under a covering of clipped yews where the heavy downpour filtered through only in scattered drops, we felt that shelter was very near and agreed laughingly that the car trouble which had just left us stranded in the countryside clearly belonged in the category of “happy accidents.”

  It just so happened that Monsieur B., a country councillor and the owner of the château, who welcomed these two rain-soaked and unexpected women out on the terrace, knew my husband slightly, and his wife—a former student at the Schola Cantorum—remembered having met me at a Sunday concert.

  Around the first wood fire of the season, there rose a talkative gaiety. My friend Valentine and I felt it only right to accept a potluck of cold meat washed down with champagne; our hosts had only just finished t
heir dinner.

  An old plum brandy and some still-steaming coffee made us feel almost intimate. The electric light, rare for the region, the smell of mild tobacco, fruits, the blazing, resinous wood—I savored these familiar delights like gifts from a newfound isle.

  Monsieur B., square-shouldered, with just a hint of gray and the handsome, white-toothed smile of a man from the south, took my friend Valentine aside, and I chatted with Madame B. less than I observed her.

  Blond, slim, and dressed as if for an elegant dinner and not for receiving stranded motorists, she surprised me with eyes so light that the least reflection robbed them of their pale blue. They became mauve like her dress, green like the silk of her chair, or disturbed, in the lamplight, by a fleeting red glimmer like the blue eyes of a Siamese cat.

  I wondered if the entire face did not owe its vacant look, its empty amiability, its sometimes somnambulistic smile to these overlight eyes. A somnambulist, in any case, singularly attentive to everything that might please us and shorten the two or three hours it would take our chauffeur, with the help of Monsieur B.’s mechanic, to repair the car.

  “We have a room you’re welcome to use,” Madame B. said to me. “Why not spend the night here?”

  And her eyes, as though untenanted, expressed only an unlimited and almost unthinking solitude.

  “It’s not so bad here, really,” she continued. “Look at my husband, he’s getting on quite well with your friend!”

  She laughed, while her wide-open, deserted eyes seemed not to hear what she said. Twice she made me repeat some phrase or other, starting slightly each time. Morphine? Opium? An addict would never have those rosy gums, that relaxed brow, that soft, warm hand, or that youthful flesh, firm and rounded beneath the low-cut dress.