by Colette
The mortified watch put out its light and Jean heaved a sigh of gratified power. But all he could get out of his rigid sides was a groan. All at once, a wind he recognized among all others, the wind that snaps the pine trees, dishevels the larches, and flattens and raises the sand dunes, began to roar. It filled his ears, and the images, forbidden to the more ordinary dream that does not pierce the curtain of closed eyelids, rose up and longed to run free, to take advantage of the limitless room. Some of them, queerly horizontal, checkered the vertical crowd who had reared straight up on end. “Scottish visions,” thought Jean.
His bed trembled slightly, shaken by the vibrating ascent of High Fever. He felt three or four years fall away from him, and fear, to which he was almost a stranger, clutched at him. He very nearly called out: “To the rescue, Madame Mamma! They’re carrying off your little boy!”
Neither in his rides, nor in the rich kingdom of the very strangest sounds—humpbacked sounds carrying reverberating ampoules on their heads, on their cockchafer backs, pointed sounds with muzzles like mongooses—nowhere had Jean ever seen such a swarm suddenly appear. His hearing tasted it like a mouth; his eye laboriously spelled it out, fascinated. “Help, Madame Mamma! Help me! You know I can’t walk! I can only fly, swim, roll from cloud to cloud . . .” At the same moment, something indescribable and forgotten stirred in his body, infinitely far away, right at the very end of his useless legs, a confused, scattered crowd of crazy ants. “To the rescue, Madame Mamma!”
But another person, whose decisions depended neither on impotence nor on motherly kindness, made a haughty sign that imposed silence. A magical constraint kept Madame Mamma on the other side of the wall, in the place where she waited, modest and anxious, to become as great as her little son.
So he did not scream. In any case, the unknown beings, the fabulous strangers, were already beginning to abduct him by force. Rising up on all sides, they poured burning heat and icy cold on him, racked him with melodious torture, swathed him in color like a bandage, swung him in a hammock of palpitations. With his face already turned to flee, motionless, to his mother, he suddenly changed his mind and launched himself in full flight, letting his own impetus carry him where it would, through meteors and mists and lightnings that softly opened to let him through, closed behind him, opened again . . . And just as he was on the very verge of being perfectly content, ungrateful and gay, exulting in his solitude as an only child, his privilege as an orphan and an invalid, he was aware that a sad little crystalline crash separated him from a bliss whose beautiful, soft, airy name he had yet to learn: death. A little, light, melancholy crash, coming perhaps from some planet deserted forever . . . The clear and sorrowful sound, clinging to the child who was going to die, held on so staunchly that the dazzling escape tried in vain to shake it off and outdistance it.
Perhaps his journey lasted a long time. But having lost all sense of duration, he could only judge of its variety. Often he thought he was following a guide, an indistinct guide who had lost his way too. Then he would groan at not being able to take on the pilot’s responsibility and he would hear his own groan of humbled pride, or such weariness that he abandoned his voyage, left the wake of a spindle-shaped squall, and took refuge, dead-beat, in a corner.
There he was pounced on by the anguish of living in a country where there were no corners, no square, solid shapes; where there was only a dark current of icy air; a night in whose depths he was no longer anything but a small boy, lost and in tears. Then he would rear himself upright on a great many, suddenly multiplied legs, promoted to the rank of stilts, that a searing pain was slicing off in rattling bundles, like faggots. Then everything would go dark and only the blind wind told him how fast he was traveling. Passing from a familiar continent to an unfamiliar sea he caught a few words in a language he was surprised to find he understood.
“The sound of the glass mug breaking woke me up.”
“Madame can see he’s smacking his lips, doesn’t Madame think he wants something to drink?”
He would have liked to know the name of that voice. “Madame . . . Madame . . . What Madame?” But already the speed at which he was going had swallowed up the words and the memory of them.
One pale night, thanks to a stop that jarred through his temples, he again gathered a few human syllables and would have liked to repeat them. The sudden stop had brought him painfully face to face with a harsh, solid object interposed between two noble and inhabited worlds. An object with no destination, finely striped, bristling with very tiny hairs and mysteriously associated—he discovered this afterward—with horrible “my-young-friends.” “It’s a . . . I know . . . a . . . sleeve . . .” Promptly he opened his wings and flung himself headfirst into reassuring chaos.
Another time, he saw a hand. Armed with slender fingers, with slightly chapped skin and white-spotted nails, it was pushing back a marvelous zebra-striped mass that was rushing up from the depths of the horizon. Jean began to laugh. “Poor little hand, the mass will make one mouthful of it, just imagine, a mass that’s all striped in black and yellow and has such an intelligent expression!” The feeble little hand struggled with all its outspread fingers, and the parallel stripes began to broaden and bend and diverge like soft bars. A great gap opened between them and swallowed up the frail hand and Jean found himself regretting it. This regret was delaying his journey, and with an effort, he launched himself off again. But he carried the regret with him, just as once, very, very long ago, he had carried the tenacious tinkle of a broken mug. After that, through whatever whirlpools and troughs he swirled and dipped, drowsy and rather pleasantly giddy, his journey was disturbed by echoes, by sounds of tears, by an anxious attempt at something that resembled a thought, by an importunate feeling of pity.
A harsh barking suddenly rent the great spaces, and Jean murmured: “Riki . . .” In the distance, he heard a kind of sob that kept repeating: “Riki! Madame, he said Riki!” Another stammering reiterated: “He said Riki! He said Riki.”
A little hard, quivering force, whose double grip he could feel under his armpits, seemed to want to hoist him up to the top of a peak. It was bruising him and he grumbled. If he had been able to transmit his instructions to the little force and its sharp corners, he would have taught it that this was no way to treat a famous traveler who only uses immaterial vehicles, unshod steeds, sledges that trace seven-colored tracks on the rainbow. That he only allowed himself to be molested by those . . . those elements whose power only the night can unleash and control. That, for example, the bird’s belly that had just laid itself against the whole length of his cheek had no right at all. And moreover, it was not a bird’s belly because it was not feathered but only edged with a strand of long hair. “That,” he thought, “would be a cheek, if there were any other cheek in the universe except mine. I want to speak, I want to send away this . . . this sham cheek. I forbid anyone to touch me, I forbid . . .”
To acquire the strength to speak, he breathed the air in through his nostrils. With the air, there entered in the marvel, the magic of memory, the smell of certain hair, certain skin he had forgotten on the other side of the world and that started up a wild rush of recollections. He coughed, fighting against the rise of something that tightened his throat, staunched a thirst lurking in the parched corners of his lips, salted his overflowing eyelids, and mercifully veiled from him his return to the hard landing-bed. Over an endless stretch, a voice said, re-echoing to infinity: “He’s crying, dear God, he’s crying . . .” The voice foundered in a kind of storm from which there arose disjointed syllables, sobs, calls to someone present, but concealed. “Come quick, quick!”
“What a noise, what a noise,” thought the child reproachfully. But more and more, he kept pressing his cheek unconsciously against the soft, smooth surface bordered by someone’s hair, and drinking up a bitter dew on it that welled out, drop by drop. He turned away his head and, as he did so, encountered a narrow valley, a nest molded exactly to his measure. He had just time to n
ame it to himself: “Madame Mamma’s shoulder,” before he lost consciousness or else fell asleep on it.
He came to himself to hear his own voice, light and faintly mocking, saying: “Wherever have you come from, Madame Mamma?”
There was no answer, but the deliciousness of a quarter orange, slipped between his lips, made him conscious of the return, of the presence of the person he was searching for. He knew that she was bending over him in that submissive attitude that flexed her waist and tired her back. Soon exhausted, he fell silent. But already a thousand questions were worrying him and he conquered his weakness to satisfy the most urgent one: “Did you change my pajamas while I was asleep, Madame Mamma? When I lay down last night, I had blue ones and these are pink.”
“Madame, it’s past believing! He remembers he had blue pajamas, the first night when . . .”
He did not listen to the rest of the sentence that a big, warm voice had just whispered and abandoned himself to the hands that were taking off his wet garments. Hands as deft as the waves between which he rocked, weightless and aimless . . .
“He’s soaked. Wrap him up in the big dressing gown, Mandora, without putting his arms through the sleeves.”
“The heat’s on full, Madame, don’t be afraid. And I’ve just put in a new hot-water bottle. Gracious me, he’s positively drenched.”
“If they knew where I’ve come from . . . Anyone would expect to be drenched,” thought Jean. “I wish to goodness I could scratch my legs or that someone would take those ants off.”
“Madame Mamma.”
He received the muteness, the vigilant stillness that were Madame Mamma’s answer when she was strained and on the alert.
“Would you please . . . scratch my calves a little because these ants . . .”
From the depths of silence, someone whispered, with a strange respectfulness: “He can feel ants . . . He said ants . . .”
Swathed in the dressing gown that was too big for him, he tried to shrug his shoulders. Why, yes, he had said ants. What was there astonishing about his having said Riki and ants? A reverie carried him away, relieved, to the margin between waking and sleeping; the rustle of some stuff brought him back again. Between his lashes, he recognized the hateful sleeve, the blue stripes, the little hairs of wool, and his resentment restored his strength. He refused to see any more of it, but a voice came and opened his closed lids, a voice that said: “Well, my-young-friend . . .”
“I abolish him, I abolish him!” shrieked Jean inside himself. “Him, his sleeve, his my-young-friend, his little eyes, I curse them, I abolish them!” Beside himself with irritation, he was panting.
“Well, well. What’s the matter? You’re very restless. There . . . there . . .”
A hand laid itself on Jean’s head. Powerless to revolt, he hoped to strike the aggressor down with one thunderbolt from his eye. But all he could see, sitting on the bedside chair reserved for Madame Mamma, was a worthy, rather fat, rather bald man, whose eyes, as they met his own, filled with tears.
“Little one, little one. Is it true you’ve got ants in your legs? Is it true? That’s splendid, my word, that’s really splendid. Could you manage to drink half a glass of lemonade? Wouldn’t you like to suck a spoonful of lemon ice? A mouthful of milk and water?”
Jean’s hand yielded itself up to some thick, very soft fingers and a warm palm. He murmured a vague acquiescence, not quite sure himself whether he was apologizing or whether he wanted the lemon ice, the drink, the “watered” milk. His eyes, paled to a tired gray between the great black rings and the dark eyebrows, gazed amicably into two small eyes of a cheerful blue that were moist and blinking and tender.
The rest of the new era was nothing but a series of muddled moments; a medley of different kinds of sleep, now short, now long, now hermetically sealed, interspersed with sudden sharp awakenings and vague tremors. The worthy doctor indulged in an orgy of great satisfied coughs, ahem, ahem, and exclamations of “Dear lady, this is capital! We’re safe now!” All this din was so cheerful that Jean, if he had not been sunk in apathy, would have asked himself what happy event had occurred in the house.
The hours passed inexplicably, signposted by fruits in jelly and milk flavored with vanilla. A boiled egg raised its little lid and revealed its buttercup yolk. The window, left ajar, let in a breath of spring, heady as wine.
The nice barber was not yet permitted to return. Jean’s hair hung down over his forehead and neck like a little girl’s and Madame Mamma risked tying it back with a pink ribbon, which Jean tore off with the gesture of an insulted boy.
Behind the pane, the chestnut branch’s rose-like buds were swelling day by day and all up and down Jean’s legs there ran ants armed with little nipping jaws. “This time, I’ve caught one, Madame Mamma!” But all he was pinching was his own transparent skin and the ant had fled inside a tree of veins the color of spring grass. On the eighth day of the new era, a great scarf of sunlight lying across his bed moved him more than he could bear and he decided that this very night the daily fever would bring him what he had been vainly awaiting for a whole week. Everything that profound weariness and sleep hewn out of a solid block of black repose had robbed him of would be restored: his faceless companions, his rides, the accessible skies, his security of an angel in full flight.
“Madame Mamma, I’d like my books, please.”
“My darling, the doctor said that . . .”
“It’s not to read them, Madame Mamma, it’s so that they’ll get used to me again.”
She said nothing and, with some apprehension, brought back the tattered volumes, the big badly bound paving stone, the light calf soft as a human skin, a Pomology with colored plates of chubby fruits, the Guérin mottled with flat-faced lions and duck-billed platypuses with beetles big as islands flying over them.
When night came, having eaten his fill—food was now something magical and interesting that he ate with the avidity of children who have come back to life—he pretended to be overcome with sleep and murmured his good nights, and a vague, mischievous song he had recently improvised. Having secretly watched the departure of Madame Mamma and Mandora, he took command of his raft of in-folio and atlas and set sail. A young moon, behind the chestnut branch, showed that the buds, thanks to the warmer weather, were about to open in leafy fingers.
He sat up without assistance in bed, towing his still-heavy legs that were overrun with ants. In the depths of the window, in the celestial waters of night swam the curved moon and the dim reflection of a long-haired child, to whom he beckoned. He raised one arm, and the other child obediently copied his summoning gesture. Slightly intoxicated with the power to work marvels, he called up his boon companions of the cruel but privileged hours: the visible sounds; the tangible images; the breathable seas; the nourishing, navigable air; the wings that mocked feet; the laughing suns.
In particular, he called up a certain spirited little boy who chuckled with inward laughter as he left the earth, who took advantage of Madame Mamma and, lord of her sorrows and joys, kept her prisoner of a hundred loving lies.
Then he waited, but nothing came. Nothing came that night or the following ones, nothing ever again. The landscape of pink snow had vanished from the nickel paper knife and never again would Jean fly, in a periwinkle dawn, between the sharp horns and the beautiful bulging eyes of cattle azure with dew. Never again would brown-and-yellow Mandora reverberate with all the strings—tzrromm, tzrromm—humming beneath her vast, generous skirt. Was it possible that the damask alp, piled high in the big cupboard, would henceforth refuse to allow a child who was nearly well to perform the feats a small cripple had achieved on the slopes of imaginary glaciers?
A time comes when one is forced to concentrate on living. A time comes when one has to renounce dying in full flight. With a wave of his hand, Jean said farewell to his angel-haired reflection. The other returned his greeting from the depths of an earthly night shorn of all marvels, the only night allowed to children whom death lets go and w
ho fall asleep, assenting, cured, and disappointed.
[Translated by Antonia White]
The Rainy Moon
“Oh, I can manage that,” the withered young girl told me. “Yes certainly, I can bring you each set of pages as I type them, as you’d rather not trust them to the post.”
“Can you? That would be kind of you. You needn’t trouble to come and collect my manuscript, I’ll bring it to you in batches as I go along. I go out for a walk every morning.”
“It’s so good for the health,” said Mademoiselle Barberet.
She gave a superficial smile and pulled one of the two little sausages of gold hair, threaded with white, that she wore tied on the nape with a black ribbon bow, forward again into its proper place, over her right shoulder, just below the ear. This odd way of doing her hair did not prevent Mademoiselle Barberet from being perfectly correct and pleasant to look at from her pale blue eyes to her slender feet, from her delicate, prematurely aged mouth to her frail hands, whose small bones were visible under the transparent skin. Her freshly ironed linen collar and her plain black dress called for the accessories of a pair of those glazed cotton oversleeves that were once the badge of writers. But typists, who do not write, do not wear their sleeves out below the elbows.
“You’re temporarily without your secretary, Madame?”
“No. The girl who used to type my manuscripts has just got married. But I don’t possess a secretary. I shouldn’t know what to do with a secretary, you see. I write everything by hand. And besides, my flat is small, I should hear the noise of the typewriter.”
“Oh, I do understand, I do understand,” said Mademoiselle Barberet. “There’s a gentleman I work for who only writes on the right-hand half of the pages. For a little while, I took over the typing for Monsieur Henri Duvernois, who would never have anything but pale yellow paper.”
She gave a knowing smile that lumped together and excused all the manias of scribblers and, producing a file—I noticed she matched the cardboard to the blue of my paper—she neatly put away the sixty or so pages I had brought.
