The Last of Cheri

by Colette

  ‘I can no longer make her happy,’ thought Chéri, ‘but I can still make her suffer. She is not altogether unfaithful to me. Whereas I am not untrue to her . . . I have deserted her.’

  Turning away from him, she began to dress. She had regained her freedom of movement and her disingenuous tolerance. The palest of pink frocks now hid from view the woman who, a moment since, had pressed her last stitch of clothing to her bosom, as though to a wound.

  She had recovered, too, her buoyant determination, her desire to live and hold sway, her prodigious and feminine aptitude for happiness. Chéri despised her afresh; but a moment came when the rays of the evening sun, shining through her transparent pink dress, outlined the shape of a young woman who no longer bore any semblance to the wounded Circassian: a heaven-aspiring form, as supple and vigorous as a serpent about to strike.

  ‘I can still hurt her, but how quickly she recovers! In this house, too, I am no longer needed, no longer expected. She has gone far beyond me, and is going further: I am, the old creature would say, her “first turn”. It’s now for me to follow her example, if only I could. But I can’t. And then would I, if I could? Unlike some of us, Edmée has never come up against what one meets only once in a lifetime and is floored by completely. Spéleïeff was fond of saying that, after a really bad crash – which, however, involved no broken bones – some horses would let themselves be killed rather than take the fence again. I am just the same.’

  He cast about for further sporting, and rather brutal, metaphors that would make his own fall and misfortunes seem an accident. But he had started his night too early, and, dog-tired, his dreams were haunted by sweet ghosts in sky-blue flounces, and half-remembered figures from the pages of the imperishable literature which finds its way into tawdry love-nests, from tales and poems dedicated to constancy and to lovers undivided in death: writings irresistible to adolescents and time-worn courtesans, who are akin in their credulity and passion for romance.

  ‘THEN SHE SAID to me: “I know who’s at the back of all this: it’s Charlotte again, making mischief about me. . . .” “It’s no more than you deserve,” I told her, “you’ve only to stop going to see Charlotte as much as you do, and trusting her with all your secrets.” She retorted: “I’m a much closer friend of Charlotte’s than of Spéleïeff’s and I’ve known her far longer. I assure you Charlotte, Neuilly, bezique, and the child would be a far greater loss to me than Spéleïeff – you can’t change the habits of a lifetime.” “That doesn’t prevent your faith in Charlotte costing you a pretty penny,” I said. “Oh! well,” was her answer, “what’s good is worth paying for.” That’s her all over, you’ll agree: big-hearted and generous but no fool. And with that she went off to dress for the Races – she told me she was going to the Races with a gigolo. . . .’

  ‘With me!’ Chéri exclaimed bitterly. ‘Am I right? It was me?’

  ‘I don’t deny it. I simply tell you things as they took place. A white dress – of white crépe-de-chine – Oriental-looking, edged with blue Chinese embroidery, the very dress you see her in here, in this snapshot, taken at the Races. And nothing will get it out of my head that this man’s shoulder you can see behind her is you.’

  ‘Fetch it me!’ Chéri ordered.

  The old woman got up, pulled out the rusty drawing-pins tacking the photograph to the wall, and brought it back to Chéri. Lolling on the Algerian divan, he raised a tousled head, and, barely running his eyes over it, flung the snapshot across the room.

  ‘When have you seen me wearing a collar that gapes at the back, and a short coat to go to the Races? Come, think again! I don’t find that sort of thing at all funny.’

  She ventured a tut-tut of timid censure, bent her stiff knees to pick up the photograph, and went on to open the door into the passage.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I can hear the water for my coffee boiling. I’m going to pour it out.’

  ‘Good. But come back here again.’

  She disappeared in a shuffle of rustling taffeta and heelless slippers. Left to himself, Chéri settled his neck against the moquette cushion stamped with Tunisian designs. A new and startlingly bright Japanese kimono, embellished with pink wistaria on a ground of amethyst, had replaced his coat and waistcoat. The fag-end of a too-far-smoked cigarette was almost burning his lips, and his hair, falling fan wise down to the level of his eyebrows, half covered his forehead.

  Wearing so feminine and flowered a garment did not make his appearance in any way ambiguous: he merely acquired an ignominious majesty that stamped every feature with its proper value. He seemed bent on death and destruction, and the photograph had flashed like a blade from his hand as he hurled it from him. Hard, delicate bones in his cheeks moved to the rhythm of his working jaws. The whites of his eyes flickered in the darkness round him like the crest of a wave, with the moonbeams interruptedly following its course.

  Left alone, however, he let his head sink back against the cushion, and closed his eyes.

  ‘Lord!’ exclaimed the Pal, coming back into the room, ‘you’ll not look more handsome when laid out on your deathbed! I’ve brought in the coffee. Would you care for some? Such an aroma! It will waft you to the Isles of the Blest.’

  ‘Yes. Two lumps.’

  His words were curt, and she obeyed with a humility that suggested, perhaps, a deep subservient pleasure.

  ‘You didn’t eat anything for dinner?’

  ‘I had enough.’

  He drank his coffee, without moving, supporting himself on one elbow. An Oriental curtain, draped like a canopy, hung from the ceiling directly above the divan, and in its shade lay an ivory and enamel Chéri, robed in exquisite silks, reclining upon an old worn dust-bedraggled rug.

  The Pal set out, piece by piece upon a brass-topped table, the coffee-set, an opium lamp capped with a glass cowl, two pipes, the pot of paste, the silver snuff-box used for cocaine, and a flask, which, tight-stoppered as it was, failed to control the cold and treacherously volatile expansion of the ether. To these she added a pack of tarot cards, a case of poker chips, and a pair of spectacles, before settling herself down with the apologetic air of a trained hospital nurse.

  ‘I’ve already told you’, grunted Chéri, ‘all that paraphernalia means nothing to me.’

  Once again she stretched out her sickly white hands in protestation. In her own home she adopted what she called her ‘Charlotte Corday style’: hair flowing loose, and wide white linen fichus crossed over her dusty mourning, looking a mixture of decorum and fallen virtue – like a heroine of the Salpêtrière Prison.

  ‘No matter, Chéri. They’re just in case. And it does make me so happy to see the whole of my little armoury set out in its proper order under my eyes. The arsenal of dreams! the munitions of ecstasy! the gateway to illusion!’

  She nodded her long head and looked up to the ceiling, with the compassionate eyes of a grandmother who ruins herself on toys. Her guest partook of none of her potions. Some sort of physical sense of honour still survived in him, and his disdain for drugs was akin to his distaste for brothels.

  For a number of days – he had kept no count of them – he had found his way to this black hole, presided over by an attendant Norn. Ungraciously, and in terms that brooked no argument, he had paid for her food, coffee, and her own liqueurs, and for his personal requirements in the way of cigarettes, fruit, ice, and soft drinks. He had commanded his slave to buy the sumptuous Japanese robe, scents, and expensive soaps. She was moved less by desire for money than by the pleasure of acting as an accomplice. She devoted herself to Chéri with enthusiasm, a revival of her old zeal as a missionary of vice who, with garrulous and culpable alacrity, would divest and bathe a virgin, cook an opium pellet, and pour out intoxicating spirits or ether. This apostolate was fruitless, for her singular guest brought back no paramour, drank soft drinks only, stretched himself on the dusty divan, and delivered only one word of command: ‘Talk.’

  She did talk, following, she believed,
her own fancies; but, now brutally, now subtly, he would direct the muddied meanderings of her reminiscences. She talked like a sewing-woman who comes in by the day, with the continuous, stupefying monotony of creatures whose days are given over to long and sedentary tasks. But she never did any sewing, for she had the aristocratic unpracticalness of a former prostitute. While talking, she would pin a pleat over a hole or stain, and take up again the business of tarot cards and patience. She would put on gloves to grind coffee bought by the charwoman, and then handle greasy cards without turning a hair.

  She talked, and Chéri listened to her soporific voice and the shuffle of her felted slippers. He reclined at ease, magnificently robed, in the ill-kept lodging. His guardian dared ask no questions. She knew enough: he was a monomaniac, as his abstemiousness proved. The illness for which she was ministering was mysterious; but it was an illness. She risked asking in, as though from a sense of duty, a very pretty young woman, childish and professionally gay. Chéri paid her neither more nor less attention than he would a puppy, and said to the Pal, ‘Are we going to have any more of your fashionable parties?’

  She did not require snubbing a second time, and he never had cause to bind her to secrecy. One day she almost hit upon the simple truth, when she proposed asking in two or three of her friends of the good old days; Léa, for instance. He never batted an eyelid.

  ‘Not a soul. Or I’ll have to hunt out some better hole.’

  A fortnight went by, as funereal in its routine as life in a monastery; but it did not pall on either recluse. During the daytime, the Pal set forth on her old woman’s junketings: poker parties, nips of whisky, and poisonous gossip, hole-and-corner gambling-dens, lunches of ‘regional dishes’ in the stuffy darkness of a Norman or Limousin restaurant. Chéri would arrive with the first shadow of evening, sometimes drenched to the skin. She would recognize the slam of his taxi-door and no longer asked: ‘But why do you never come in your motor?’

  He would leave after midnight, and usually before daybreak. During his prolonged sessions on the Algerian divan, the Pal sometimes saw him drop off to sleep and remain for an instant or two with his neck twisted against his shoulder, as though caught in a snare. She never slept herself till after his departure, having forgotten the need for repose. Only once, in the small hours of the morning, while he was putting back, meticulously and one by one, the contents of his pockets – key on its chain, note-case, little flat revolver, handkerchief, cigarette-case of green gold – did she dare to ask: ‘Doesn’t your wife begin to wonder, when you come in so late?’

  Chéri raised long eyebrows above eyes grown larger from lack of sleep: ‘No. Why? She knows perfectly well I’ve been up to no harm.’

  ‘No child, of course, is easier to manage than you are. . . . Shall you be coming again this evening?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll see. Carry on as if I were coming for certain.’

  Once more he gazed long at all the lily necks, all the blue eyes, that flowered on one wall of his sanctuary, before he went his way, only to return again, faithfully, some twelve hours later.

  By roundabout ways he considered cunning, he would lead the Pal to speak of Léa, then he would clear the narrative of all bawdy asides that might retard it. ‘Skip it. Skip it!’ Barely bothering to enunciate the words, he relied on the initial sibilants to speed up or curtail the monologue. He would listen only to stories without malice in them, and glorifications of a purely descriptive nature. He insisted upon strict respect for documentary truth and checked his chronicler peevishly. He stocked his mind with dates, colours, materials, and places, and the names of dressmakers.

  ‘What’s poplin?’ he fired at her point-blank.

  ‘Poplin’s a mixture of silk and wool, a dry material . . . if you know what I mean; one that doesn’t stick to the skin.’

  ‘Yes. And mohair? You said “of white mohair”.’

  ‘Mohair is a kind of alpaca, but it hangs better, of course. Léa was afraid to wear lawn in the summer: she maintained that it was best for underwear and handkerchiefs. Her own lingerie was fit for a queen, you’ll remember, and in the days when that photograph was taken – yes, that beauty over there with the long legs – they didn’t wear the plain underclothes of today. It was frill upon frill, a foam, a flurry of snow; and the drawers, dear boy! they’d have sent your head whirling. . . . White Chantilly lace at the sides and black Chantilly in between. Can’t you just see the effect? But can you imagine it?’

  ‘Revolting,’ thought Chéri, ‘revolting. Black Chantilly in between. A woman doesn’t wear black Chantilly in between simply to please herself. In front of whose eyes did she wear them? For whom?’

  He could see Léa’s gesture as he entered her bathroom or boudoir – the furtive gesture as she drew her wrap across her body. He could see the chaste self-confidence of her rosy body as she lay naked in the bath, with the water turned to milk by some essence or other. . . . ‘But, for others, she wore drawers of Chantilly lace. . . .’

  He kicked one of the hay-stuffed moquette cushions to the floor.

  ‘Are you too warm, Chéri?’

  ‘No. Let me have another look at that photo . . . the large framed one. Tilt the what’s-its-name of your lamp up a bit . . . a bit more . . . that’s it!’

  Abandoning his usual circumspection, he applied a searching eye to the study of every detail that was new to him, and almost refreshing. ‘A high-waisted belt with cameos! . . . Never saw that about the place. And boots like buskins! Was she wearing tights? No, of course not, her toes are bare. Revolting. . . .’

  ‘At whose house did she wear that costume?’

  ‘I don’t rightly remember. . . . A reception at the club, I believe . . . or at Molier’s.’

  He handed back the frame at arm’s length, to all appearances disdainful and bored. He left shortly afterwards, under an overcast sky, towards the close of a night that smelt of wood smoke and dankness.

  He was deteriorating physically and took no account of it. He was losing weight through eating and sleeping too little, walking and smoking too much, thus bartering his obvious vigour for a lightness, an apparent return to youth, which the light of day repudiated. At home, he lived as he pleased, welcoming or running away from guests and callers. All that they knew of him was his name, his almost petrified good looks fined down little by little under an accusing chisel, and the inconceivable ease with which he would ignore them.

  So he eked out his peaceful and carefully regimented despair until the last days of October. Then, one afternoon, he was seized by a fit of hilarity, because he caught a glimpse of his wife’s unsuspected terror. His whole face lit up with the merriment of a man impervious to all feeling. ‘She thinks I’m mad. What luck!’

  His merriment was short-lived: for, on thinking it over, he came to the conclusion that, where the brute and the madman are concerned, the brute wins every time. She was frightened of the madman; otherwise would she not have stood her ground, biting her lips and forcing back her tears, in order to worst the brute?

  ‘I am no longer even considered wicked,’ he thought bitterly. ‘And that’s because I am no longer wicked. Oh! the harm the woman I left has done to me! Yet others left her, and she left others. . . . How, I wonder, does Bacciocchi exist at the present time? or Septfons, Spéleïeff, and all the rest of them? But what have we got in common, I and the rest of them? She called me “little bourgeois” because I counted the bottles in the cellar. “Little bourgeois”, “faithful heart”, “great lover” – those were her names for me – those were my real names: and, though she watched my departure with tears glistening in her eyes, she is still herself, Léa, who prefers old age to me, who sits in the corner by the fire counting over on her fingers: “I’ve had What’s-his-name, and Thingummy-bob, and Chéri, and So-and-so . . .” I thought she belonged to me alone, and never perceived that I was only one among her lovers. Is there anyone left, now, that I am not ashamed of?’

  Hardened by now to the exercise of impassi
vity, he sought to endure the capricious hauntings of such thoughts with resignation, and to be worthy of the devil by which he was possessed. Proud and dry-eyed, with a lighted match held between steady fingers, he looked sideways at his mother, well aware of her watchful eye. Once his cigarette was alight, with a little encouragement he would have strutted like a peacock in front of an invisible public, and taunted his tormentors with a ‘Good, isn’t it?’ In a confused way, the strength born of his dissimulation and resistance was gathering in his inmost self. He was beginning now to enjoy his extreme state of detachment, and dimly perceived that an emotional storm could be just as valuable and refreshing as a lull, and that in it he might discover the wisdom which never came to him in calmer moods. As a child, Chéri frequently had taken advantage of a genuine fit of temper, by changing it into a peevishness that would bring him what he wanted. Today he was fast approaching the point at which, having attained to a definite state of unhappiness, he could rely on it to settle everything.

  One gusty, wind-swept, September afternoon, with leaves sailing straight across the sky – an afternoon of blue rifts in the clouds and scattered raindrops – Chéri felt an urge to visit his dark retreat and its attendant, garbed in black, with a touch of white on the chest like a scavenging cat. He was feeling buoyant, and avid for confidences, though these would be sickly, like the fruit of the arbutus and as prickly leaved. Words and phrases of special though ill-defined significance kept running in his head: ‘Her monogram embroidered in hair on all her lingerie, dear boy, in golden hairs from her own head . . . faery handicraft! And, did I tell you, her masseuse used to pluck the hairs from the calves of her leg, one by one. . . .’

  He turned round and left the window. He found Charlotte on a chair looking thoughtfully up at him; and in the restless waters of her great eyes he saw the formation of a prodigious, rounded, crystalline, glistening sphere which detached itself from the bronzed pupil, and then vanished, evaporating in the heat of her flushed cheek. Chéri felt flattered and cheered. ‘How kind of her! She’s weeping for me.’