The Collected Stories of Colette (10 page)

My Dear Valentine,

I received your postcard. I was able to make out—from the few lines covering the view of the Lac du Bourget like a network of fine hairs—what faithful friendliness and affectionate concern there is in it.

We parted somewhat coolly, and you write to me, circumspect: “Abominable weather, impossible excursions, we’re thinking of going back home . . . And what about you, what are you doing?”

That’s enough; it’s not hard to translate: “I’m afraid I’ve made you very angry . . . Don’t forget me, don’t hold it against me; we don’t share two ideas in common, but I’m very fond of you, I don’t know why; I like you just as you are, with all your faults. I’m upset about you: put my mind at ease.”

Don’t blush, my friend Valentine—it’ll make your face powder cake!—and understand right away that I am still your friend.

I’ve followed your travels in the newspapers.
Figaro
assured me of your presence in Trouville, and I don’t know which fashionable women’s paper it was that depicted you in the most surprising terms: you were attributed with an “impeccable navy-blue Louis XV suit, with a twisted Guayaquil pompadour . . .” A twisted Guayaquil pompadour! Really! As a friend by the name of Claudine used to say to me, “I don’t know what it is, but it must be beautiful!”

Because I’m living in a desert of golden sand—sixty square kilometers of beach, without a single strand of greenery, without one bald pebble—I am surprised, honestly, that there still are ladies who wear hats, tight-fitting dresses, boned collars, long corsets, and perilously high heels. How can I admit to you that, for the season, I have put away my dresses and shoes, and that beneath the indifferent and calloused soles of my feet I walk on the varnished seaweed, the sharp-edged shells, and the gray, salty furze that breaks through the sand? How dare I paint myself to you, dark as I am, my nose peeling a little from too much sun, my arms gloved in a deep shade of reddish brown? Thank God, the gulls and the delightful curlews are the only ones frightened by my riding outfit: knickers which at one time were blue, and a coarse knitted jersey. Add to that blue cycling stockings, rubber shoes, a soft cap, and the whole thing perched on top of a big nag of a bay horse—and you’ll haye a little equestrian group you wouldn’t want to run into in the Bois de Boulogne.

At least let me congratulate you!
Femina
prints a picture of you, in your tennis clothes, among those of the “best rackets” in Deauville . . . this Joan of Arc cuirass of white serge, which cuts across the pleated skirt at mid-thigh, is charming. You look like a little warrior in it, not the least bit athletic, but so endearing!

You see, we’re not angry with each other at all. You’re so unbearable, Valentine my friend! And I’m so impossible! I can still see us, very dignified, exchanging courteous and theatrical goodbyes. You had asked me what I was doing this summer and I’d answered, “Well . . . first of all I’m going to do ‘Flesh’ in Marseille.” To which you said, “Again!”

Me: “What do you mean ‘again’?”

You: “That horrid thing again!”

Me: “It’s not horrid, it’s a ‘sensational mime-drama’!”

You: “It’s perfectly horrid! Isn’t that the one where you tear off your dress and appear . . .”

Me: “Undressed, precisely.”

You: “And it doesn’t matter to you?”

Me: “What do you mean, ‘it’?”

You: “To show yourself off in public in an outfit, in a costume . . . well . . . It’s beyond me! When I think that you stand there, in front of the whole world . . . oh . . . !”

Seized by an irresistible shudder of modesty, you covered your face with your hands and your whole body cringed, so that your dress, clinging to you, outlined you for an instant worse than naked: your little breasts crushed by the maillot corset, your stomach elongated and flat, ending in a mysterious fold, your round thighs pressed together, your delicate knees, bent slightly, every detail of your graceful body appeared to me so clearly beneath the crepe de Chine that it embarrassed me.

But you were already uncovering your incensed eyes.

“I have never seen . . . recklessness like yours, Colette!”

To which I responded, with witless rudeness, “My dear, you bore me. You’re neither my mother nor my lover: therefore . . .”

An exasperated sigh, a stiff handshake, that’s all there was to our goodbye. Now, alone, I laugh to myself when I think of your special modesty, which shelters a slight body beneath vast, high hats, a body whose every step reveals, underneath a short, tight tunic, the movement of the hips, the protruding and rolling of the tight buttocks, and even the pink and amber color of your arms, shoulders, and back beneath the lace of the sleeves and the bodice. I’d really like to give you a good dressing down . . . you who—not content to appear in the light of day in this getup that a little Tanagra nymph would have found just barely adequate—come out of the water at Trouville with your nipples showing under your tight silk bathing suit glistening like a wet fish . . .

There’s one thing, Valentine my friend, that you will never teach me, and that is that the skin on my lower back or my hips can be more tempting and more secret than the skin on my hand or my calf, and it’s this “recklessness,” as you call it, this savage serenity, which makes all your indignation, your whole display of petty—do I dare say—local virtue, of your modesty by the square centimeter, pointless.

Do you remember the legal proceedings, still notorious, against nudity in the music hall? One little walk-on was cruelly upset at the time. She was playing two roles in a year-end review: in one she appeared nude, chaste, and silent, motionless on a cardboard cloud, with a bow in her hand. Two tableaux later, she came back onstage with “Feminine Undergarments,” dressed in a lace teddy and a pair of half hose: her naked little knees would quiver, as she sang a little song with indistinct words, and the flowers of her breasts would show mauve beneath the sheer linen. She looked sweet in it, slightly ridiculous, and perfectly indecent; well, one of her roles was cut: you understand that that meant she gave up the bow of Artemis and kept her sheer lace.

Does that seem perfectly natural to you? I was sure it did.

O infernal little woman! There are still moments when I am weak enough to want to make you understand me, to grab that hard little head of yours by its golden hair—real or false—and give it a good hard knock, to shake loose all its prejudices, all the bits and pieces of ideas, the debris of principles which, all together, make such an immoral fuss inside it.

Yes, immoral, you little dolt! Immoral, you ninny! Immoral, you nitwit! (And I’m still using polite language!) I don’t care about your wide eyes and gaping mouth. You will never know all the bad things I think of you, you who look at me because I broke off with my husband, as though I had contracted an embarrassing disease, hard to hide and hard to admit. You will laugh, as though it were an easy paradox, if I try to explain to you that the married state appears preposterous and quite abnormal to me, you who have a husband—a husband in automobiles!—and who forget, when you’re in his arms, about infidelity and the flight of a first lover . . .

Haven’t you ever thought long and hard about that man, your husband? Don’t answer me wittily and evasively: “Yes, since I started cheating on him!” Remember back, without laughing, to the time when you didn’t cheat on him. Wasn’t there a day in your life when, faithful, loving, even in love, you suddenly looked at him and shrank back in astonishment: “What is this man doing in my house with me? Why, in fact, am I living with this man here in my bedroom? I married him, fine! I’ve gone to bed with him, fine!—all that doesn’t change the fact that this is
a man
, a man like any other, who is here in my bedroom, in my bed, in my life. He comes in, into my bathroom, after asking, ‘Am I bothering you, darling?’ I reply, ‘No, my love!’ but that doesn’t change the fact that
this man
is here, in my bedroom, and that his face, the shape of his back, the way he strokes his mustache, suddenly strike me as strange, shocking, out of place . . . All my life, then, I’ll live like this
with a man
, who will have the right to see how awful I look in the morning, to walk in on me while I’m drinking my laxative tisane, who’ll ask about awkward dates in my little lady’s calendar, and walk around in his shorts in my bathroom! There he is in my life, for the rest of my life! Why? The fact is, I don’t know why. I love him . . . but that’s another matter. Love has nothing to do with living together—on the contrary, most of the time it dies from it.”

Admit it, my friend: it is simply not possible that your married state has not appeared to you—for an hour, for an instant—in all its ludicrous crudeness! And who’s to say that your husband, in his modesty, hasn’t suffered from it too, with a man’s modesty which is nearly always more delicate, more sincere than ours? I mean your husband, my husband, the husbands of all these ladies . . . One morning he’ll wake up in a sullen mood, absorbed in his thoughts, hardly saying a word, eyes downcast. To your concerned “What’s the matter, darling?,” he’ll reply, “Nothing . . . a little migraine . . .” And after swallowing the headache powder offered by your affectionate hand, he’ll remain silent, with the look of a man to whom something has happened.

What has happened to him is the same thing that has happened to you! He doesn’t recognize you. He steals glances at you, over his newspaper, stunned and revolted, to discover you suddenly, to examine, with a cold and lucid eye,
this woman
who is there in his home, who sings as she pushes the tortoiseshell hairpins into her chignon, rings for the maid, gives orders, makes decisions, arranges things . . . I swear to you, my friend, that in these fugitive moments there are looks, from lover to mistress, from wife to husband, which are frightening . . .

I remember a delightful remark my mother made one day, as she was being upbraided by my father.

“I forbid you,” she said, “to speak to me that way: you’re not even related to me!”

My childish ears remembered this singular remark and I have thought about it often since.

At this moment, you little pest, you’re quite capable of reading this with a pretty, wicked little smile which means: “You can understand why she bad-mouths marriage, she who . . .” I who
what?
I who never had any reason to congratulate myself for it? What of it! I won’t let you sidestep the question in a ladylike way. I will quote for you, as I remember it, the little sermon my mother gave me the night before I married the man I loved, and who loved me.

“So, my poor little
toutou
, you’re going to go away and leave me? You’re going away, and with who?”

“But, Mama, with the man I love!”

“I know perfectly well that you love him, and that’s not the worst part of this whole business. Believe me, it would be much better if you loved him less. And afterward?”

“Afterward? Well, that’s all!”

“That’s all. A lot of good it’ll do you! What I see most clearly is that you’re going off with some man, and I don’t find that very pretty, my daughter going off with some man.”

“But, Mama, he’ll be my husband!”

“Him being your husband doesn’t mean a thing to me. I myself have had two husbands and I’m none the prouder for it . . . A man whom you don’t even know!”

“Oh, but I do, Mama, I do know him!”

“You do not know him, you silly little thing, because you love him! You are going to go away, all alone, with a man, and we’ll watch you leave, your brothers and I, with long, sad faces. It’s disgusting that things like this are allowed.”

“Oh really, Mama, you’re extraordinary! What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you want, naturally. But it’s not right. The whole thing’s set up so badly. Look at it for a minute! He tells you he loves you, and since you love him too, there you are in his arms, ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. But let him tell you all of a sudden, ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ and he looks different to you! You discover he has the short nose of people who lack judgment and balance, the short, thick neck of those who kill in a fit of anger, the subtle and seductive voice of a liar, the weak and sensual chin of a woman . . . My darling little
toutou
, don’t cry! I’m just an old killjoy. What can I do? I always say outrageous things, but the truth is that you’d have to marry your own brother if you wanted to marry with full knowledge of the facts, and even then! All this strange blood that comes into a family, and makes you look at your own son and say, ‘Where does he get those eyes, and that forehead, and his wild fits of anger, and his talent for lying?’ Ah, my poor darling
toutou
, I’m not trying to explain, or to make the world over, as they say, but the whole thing’s set up so badly!”

Forgive me, my friend. I’m letting myself get carried away by memories which might be lacking in happiness. I’m not trying to change what exists any more than my charming, crazy mother. Solitude, an intoxicating sense of freedom, and the absence of corsets has, as you can see, quickly turned me into a preacher of the worst sort. I only wanted to moralize a little, in my turn, purely as a tease.

And I bring to the game a lamentable conviction. It seems as if I can see, ten years or so from now, an old, dried-up, quibbling Colette, with hair like a Russian schoolgirl, in a reformist dress, who’ll go into the towns advocating free love, proud loneliness, and
patatipatata
, and a whole pile of nonsense! Brrrr! But what demon shows me the image, still more terrible, of a forty-year-old Colette, burning with a new love, ripe and soft beneath her makeup, combative and desperate? With both arms outstretched I push both phantoms away from me, and I look for a sheltered narrow path between the two of them, where a friendly hand guides me.

Goodbye, my dear Valentine. I am afraid you won’t like this letter. We will never understand one another, my friend. And I hope each of us will search, all our lives, for the other, with aggressive, unselfish tenderness. You no longer hope to “bring me back to the fold”; I don’t count on ever converting you. It provides our conversations with an artificial and inoffensive warmth, which gives us comfort and no illusions.