The Collected Stories of Colette (17 page)

She turns halfway around, hands on her hat, looking lost behind its veil.

“Well no, I couldn’t! With this style of long jacket, the peplum shows under my broadtail coat, and I ask you now, what would that look like?”

“You should have lengthened the broadtail.”

“Thank you! and what next! Max is very chic, and not all that expensive, but still . . .”

“You should have . . . bought a bigger sable . . .”

My friend turns on me, as if about to bite me. “A . . . a bigger sable!!! I’m not Rothschild!”

Me either. Or else . . . wait . . . you should have had a serious coat made of a less expensive fur, that wasn’t sable . . .”

Disentangled from her veil, my friend lets her tired arms fall. “A different fur! There is no truly chic, no truly dressy fur, besides sable . . . A chic woman without sable, seriously, my dear, what must that look like?”

What, in fact, does it look like? I really don’t know. I feel around with my toes, at the foot of the bed, for my hot-water bottle.

The fire crackles and hisses, a shameless country fire, which spits and shoots out little glowing embers.

“Valentine, be a sweetheart and take care of the chores. Pull the tea table up next to the bed. There’s boiling water by the fire; the sandwiches, the wine, everything’s there . . . you won’t have to ring for Francine and I won’t be forced to get up; we’ll be quiet, lazy gluttons. Take off your hat, you can lean your head against the cushions . . . over there.”

She looks sweet without her hat. A little like a hatmaker, a little like a mannequin, but sweet. A beautiful roll of golden hair billows down to her brown eyebrows and holds up a large, flowing wave; above it there is another, smaller wave, and still another above that, and in the back, curls, curls, curls . . . It’s alluring, clean-looking, frothy and neat at the same time, as complicated as a side dish at a wedding feast.

The lamp—I’ve shut the blinds and drawn the curtains—casts a pink wash on my friend’s face, but despite the even, velvety layer of face powder, despite the red lipstick, the drawn features, the stiff smile . . . she leans back against the cushions, with a long sigh of weariness . . .

“Dead?”

“Completely dead.”

“Love . . . ?”

Movement in the shoulders. “Love? Oh, no . . . No time. With all the openings, the dinners, the suppers, driving here and there to lunch, the exhibitions and the teas . . . this is a terrible month!”

“So you get to bed late, huh?”

“Alas . . .”

“Get up late. Or you’ll lose your beauty, my dear.”

She looks at me, astonished. “Get up late? That’s easy for you to say. What about the house? And the orders to give? And the bills to pay? And everything, everything! And the maid who knocks on my door twenty-five times!”

“Unlock the door and say you’re not to be disturbed.”

“But I can’t! Nothing would get done; it would be a disaster, organized theft . . . unlock the door! I can imagine what kind of a face there’d be on the other side, on my fat headwaiter who looks like Jean de Bonnefin . . . Now what would I look like then?”

“I really don’t know . . . Like a woman who’s getting some rest . . .”

“Easy to say . . .” She sighs with a nervous yawn. “You can treat yourselves to it, you people who are . . . who are . . .”

“On the fringes of society . . .”

She laughs with all her heart, suddenly rejuvenated. Then melancholy: “Yes, you can.
We others
aren’t allowed to.”

We others
 . . . The mysterious plural, the strict imposing freemasonry of those whom the world hypnotizes, overworks, and disciplines. An abyss separates this young woman sitting there in her tailored brown suit from this other woman lying on her stomach, her chin resting on her fists. Silently, I savor my enviable inferiority.

To myself, I muse: “
You others
cannot live however you like . . . that is your torment, your pride, and your loss. You have husbands who take you out to supper after the theater—but you also have children and maids dragging you out of bed in the morning. You have supper at the Café de Paris, next to Mademoiselle Xaverine de Choisy, and you leave the restaurant at the same time she does, both of you a little tipsy, a little amorous, your nerves tingling . . . but once home, Mademoiselle de Choisy sleeps if she feels like it, loves if she feels up to it, and as she falls asleep she calls out to her faithful chambermaid: ‘I’m going to sleep until two in the afternoon, and I don’t want anyone bothering me before that or I’ll send you all home for a week!’ Having gotten nine hours of well-deserved rest, Mademoiselle de Choisy wakes refreshed, has her breakfast, and dashes down the rue de la Paix, where she runs into you, Valentine, all you Valentines, you my friend, on your feet since eight-thirty in the morning, already worn out, pale-looking, with dark circles under your eyes . . . And Mademoiselle de Choisy says aside to her fitter: ‘Little Madame Valentine What’s-her-name doesn’t look well at all! She must be keeping late hours!’ And your husband and your lover, at supper later, will also compare
in petto
Mademoiselle de Choisy’s well-rested freshness to your obvious fatigue. You will think, furious and ill-considered: ‘Women like that are made of steel!’ Not at all, my friend! They get more rest than you. What demimondaine could withstand the daily hustle and bustle of certain women of the world or even of certain women with families?”

My young friend has brewed the tea, and is filling the cups with a deft hand. I admire her somewhat deliberate elegance, her precise gestures; I appreciate the fact that she is walking noiselessly as her long skirt both precedes and follows her, in an obedient, moiré stream . . . I appreciate the fact that she confides in me, that she comes back at the risk of compromising her position as a woman with a husband and a lover, for coming back here to see me with an affectionate persistence which verges on heroism.

When she hears the tinkling of the spoons, my gray cat opens her serpent-like eyes.

She is hungry. But she does not get up right away, out of pure cant. To beg, like a plaintive and wheedling Angora, in a minor threnody, bah! What would that look like, as Valentine says. I offer her a burned corner of toast, which crackles between her little teeth made of bluish-white silex, and her pearly purring doubles that of the kettle. For a long moment, a quasi-provincial silence settles on us. My friend is resting, arms at her sides . . .

“You can’t hear a thing,” she whispers cautiously.

I answer with my eyes, without speaking, glowing with warmth and idleness. It feels so nice . . . But wouldn’t it be even nicer if my friend weren’t here? She’s going to start talking, it’s inevitable. She’s going to say, “What must we look like?” It’s not her fault she was raised that way. If she had children, she would forbid them to eat their meat without bread, or to hold their spoon with their left hand: “John, behave yourself! What must you look like?”

Shhh! She isn’t talking. Her eyelids are drooping and her eyes look as if they’re fading away. I have in front of me an almost unknown face, the face of a young woman drunk with drowsiness who falls asleep before her eyelids are closed. The studied smile fades away, the lip pouts, and the little round chin crushes down on the collar of silver embroidery.

She’s sleeping soundly now. When she wakes with a start, she’ll apologize and exclaim: “Falling asleep during a visit, in an armchair! What must that look like?”

My friend Valentine, you look like a young woman left there like a poor but graceful rag. Sleep between me and the fire, to the purring of the cat and the faint rustling of the pages of the book I’m going to read now. No one will come in before you wake up; no one will cry out, staring at your sulky sleep and my unmade bed: “Oh, what must this look like!,” for you might die of chagrin. I am keeping watch over you, with a mild, a kindly pity; I am keeping watch over your vigilant and virtuous concern for what it is we
must
look like . . .

The gray cat is delighted that I am on the stage. Theater or music hall, she shows no preference. What matters is that I disappear every evening, after swallowing down my cutlet, in order to reappear around half past midnight, and that once again we sit ourselves down at the table, in front of a chicken leg or some pink ham . . . Three meals a day instead of two! She no longer thinks of concealing her elation past midnight. Seated on the tablecloth, she smiles without dissimulation, the corners of her mouth turned up, and her eyes, spangled with scintillating sand, fixed wide open and confident on mine. She has waited all night for this precious hour, she savors it with a triumphant and egoistic joy which brings her closer to me.

O cat of ashen coat! To the uninitiated you look like every other gray cat on earth, lazy, oblivious, morose, somewhat listless, neuter, bored . . . but I know you to be wildly tender, and whimsical, jealous to the point of starving yourself, talkative, paradoxically awkward, and, on occasion, as tough as a young mastiff.

Now it is June and I am no longer in
Flesh
and my run in
Claudine
is over. Over, too, our late-night suppers together! Do you miss the quiet hour when, ravenous and somewhat dazed, I used to scratch that flat little skull of yours, the skull of a cruel beast, thinking vaguely, “It went well tonight . . .” Here we are alone, homebodies once again, unsociable, strangers to almost everything, indifferent to almost everyone. We are going to see our friend Valentine again, our “respectable acquaintance,” and listen to her hold forth about a world of people, strange, little known to us, full of pitfalls, duties, prohibitions, a formidable world, or so she says, but so far from me that I can scarcely conceive of it.

During my training in pantomime and acting, my friend Valentine disappeared from my life, discreet, alarmed, modest. This is her polite way of showing her disapproval of my sort of existence. I’m not offended by it. I tell myself that she has a husband in automobiles, a society-painter lover, a salon, weekly teas, and twice-monthly dinners. Can you just see me, performing
Flesh
or
The Faun
at one of Valentine’s soirees or dancing
The Blue Serpent
for her guests? I put up with it. I wait. I know that my more respectable friend will come back, sweet and embarrassed, one of these days. A little or a lot, she cares about me and proves it to me, and that is enough to make me indebted to her.

Here she is. I recognize the short and precise way she rings the bell, the ring of well-bred company.

“At last, Valentine! It’s been such a long time . . .”

Something in her eyes, in her entire face, stops me. I cannot say just how my friend has changed. Is she sick? No, she never looks sick, under the evenly spread, velvety powder and the pink smear on her cheeks. She always has the air of an elegant mannequin, small-waisted, slim-hipped beneath her skirt of pale gold tussore. She has fresh blue-gray-green-brown eyes blossoming between the double fringe of her blackened lashes, and a mass, a beautiful mass of Swedish blond hair . . . What’s wrong? A tarnish on all that, a new fixity in her gaze, a moral discoloration, if I may put it that way, which disconcerts, which stops the banalities of welcome on my lips. Nevertheless, she sits down, turning deftly in her long dress, smoothing out her linen jabot with a pat, and smiles and talks and talks until I undiplomatically interrupt her.

“Valentine, what’s the matter?”

She is not surprised and answers simply: “Nothing. Almost nothing, really. He’s left me.”

“What? Henri . . . your . . . your lover’s left you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Exactly three weeks ago today.”

Her voice is so soft, so cool, that I am reassured.

“Oh! Was it . . . was it painful?”

“No,” she says, with the same softness. “It
was
not; it is.”

Her eyes grow wider and wider, questioning mine with sudden rawness.

“Yes, I’m in pain. Oh, I am! Tell me, is it going to go on like this? How long am I going to suffer? Don’t you know of any way . . . I can’t get used to it . . . What am I going to do?”

The poor child! She is stunned by suffering, she who didn’t believe herself capable of it.

“What about your husband, Valentine . . . he didn’t know anything?”

“No,” she says impatiently, “he didn’t know anything. It’s not a question of that. What can I do? Don’t you have any ideas? For two weeks I’ve been asking myself what I should do.”

“Do you still love him?”

She hesitates: “I don’t know . . . I’m terribly angry with him, because he doesn’t love me anymore and because he’s left me . . . I don’t know. All I know is that this is unbearable, unbearable, this loneliness, this giving up of everything you’ve loved, this emptiness, this . . .”

She has stood up at the word “unbearable” and is walking around the room as if a burn caused her to run off, to find the coolest place . . .