The Collected Stories of Colette (23 page)

Wilson, the second on the scene, enters with a vacant look, hardly awake.

“Listen! Hell! I’d got something to tell you . . . I must have swallowed it on the way.”

She, too, takes off her hat according to established rites, then lifts a fringe of fair hair off her forehead, to disclose an incompletely healed scar.

“You can’t imagine how my head still throbs from it!”

“Serves you right,” interrupts Anita in a dry tone. “If you will go and get half the scenery on your ‘nut,’ and if this happens in a joint where the managers are mean enough to send you home with tuppence worth of ether on a handkerchief—without even paying the cab fare or the doctor’s fee—so that you have to stay put, half dead, for a whole week, and if you haven’t even the self-respect to sue the management, then you do not complain, you just shut up. Now, had it been me!”

Wilson does not reply, too busied—her features distorted by the effort—in trying to detach a long golden hair that is wickedly sticking to her wound. Besides, it is useless to answer back Anita, a born termagant and anarchist, always ready to “sue” or “get the story into the newspapers.”

The three others arrive simultaneously: Régine Tallien, whose plump little housemaid’s figure, abundantly furnished in front and behind, ironically casts her for page-boy parts, or “stylish male impersonations”; Marie Ancona, so dark she really believes herself a genuine Italian; and little Garcin, an obscure supernumerary, rather alarming, who flashes dark glances partly insincere, partly apprehensive, and is as thin as a starved cat.

They don’t bother to pass the time of day, they meet too often. No rivalry exists between them because, with the exception of Maria Ancona, who has a small solo in the tarantella, they all vegetate in chorus routine. Nor is it Maria Ancona’s “part” that little Garcin envies her, but much more the brand-new dyed fox fur around her neck. They are not friends either, yet from being thus thrown together, crowded and almost choked to death in their cribbed cabin, they have developed a sort of animal satisfaction, the cheerfulness of creatures in captivity. Maria Ancona sings as she unfastens her garters, held together by safety pins, and her stays with broken laces. She laughs to find that her slip is torn under the arm, and nettled by Régine Tallien, who wears the embroidered linen and stout cotton corsets of a well-behaved maid-servant, she retorts: “Can’t help it, my dear. I’m an artist by temperament! And d’you suppose I can keep my underwear clean with that horrible tin armor of mine!”

“Then do like me,” whispers sly little Garcin; “don’t wear any, any underslips, I mean.”

She is clothed only in a pair of trellised tights, all gold and pearls, with two openwork metal discs stuck over her non-existent breasts. The rough edges of her jeweled ornaments, the coarsely punched copper pendants, the clinking chain armor she wears, scratch and mark her lean and apparently insensitive bare skin without her even noticing.

“Just admit,” shouts Anita, “that the management ought to provide the slips worn on the stage! But you’re all so thin-skinned, you’re not even capable of claiming your dues!”

She turns a half-made-up face toward her companions, a dead-white mask with bright red goggles, that makes her look like a Polynesian warrior, and without even interrupting her tirade, she ties around her head a filthy silk rag, all that remains of a “wig-kerchief,” intended to protect the hair from the brilliantine on the stage wigs.

“It’s like this tattered duster I’ve got on my nut,” continues Anita. “Yes, yes, go on saying it disgusts you, but I-will-not-change-it! The management owes me one, and this
thing
can jolly well rot on my head, I will not replace it! My dues, that’s all I care about.”

Not one of them is carried away by her anarchic rage, knowing it to be merely verbal, and even little Wilson, wounded as she is, simply shrugs her shoulders.

The hour flies by, the unbreathable dryness of the air is now permeated by a hot dormitory smell. From time to time a dresser squeezes sideways into the room, somehow managing to move about, fastening a hook, tying the strings of stage tights or the ribbons of a Greek buskin. Régine Tallien and Wilson have already fled, halberd in hand, to their medieval parade. Anita hastens behind Maria Ancona, because a voice from the staircase is calling out: “Ladies of the Tarantella, have I to come in person to fetch you?”

Little Garcin, whose asexual graces are kept in store for a “Byzantine Festival,” now remains alone. Out of her sordid handbag she extracts a thimble, a pair of scissors, a piece of needlework already begun, and, perched on her rush-seated stool, she begins to sew with avid concentration.

“Oh!” cries Maria Ancona, returning hot and out of breath. “So she’s already settled down to it!”

“What d’you expect,” jealously echoes Anita, “for all the work she has to do on the stage!”

The sound of a cavalcade on the stairs and a shrill distant bell announce the end of the first act, bringing back Wilson, still slightly dazed and with an aching forehead, and Régine Tallien with her red man-at-arms wig. The daily break for the intermission, instead of bringing relaxation, seems to excite the girls. Off fly bicolored tights and Neapolitan skirts, to be replaced by spongy dressing gowns or cotton kimonos, mottled with the stains of cosmetics. Bare feet, unexpectedly bashful, grope under the makeup table for shapeless old slippers, while hands, pale or red, suddenly become cautious in unrolling lengths of linen and bits of imitation lace. They all inquisitively bend over Maria Ancona’s unfinished “combination,” the cynical little garment of a poor prostitute, outrageously transparent, sewn with broad, clumsy stitches. Little Garcin smocks fine muslin with the patience of a persistent mouse. Régine fills in her time hemming white handkerchiefs.

The five of them, now seated on their high rush stools, are busy and quiet, as if they had at last reached their goal at the end of the day. This half hour is theirs. And during this half hour they allow themselves, as a respite, the candid illusion of being cloistered young women who sew.

They suddenly fall silent, pacified by some unknown spell, and even the rowdy Anita gives no thought to her “dues,” and smiles mysteriously at a tablecloth embroidered in scarlet. In spite of their gaping wraps, of their high-pitched knees, of the insolent rouge still blossoming on their cheeks, they have the chaste attitude and bent backs of sedate seamstresses. And it is from the lips of little Garcin, naked in her beaded-net pants, that a childish little song, keeping time with her busy needle, involuntarily finds its way.

“You see all those people in the char-à-bancs, don’t you?—and those others in four-wheelers?—and again those in taxis? And you see the ones over there, in shirt sleeves on their doorsteps, and those sitting outside the cafés? Very well, then! All that crowd do not have to play in a matinee. D’you hear me?”

“. . . give a damn.”

“But
you
are playing in a matinee!”

“Don’t go on so, Brague!”

“I am playing in a matinee, too. We are playing in a matinee. On Thursdays, and on Sundays too, we have a matinee.”

I could slap him—were it not for the effort of lifting my arm. He continues, relentlessly. “There are also those who are not here, those who decamped to the country yesterday evening and won’t come back to town till Monday. They’re out under the trees, or taking a dip in the Marne. Well, they’re doing what they’re doing, but . . .
they are not appearing in a matinee
!”

As our taxi jerks to an abrupt stop, the dry wind, which had been baking our faces, suddenly drops. I feel the pavement burning through the thin soles of my shoes. My cruel companion stops talking and purses his mouth, as much as to say: “Now it’s becoming serious.”

At the dark and narrow stage door there is still a trace of musty coolness. The doorman, dozing in his chair, wakes up as we pass to brandish a newspaper.

“Ninety-six in the shade, eh!”

He throws this figure at us, in triumph, yet scared, as if it were the death roll in some grand-scale catastrophe. But we pass in silence, sparing of speech and movement, in fact jealous of this old man who keeps watch in a shady paradise, a paradise invaded by stale cellar smells and ammonia, on the threshold of our own inferno. Anyhow, what do ninety-six degrees mean? Ninety-six, or ninety-six thousand, it’s all the same. We have no thermometer up there on our second floor. Ninety-six degrees on the tower of St.-Jacques? And what will it rise to during this afternoon’s matinee? How high will it be in my dressing room, with its two windows, two right royal windows facing due south and shutterless?

“There’s no saying,” sighs Brague, as he enters his cubicle, “we must jolly well be ‘above normal’ up here!”

After a dismal glance, devoid even of entreaty, at the panes set ablaze by the sun, I let my clothes drop off without any relief: my skin can no longer look forward to the biting little draft between door and window that only a month ago nipped my bare shoulders.

A strange silence reigns within our crowded cells. Opposite mine, a half-open door allows me a glimpse of the backs of two seated men, in dirty bathrobes, bending over their makeup table without a word passing. The electric bulb burns above their heads, anemically pink in the radiant light of three o’clock in the afternoon.

A shrill note, a prolonged piercing cry, rises up to us from the depths of the theater. This means that there really is at this very moment down there on the stage a rigidly corsetted woman, swathed in the long, tight-fitting dress so dear to lady novelists, who has achieved the miracle of smiling, singing, and reaching the gods with her high-pitched C, which makes my parched tongue thirst for slices of lemon, for unripe gooseberries, for all things acid, fresh, and green.

What a sigh answers mine from a nearby dressing room, such a tragic sigh, almost a sob! Surely it must come from that chit of a girl barely recovered from a bout of bronchial fever, the fragile little ballad-singer, exhausted by this savage heat, who peps herself up by drinking iced absinthes.

My cold cream is unrecognizable, reduced to a cloudy oil that smells of gasoline. A melted paste, the color of rancid butter, is all that remains of my white grease foundation. The liquefied contents of my rouge jar might well be used “to color,” as cooks say, a dish of
pêches Cardinal
.

For better or worse, here I am at last, anointed with these multicolored fats, and heavily powdered. I still have time, before our mimodrama, to survey a face on which glow, in the sunshine, the mixed hues of purple petunia, begonia, and the afternoon blue of a morning glory. But the energy to move, walk, dance, and mime, where can I hope to find that?

The sun has sunk a little, releasing one of my windows which I hasten to fling open; but the sill burns my hands, and the narrow mews below reeks of rotting melons and unwatered gutters. Two hatless women have pitched their chairs in the middle of the street and stare up at the powdery sky, like animals about to be drowned.

A hesitant step slowly mounts the stairs. I turn around at the moment when a frail little dancer dressed as a Red Indian reaches our landing: she is quite pale despite her makeup, and her temples are black with sweat. We look at each other without uttering a word. Then she lifts toward me the hem of her embroidered costume, weighted down with glass beads, strips of leather, metal, and pearls, and murmurs as she goes back to her dressing room, “And with all these trappings it must weigh eighteen pounds!”

The call bell is the only sound to break the silence. On my way down I pass stagehands, half stripped and mute. Girls of the Andalusian ballet cross the foyer in full costume, without any greeting other than a ferocious glance at the great mirror. Brague, suffering agonies under the black cloth of his short waistcoat and skin-tight Spanish trousers, whistles out of sheer vanity to show that he’s “not going to snuff out like the others!” An enormously fat boy, round as a barrel in his innkeeper’s clothes, looks about to suffocate and terrifies me: supposing he were to die on the stage!

Somehow or other, the mysterious forces of discipline and musical rhythm, together with an arrogant and childish desire to appear handsome, to appear strong, all combine to lead us on. To be truthful, we perform exactly as we always do! The prostrated public, invisible in the darkened auditorium, notices nothing that it should not, the short breaths that parch our lungs, the perspiration that soaks us and stains our silk costumes, the mustache of sweat and drying powder that so tactlessly gives me a virile upper lip. Nor must it notice the exhausted expression on its favorite comic’s face, the wild glint in his eyes as though he were ready to bite. Above all, none must guess at the nervous repulsion that makes me shrink back at touching and feeling only damp hands, arms, cheeks, or necks! Damp sleeves, glued hair, sticky tumblers, handkerchiefs like sponges—everything is moist or ringing wet, myself included.