The Collected Stories of Colette (26 page)

For the time being she takes a rest on her feet, like a saleswoman in a big store, and keeps worrying a recent hole in her flesh-tinted tights with her big toe. “Five francs for invisible mending!”

One hand absentmindedly smoothes the creases in the hem of her babyish satin frock, once Nile green, now yellow. “Dry cleaning, ten francs. Hell, that eats up my night’s earnings! If only that tipsy little lady would come back, the one who was here the night of the masked ball, and threw me the change from her bill!”

A violinist in an embroidered Rumanian shirt plays “You Once Vowed to Be Mine” with such amorous intensity that he is smothered in encores.

“So much the better,” she says to herself once more. “How I wish he’d play all night long, for then I’d be living on unearned income!”

Her fond hopes are dashed. A wink from the manager orders her to waltz, clinging to the shoulders of a sham toreador, thin and willowy and far too tall for her. Maud is so tired by this time that she waltzes without being aware of it, hanging on to the youth, who clasps her to him with professional, almost indecent unconcern. Everything swirls about her. The head of a hatpin, the clasp of a necklace, the setting of a ring, pierce her eyes as she dances around. The polished floor glides under her feet, glistening, soapy, as if wet.

“If I go on waltzing for very long tonight,” she muses in a daze, “I’ll end up without a thought in my head.”

She shuts her eyes and abandons herself to her partner’s insensitive breast, throwing herself into the whirl with the trustful semiconsciousness of a child ready to drown. But the music stops suddenly, and the toreador lets his charge drop without a glance, without a word, like flotsam, on the nearest table.

Maud smiles, passes a hand across her forehead, and looks around. “Ah, there’s my ‘sympathetic couple.’” For every night she picks out among those supping at the Good Hostess a couple who catch her fancy—in all innocence—and on whom she lavishes her most childish smiles, occasionally blowing them a kiss, or throwing them a flower; a couple whose departure brings her a short pang of regret, when she watches the woman rise to go with the air of regal boredom befitting one who knows she is being followed by an enamored escort.

“How sweet they are this evening, my sympathetic couple!”

Sweet . . . in a way. Maud chooses to see things in that way. A restless, vindictive desire seems to possess the man, who is very young and can barely conceal his impatience. His eyes are bright and shifty, and so constantly changing in color that they turn pale more often than his tanned face. He eats hurriedly, as if he had a train to catch. When his glance catches his companion’s, he throws his head back as if a bunch of too-fragrant flowers had touched his nostrils.

She had arrived looking happy and self-assured, stimulated by the cold outside and a hearty appetite. She had clasped her hands under her chin and then asked the violinist in the embroidered shirt to play waltzes, more waltzes, and still more waltzes. He played for her “You Once Vowed to Be Mine” . . . “Now You Will Never Know!” . . . “Your Heart Was Cruel.”

“Oh, how I adore that music!” she had sighed aloud.

She had smiled at Maud as she whirled past. And then she had fallen silent, gazing intently at her companion. “Leave me alone,” she told him, pulling away the hand he was stroking.

“They’re sweet, but they seem to quarrel without a word passing,” Maud observes. “They may be in love, but they’re not true friends.”

Now the woman is leaning back in her chair, never taking her eyes off the ferocious eater facing her. Maud is fascinated by the woman’s slender, feverish face, as though something were soon about to happen. The manager clacks his tongue to no purpose, in his attempt to recall the little dancer to her duty; Maud lingers on, bound by some mysterious telepathy to the woman who sits there, speechless, separated from her friend by gulfs of music, drifting farther from him, perhaps, at every throbbing note of the violin, with despairing clairvoyance.

“They love each other, but they’re ill at ease in each other’s company.” Such devotion wells up in the woman’s dark glances, yet she remains obstinately silent as though fearful of bursting into tears or unburdening her heart in a flood of banal complaints. Her eyes are beautiful, eloquent, and frightened, and seem to be telling the man: “You’re a clumsy lover . . . You don’t begin to understand me . . . I don’t really know you, and you scare me . . . You sneer at everything I like . . . You lie so well! . . . You possess me completely, yet I can’t trust you . . . If you knew what limpid springs you wall up within me because I fear you! ‘What am I doing here at your side? Would that this music could free me of you forever! Or else that this violin would stop before I find out any more about you! You yearn for my undoing, not my happiness, and what is worst in me assures you of your victory.”

Maud sighs, “Oh, what an ill-assorted pair they are this evening! She ought to leave him, but . . .”

“Come along,” the man murmurs as he stands up.

His companion rises to her feet, tall, black, and glittering, like an obedient serpent, under the threat of his two bright eyes, so caressing, so treacherous. Defenseless, she follows him, with no support other than the sisterly smile of a little blond dancer, who inwardly regrets the exit of her “sympathetic couple” and whose pout seems to indicate a reproachful “Already?”

From my dressing room I could hear, every night, the tap-tap of heavy crutches on the iron steps leading up to the stage.

Yet there was no “Cripple’s Number” on our program. I used to open my door to watch the midget pony climbing the stairs on its nimble unshod feet. The white donkey followed, clip-clopping behind, then the piebald Great Dane on its thick soft paws, then the beige poodle and the fox terriers.

Bringing up the rear, the plump Viennese lady in charge of the “Miniature Circus” would herself supervise the ascent of the tiny brown bear, always reluctant and somehow desperate, clutching at the banisters and moaning as he mounted, like a punished child being sent up to bed. Two monkeys followed, in flounced silk sprinkled with sequins, smelling like an ill-kept chicken run. All of them climbed with stifled sighs, subdued groans, and inaudible expletives; they were on their way up to wait their daily hour’s work.

I never again wished to see them up there, under full control and tame; the sight of their submissiveness had become intolerable to me. I knew too well that the martingaled pony tried in vain to toss its head and constantly pawed with one of its front legs, in a sort of ataxic jerk. I knew that the ailing, melancholic monkey would close its eyes and let its head rest in childish despair on its companion’s shoulder; that the stupid Great Dane would stare into vacancy, gloomy and rigid, while the old poodle would wag its tail with senile benevolence; above all, I knew that the pathetic little brown bear would seize its head in both paws, whimpering and almost in tears, because a very narrow strap fastened around its muzzle cut into its lip.

I should have liked to forget the entire misery-stricken group, in their white leather harness hung with jingle bells and adorned with ribbons and bows, forget their slavering jaws, the rasping breath of these starved animals; I never again wanted to witness, and pity, this dumb animal distress I could do nothing to alleviate. So I remained down below, with Lola.

Lola did not come to visit me straightaway. She waited until the sounds of the laborious ascent had died away, till the last fox terrier had whisked its rump, white as a rabbit’s scut, around the angle of the stairs. Only then did she push my half-open door with her long insinuating nose.

She was so white that her presence lit up my sordid dressing room. A slim, elongated greyhound body, white as snow; her neck, her leg joints, her flanks and tail, bristled with fine silver; her fleecy coat shone like spun glass. She walked in and looked up at me with eyes of orange melting into brown, a color so rare that it alone was enough to touch my heart. Her tongue hung out a little, pink and dry, and she panted gently from thirst . . . “Give me a drink. Give me a drink, though I know it’s forbidden. My companions up there are thirsty too, none of us is allowed to drink before working time. But you’ll give me a drink.”

She lapped up the lukewarm water I poured into an enameled basin I had first rinsed out for her. She lapped it with an elegance that appeared, as did all her movements, to be an affectation, and in front of her, I felt ashamed of the chipped rim of the basin, of the dented jug, of the greasy walls she took good care to avoid.

While she drank I looked at her little winglike ears, at her legs, slender and firm as a hind’s; at her fleshless ribs and beautiful nails, white as her coat.

Her thirst quenched, she turned away her coy tapering muzzle from the basin, and for a little while longer gazed at me with a look in which I could read nothing but vague anxiety, a sort of wild animal prayer. After that she went up by herself to the stage, where her performance was limited, it must be added, to an honorary appearance, to jumping a few obstacles which she took with accomplished grace, with a lazy, concealed strength. The footlights heightened the gold in her eyes, and she answered each crack of the whip with a nervous grimace, a menacing smile which disclosed the pink of her gums and her faultless teeth.

For nearly a month she begged no more of me than lukewarm, insipid water from a chipped basin. Every evening I used to say to her, but not in words, “Take it, though I am pining to give you all that is your due. For you have recognized me and deemed me worthy of quenching your thirst, you, who speak to no one, not even to the Viennese lady whose podgy, masterful hands fasten a blue collar around your serpent neck.”

On the twenty-ninth day, sorrowfully, I kissed her flat silky forehead, and on the thirtieth . . . I bought her.

“Beautiful, but not a brain in her head,” the Viennese lady confided to me. By way of a farewell, she chirped a few Austro-Hungarian endearments into Lola’s ear, while the bitch stood beside me, serious, gazing straight in front of her, a hard look on her face, and squinting slightly. Whereupon I picked up her dangling leash and walked away, and the long brittle spindles, armed with ivory claws, fell into step behind me.

She escorted rather than followed me, and I held her chain high, so as not to inflict its weight on my captive princess. Would the ransom I had paid for her make her really mine?

Lola did not eat that day, and refused to drink the fresh water I offered her in a white bowl bought specially for her. But she languidly turned her undulating neck, her delicate feverish nose, toward the old chipped basin. Out of this she consented to drink, and then looked up at me with her luminous eyes, sparkling with gold like some dazzling liqueur.

“I am not a fettered princess, but a bitch, a genuine bitch, with an honest bitch’s heart. I’m not responsible for my too conspicuous beauty, which has aroused your possessive instincts. Is that the sole reason for your buying me? Is it for my silver coat, my prow-shaped chest, the curved arc of my body which seems to drink in the air, my taut brittle bones barely covered by my light sparse flesh? My gait delights you, and also the harmonious leap in which I appear both to jump over and crown an invisible portico, and you call me chained princess, chimera, lovely serpent, fairy steed . . . Yet here you stand dumbfounded! I am only a bitch, with the heart of bitch, proud, ill with suppressed tenderness and trembling for fear I may give myself too quickly. Yes, I am trembling, because you now have me, past redemption, forever, in exchange for those few drops of water poured by your hand, every night, into the bottom of a chipped basin.”

Is it today he’ll kill himself?

There he goes, bunched on his bicycle, back humped like a snail, nose between his knees, swaying as he pedals on the revolving platform, struggling as though in the teeth of a gale, against its centrifugal force.