The Collected Stories of Colette (27 page)

The rimless tray spins beneath him, slowly at first, then faster, till it becomes at full speed a polished shimmering disk of watered silk, scored with concentric circles, like ripples when a pebble is dropped in a fountain. Upon its surface the small black figure astride two wheels pits his strength against the unceasing repulsion of the invisible force, and when he begins to falter, each lapse wrings from us one and all a similar strangled gasp.

The whole contraption sweeps around to the muffled roar of its motor; the deadly edges of the turntable crackle with electric sparks, green and red; a siren maintains a shrill, agonizing wail throughout the race.

Despite the spiraling blast that sweeps over the stage, we stay there, all of us, hidden in the wings; mute, competent mechanics in boiler suits; acrobats with their hair greased, their faces the pink of artificial flowers; small-part actresses in hastily flung-on faded kimonos, hair scraped back Chinese fashion under their filthy rubber “makeup bands.” We stay there, all of us, glued to the spot by the hideous excitement of the unspoken query, “Is it today he’ll ride to his death?”

No. It’s all over now. The chromatic keening of the siren is silenced the moment the dizzy speed slackens to a standstill, and the black insect, after battling against odds gripped to the handlebars, alights with an elastic leap onto the now motionless disk.

No, it won’t be today he’ll kill himself. Unless, of course, this evening . . . For today is Sunday, and this is only the first house. Clearly, therefore, he still has time to kill himself at the evening performance.

I would like to get out of this place. But outside, rain is falling, the depressing, black, and desolate rain of the south, which has turned a whole town—white in the sun yesterday the length of its seafront—into a yellow quagmire. Outside this place there is only the rain and the hotel bedroom. Those who travel without respite, those who wander in isolation, those who sit down in a small restaurant at a table laid with a single plate, a single glass, and prop their folded newspaper against the water jug, such persons know the periodic, regular recurrence of fits of mental despair, the disease bred of loneliness.

I would like to get away from here, but for the moment I lack the strength to carry out my wish or to imagine any place that might bring me comfort. To create such a place, or revive it in my memory, to liven it with a beloved face, with flowers, streams, domestic animals, is for the present too great an effort, but it may be granted me a little later, perhaps in an hour’s time. My mental inertia adapts itself to the physical lassitude which holds me here, fainthearted and with sagging legs, querulously repeating to myself, “I would like to get away . . .”

I fear, I expect some unknown tragedy, I am alarmed that the management has assembled here, for the perverse pleasure of an alien audience accustomed to view with indifference the spilling of the dark blood of bulls, so many dangerous or macabre “acts.” A slight fever makes my temples throb—journey fatigue, change of climate, saline humidity?—transmogrifying, perhaps, familiar, almost friendly scenery into the trappings of a romantic nightmare. Tonight my peculiar mood isolates me from my bespangled and needy brethren who bustle about all around me; myself invisible, I watch their act from a sort of elevated quay, around which runs an iron balcony connecting the dressing rooms and overlooking the stage.

A red demon has just this moment sprung from a trapdoor and I can hear the laughs he raises among the distant public by his little pointed red beard and forked eyebrows, indeed by his entire mask, modeled in thick plaster and heavily black-penciled.

But the man has begun his labors as a contortionist, a slow, serpentine dislocation, the unscrewing of each articulation, a double-jointed entanglement of every limb knit into an involved, uncanny pattern, and from up here I can see why it is he hides his features beneath those of a laughable demon: his self-inflicted tortures are such that at times his face refuses to obey him and really does become that of a man condemned to everlasting flames. Will he succumb, like a reptile strangled by its own coils? What is more, he is on my side of the orchestra, and the music fails to drown his frequent moans, the brief involuntary moans of a man being slowly crushed to death.

When at last he goes off and passes, limping, below me, dragging his long body that looks half drained of its strength, I expand my constricted chest, I want to breathe. I trust this is the last of those brief horrors, I long for some insipid flowery ballet . . . but already the rifles are being leveled at their target, an ace of clubs held aloft in the hand of a trusting child.

I cannot endure the sight of this small hand, and in my morbid state I imagine its palm pierced by a red hole. Yet even so I remain, I even approach a little closer, returning to cower behind a stay, fascinated by a flight of navaja blades hurled at lightning speed by a knife thrower. The man seems hardly to move, a flash of blue steel darts from his fist to penetrate, vibrating, a vertical board and is to be seen planted close against the temples of a youth, who wears a fixed smile and never bats an eyelid.

I myself blink as each blade passes, and each time, I lower my head. A scream from the audience, the cry of a frightened woman, finally shatters my nerves, but the youth is still there, and alive, smiling and petrified. Nothing has happened; he is alive, alive! Nothing has happened but the suspension, no doubt, the temporary indecision—for an immeasurably short instant—of whatever was hovering over this theater. A sovereign wing, one that did not deign to descend today, has spared the man on the revolving table, spared the tortured neck of the red demon. It has not chosen to divert from their mark the bullets aimed at the ace of clubs held on high by a frail hand. Yet for a split second, it remained poised, capriciously, above the head of the youthful St. Sebastian, who is smiling, down there, his brow haloed with knives.

Now it has resumed its flight. Will it fly far from us, this Fate whose invisible presence has so painfully oppressed me and left me with so trembling a soul, pusillanimous and greedy for horrors, the soul of a theater addict?

“Well I never! Who’d’ave thought our paths would ever cross again! How long is it now since I last set eyes on you! Why, Marseilles of course, remember? You were on tour with the Pitard Company, and I with the Dubois. We both played the same night. It was up to our group not to be outdone by yours, and vice versa. That didn’t stop us going out to have a bite together that night, shellfish, eh! on the terrace, at Basso’s.

“. . . No, you’ve not changed much, I must say. You’ve looked after number one, all right; you’re lucky! Your digestion’s been your saving, but if you’d got thirteen years of touring in your system, like me, you wouldn’t be looking so nifty!

“Yes, go ahead, you can tell me I’ve changed! At forty-six, it’s a bit hard having to play duenna parts, when there are so many skittish youngsters of fifty and sixty to be seen footling about in juvenile leads on the Grands Boulevards, who’ll throw up their parts, as likely as not, if there’s a brat of over twelve in the cast! It was Saigon knocked me out, and long before my time too. I sang in operetta at Saigon, I did, in a theater lit by eight hundred oil lamps!

“. . . And what else? Well, apart from that, there’s not much to tell. I go on ‘touring,’ like so many others. I keep saying I’ve had enough of it, and this’ll be the last time I’ll do it; I go on saying to all who’ll listen that I’d rather be a theater attendant or travel in perfumery. So what? Here I am back again with Pitard, and you’re back with Pitard too. We came back to find work, and it’s noses to the grindstone once again.

“. . . I don’t need you to tell me that prices have dropped all around. If it got about what I’m working for this time, my reputation would be gone. It really seems as if they think we don’t need to eat when on tour.

“Not to mention that I’ve got my sister with me, you know. It may make two on the payroll but it means two mouths to feed. Oh, she’s taken to the life right enough, the poor kid; she’s got guts! More guts than health, if you ask me! She’ll tackle any part. Take the time when we had a fifty-day contract with the Miral Touring Company, in a mixed bill of three plays nightly: the child took the part of the maid who lays the table in the first—ten lines; then an old peasant woman who tells everyone a few home truths—two hundred lines; and to end up, a girl of seventeen married off against her will who never stops crying throughout. Just think of the poor thing having to cope with all those changes of makeup!

“And for starvation fees, too, I’ll have you know! On top of that we had the doctor’s and chemist’s bills to pay—it was the winter my bronchitis was so bad—not to mention the nurse’s charge for cupping, thirty-seven francs’ worth! I went on rehearsing with forty cups on my back and so hid the fact I was suffering. When I was seized by a fit of coughing, I rushed off to the lav, otherwise they’d have replaced me within the hour, you bet!

“I was able to get away, but doctors and their drugs had ruined me in advance. It was then the child began to knit woolen garments, you know, those loose coatees that are fashionable just now, with a little woolen jumper to match. She works when we’re traveling, on the train; she’s got the knack of it. When we’re in for a journey, eight or nine hours by rail, she’ll reel off a coatee in four days and post it off at once to a firm in Paris.

“. . . Yes, yes, I know, you’ve got the music hall to keep you going. There’s still a living to be made in the halls; but what d’you suppose there’s left for me? They’ll bury my bones on one of these tours, and believe me, I’m not the only one . . . Oh, I’m not trying to plead constant illness, you know. I still have my good moments; I was happy-go-lucky enough when young! If only my liver let me alone for three weeks, or if my cough left off for a fortnight, or the blessed varicose veins didn’t make my left leg weigh so heavy, then I’d be my old self again!

“If, granted that, I chanced on a few good companions, not too mangy a lot, but sporty, who don’t spend their lives harping on their woes and retailing their maladies and confinements, then I promise you I’d soon get my fair share of fun again.

“Provided, of course, I’m not laid out like Marizot . . . didn’t you know? It wasn’t in the papers, but the story might have come your way. We were . . . now, where were we? . . . in Belgium, in pouring rain. We’d just finished a passable dinner, that is, my sister and I, Marizot and Jacquard. Marizot goes out first, while we stay behind to settle the bill. You know how shortsighted he is. He misses his way, and off he goes down a dark narrow street, and there at the end was a stream, a river, I don’t know, the Scheldt, or something: to be brief, he falls into the water and gets carried away. They only found him two days later. It all happened so quick that the first night after, we hadn’t even begun to feel sad, believe me! It wasn’t till the next night, when the undermanager played Marizot’s part, that we all began to get weepy and cried on the stage . . .

“Anyhow, people don’t drown every day, thank God! We did find some consolation at the time of the railway strike. Yes, and it played us a most unusual trick. Listen to this: we ended up the tour with
Fiasco
—the devil of a title—and the night before we’d played it in Rouen. When we reach Mantes, the train stops. ‘All change! Everyone to leave the train! We go no farther!’ The strike was on! Off I went to have a good moan. I had acute liver trouble, rheumatism in my left leg, a high temperature, the whole boiling. I sat down on a bench in the waiting room, saying to myself, ‘After a knock like this nothing will get me to budge again, my luck’s right out, I’d rather die on the spot!’ Jacquard was there, same as ever, with his big overcoat and his pipe, and he comes up to me and says, ‘Why don’t you just go home. You’d better take the Pigalle-Halle-aux-vins bus, which drops you on your doorstep.’

“‘Oh, leave me in peace!’ I give him for answer. ‘Have you no heart at all? Here we are, stuck for Lord knows how long by this filthy strike? D’you think I get much fun out of spending my miserable salary on drugs and digs, eh! I’d like you to be standing in my shoes and then see what you’d do in my place!’

“‘In your place?’ he says. ‘In your place I’d take the Pigalle-Halle-aux-vins bus.’

“I could have cried with rage, dearie. I could have struck him, that Jacquard, with his pipe and his wooden mug! I flayed him alive with my tongue! When I’m finished, he takes me by the arm and forcibly leads me to the glass door. And what d’you suppose I see in the station-yard?
Pigalle-Halle-aux-vins
, dearie!
Pigalle
, in so many words! Three Pigalle buses, which had been used to bring along another troupe that very morning! And there they were, having a soft drink, right in front of that station at Mantes!

“I started to giggle, not but what my liver was killing me, and on I giggled till I thought I never would stop. And the best of it was that we went back to Paris in
Pigalle-Halle-aux-vins
, dearie, by the special authority of the subprefect. It cost us a bit more than two and a half francs, but what a time we all had! Jacquard and Marval sat on the top deck and threw down sausage skins to us inside, and you should have seen the faces of the ‘bystanders’! That alone was worth the whole trip!