The Collected Stories of Colette (30 page)

“. . . ?”

“Yes, he was mine, that little boy you saw yesterday. When he comes out from his nursery school, Madame Barucchi is kind enough to let me have him here, so that I don’t have to fret about what’s become of him. He’s sweet. He watches all these ladies here at their lesson, he’s learned a few steps already. He’s an observant child.”

“. . .”

“Yes, I know. I’m always being told that I’m doing an old woman’s job and that I can well afford the time to wait until I’m gray-haired before settling down as an accompanist, but I’d rather stick where I am. And then I’ve already suffered a good many hard knocks in my life, so all I ask is to be left to sit quietly on my piano stool . . . You’re looking at the time? Be patient for a little longer! Madame Barucchi can’t be long now. I know you’re wasting precious minutes, whereas I’m earning my income, at the moment, by twiddling my thumbs. That doesn’t happen to me very often!”

“. . . ?”

“Because I’m paid by the hour. Two francs fifty.”

“. . . !”

“You don’t think that a lot? But just consider, Madame, everyone plays the piano, there’s a neighbor of mine who gives lessons in town at a franc a time: out of that she has to pay her bus fare, plus the wear and tear of her shoe leather and umbrella. And here am I under cover all day, and warm, even too warm: the studio stove sometimes makes me feel dizzy. But then I have the satisfaction of being among artistes; that makes up for a lot.”

“. . . ?”

“No, I’ve never been on the stage. I was a model once, before I had my little boy. That left me with certain tastes, certain habits. I could never again live a common or garden life. There was a moment, three years ago, when Madame Barucchi advised me to try the music hall, as a dancer . . . ‘But,’ I said to her, ‘I don’t know how to dance.’—‘That makes no difference,’ she answered, ‘you could go on as a “dancer in the nude”: then you wouldn’t tire yourself out by dancing.’ I had no wish to do that.”

“. . . ?”

“Oh, that wasn’t the only reason. A dancer in the nude, as the saying goes, displays no more than any of the others. A dancer in the nude always means something in the Egyptian style, and that entails a good ten pounds’ weight of beaten-metal straps and belts and ornaments, beaded latticework on the legs, necklaces from here to there, and no end of veils. No, it wasn’t merely the question of decency that made me decline. It’s my nature to stay in my corner and watch the others.

“People are passing through here all day long, not only the ladies of the music hall, but actresses, real stage actresses, who play in the boulevard theaters, especially now that there is so much dancing in straight plays. I must admit they are like fish out of water at the start. They’re not accustomed to taking their clothes off for their lesson. They arrive wearing the latest fashion models, they begin by lifting up their dress and fastening it with safety pins, then they become exasperated, the heat mounts higher, they unhook their collar, and then they get rid of their skirt and next thing it’s the blouse . . . Finally, their stays come off, hairpins start falling out and some of their hair, too, on occasion, and their face powder turns moist. At the end of an hour’s work you would be in fits to see, in the place of a smart lady, an ordinary little woman, running with sweat, who pants and rages, swears a little, dabs her cheeks with a handkerchief, and doesn’t care a button if her nose is shining: in fact, just an ordinary woman! There’s no malice in what I’ve been saying, believe me, but it does amuse me. I enjoy my little observations.”

“. . . ?”

“Oh, certainly not, it gives me no wish to exchange my lot for theirs. The mere thought of such a thing makes me feel tired. Dancing lessons apart, they still go rushing around outside, at least that’s how I see it. You should hear them retailing their grievances. ‘Oh, heavens above, I have to be at such and such a place at five, and at my masseuse’s at five-thirty, then back home for an appointment at six! Then there’s my three stage dresses to try on! Oh, heavens above, I’ll never get through it all!’

“It’s terrifying. I have to close my eyes, they make me feel sleepy. The other day, for example, Madame Dorziat—yes, Madame Dorziat, in person—very kindly said to Madame Barucchi, referring to me, ‘That poor girl, who’s been grinding away at my dance music for the last hour and a quarter, I shouldn’t care to be in her place!’ My place, my place, why, it’s the one that suits me best! All I ask is to be left alone in it. I fooled about a bit in my younger days, and I’ve been well punished for it! But it’s left me apprehensive. The more I see of the way others fling themselves into the swirl of life, the more I want to remain seated. For here I see little else but the fuss and bother in which people become involved. Bright lights, spangles, costumes, painted faces, smiles, that spectacular sort of life is not for me. I see nothing but careers, sweat, skins that are yellow by the light of day, and despondency . . . I’m not much good at expressing myself, but those are the lines along which my mind works. It seems as though I were the only person with a working knowledge of the sidelights that others view from the front of the stage.”

“. . . ?”

“Get married, me? Oh, no, I should be afraid, now. As I was saying, it’s left me apprehensive. No, no, things are all right as they are, I wish to remain just as I am. Just as I am, with my little boy clinging to my skirts, both of us well sheltered behind my piano.”

Watchdogs, in a kennel with its back turned to the west wind, are better housed. She has her lair, from eight in the evening till midnight, and from two till five for matinees, in a damp recess under the stairs leading down to the artistes’ dressing rooms, and the battered little deal pay desk is her sole protection against the brutal draft directed at her whenever the constantly opened and shut iron door swings back into place. Alternate hot and cold gusts, from the radiator on one side and the stairs on the other, slightly ruffle the curls around her head and her little knitted tippet, whose every stitch carries an imitation jet bead.

For the past twenty-four years she has been entering in a cash book the number of soft drinks consumed in the stalls of the Folies-Gobelins, as well as those in the Café-Gobelins annexed to the theater: bocks, mazagran coffees, brandied cherries. An electric bulb hangs above her head like a pear on a string, petticoated in green paper, and at first all that can be distinguished is a small yellow hand emerging from a starched cuff. A small yellow hand, clean, but with the thumb and forefinger blackened from counting coins and copper tallies.

After a short while of attentive scrutiny, the features of the cashier can easily be discerned, among the many green shadows cast by the lamp, on the shriveled face of a pleasant, timorous old lizard, devoid of all color. Supposing her cheek were pricked, would there spurt from it, instead of blood, pale globules of the anemic juice used in bottling brandied cherries?

When I go down to my dressing room, she hands me my key from on top of the five-shelved row of those special cherries for which the establishment is far famed: five cherries per portion in a glass cupel, arranged pyramidally, so that they look like the boxed shrubs in a French formal garden, with the inkwell, in this instance, a substitute for the glass-surfaced water.

I know nothing of the cashier except her bust, always bent forward from her habit of writing and her desire to please . . . She arrives at the Folies-Gobelins long before me and leaves at midnight. Does she walk? has she legs and feet, a woman’s body? All that must have melted away, after twenty-four years behind her battered little pay desk!

A lizard, yes, a nice little wrinkled lizard, old and frail, but not so timorous after all: her tart voice has a shrill ring of authority, and to one and all alike she exhibits the equable kindliness of one whose power is undisputed. She treats the waiters like unruly children, tut-tutting like a governess, and the artistes like irresponsible or sick children, past correction. The chief stagehand, gray-haired, blue-boiler-suited, speaks to her as would a small boy: he has been on the house staff for a mere eighteen years!

In some obscure way, the cashier feels herself to be as fixed and weather-beaten as the building itself, and the panel of her hutch, never whitewashed, never repainted, is thickly coated with a shiny black, with an indelible varnish of dirt: I can’t help being reminded of other smoky traces left untouched by the centuries, the smoky traces of a lamp—forever extinguished—at Cumae, in the Sibyl’s cave.

It is from the lips of our benign Sibyl that I learn, in three words, whether the audience is dense or sparse, whether the trade in soft drinks is slack or flowing abundantly. She also informs me of how my face looks, of the temper of the upper gallery, and of the reception accorded to the evening’s “first appearance.”

I learn, into the bargain, that it is cold outside or that rain can be expected. What can she know of the weather, this cashier who, to reach her windswept hovel, must quit some other murky basement, far distant, and make her way by métro, under the ground, always under the ground.

Only smothered strains of the orchestra reach her, sometimes carrying on a wave of music the shrill high note of a popular soprano . . . The applause crackles like a distant fall of rubble.

The cashier lends it her ear and says to me, “You hear them? All that is for little Jady! She’s made quite a hit here. She’s got a way of putting it across that is all her own, and she . . .”

Her voice sounds discreet, amiable; it remains for me to detect the underlying censure, the compassionate scorn for all things and creatures connected with the music hall.

The cashier has great affection for the dirt and gloom of the Folies-Gobelins, for her hovel, her lamp with its green petticoat, and her flower borders of brandied cherries. What takes place on the stage is no concern of hers. When I rush off, out of breath, quite beside myself, and shout to her as I pass, “How splendidly it’s gone tonight, a first-rate audience! They made us take four curtain calls!” she smiles in response, and says, “Now’s the moment for you to rush to your dressing room and give yourself a hard rub with eau de Cologne, or you’ll catch a chill.” She adds nothing but a superficial flicker of her keen eyes over my unfastened dress and my bare sandaled feet.

It is in the warmth and darkness of the Folies-Gobelins incubator that the insufferable little Jady was hatched out: two quivering legs, as clever and responsive as antennae, a pointed, fragile voice that breaks every other instant—like the legs of an insect, no sooner snapped than they’ve grown together again—and, the other day, when standing by the pay desk, I happened to expatiate on the peculiar gifts of this singer born to be a dancer.

“Yes,” the cashier concurred, “I’m bound to admit that she’s won universal applause. They tell me she’s got pep, she’s got dash, she’s got ‘it,’ in other words, she’s got everything, but how can I tell? But do you know her little girl? No? A darling, Madame, a real beauty! And so sweet and well mannered! Only two, but she knows how to say please and thank you, and can even blow kisses! And amenable, too! You can leave her by herself at home the whole livelong day, just think of that!”

I do think of that. And I come to think that a despondent moralist, a discriminating if captious critic, is hidden away in this gloomy hovel under the stairs of the Folies-Gobelins. Our wrinkled Sibyl does not cry after us, “Unhappy, erring folk like you are, have the words ‘family,’ ‘morals,’ ‘hygiene’ no meaning for you?” She smiles, rather, and murmurs at the end of a sentence which has no conclusion, “Think of that! . . .” And it needed no more than that for me to visualize, in some suburban tenement, a baby of two,
amenable
, left alone by itself all day, waiting contentedly until such time as its mother should finish her act.

“It’s me, Madame, it’s the dresser. Has Madame everything she requires?”

“. . . !”

“Well! If this isn’t something more than a surprise! I felt sure it would bowl you over to see me again! Yes, yes, it’s me all right! You never expected to find your old Jeanne of the Empyrée-Clichy down here! Yes, I’m spending the winter in Nice, like the English. And how are things with you? All going well?”