The Collected Stories of Colette (4 page)

He ran into Lulu one night in the restaurant, accompanied by her new “friend,” and was quite proud of himself for feeling neither shocked nor heartbroken. But the next day, sitting in a music hall, he broke down in tears watching a clown who couldn’t free himself from a piece of flypaper; and his circle of friends, rising up as one, scorned Clouk to the point of dropping him altogether. Only the sisterly and melancholy friend named Eva stood by the sniffling, phlegmy Clouk, calling him “poor thing.”

“You poor thing, I can’t stand seeing you like this anymore. Let’s go have a smoke.”

“A smoke of what?”

“Opium.”

“Oh, no . . . no opium.”

Clouk still remembered, after one try—three pipes following a heavy dinner—a severe case of indigestion. But his consoler’s authority left him no room to argue, and less than an hour later Clouk, undressed, shivering under a kimono, was lying down on a thin mattress covered with a white mat, cold and smooth to the touch like the skin of a lizard.

Across from him, on the other side of the lacquered tray, he could see Eva fussing about, stout and heavy in her Japanese dress, with her dyed hair hanging across her unpowdered cheek, suddenly affectionate with that bizarre motherliness of women opium smokers: “Wait, you’re not comfortable . . . This cushion here under your head . . . Oh, he’s so pale, a real Pierrot . . . You’ll feel better in a minute . . . I’ll turn off the ceiling light. As you can see, it’s not set up as an opium den; most of the time, it’s my little living room.”

Clouk, lying on his side, clenched his teeth to keep himself from shivering, or crying, or talking. His eyes wandered from the ceiling hung with fabric to the cheap plaster Buddha, dark against the bright wall, then returned to the three luminous, living blazes formed by Eva’s face and deft hands in the shadows. The little oil lamp, beneath its crystal hood, also caught his eye and he blinked, bothered by the short flame, without the strength to turn his head away . . .

“Wait,” said Eva, “I’ll cover the flame for you. Would you like the butterfly, or the spider, or the little moon?”

With the tips of her fingers, she turned the tiny screens of colored glass, jade, and horn around the globe of the lamp. Clouk was silent, intimidated, and tired, and the screens passed between him and the flame like the figures of a new and incomprehensible game . . .

Hearing the drop of opium sizzle, he leaned back on his elbows. His hands were shaking so badly as he took hold of the bamboo that he burned his first bowl somewhat, and his throat filled with acrid smoke.

“Very clever,” said Eva without impatience. “Here, let me fix you another.”

Clouk, having lain back down, breathed in the smell of the opium, surprised to find it agreeable, comestible, soothing.

“You understand . . .” he began despite himself.

Eva merely nodded and he ventured on. “You understand, don’t you? I haven’t been eating or sleeping much lately. When you’re worrying yourself sick . . .”

She interrupted him by offering him a second pipe, which he exhausted with one long inhalation, without taking a breath, and his consoler, who knew the price of silence, whistled softly to express her admiration.

Lying back on the mat, Clouk repeated slowly: “You understand that since . . . since it happened, it’s been as if I have nothing of my own. It’s strange, I can’t get it into my head that I still do have things of my own, even my money, since . . . well, since then. You see, I . . . I’m worried . . .”

Already intoxicated, Clouk spoke with childlike sweetness. Several more times he said, “I don’t have anything of my own . . . of my own . . .” then was quiet, and stopped the pathetic shivering, the tightening of his stomach muscles, and the flexing of his toes. He sat up for a third pipe and lay back down once more, happy to be thinking again at last, lucidly assessing his lovelorn misery, assimilating it to his utter destitution. A mellifluous murmuring of rising water filled his ears, and his entire body, healed, experienced the sensation of a lukewarm bath, whose liquid density would lift him . . . He did not think of Lulu’s apparition, and did not call it forth, but the successive settings of their life as lovers rose with singular and progressive strength. Clouk, motionless, his eyes half open and dead, was reveling in the heightened colors of Lulu’s little living room, the deep greens of a garden at a spa. A gnarled old wisteria clung to the pitted wall of a tower; Clouk followed the tortured vine of the clambering trunk, counted the flowery clusters, inhaled their acacia-like fragrance . . .

Other landscapes appeared, without Lulu in them, but as if still fragrant with her passage, and all of them, vast or intimate, were inscribed in the nacreous little moon, in the tiny screen hooked on to the lamp . . .

“Clouk, are you asleep?”

Clouk heard but did not answer. Even if he had wanted to, he would not have been able to turn his eyes away from the transparent disk of lustrous mother-of-pearl. But Eva’s hand, bumping the lamp, made the screen slip off and Clouk groaned, wounded by the naked light.

“There, there, shhhh . . . I didn’t do it on purpose.”

The pink penumbra once again veiled the flame, and Clouk’s eyelids moistened, brimming with well-being. Borne along with the murmuring of the rising water, he was slipping off to a black and priceless sleep. “Nothing of my own?” he said to himself without moving his lips. “No more mistress, no more home?” He smiled, or thought he smiled, and took pity on himself for having cherished and regretted such perishable belongings, since now he possessed, beaming gently within reach of his eyes and his fingers, milky, iridescent, deliciously round, huge as a star, no bigger than a precious coin, the little mother-of-pearl moon, the opaline satellite of the opium lamp.

CLOUK ALONE

“You rats! You can’t, you can’t desert me like this!”

“We most certainly can! Stop, Clouk, you’ll tear my coat . . . Make him stop, can’t you see I can’t raise my arms in these sleeves!”

The small woman struggles, and Clouk holds on to her with the sticky perseverance of a tipsy man. He is only a little drunk, and besides, the fine rain showers his damp forehead, the warm rims of his ears . . .

“
You’re
not going to desert me too, are you? You’re more loyal than that!”

The circle of friends dwindled despite Clouk’s entreaties. He latched on to two “loyal” friends whom he succeeded in detaining for twenty minutes on the main staircase of his residence, then for a good quarter of an hour on the divan in the front hall. He still hopes to keep them awhile on the terrace, despite the damp night, the wind shaking the roasted chestnut trees . . .

All three stand around, black against the wide, illuminated hall, the muddy gravel of the garden. The small, imprisoned woman looks as if she is dancing in Clouk’s arms. Her peaked hat meets a gray fox collar that muffles her neck and her ears; but the rest of her body shivers under a tight satin wrap glistening in the light like a blue fish.

“Lord,” she exclaims, “this is August! I’m freezing! We’ll see you tomorrow, Clouk. What am I saying, tomorrow? We’ll see you today, it’s already past two . . . My darling husband, are you asleep on your beautiful little feet?”

“Let Robert leave by himself,” begs Clouk. “You can keep me company.”

The woman bursts out laughing. “Robert? Leave by himself? No danger of that: he’s much too afraid all alone at night! Aren’t you, Robert?”

Robert only groans like a man shaken in his sleep, and Clouk doubles over with laughter and slaps his thigh. “He’s afraid to be alone? That’s too much . . . Come inside and tell me all about it, Eva!”

But, despite her tight coat, Eva gets away and manages to run, dragging Robert, drowsy and dignified, behind her. Her feet, in white shoes, skip with short hip-hops like two little rabbits. Clouk follows her like a puppy. He opens the gate regretfully, hoping that the car waiting at the curb won’t start . . . But it does, on the first try, then glides off unctuously over the wet asphalt as Clouk shouts out one last time: “See you this afternoon! Hey, Robert . . . Robert! Leave Eva with me and I’ll turn you over to my old nanny if you’re so afraid of the dark!”

He leans forward to see the red light on the tail of the car pull off and fade away. Then, suddenly, his face freezes and he shuts the heavy gate. He walks back toward the brightly lit house, with long, gliding strides, forcing himself not to run, his arms pressed to his sides so as not to brush against the shrubs. The entrance hall dazzles and reassures him; he takes off his misty monocle, blinks his sensitive eyelids, and shrugs his shoulders.

“Afraid to be alone at night . . . Oh, brother . . .”

He was about to turn off the electricity before going up to his room, but stopped short: to get to the light switch he would have to walk past a long mirror, tinged green by the dampness, where he would have time to watch himself walking by, paler than normal, even more of the “poor child” than his fabulously wealthy mother had made him.

He does not like to walk past it at certain hours of the night. He prefers to go straight up to the second floor, letting the chandelier and the sconces burn on. Upon waking, he would open his fishlike mouth, which could feign astonishment quite easily, when his inexorable valet would say to him: “Monsieur realizes that Monsieur
again
left the lights on downstairs. Monsieur won’t wonder why Monsieur’s electric bill is seven hundred francs
again
this month, worse than a department store.”

Clouk, born a millionaire, remained parsimonious by upbringing: a new car every year is a duty, turning off the electricity when one leaves a room is another.

He hurries noiselessly up the staircase, reaches his room, which he crosses double time, and rushes into his dressing room, turning on the light with a feverish hand before falling into an easy chair.

“Afraid to be alone at night . . .” Right now Robert must be undressing to the reassuring sound of feminine chatter; Eva humming, taking off her shoes, yawning with a moan, fluffing up the pillows . . . Since Lulu left him, Clouk, as weak as if he were being bled, would revert at night to the terrors of childhood. He is flabbergasted that, before Lulu, he had been able to live alone in this pretentious dungeon, erected near the gates of the Bois de Boulogne, “an edifice, Monsieur, to withstand a siege,” the architect had declared.

“A siege,” repeated Clouk. “Why did the idiot say that? Is it within the realm of possibility that it would ever come under siege?”

He reaches out a limp hand to touch the wall, to feel its deep resonance like that of a full wine cask, but the coldness of its varnish stings him like a burn.

“A siege . . . Who’s stamping around down in the garden like that? Really now . . .”

For a brief instant, the combativeness of the proprietor in him struggles with an alcoholic cowardice.

“How many of them are there? My God, they’re making a racket!” stammers Clouk, his head buzzing.

He wants to get up and run to the window, but would he even be able to raise the padlocked bar across the heavy iron doors? Clouk, immured in his citadel, panics behind the walls whose protection he had just invoked.

“Somebody could easily do me in here, the neighbors wouldn’t even wake up . . .”

“Do me in . . .” The words struck Clouk’s sad brain with the dull sound of doom. Whole pages from detective novels, illustrated with thugs in cars, masked men carrying bludgeons, came back to Clouk’s memory like so many dire predictions. “Do me in . . . do me in . . .” and Clouk cursed his daily reading, which delighted him when the morning sunlight made the shadows of the leaves dance in the folds of the sheets. Oh, to believe in phantoms as when he was a little boy, to tremble at the mere rustling of an invisible, silky dress, to run from the harmless ghost abroad at midnight, how thrilling compared to the precise image which now has Clouk glued to his chair: a white hand wrapped around the black butt of a revolver moves slowly through the open door of the bedroom. Slowly, slowly, the muzzle of the gun turns its round eye toward Clouk . . . Afterward, there is nothing but chaos, horror, warm blood on the white rug, the smell of gunpowder and melted metal around the open safe . . . But this bloody confusion, still settling in Clouk’s imagination, does not equal in shock the appearance of the white hand, there in the doorway of . . .

“No!” he screams despite himself.

The loudness of his scream makes him stand up, his back to the wall, hands groping. A bell button gives way beneath his fingers, and this involuntary gesture brings him back to his senses.

“Did I ring? Did I ring or not? I didn’t hear the bell . . . But if I didn’t ring, who’s that coming up the stairs?”

Back against the wall, stiff, dripping with sweat, Clouk has time to appreciate the difference between the footsteps of an imaginary group of people and the sound of someone approaching slowly, heavily climbing the stairs, fumbling with the door, opening . . .

“Monsieur rang?” asked the valet.

Breath, movement, both came back to Clouk with life. And life is all vanity, reflection, the meaning of lies and frugality, his very soul . . .

“Yes . . . I’d like you to turn off the lights, downstairs, in the front hall.”

CLOUK’S FLING

It is only half past midnight; they have arrived a little early, the bar is nearly empty. Clouk and his “companion” sit down side by side on the red banquette, haphazardly, with the vague feeling they would be better off at the table across from them, or in the corner at the back.

“You don’t think we’re too near the door?” his companion asks.

Clouk lifts one shoulder, sticks out a dubious lower lip, and his monocle falls. He wipes it, then applies it once again to his right eye, with a carefulness he knows is vain, for the monocle refuses to stay put for long on his soft little face, made, one might say, of pink butter.