The Collected Stories of Colette (44 page)

The surgical suddenness of their break left him stupefied. Alone in the house where they had lived as a quasi-conjugal couple for some twenty years, he was unable, a week later, to bring himself out of his stupor long enough to be sad. He struggled, comically, against the disappearance of ordinary objects, and berated his manservant in a childish manner: “Well, no one’s eaten those collars! And don’t tell me I don’t have any more sticks of shaving soap; there were two of them, there, in the small cupboard in the bathroom! You’re not going to make me believe that I don’t have any shaving soap just because Madame isn’t here!”

Bewildered at no longer feeling held accountable, he forgot mealtimes, returned home for no apparent reason, went out just to get away, floundering about, half choked, at the end of a rope which the imperious hand of a woman no longer held.

He called his friends to witness, embarrassed them, offended their sense of reserve as men unfaithful or enslaved. “My good man, it’s unbelievable! Cleverer men than I wouldn’t understand it at all . . . Aline’s gone. She’s gone, that’s it. And not alone, you can bet on that. She’s gone. I could repeat it a hundred times and I still wouldn’t find anything more to say. This sort of thing apparently happens every day to I don’t know how many husbands . . . What can I say? I can’t get over it. I just can’t get over it.”

His eyes would open wide, he’d raise his arms, and then drop them again. He seemed neither tragic nor humiliated, and his friends ridiculed him a little: “He’s slipping, yes, he’s slipping! At his age, it’s hit him pretty hard.” They talked about him as if he were an old man, secretly pleased at last to belittle this handsome, graying man who had never tasted disappointment in love.

“His beautiful Aline . . . He thought it was all perfectly natural that at forty-five she suddenly became a blonde, blond like an artificial flower, and that she changed her dressmaker, and her shoemaker. He wasn’t suspicious . . .”

One day he took a train ride because his manservant had asked him for the week off. “Since there’s less work with Madame not being here, I thought . . .” and also because he was losing more and more sleep, dozing off at daybreak after nights spent like a hunter on the lookout, motionless in the dark, jaws clenched, ears twitching. He left one evening, avoiding the country house he had bought fifteen years earlier and furnished for Aline. He bought a ticket for a large provincial town where he remembered having “spread the good word” and banqueted at the expense of
L’Extension Economique
.

“A good hotel,” he told himself, “and a restaurant with good French cooking, and I’m in business. I don’t want this thing to kill me now, do I? So then, off we go. Travel, good food . . .”

On the way, he saw reflected in the window of the compartment his still-erect figure and the gray brush which hid his relaxed mouth. “Not bad, not bad. I’m not going to let it kill me, by gum! The hussy!” He used no stronger word for the unfaithful woman than this mild, old-fashioned insult, which when spoken by older people is still meant to compliment the rashness of youth.

At the hotel he asked for the same room as last year. “The round corner room, you know, the one with a nice view of the square”; he dined on cold meat and beer and, as it was nightfall, went to bed. His weariness had led him to believe that sleep would soon reward his flight. Lying on his back, he felt the coolness of sheets which were not quite dry, and calculated in the darkness the half-forgotten place of the big round bay window, judging from two high shafts of bluish light between the drawn curtains. In fact, he was fast asleep in a matter of seconds, and then woke up for good by having unconsciously made room, with a movement of his legs, for her, who, absent now both day and night, returned faithfully under cover of sleep. He woke and bravely uttered the conjuring words: “Come on now, it’ll be daylight soon, take it easy.” The two shafts of blue light were turning rose, and from the square he heard the welcome, hoarse-sounding racket of the iron-hooped wooden buckets and the
clip-clop
of the horses’ big, patient hooves. “Exactly the same sound as the stables at Fontainebleau, in that villa we’d rented near the hotel. At daybreak we would listen to . . .” He shivered, turned over, and once again sought sleep. The horses and the buckets were quiet now. Other sounds, more discreet, rose up through the open window. He could make out the dense, dull sound of flowerpots being unloaded from a truck, a light sprinkling of water on plants, and the soft thud of big armfuls of leaves thrown on the ground.

“A flower market,” the sleepless man said to himself. “Oh, no doubt about it. It was in Strasbourg during that trip we made, sunrise brought us a charming flower market, under our windows, and she said she had never seen cinerarias as blue as . . .” He sat up, the better to withstand a despair which flowed over him in steady waves, a new despair, entirely fresh and unknown. Underneath the nearby bridge, oars slapped the sleepy river, and the flight of the first whistling swallows pierced the air. “It’s early morning in Como, the swallows that followed the gardener’s boat, loaded with fruits and vegetables whose smell came in through our window, at the Villa d’Este . . . My God, have some pity . . .” He was still strong enough to blush at the start of a prayer, although the pain of loneliness and memory had left him doubled over on his bed like a man struck in the chest. Twenty years . . . all the dawns of twenty years were pouring out their faint or brilliant rays, their bird cries, their raindrops, on the head of a companion asleep or awake at his side, twenty years . . .

“I don’t want it to kill me, my God . . . twenty years means something . . . but I had other dawns, before her . . . Yes, let me see, when I was a very young man . . .”

But he could summon up only the twilights of a poor student, the gray mornings at law school, warmed by skimmed milk or alcohol, mornings in furnished rooms with narrow washbasins or zinc buckets. He turned away from them, called on his adolescence and dawns long past for help, but they came to him, mean and bitter, emerging from a rickety iron bed, prisoners of a wretched time, marked on his cheek with a stinging slap, dragging shoes with spongy soles . . . The abandoned man knew he had no refuge and that he would struggle in vain against the light’s return, that the cruel and familiar harmony of the first hour of the day would sing only one name, reopening the same wound, fresh and new each time; so he lay back and broke down in tears.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

The moment the gate closed behind us and we saw the lantern in the gardener’s hand dancing in front of us, under a covering of clipped yews where the heavy downpour filtered through only in scattered drops, we felt that shelter was very near and agreed laughingly that the car trouble which had just left us stranded in the countryside clearly belonged in the category of “happy accidents.”

It just so happened that Monsieur B., a country councillor and the owner of the château, who welcomed these two rain-soaked and unexpected women out on the terrace, knew my husband slightly, and his wife—a former student at the Schola Cantorum—remembered having met me at a Sunday concert.

Around the first wood fire of the season, there rose a talkative gaiety. My friend Valentine and I felt it only right to accept a potluck of cold meat washed down with champagne; our hosts had only just finished their dinner.

An old plum brandy and some still-steaming coffee made us feel almost intimate. The electric light, rare for the region, the smell of mild tobacco, fruits, the blazing, resinous wood—I savored these familiar delights like gifts from a newfound isle.

Monsieur B., square-shouldered, with just a hint of gray and the handsome, white-toothed smile of a man from the south, took my friend Valentine aside, and I chatted with Madame B. less than I observed her.

Blond, slim, and dressed as if for an elegant dinner and not for receiving stranded motorists, she surprised me with eyes so light that the least reflection robbed them of their pale blue. They became mauve like her dress, green like the silk of her chair, or disturbed, in the lamplight, by a fleeting red glimmer like the blue eyes of a Siamese cat.

I wondered if the entire face did not owe its vacant look, its empty amiability, its sometimes somnambulistic smile to these overlight eyes. A somnambulist, in any case, singularly attentive to everything that might please us and shorten the two or three hours it would take our chauffeur, with the help of Monsieur B.’s mechanic, to repair the car.

“We have a room you’re welcome to use,” Madame B. said to me. “Why not spend the night here?”

And her eyes, as though untenanted, expressed only an unlimited and almost unthinking solitude.

“It’s not so bad here, really,” she continued. “Look at my husband, he’s getting on quite well with your friend!”

She laughed, while her wide-open, deserted eyes seemed not to hear what she said. Twice she made me repeat some phrase or other, starting slightly each time. Morphine? Opium? An addict would never have those rosy gums, that relaxed brow, that soft, warm hand, or that youthful flesh, firm and rounded beneath the low-cut dress.

Was I dealing with a silent conjugal victim? No. A tyrant, even a Machiavellian one, does not say “Simone” so tenderly, never bestows upon his slave so flattering a look . . .

“Why, yes, Madame, they do exist,” Monsieur B. was saying to my friend Valentine. “There are couples who live in the country eight months out of the year, are never out of each other’s sight, and don’t complain about their fate! They do exist, don’t they, Simone?”

“Yes, thank God!” replied Simone.

But in her eyes, just barely blue, there was nothing, nothing but a tiny yellow cinder, very far away—the lamp’s reflection in a potbellied samovar. Then she stood up and poured us cups of steaming hot tea flavored with rum “for the dark road.” It was ten o’clock. A young man came in, bareheaded, and before being introduced gave some opened letters to Monsieur B., who asked my friend to excuse him as he leafed quickly through his mail.

“He’s my husband’s secretary,” Madame B. explained to me as she cut a lemon into thin slices.

I responded by saying exactly what I was thinking: “He’s very good-looking.”

“Do you think so?”

She raised her eyebrows like a woman surprised, saying, “I’ve never thought about it.” However, what was striking about this svelte young man was his air of stubborn, completely unself-conscious persistence, a habit of lowering his eyelids which, when he raised them, made his brusque, wild, quickly masked glance all the more arresting, and more disdainful than shy. He accepted a cup of tea and sat in front of the fire, next to Madame B., thus occupying the other place on one of those horrid, handy, S-shaped settees which the style of the 1880s named love seats.

Suddenly everyone fell silent for a moment and I was afraid our amiable hosts had tired of us. In order to break the silence I said softly, “How cozy! I’m going to remember this charming house I will have been in without ever knowing what it looks like set in the countryside . . . This fire will warm us again, won’t it, Valentine, if we close our eyes in the wind, a while from now.”

“It will be your own fault,” Madame B. cried out. “If it were me, I wouldn’t need any sympathy. I love driving at night, with the rain streaking the air in front of the headlights and the drops of rain on my cheeks like tears. Oh, I love all that!”

I looked at her with surprise. She glowed all over with a delicious, human flame, which shyness had perhaps stifled for the first few hours. She no longer held herself back and the most attractive self-confidence showed her to be gay, sensible, well informed about local politics and her husband’s ambitions, which she scoffed at by imitating him, the way little girls do when playacting. There was no lamp on the mantel, and only the crackling hearth, far from the central light, colored or left in shadow this young woman whose sudden animation made me think of the gaiety of canaries, awakened in their cage at the hour when the lamps are lit. The dark back of Monsieur B.’s secretary was angled against the S-shaped armrest which separated him from Madame B. While she was talking to her husband and my friend from a slight distance, turned toward them, I rose in order to set down my empty cup and I saw that the young man’s concealed hand held Madame B.’s bare arm in a steady and perfectly motionless grip above the elbow. Neither one of them moved, the young man’s visible hand held a cigarette he was not smoking, and Madame B.’s free arm waved a small fan. She was speaking happily, attentive to everyone, her eyes limpid, in a voice interrupted now and then by her quickened breathing, like the urge to laugh, and I could see the veins in one of her hands begin to swell, so amorous and strong had the hidden embrace become.

Like someone who feels another’s glance weighing down on him, Monsieur B.’s secretary suddenly rose, bowed to everyone, and left.

“Isn’t that our motor I hear?” I asked Madame B. a moment later. She did not answer. She was staring into the fire, inclining her head toward a sound beyond her hearing, and slightly slumped over, looked like a woman who had just taken a bad fall. I repeated my question; she gave a start.