The Collected Stories of Colette (5 page)

“
Garçon
! Keep an eye on the door, will you, our legs are freezing!”

His companion gives the orders, with the authority of an old habitué, and lights a cigarette before even unbuttoning her coat.

“What are you having, Clouk?”

“Uh . . . I have no idea, really.”

He too is smoking, his eyes on the entrance, and shivers each time the door is opened: what if, after her performance, Lulu had the idea to come have supper? . . . He barely gives it a thought, he doesn’t think about it anymore, it’s over, but each time the revolving door gleams and spins, he trembles imperceptibly.

“I think I’ll have a nice little whiskey soda,” says his companion. “And you?”

“I’ll have . . . I don’t know . . . a hot toddy.”

He shivers at the thought of the steaming and spicy toddy. Opposite him the mirror reflects a stiff, pale little Clouk, next to his companion devoid of coquetry, somewhat heavy and squat in her moleskin coat. She is a brunette, dyed a redhead, whom one must meet several times before recognizing her, not ugly, not pretty, with big eyes and a hard mouth. She yawns nervously and, with a compulsive gesture, clicks the clasp of a long, dented gold case, bigger than a wallet, that can hold fifty cigarettes.

Neither she nor Clouk saw the color of this brief and bright winter day. They got home around five in the morning, after a dismal night in Montmartre. Suffused with tobacco and the smell of alcohol, they slept the uneasy sleep of those who drift off a little drunk, deprived of the warm spray of the shower and a scented bath.

They woke up stiff and unsightly around three in the afternoon, with the impression of having slept a very long time and being very old. The best time of their day was the interminable daily toilette, two hours of bath, hairdresser, manicurist, masseuse: the meticulous and listless toilette of cloistered women, the empty chatter, the perplexed fussing with ties and vests . . . Then the brief drive in the car around the already dark Bois, truly an old ladies’ drive, cut short again by the desire, the need to return and sit down at the table of a bar. “Some port and herring sandwiches, right, Clouk? What dried us up like that last night was that nasty demi-sec champagne.”

They tried to eat dinner around nine-thirty, both of them overtaken by a sudden concern for health: two
jus de viande
and pasta. Clouk, basically disgusted, gulped down the syrupy, peppery juices and twirled skeins of long noodles around two forks, broadening his narrow shoulders with the childish hope that his “diet” would endow him with new strength and muscles to amaze the universe, the entire universe—and Lulu too.

The hours after dinner, divided between the restaurant and box seats in a music hall, went by quickly—barely time for a dozen cigarettes—bringing back midnight and the moment to sit down, for the third time since waking, in front of a stiff tablecloth, glazed by the roller, and cold as oilcloth.

Each time he sits down at a table in some late-night bar, Clouk feels a warm, fleeting rush of exhilaration. He is beginning to believe, he the weak, he abandoned by Lulu whom he loved, he the poor little rich boy, miserable and friendless, that he was closing, joyfully and forever, the dark string of his errant days. There are nights when every reflection in the glass panes of the revolving door seems to announce a marvelous arrival, which he was no longer hoping for, nights when the soft handshake of his “friends” seemed warm to the touch and indicative of a vigorous friendship; nights when the bubbly alcohol, gulped down like medicine, numbs the cramps in his stomach and the migraine clamped around his head. So Clouk gives himself over to the pleasant, poisonous warmth dilating and deadening him; he leans his head on his sisterly companion’s shoulder and speaks to her vaguely, in a low voice, while a familiar chorus of men and women eating their supper comment—some kindly, some ironically—on the tender pose of the two “lovers.”

This same night, despite the emptiness of the room which creates an anxious idleness in the woman who owns the bar—yesterday’s demimondaine, today’s plump businesswoman dressed severely, like a minor town official’s wife—Clouk does not despair and waits for his hour. From minute to minute, the glass door turns, flashes brightly, and Clouk shivers, not with hope, but by now it is a habit with him to jump at the sound of a door or the ringing of a bell.

“You can be such a bore,” says his companion indolently. “I had a dog like you once, his left leg used to twitch all the time. The vet said it was worms . . .”

 . . . It has been a long time, it has been months since Clouk stopped waiting for Lulu. He simply watches the door and counts the people who come in, the anonymous walk-ons vital to his happiness. There are the couples of petite women, regulation brunettes this year, hair all over the place and a little powdery, with lips as thick as a quadroon’s. There, one by one, or in groups, are Clouk’s “friends,” who for the most part are juvenile, defiant, and brought up to hold women in respect. The fact of drinking in company does not incite them to generosity, for they are rich, and it took the worst misfortune of love to teach Clouk, if not prodigality and the disdain of money, at least the beginnings of a noblesse called casualness . . .

The piano, the diuretic scratching of the mandolins, the thready voice of a short tenor all rose together, and Clouk nodded in time to the music as if greeting someone affectionately recognized. The time for the music has come; the bar, now packed, is thick with smoke. Clouk is no longer trembling, no longer waiting for anyone. His night is beginning according to ritual; he is warm, he is thirsty because he has been drinking; he will have all the songs he likes, all the chaste, melancholy songs which comprise the repertoire of disreputable establishments and Clouk’s own poetic anthology: he will hum:

He will proclaim at the top of his voice:

He will be drunk, howling, and happy: nothing, except dawn, will disturb the reassuring and predictable course of his sleepless night. A few more drinks, a few more rhymes, and he will be drunk enough to abandon himself—his feet on the knees of a “friend” he doesn’t know, his head leaning back against the warm shoulder of his sweet, insipid companion—to abandon himself to his most heartrending and purest memory, to his hidden, incurable love, still intact, for Lulu.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“Léa! Give it to me, give me your necklace! Do you hear me, Léa? Give me your pearls!”

He moves, black and thin, back and forth across the sun-filled window. Because of the bright-pink curtains, slightly parted, he looks like a graceful demon dancing in front of a blazing fire. As he moves back into the center of the room, he turns white, dressed in silk pajamas and white babouches.

“Why won’t you give me your necklace, Léa? It looks as good on me as it does on you . . . at least!”

He raises his hands, and around his neck he fastens a strand of pearls which iridesce and light up, radiant, next to the white silk . . .

At the faint snap of the clasp, the lace linens of a big bed ripple and two bare, strong arms, thin-wristed, raise two lovely, lazy hands. “Leave it alone, Chéri, you’ve played enough with that necklace.”

“Why? It amuses me . . . Are you afraid I’ll steal it from you?”

He had moved toward the bed, silent as a cat in his white slippers. He is a very handsome and very young man whose smooth black hair is worn like the tight cap of Pierrot. He leans his naughty chin over Léa, and the same pink spark, from the window, dances in his dark eyes, on his teeth, and on the pearls of the necklace . . .

The nonchalant hands draw a vague response in the air and Chéri insists, “Say it, go on! Are you afraid I’ll take it?”

“No. But if I were to offer it to you, you’re quite capable of accepting it.”

He laughs softly, to himself, turns toward the warm light, and rolls the round pearls between his fingers.

“And why not? It’s fine for a man to receive a set of studs and a tie pin, two or three pearls. But any more than that and the gift becomes a scandal. Really now . . . do I look ugly in a pearl necklace? Tell me.”

He pirouettes nimbly and admires himself in the mirror, opening his pajama top with both hands and revealing a smooth, muscular neck and a tight, hard chest, curved like a shield.

“Go on, say it, say I’m ugly!”

Léa, leaning on her elbow, looks at him. In the merciful half-light, she shows what a pretty fifty-year-old woman, well cared for and in good health, can show: the bright complexion, somewhat ruddy and a bit weathered, of a natural blonde, shapely, solid shoulders, and celebrated blue eyes which have kept their thick chestnut lashes. But she is now a redhead, because of her hair, which is turning gray.

She loves to chat in bed, almost invisible, while her magnificent arms and expressive hands comment on her wise words. Nearing the end of a successful career as a sedate courtesan, she is neither sad nor spiteful. She keeps the date of her birth a secret, but willingly admits, as she settles her calm gaze on Chéri, that she is approaching the age when one is permitted little comforts . . .

“I’m not going to say you’re ugly. In the first place, you wouldn’t believe it. But can’t you laugh without wrinkling up your nose like that? You won’t be happy until you’ve got three wrinkles at the corners of your nose, will you?”

Chéri’s handsome face suddenly freezes and he turns around to examine, with fierce closeness, the little lines marking Léa’s cheeks from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she says without getting angry. “But I’m not twenty-four years old. Take off that necklace.”

He obeys reluctantly and sulks. “I obviously wouldn’t traipse around with this trinket on my neck, but if you were to give it to me, it would make an absolutely stunning wedding present!”

“Wedding present? For whom?”

“Why, for my fiancée!”

“Your fiancée?”

Léa sits up, showing above the covers. “Your fiancée! Are you serious?”

Chéri nods his head, malicious and self-important. “I’m afraid so. The poor child’s crazy about me.”

“Is it that same little girl? . . .”

“Yes, the same.”

“And what about you, what do you have to say about it?”

Chéri raises his velvety eyes to the sky and opens his arms like a victim. “Take me . . .”

Conscious of his beauty, he strikes a pose, because Léa is staring at him intently.

“You’re getting married . . . just like that? . . . You’re getting married . . . Why?”

Chéri puts his finger to his lips, goes “Shhh!” mysteriously, and shrugs his shoulders. His charming liar’s face grows sad, then smiles, then goes blank—he plays with all his features like an expert mime.

“Well, there you have it . . . Lofty motives, my dear. The kid’s loaded. And pretty, too. And besides, the old girl—I mean my sainted mother—has spoken, and when my mother speaks . . . Besides . . . besides, what do I know?”

He leaps up, comes back down after a perfect
entrechat-six
, butts his way through the Persian door curtains, and disappears, shouting: “My bath—now! And send the masseuse to my dressing room, quick! I’m lunching at the old girl’s!”

“Chéri! . . . Listen, Chéri!”

He does not hear or else does not want to come back.

Seated on the edge of the big bed, Léa thinks to herself: “What? He’s getting married? It’s impossible! The whole family’s crazy! What can his mother be thinking? Marry Chéri!”

She looks at the Persian door curtains and raises her shoulders. “Marry that?”

Léa is neither pained nor jealous. She is shocked and is slowly becoming indignant.

“I swear, people are crazy! Here’s a boy who’s . . . well, who’s Chéri! As far as reason goes, he’s eight years old, except that he knows pearls like an old Jewess and speaks sharply to the help—at least to mine. What need is there for him to marry, I ask you. Doesn’t he have everything he needs here, everything? A young girl . . . crazy about him . . . She’s going to give this spoiled little brat her love, as if he needs it! He’s too mean, he’s too young. It doesn’t matter to me. He can sharpen his nails on me, it doesn’t leave any marks. But a young girl . . . who loves him! . . . This one doesn’t love anything. He doesn’t know how.
They
don’t know how, all the other Chéris just like him . . . People envy me because he’s so young and so handsome, they envy me for being the nanny of one of these brainless boys, Chéri or some other one, brought up by lackeys, manicurists, and boxing instructors . . . Poor Chéri, people take him for a man because he has biceps. They’re going to give him a wife—a young girl . . . a child . . . Oh, they can’t do that! . . .”