The Collected Stories of Colette (50 page)

“Thanks to you . . . thanks to you,” he stammered.

“I don’t deserve it, young man.”

“If . . . if . . .” the boy interrupted, grasping him by the hands. “It’s done. Thanks to you. For days and days I didn’t dare. I endured everything. I cared so much for her. I knew she was lying to me, and that all those nights . . . But I didn’t dare. And then by some miracle I ran into you! You set me back on the track, you made me understand that running away wouldn’t do me any good, that I would be carrying my torture with me . . . You told me that deliverance, peace . . . oh, at last, peace . . . depended on doing something . . . Thank you, thank you . . . I did it. Thank you.”

He let go of Monsieur Mestre’s hands, started to run as though on winged, silent feet, his black hair pushed back away from his pale face. Then Monsieur Mestre felt his heart sink; he took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead and his hands, which the feverish grip had left feeling hot and moist, and saw on his handkerchief the red marks left by his fingers.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

After he had killed her, with a blow from the little lead weight under which she kept her wrapping paper, Louis found himself at a loss. She lay behind the counter, one leg bent back under her, her head turned away, and her body turned toward him, in a ridiculous pose which put the young man in a bad mood. He shrugged his shoulders and almost said to her, “Get up now, you look ridiculous!” But at that moment the bell on the shop door rang, and Louis saw a little girl come in.

“A card of black mending wool, please.”

“We don’t have any more,” he said politely. “We won’t have any until tomorrow.”

She left, closing the door carefully, and he realized that he hadn’t even thought that she could have walked up to the counter, leaned over, and seen . . .

Night was falling, darkening the little stationery-notions shop. One could still make out the rows of white boxes with an ivory-nut button or a knot of passementerie on the side. Louis struck a match mechanically on the sole of his shoe in order to light the gas jet, then caught himself and put the match out under his foot. Across the street, the wine merchant lit up his whole ground floor all at once, and in contrast the little stationery-notions shop grew darker in a night streaked with yellow light.

Once again Louis leaned over the counter. To his overwhelming astonishment he saw his mistress still lying there, her leg bent back, her neck turned to the side. And something black besides, a thread, as thin as a wisp of hair, was trickling down her pale cheek. He grabbed the forty-five francs in change and dirty bills that he had so furiously refused earlier, went out, took off the door’s lever handle, put it in his pocket, and walked away.

For two days he lived the way a child lives, amusing himself by watching the boats on the Seine and the schoolchildren in the squares. He amused himself like a child, and like a child, he grew bored with himself. He waited and could not decide whether to leave the city or to go back to street peddling like before. His room, paid for by the week, still harbored a stash of Paris monuments on stacks of postcards, mechanical jumping rabbits, and a product you squeezed from a tube to make your own fruit drinks. But Louis sold nothing for two days, while staying in another furnished room. He didn’t feel afraid, and he slept well; the days flowed by smoothly, disturbed only by that pleasing impatience one feels in big port cities after booking passage on an ocean liner.

Two days after the crime he bought a newspaper, as on other days, and read:
WOMAN SHOPKEEPER MURDERED IN THE RUE X
. “Aha!” he said out loud like an expert, then read the article slowly and attentively, noted that the crime, because of the victim’s “very retired” existence, was already being considered “mysterious,” and folded the paper back up. In front of him his coffee was getting cold. The waiter behind the bar was whistling as he polished the zinc, and an old couple next to him were dipping croissants in hot milk. Louis sat there for several moments, dumbstruck, with his mouth half open, and wondered why all these familiar things had suddenly ceased to be close and intelligible to him. He had the impression that, if questioned, the old couple would answer in a strange language, and that, as he whistled, the waiter was looking right through Louis’s body as if it weren’t even there.

He got up, threw down some money, and headed off toward a train station, where he bought a ticket for a suburb whose name reminded him of the races and afternoons spent boating. During the ride it seemed to him that the train was making very little noise and that the other passengers were speaking in subdued voices.

“Maybe I’m going deaf!”

After getting off the train, Louis bought an evening paper, and reread the same account as in the morning paper, and yawned.

“Damn, they’re not getting anywhere!”

He ate in a little restaurant near the station and inquired of the owner as to the possibility of finding a job in the area. But he accomplished this formality with great repugnance, and felt ill at ease when the man advised him to see a dentist in a neighboring villa who regrettably had just lost a young man, employed until the day before to care for his motorcycle and to sterilize his surgical instruments. Despite the late hour, he rang the dentist’s doorbell, claimed he was a maker of mechanical toys, didn’t argue about the pay—two hundred and fifty francs—and slept that same night in a small attic room, hung with that blue-and-gray-flowered wallpaper usually used for lining cheap trunks.

For a week he kept the job as laboratory assistant to the American dentist, a great horse of a man, big-boned and red-haired, who asked no questions and smoked with his feet up on the table, as he waited for his rare clients. Clad in a white linen lab coat and leaning against the open gate, Louis breathed the fresh air, and the maids from the villas would smile at his gentle, swarthy face.

He bought a paper every day. Banished from the front page, the “crime in rue . . .” now languished on page 2, amid colliding trains and swindling somnambulists. Five lines, two lines confirmed dispassionately that it remained “a complete mystery.”

One spring afternoon, made fragrant by a brief shower and pierced with the cries of swallows, Louis asked the American dentist for a little money, “to buy himself some underwear,” took off his white lab coat, and left for Paris. And since he was nothing but a simple little murderer, he went straight back to the stationery-notions shop. There were children playing in front of the lowered iron shutter and a week’s worth of splashing had left the door caked with mud. Louis walked the hundred steps back and forth on the sidewalk across the street for a long time and did not leave the street till after nightfall.

The next day he went back again, a little later so as not to attract attention, and the following evenings he faithfully kept watch, after dinner, sometimes without dinner. He felt himself filled with a strange hope resembling the anguish of love. One evening, when he had halted to tilt his head back toward the stars and let out a deep sigh, a hand was placed gently on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and, without turning around, fell limply, blissfully into the arms of the policeman who was following him.

During the course of the interrogation, Louis confessed that, yes, he did regret his crime, but that a moment like the one when he felt the liberating hand on his shoulder was “worth it all” and that he could only compare it to the moment when he had, as he said, “known love.”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

Both women opened the windows of their adjoining rooms at the same time, rattling the blinds, half closed against the sun, and smiled at one another as they leaned over the wooden balcony.

“What weather!’

“And the sea doesn’t have a wrinkle!”

“Just one lucky streak. Did you see how much the wisteria’s grown since last year?”

“And the honeysuckle! It’s got its shoots caught in the blinds now.”

“Are you going to rest, Lily?”

“I’m getting me a sweater and going down! I can’t sit still the first day . . . What are you going to do, Alice?”

“Arrange things in my linen closet. It still has the scent of last year’s lavender. Go on, I’ll amuse myself like a madwoman. You go about your little affairs!”

Lily’s short, bleached hair bounced goodbye like a puppet’s, and a moment later Alice saw her, apple-green, going down into the sandy garden, poorly protected against the wind from the sea.

Alice laughed good-naturedly. “She’s so plump!”

She looked down contentedly at her long white hands and crossed her thin forearms on the wooden rail, breathing in the salt and iodine that enriched the air. The breeze did not disturb a single strand of her hair, done in the “Spanish style,” smoothed back, forehead and ears uncovered, quite flattering to her fine, straight nose, but quite hard on everything else that was showing the decline in her: horizontal wrinkles above her eyebrows, hollow cheeks, the dark circles of an insomniac around her eyes. Her friend Lily blamed the severe hairstyle. “What can I say? I think that when fruit gets a little dry it needs some greenery!”

To which Alice replied, “Not everybody forty-five can wear her hair like a girl in the Folies!”

They lived in perfect harmony, and this daily teasing was fuel for the fire of their friendship. Elegant and bony, Alice would voluntarily point out, “You might say my weight hasn’t changed since the year my husband died. I’ve kept a blouse I had when I was a girl, out of curiosity: you’d think it was made for me yesterday!”

Lily did not mention any marriage, and for good reason. Her forties, after a dizzy youth, had endowed her with an irreducible plumpness.

“I’m plump, it’s true,” she would declare. “But you look at my face: not one wrinkle! And the same goes for the rest! Now, you must admit that’s something.”

And she would cast a malicious glance at Alice’s hollow cheeks, at the scarf or fox meant to hide the tendons in her neck, or her collarbones forming the cross bar of the letter T . . .

But it was love, more than rivalry, that bound the two friends together: the same handsome man, famous long before he grew old, had rejected them both. For Alice, a few letters from the great man were evidence that for a few weeks he had found her jealous eyes, her irresistible elegance as a skinny, cleverly veiled brunette to his liking. All that Lily had from him was a telegram, one telegram, strangely terse and urgent. Shortly afterward he forgot both of them and the “What? You knew him too?” of the two friends was followed by nearly sincere confessions which they made tirelessly again and again.

“I never understood his sudden silence,” admitted Alice. “But there was a moment in our life when I could have been, I’m sure of it, the friend, the spiritual guide to that fickle man, whom no one has been able to hold on to . . .”

“Well, my dear, I won’t argue with you there,” countered Lily. “The friend, the guide . . . I’ve never understood those big words. What I do know is that between him and me . . . Oh, heavens! What fire! We weren’t thinking about pathos, take my word for it! I felt, right here, as clearly as I’m talking to you, that I could have ruled that man through the flesh. And then it fell apart . . . It always falls apart.”

Content, in short, with their equal disappointments, having reached the age when women begin adorning little chapels, they had hung, in the drawing room of Lily’s villa where they lived together, sharing expenses for two months, a portrait of the ingrate, the best portrait, the one used by all the daily papers and the illustrated magazines. A photographic enlargement, touched up, enhanced with only highlights like an impassioned etching, softened with some pink on the mouth, some blue on the eyes, like a watercolor . . .

“It’s not what you’d call a work of art,” Alice would say, “but when you knew him as I did—as we did, Lily, it’s alive!”