The Collected Stories of Colette (51 page)

For two years now they had happily resigned themselves to a kind of devout solitude, entertaining friends, inoffensive women and older well-bred men. Growing old? Well, heavens, yes, growing old, you have to get used to the idea . . . Growing old, under the eyes of that youthful portrait, in the glimmer of a beautiful memory . . . Growing old in good health, in the course of short, restful little trips, in the course of well-prepared little meals.

“Now, isn’t this better than hanging around dance halls, masseuses, and gambling parlors?” Lily would say.

Alice would nod in agreement and add: “Everything is so pale, next to a memory like that . . .”

When she finished straightening the closet, Alice changed her dress, buckled a white leather belt around her waist, and smiled. “The same hole as last year! It really is amusing!”

But she scolded herself for not having greeted, downstairs in the drawing room, “their” portrait . . .

“Alice! Alice! Are you coming down?” called Lily’s voice from below. Alice leaned out over the balcony.

“In a minute! What is it?”

“Come down . . . Something strange . . . Come on!”

Vaguely excited, always ready for some romantic encounter, she ran downstairs and found Lily standing in front of “their” portrait, taken down from its hook and set on an armchair in the light. The exceptionally humid weather, some combination of salt and paint, had, in ten months in the darkness of the closed villa, worked an intelligent disaster, an act of destruction in which chance had armed itself with an almost miraculous malevolence. Mold growing on the great man’s Roman chin had drawn the whitish beard of an unkempt old man, the paper had blistered, puffing the cheeks up into two lymphatic pouches. A few grains of black charcoal, slipping down from the hair across the entire portrait, loaded the conqueror’s face with wrinkles and years . . . Alice put her white hands over her eyes.

“It’s . . . it’s vandalism!”

Lily, ever prosaic, sighed out a long “Good God . . .” adding feverishly, “We’re not going to leave it there, are we?”

“Lord, no! I’d be sick!”

They looked at each other. Lily found Alice’s svelte figure young-looking, and Alice was unable to ward off a feeling of envy: “What a complexion Lily has! Like a peach!”

Their lunch rang with unusual chatter, during which there was talk of massages, diets, dresses, and the local casino. They spoke, as if incidentally, about the prolonged youth of certain artists and about their publicized love affairs. For no apparent reason, Lily exclaimed, “Hmph! Short and sweet? I prefer long and happy!” and Alice distractedly mentioned the same man’s name four or five times, the name of one of their friends who would be spending—“or else I’m very much mistaken”—the summer in the neighborhood . . . A feverish desire to escape, a rush of wicked designs, made them eat, drink, smoke, and talk freely. But in the drawing room Alice turned her face away pityingly as she walked past the portrait, and it was the frivolous Lily, rubicund and a little tipsy, who exhaled the smoke through her nostrils at the great man with disdain.

“Poor old thing!”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

The painter who wanted to die made the gesture, at once spontaneous and literary, of writing out a few lines before giving himself over to death. He reached for a large sheet of drawing paper and a pencil, and then, just as he was about to write, he changed his mind.

“A few lines? For whom? The concierge knows I live alone, that I have no family, that my mistress has left me. Let’s give her the pleasure of telling the story of this meaningless accident, once to the police and twenty times to the neighbors. My paintings? Let somebody sell them. I’d just as soon burn them, but it would be such a strain . . . and the smell of burning oil and charred hemp, in this beautiful air . . . For my last earthly memory to be a nauseating stench, ugh! That’s not what I want.”

Yet he still hesitated, tormented by a childish restlessness, a kind of vanity and honesty that were very much alive: the need to leave behind him the mark of his passing, to note the hour of his dying; in short, a need which was equivalent to that of recounting his wretched life as a lover betrayed . . . He threw down the pencil.

“And after I’m dead, people will think I was looking for pity . . . Then die, without words! Is it so difficult to die simply?”

He grabbed his revolver, loaded it, and his right elbow felt instinctively for the familiar armrest of his big, stuffed chair; facing him, a blank canvas on the easel reflected back onto his face the soft yellow light of the spring afternoon. He set the weapon down on a small round table and then, slowly, he stood up.

“Yes . . . that’s it, I can do that. I almost have to. I see a landscape, inside me, that resembles my life, that explains why it is I’m dying . . .”

He began to paint, rapidly, with a sweep and freedom to his strokes which was not typical of him. He barely paused to contemplate his model, the inner landscape composed of his stormy, youthful grief, sometimes sharp and clear, sometimes obscured by clouds which passed, only for him to restore its blinding clarity and somewhat conventional symbolism.

He painted a marshy plain and a desert where greenish-black reeds emerged, in scattered tufts, from pools the color of lead. From the foreground, where a few curled leaves floated like skiffs, to the horizon closed with a rigid barrier of cirrus, there was nothing but rushy marshes, flat desolation, and reflections, wrinkled by the wind, of a sky in which the low, swelling clouds moved forward in parallel banks.

In the foreground, a single, bare tree, bent beneath the gusting wind like river grass bowing in the current. The main branch, broken yet living, revealed the splintered white sapwood beneath the torn bark . . .

The feverishly working hand finally stopped, the stiff arm dropped to his side. A warm fatigue softened the last hour of life.

“It’s good,” the painter said to himself. “My portrait looks just like me. I’m satisfied. There’s nothing holding me back now. I’m going to die.”

The rectangular patch of sky, above the bay window, changed from yellow to pink, heralding a long spring twilight. A young woman’s voice, very near, sang through the open window the first notes of so touching, so colorful a song that the painter, holding his breath, stared at the window as if waiting to see the sound pass by as copper spheres, round flowers, and fruit dripping with juice. Holding the revolver in his hand, he leaned out and looked down, curious, into the courtyard. He did not discover there the sweet mouth which was sending, toward his death, such a generous farewell. But across the courtyard, in a dark little apartment, the blond nape of a young girl’s neck shone like a pile of golden straw in a dark loft.

The painter returned to his canvas, sat down, and rubbed his right elbow on the chair’s armrest . . . In sympathy with a sustained B flat, a fragile crystal goblet close to him vibrated.

“Something is missing from the canvas . . . A link . . . an intelligible detail . . . A detail which would serve as the humble legend . . .”

He put down his revolver and began painting a gray bird on the main branch of the tree, a songbird which, filled with its song, head raised toward the closed sky, was singing.

He delighted in the lustrous plumage and the gleaming eye—a shining jet bead . . . When evening fell and a servant came up, bringing his meal, she found the painter standing in front of his canvas, next to the forgotten weapon. He had finished painting the bird. Now he was using the last lilac rays of day to sketch, at the foot of the bare tree, a still-rudimentary flower struggling to lift the sickly, obstinate petals of its face out of the marsh.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

It is certain that we come in contact with the half-crazy every day. They cannot be confined like the insane; they cannot be punished like the sane. If certain people hesitate to admit the existence of the half-crazy, they have only to read the daily paper to be convinced
.

My dear colleague, I too invite them in, and with the same end in mind, to write about them. In June, July, and August, the place where a daily paper takes shape is a snare which attracts the half-crazy, the way the baited mousetrap attracts the mouse. Is it the cool floor, the dark anteroom with padded doors, the pleasant humidity absorbed by the stacks of blank paper? Enticed, the half-crazy seeks out the shade of our factory, investigates the smell of the ink, slakes his hidden agitation at the very wellspring of the printed drama, the event which soon will stir the crowd gathered at the outside windows . . .

But above all, he brings with him, heavy, swollen with muddled language, the poor soul of a man already cut off from the normal world, his soul in danger at every moment of allowing his secret to escape. He knows he must keep quiet and the confession trembles on the tip of his tongue. Storms and sunshine increase these clever intrusions, so he plays with danger, risks the obsessive word in conversation, the nervous mannerism capable of giving away everything. He is almost always at the mercy of a few syllables, whose sound and pattern engender in him a frenzy of which he remains the master only as long as he resists the urge to utter them one more time . . . then again and then just once more . . . He resists, for his whole life is nothing but watching and mistrusting himself. His half-crazed conversation, the stubbornness with which he informs us of his discoveries, his political, literary, or financial genius, are not moments of abandon; on the contrary. He seeks these contacts out of a taste for risk, diversion, and boasting, to prove to himself that he can still chat with us without falling into the deadly intoxication of the repeated word, the forbidden phrase which sings in him like a flood still contained, or the gesture which, once unleashed, opens the sinister door to the house of the insane.

During the hot weather, three or four of these troubled souls roam around the room where I work, slipping in quietly or forcing the door by surprise. One, cordial and lively, full of a southern plumpness, empties his pockets filled with manuscripts, verse and prose neither good nor bad. He tells anecdotes, laughs loudly, then apologizes for babbling on. I know of nothing more reassuring than he—if it weren’t for the way he lurks in the shadows for hours, and then springs out unexpectedly with a burst of gaiety which terrifies the less spirited. Yet I still prefer him to that gentle, well-bred, well-dressed young man, who the first time he came was called Vernier, the second time Lugard, and the third Wilder. He first inquired about ways of getting a quick divorce, because his freedom of mind, his ability to work depended on it. Under the name of Lugard, he decried the fact that family arguments thwarted his vocation as a painter; finally, the one named Wilder, with the charming, disenchanted smile of Lugard, spoke in restrained, well-chosen terms about imperious gifts—a unique voice, a personal understanding of the great works of music—which destined him to the opera and to light opera. His modesty forced him to admit, at the end of the conversation, that he didn’t know a note of music . . . What scorching day brought to me, under the name of Durand or Bojidar Karageorgevitch, a young whispering Proteus? He was well-mannered and had the sweet face of adolescents who resemble a very pretty mother. No doubt he will return, spreading anxiety, himself well protected from it, having already found refuge in an incurable sense of security.

And will she be cured, the stout visitor with the downy upper lip who came, round as a bubble, carried here on the moaning wind of a sudden storm from the west? She arrived all talkative and communicative, embellished with the graces and attributes of a local muse. The dress the color of Greek olives, the large, somewhat precarious hat, the scarf that slips off, the ceremonial glove, and the manuscript rolled up and tied with a thin ribbon—she wasn’t missing a thing! Only her black eyes, like a bird’s which betray no thought, lit up this turret with an unstable and mysterious fire. The lady of letters began by complaining about the heat, then about the difficulty there is, for an unyieldingly honest woman, in guaranteeing the sale of her stories, novellas, and serials. A bitter and banal song, in short, delivered rather gaily.