The Collected Stories of Colette (54 page)

No more troublesome and squandering husband, no more scenes, no more unexpected entrances, departures that are more like flights, suspicious telegrams, no more invisible female intruders on the phone named “sir” or “my good man . . .”

No more husband, no child, no admirers, and no lover . . . “Free and sitting on top of the world!” her jealous friends would say.

“But did I ask to be free and sitting on top of the world?”

She had taken back her dowry, regained her independence, moved into a luxurious old apartment, sunny and secluded, made for a recluse or a passionate twosome, and lived in peace—ah, what peace . . .

“But did I want so much peace?”

She stood there, in front of the easy chair and the screen which were trying, beneath the ceiling, to enclose Irene in a refuge her own size. She felt a sudden need for light, and lit the little smoked-crystal chandelier, the antique bronze sconce, and the basket of electric fruit on the dining-room table. But she left the bedroom, which she had prided herself on earlier, and her Spanish bed from whose corners there rose, like heraldic pales, four gilded wooden flames, in darkness . . .

“Oh, yes, I have a lovely house,” she said coldly. “I have nothing to do but wait till it’s time to show it to other friends, other women. And afterward . . . ?”

She envisaged a series of days, with herself in the role of cicerone, praising the shell chimneypiece, the wrought-iron banister, the Seine, the woodwork with its fading gilt . . . All of a sudden, with desperate fierceness, she envied a little furnished apartment where for want of anything better one of her friends was living with a young painter, two dirty rooms with cigarette ashes and paint stains everywhere, but warm with the sounds of people quarreling, laughing, making up. At the same time she felt herself, almost physically ill and full of bitterness, being thrust into a studio which doubled as an apartment—you have to live somewhere!—for a whole family, the two parents, the three beautiful children, as much alike as three pure-bred puppies . . . The warmth of the narrow, sensual apartment, the high, vertical daylight from the studio windows on the three naked little bodies . . . Irene hit the light switch, suddenly cutting off the electricity, and sighed, somewhat relieved, as the beautiful antique order of the apartment disappeared. She moved the screen and the easy chair away from the fire, drew the curtains, put an old, warm overcoat across her shoulders, turned off the last lamp in the drawing room cautiously, and hastily left the room, taking with her a detective novel, the caviar sandwiches, and the pot of chocolate, to finish her evening in a straw chair wedged between the sink and the shower stall in the bathroom.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

It’s not that I like it here, but it’s so cold outside. As soon as you come in here, the air wraps you in eiderdown. When I was a child, during the winter I used to sleep under a thick cloud of fine goose down, enclosed in red marceline silk, choice, weightless down which gave off a mysterious warmth . . . But it’s just plain stuffy in here. You breathe in all the smells of a tearoom: frangipane, warm pastry, the vegetable bitterness of scalding tea, the rum in the babas, burned toast crumbs that have fallen into the embers. And especially perfumes, women’s perfumes . . . There are no sanctions against certain perfumers; the manufacture of essences is dangerously unrestricted and the female sense of smell, often rudimentary and poorly developed, confronts and tries out everything that’s sold in little bottles. The faint lavender of angelica, the sticky rose of geranium, vanilla extract pointlessly braced with resin, tarry narcissus, prussic-acid lilac, creosoted carnation, benjamin disguised as amber, and all that vague flora, those distilled flower beds, inevitably giving off the poorly disguised, nauseating soul of wild parsnip!

I try to forget the cacophony of perfumes floating in the air. Besides, the two pretty women next to me smell nice. I would get tired of the brunette’s sandalwood after a while, and I know that behind the “red rose” the blonde has sprayed on herself there hides, on the secondary olfactory plane, a vague, fetid smell of fresh ink. But so what? This brunette, this blonde, and I aren’t going to spend the rest of our lives together.

The brunette is pretty and the blonde is charming—and bleached. But the brunette, dressed all in gray velvet with panels of flame-colored beads, a stole of silver foxes around her neck, shoes covered with sequins, feathers, and paste jewels, gloves that are embroidered and funnel-shaped, and a hat with a spray of aigrettes which hang, above two stars, like a threatening cloud, the brunette is resplendent with the somewhat harsh elegance people go for nowadays . . . The greedy, chattering women fall silent as she enters. They stare at her, and the envy in their eyes enhances her beauty the way a summer rain adds luster to the enameled feathers of a kingfisher. She is warm and drinks like a pigeon, her neck stretched out, her jabot hanging. She has two gestures which, though frequent as tics, are the result of a studied coquetry: with her forefinger she flicks a very light brown curl away from her eyebrow, displaying her almond-shaped fingernail, which glistens near her wide, tapering eye; she sticks a trident-shaped tortoiseshell comb into the hair at the nape of her neck, and as she raises her arm, the eye follows the roundness of her well-supported breast, which rises with the arm.

The blonde . . . the blonde is charming in her own way. She’s merely a blonde in black Moroccan crepe and a plush cape, a blonde with a short neck and a carnivorous mouth. Her mannerisms do not make her more attractive. She thrusts out her chin the way a pug does, and wrinkles up her nose like a baby seal as it comes blinking up out of the water. It’s not a pretty sight. I’d like to tell her so . . . another time. And now, beneath the fiery glances, she’s imitating her friend’s little game. She puffs out her chest and with one hand pats at her low, golden chignon. In the same way a younger sister unconsciously imitates an older sister already sure of her seductive power. What a delight to the eye it is to watch these two well-trained peahens! The more beautiful of the two is a bit contemptuous toward the more docile one, and the latter, not without a twinge of jealousy, imitates, conforms, corrects herself.

A man appears. Were they expecting him? I think so. For they both exclaim at the same time, “Well!” as if surprised. Which one has he come for? I don’t know. One fills his cup, the other offers him cakes. Impartial, courteous, he leans toward the blonde, then gives his full attention to what the brunette is saying. The blonde seems to be getting nervous. She juts her chin out in little jerks, wrinkles up her nose, and laughs too much. Now she looks ugly next to her rival . . . The man will have eyes only for the brunette, her dress of ash and flame, her white skin, her pink forefinger, her round breast under her dress which has a vigor all its own. I bet on the brunette . . . and I lose. The man turns imperceptibly, irresistibly toward the blonde. First, his body shifts gradually. Then the chair, with little, impatient hitches. Now the blonde can stick out her chin, repeat that coarse gesture which shortens her neck, wrinkles her nose, and shows too much of her gums above her uneven teeth, because she’s not risking anything anymore. The man prefers her. She wins and within a few seconds she blushes like a piece of fruit brushed by a streak of dawn.

And the brunette, upset and confused, intervenes, trying to discover the victorious blonde’s secret, and risks, by way of imitation, the wrinkling of the nose, the batting of the eyelashes, the puppy-dog faces, chin out, teeth bared . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

They parted as they had come together, without knowing why. One thing, however, is certain. Jeannine did reveal to certain third parties, with far too much glee, that Andrée’s real name, given to her by a grandmother at baptism, was Symphorienne. Another version had it that Andrée, clumsily overestimating her authority as the older and as a solidly built brunette, signaled Jeannine it was time to leave one afternoon, in front of twenty cups of tea and as many glasses of port, by whistling for her as she whistled for her dogs in the Bois. Uncertain friends, for once impartial, blamed both Andrée and Jeannine. “I don’t know if Andrée whistled for Jeannine or not, but those truck-driver manners are just like her; and that silly Jeannine excels at arranging her own slavery for the sadistic pleasure of whining with humiliation afterward.”

After their falling out, they bore with dignity and discretion the sorrow they felt for their great friendship, which had lasted through two seasons at Deauville, two at Chamonix, and three on the Riviera. Jeannine, the weaker, more impertinent, more frivolous of the two, changed dance halls, discovered a new tearoom-bistro in Belleville where she took her friends at three in the afternoon and then again at one o’clock in the morning for some potato salad and that strange fish, sea pike, prized in the open-air markets and snubbed by high-class fish markets because of its jade-green backbone. Without Jeannine, Andrée reverted to her rustic tastes and moved her walk in the Bois and her boat ride on the lake up an hour. Jeannine thought, “I’m drowning my sorrow,” and Andrée, in her flat-heeled shoes, her balaclava around her neck, and her hands in her pockets, repeated, “I don’t want to hear any more about intimate friends, men or women! I’m turning back into the wild nymph of the unexplored forest!” Deep down and with naïve astonishment, they accepted their shared indifference and the ease, the amazing benignity of their breakup.

Spring led Jeannine back toward the restaurants in the Bois. May found her shivering in a white crepe cape, dancing to stay warm, at eleven o’clock at night, on a dance floor whitened by electric moonlight, between the tables and the saplings lashing in the icy wind. She crossed the Bois whenever a day of shopping allowed her to parade beneath a false little sun, dressed in winter muslins, then summer furs. But neither by night nor by day did the Bois remind her of her friend, the nymph, for the Bois of the morning and pedestrians does not look like the Bois of cars and night.

It happened, however, that she was walking alone at the unlikely hour of fifteen minutes before noon, down one of the long paths which lead from the Entre-Deux-Lacs to the Cascade. She was walking fast, for her new friend, both intimate and athletic, had just chosen a game of tennis instead of her, and Jeannine, out of spite, had refused a ride. She was walking without enjoyment, and did not hear the nightingales, or the blackbirds and the orioles who were trying to imitate the nightingales. The acacias, which were losing their blossoms, snowed down in vain at Jeannine’s feet, but her charming little nose, as imperious as a swift’s beak, was closed to their fragrance, vanilla beignets and orange blossoms.

The sound of someone whistling stopped her, and she knew why she had stopped, listening through the trees to the voice calling, “Here, girl, here, girl, come on, come on!” A Belgian sheep dog appeared, just long enough to show its bearlike eyes and its thick tail, hanging down like a she-wolf’s. A bulldog followed after her, snorting like an old taxi, white, and monocled with a black half-moon, then came a frantic griffon terrier, yellow and bristling like a bundle of straws . . .

“Mieke . . . Relaps . . . Joli-Blond . . .” counted Jeannine. Behind the dogs, Andrée crossed the path but did not see Jeannine, who recognized the chestnut-colored, all-weather suit, the muddy, flat-heeled boots, the red woolen scarf, and the whip with the big braided handle.

“Here, girls, here, girls, here . . . !”

The call faded away; one of the dogs barked in the distance. Jeannine stood there motionless, trembling. She hoped for the familiar cry to come again, heard nothing more, and set off on her way, hesitant, half-hearted, her face pale and her eyes brimming with two tears that refused to fall.

“I wonder . . . Really, I wonder what came over me . . . I wonder . . .”

For nothing in her heart leaped out toward Andrée. She calmly imagined her somewhat “haremesque” perfume and her virile hand in her big glove. But deep inside her a jealous tenderness, a regret, stinging like a child’s hurt, demanded the three dogs eager for their daily walk, the pleasure of calling them by their names, the right to mark the damp path with two small sharp heels next to two flat rubber heels; the privilege of tossing off meaningless phrases into the mist of the lake, the canopy of the elder trees, or the branch alive with thrushes, phrases good only for the moment, a naïve and sweet custom, the security of saying them again the next day.