The Collected Stories of Colette (59 page)

Mandora crossed the room and her brown-and-yellow-striped skirt, as it brushed against the furniture, gave out rich cello notes that only Jean could perceive. She placed the little short-legged table across the bed; on its embroidered linen cloth stood a steaming bowl.

“Here’s this dinner of yours.”

“What is it?”

“First course, phosphatine: there, you know that. After . . . you’ll see for yourself.”

The sick child received all over his half-recumbent body the comfort of a wide brown gaze, thirst-quenching and exhilarating. “How good it is, that brown ale of Mandora’s eyes! How kind to me she is, too! How kind everyone is to me! If only they could restrain themselves a little . . .” Exhausted under the burden of universal kindness, he shut his eyes and opened them again at the clink of spoons. Medicine spoons, soup spoons, dessert spoons. Jean did not like spoons, with the exception of a queer silver spoon with a long twisted stem, finished off at one end with a little engine-turned disc. “It’s a sugar crusher,” Madame Mamma would say. “And the other end of the spoon, Madame Mamma?” —“I’m not quite sure. I think it used to be an absinthe spoon.” And nearly always, at that moment, her gaze would wander to a photograph of Jean’s father, the husband she had lost so young, “Your dear Papa, my own Jean,” and whom Jean coldly and silently designated by the secret words: “That man hanging up in the drawing room.”

Apart from the absinthe spoon—absinthe, absinthe, absent, apse saint—Jean only liked forks, four-horned demons on which things were impaled, a bit of mutton cutlet, a tiny fish curled up in its fried bread crumbs, a round slice of apple and its two pip eyes, a crescent of apricot in its first quarter, frosted with sugar.

“Jean, darling, open your beak.”

He obeyed, closing his eyes, and swallowed a medicine that was almost tasteless except for a passing, hypocritical sickliness that disguised something worse. In his secret vocabulary, Jean called this potion “dead man’s gully.” But nothing would have wrenched such appalling syllables out of him and flung them gasping at the feet of Madame Mamma.

The phosphatized soup followed inevitably; a badly swept hayloft, with its chinks stuffed with mildewed flour. But you forgave it all that because of something that floated impalpably over its clear liquid; a flowery breath, the dusty fragrance of the cornflowers Mandora bought in little bunches in the street for Jean, in July.

A little cube of grilled lamb went down quickly. “Run, lamb, run, I’m putting a good face on you, but go right down into my stomach in a ball, I couldn’t chew you for anything in the world. Your flesh is still bleating and I don’t want to know that you’re pink in the middle!”

“It seems to me you’re eating very fast tonight, aren’t you, Jean?”

The voice of Madame Mamma dropped from the height of the dusk, perhaps from the molded plaster cornice, perhaps from the big cupboard. By a special gracious concession, Jean granted his mother permission to ascend into the alpine world at the top of the cupboard, the world of the household linen. She reached it by means of the stepladder, became invisible behind the left-hand door, and came down again loaded with great solid slabs of snow, hewn straight out of the heights. This harvest was the limit of her ambition. Jean went farther and higher; he thrust up, alone, toward the white peaks, slipping through an odd pair of sheets, reappearing in the well-rounded fold of an even pair. And what giddy slides between the stiff damask table napkins or on some alp of starched curtains, slippery as glaciers, and edged with Greek-key pattern, what nibbling of stalks of dried lavender, of their scattered flowers, of the fat and creamy orris roots.

It was from there he would descend again into his bed at dawn, stiff all over with cold, pale, weak, and impish. “Jean! Oh, goodness, he must have uncovered himself again in his sleep! Mandora, quick, a hot-water bottle!” Silently, Jean congratulated himself on having got back just in time, as usual. Then he would note, on an invisible page of the notebook hidden in the active, beating nook in his side he called his “heartpocket,” all the vicissitudes of his ascent, the fall of the stars and the orange tintinnabulation of the dawn-touched peaks.

“I’m eating fast, Madame Mamma, because I’m hungry.”

For he was an old hand at all kinds of deception and didn’t he know that the words “I’m hungry” made Madame Mamma flush with pleasure?

“If that’s true, darling, I’m sorry I only gave you stewed apples for your pudding. But I told Mandora to add some zest of lemon peel and a little stick of vanilla to make it taste nice.”

Jean resolutely faced up to the stewed apples, an acid provincial girl aged about fifteen who, like other girls of the same age, had nothing but haughty disdain for the boy of ten. But didn’t he feel the same toward her? Wasn’t he armed against her? Wasn’t he an agile cripple, leaning on the stick of vanilla? “It’s always too short,
always
, that little stick,” he murmured in his elusive way.

Mandora returned, and her billowing skirt with the broad stripes swelled up with as many ribs as a melon. As she walked she sounded—
tzrromm, tzrromm
—for Jean alone—the inner strings that were the very soul, the gorgeous music of Mandora.

“Finished your dinner already? If you eat so fast, you’ll bring it up again. It’s not your usual way.”

Madame Mamma on one side, Mandora on the other, were standing close by his bed. “How tall they are! Madame Mamma doesn’t take up much room in width in her little claret-colored dress. But Mandora, over and above her great sounding box, makes herself bigger with two curved handles, standing with her arms akimbo.” Jean resolutely defied the stewed apples, spread them all over the plate, pressed them down again in festoons on the gilded rim, and once again, the question of dinner was settled.

The winter evening had long ago fallen. As he savored his half glass of mineral water, the thin, light furtive water that he thought was green because he drank it out of a pale green mug, Jean reckoned he still needed a little courage to conclude his invalid’s day. There was still his nightly toilet, the inevitable, scrupulous details that demanded the aid of Madame Mamma and even—
tzrromm, tzrromm
—the gay, sonorous assistance of Mandora; still the toothbrush, the washcloths and sponge, the good soap and warm water, the combined precautions for not getting the sheets the least bit wet; still the tender maternal inquiries.

“My little boy, you can’t sleep like that, you’ve got the binding of the big Gustave Doré digging right into your side, and that litter of little books with sharp corners all over your bed. Wouldn’t you like me to bring the table nearer?”

“No, thanks, Madame Mamma, I’m quite all right as I am.”

When his toilet was finished, Jean struggled against the intoxication of tiredness. But he knew the limit of his strength and did not try to escape from the rites that ushered in the night and the marvels it might capriciously bring forth. His only fear was that Madame Mamma’s solicitude might prolong the duration of day longer than he could bear, might ruin a material edifice of books and furniture, a balance of light and shadows that Jean knew and revered. Building that edifice cost him his final efforts and ten o’clock was the extreme limit of his endurance.

“If she stays, if she insists, if she still wants to go on watching over me when the big hand slants to the right of the XII, I’m going to feel myself turning white, whiter, whiter still, and my eyes will sink in and I shan’t even be able to keep answering the no-thank you—quite-all-right-Madame-Mamma—good nights that are absolutely necessary to her and . . . and . . . it’ll be awful, she’ll sob.”

He smiled at his mother and the majesty that illness confers on children it strikes down wakened in the fiery glint of his hair, descended over his eyelids, and settled bitterly on his lips. It was the hour when Madame Mamma would have liked to lose herself in contemplation of her mangled and exquisite work.

“Good night, Madame Mamma,” said the child, very low.

“Are you tired? Do you want me to leave you?”

He made one more effort, opened wide his eyes, the color of the sea off Brittany, manifested with his whole face the desire to be fit and bonny, and bravely lowered his high shoulders.

“Do I look like a tired boy? Madame Mamma, I ask you now!”

She replied only with a roguish shake of her head, kissed her son, and went away, taking with her her choked-back cries of love, her strangled adjurations, her litanies that implored the disease to go away, to undo the fetters on the long, weak legs and the emaciated but not deformed loins, to set the impoverished blood running freely again through the green network of the veins.

“I’ve put two oranges on the plate. You don’t want me to put out your lamp?”

“I’ll put it out myself, Madame Mamma.”

“Good heavens, where’s my head? We haven’t taken your temperature tonight!”

A fog interposed itself between Madame Mamma’s garnet dress and her son. That night Jean was burning with fever but taking a thousand precautions to conceal it. A little fire was smoldering in the hollow of his palms, there was a drumming
woo-woo-woo
in his outer ear, and fragments of a hot crown clinging to his temples.

“We’ll take it tomorrow without fail, Madame Mamma.”

“The bell is just under your wrist. You’re quite sure you wouldn’t rather have the company of a night light, during the hours you’re alone, you know, one of those pretty night . . .”

The last syllable of the word stumbled into a pit of darkness and Jean collapsed with it. “Yet it was only a very tiny pit,” he rebuked himself as he fell. “I must have a big bump at the back of my neck. I must look like a zebu. But I zeed, yes I zaw kvite veil that Madame Mamma didn’t zee, no, didn’t see anything fall. She was much too absorbed in all the things she takes away every night gathered up in her skirt, her little prayers, the reports she’s got to give the doctor, the way I hurt her so much by not wanting anyone near me at night. She carries all that away in the lap of her skirt and it spills over and rolls on the carpet, poor Madame Mamma. How can I make her understand that I’m not unhappy? Apparently a boy of my age can either live in bed or be pale and deprived of his legs or be in pain without being unhappy. Unhappy . . . I
was
unhappy when they still used to wheel me about in a chair. I was drenched with a shower of stares. I used to shrink so as to get a bit less of it. I was the target for a hail of ‘How pretty he is!’ and ‘What a dreadful pity!’ Now the only miseries I have are the visits of my cousin Charlie, with his scratched knees and his nailed shoes and that phrase ‘boy scout,’ half steel, half India-rubber, he overwhelms me with . . . And that pretty little girl who was born the same day as me, whom they sometimes call my foster-sister and sometimes my fiancée. She’s studying dancing. She sees me lying in bed and then she stands on the tips of her toes and says: ‘Look, I’m on my points.’ But all that’s only teasing. There comes a time at night when the teases go to sleep. This is the time when everything’s all right.”

He put out the lamp and peacefully watched his nocturnal companions, the choir of shapes and colors, rising up around him. He was waiting for the symphony to burst out for the crowd Madame Mamma called solitude. He drew the pear-shaped bell, an invalid’s toy of moonlight-colored enamel, from under his arm and laid it on the bedside table. “Now, light up!” he commanded.

It did not obey at once. The night outside was not so black that you could not make out the end of a leafless branch of a chestnut tree in the street swaying outside one of the panes and asking for help. Its swollen tip assumed the shape of a feeble rosebud. “Yes, you’re trying to soften my heart by telling me you’re next season’s bud. Yet you know how ruthless I am to everything that talks to me about next year. Stay outside. Disappear. Vanish! As my cousin would say: skedaddle.”

His fastidiousness about words reared up to its full height and poured one more dose of withering scorn on that cousin with his scratched, purple knees and his vocabulary plastered with expressions such as “And how!” “I put a wrench in the works,” “I’m not having any,” and “Golly!” Worst of all, Charlie was always saying, “Just think!” and, “I do understand!” as if those immensely learned crickets, thought and penetration, would not have fled in terror on all their delicate legs from a boy like that, shod in hobnails and dried mud.

At the mere sight of his cousin Charlie, Jean wiped his fingers on his handkerchief as if to rid them of some kind of coarse sand. For Madame Mamma and Mandora, interposed between the child and ugliness, between the child and scurrilous words, between the child and the baser sorts of reading, had made it possible for him to know and cherish only two forms of luxury: fastidiousness and pain. Protected and precocious, he had quickly mastered the hieroglyphs of print, dashing as wildly through books as he galloped astride clouds. He could compel the landscapes to rise up before him from the smooth page or assemble around him all the things that, for those likewise privileged, secretly people the air.

He had never used the silver fountain pen, engraved with his initials, since the day when his rapid, mature writing had startled and, as it were, offended the doctor with the cold hands. “Is that really the handwriting of a young child, Madame?” —“Oh, yes, Doctor, my son has very definitely formed handwriting.” And Madame Mamma’s anxious eyes had asked apologetically: “It’s not dangerous, Doctor, is it?”

He also refrained from drawing, fearing all the things the eloquence of a sketch might give away. After having drawn the portrait of Mandora, with all her inner keyboard of resounding notes, the profile of an alabaster clock galloping full speed on its four supporting pillars, the dog Riki in the hands of the barber, with his hair done, like Jean’s own, “à L’Aiglon,” he had been terrified by the truth to life of his efforts and had wisely torn up his first works.

“Wouldn’t you like a sketchbook, my young friend, and some colored chalk? It’s an amusing game and just the thing for a boy of your age.” At the suggestion, which he considered outside the province of medicine, Jean had only replied by a look between half-closed lashes, a serious, manly look that summed up the doctor who was giving him advice. “My nice barber wouldn’t dream of making such a suggestion!” He could not forgive the doctor for having dared to ask him one day when his mother was out of the room: “And why the devil do you call your mother Madame?” The angry masculine glance and the weak, musical voice had answered with one accord: “I didn’t think that was any business of the devil’s.”