The Collected Stories of Colette (62 page)

Behind me, I became unpleasantly conscious that Mademoiselle Barberet must be getting bored, so I resumed our conversation.

“It’s pretty, this outlook.”

“Above all, it’s light, for a first floor. You won’t mind if I put your pages in order, Madame, I notice there’s a mistake in the sequence of numbers. The three comes after the seven and I can’t see the eighteen.”

“I’m not in the least surprised, Mademoiselle Barberet. Yes, do sort them out, do . . .”

“Above all, it’s light.” Light, this mezzanine floor, where, at all times of the year, almost at all times of the day, I used to switch on a little chandelier under the ceiling rose? On that same ceiling there suddenly appeared a halo of yellow light. Mademoiselle Barberet had just turned on a glass bowl, marbled to look like onyx, that reflected the light up onto the ceiling rose, the same icing-sugar ceiling rose under which, in other days, a branch of gilded metal flowered into five opaline blue corollas.

“A lot of mistakes, Mademoiselle Barberet? Especially a lot of crossings out.”

“Oh, I work from manuscripts much more heavily corrected than this. The carbon copy, shall I do it in purple or black?”

“In black. Tell me, Mademoiselle . . .”

“My name’s Rosita, Madame. At least, it’s nicer than Barberet.”

“Mademoiselle Rosita, I’m going to abuse your kindness. I see that I’ve brought you the whole of my text up to date and I haven’t a rough copy. If you could type page 62 for me, I could take it away with me so as to get my sequence right.”

“Why, of course, Madame. I’ll do it at once. It’ll only take me seven minutes. I’m not boasting, but I type fast. Do please sit down.”

All that I wanted to do was just that, to stay a few minutes longer and find in this room the traces, if any, of my having lived here; to make sure I was not mistaken, to marvel at the fact that a wallpaper, preserved by the shade, should not; after all these years, be in tatters. “Above all, it’s light.” Evidently the sanitary authorities or perhaps just some speculative builder had razed all the bank of houses that, in the old days, hid the slope of one of Paris’s hills from my unwitting eyes.

To the right of the fireplace—in which a little wood stove, flanked by its provision of sticks, tarred roadblocks, and old packing-case staves, was snoring discreetly—I could see a door and, to the right, a door exactly like it. Through the one on the right, I used to enter my bedroom. The one on the left led into the little hall, which ended in a recess I had turned into a bathroom by installing a small tub and gas heater. Another room, very dark and fairly large, which I never used, served as a box room. As to the kitchen . . . That minute kitchen came back to my memory with extraordinary vividness; in winter, its old-fashioned blue-tiled range was touched by a ray of sun that glided as far as the equally Old World cooking stove, standing on very tall legs and faintly Louis XV in design. When I could not, as they say, stick it anymore, I used to go into the kitchen. I always found something to do there: polishing up the jointed gas pipe, running a wet cloth over the blue porcelain tiles, emptying out the water of faded flowers, and rubbing the vase clear again with a handful of coarse, damp salt.

Two good big cupboards, of the jam-cupboard type; a cellar that contained nothing but a bottle rack, empty of bottles.

“I’ll have finished in one moment, Madame.”

What I most longed to see again was the bedroom to the right of the fireplace,
my
room, with its solitary square window, and the old-fashioned bed-closet whose doors I had removed. That marvelous bedroom, dark on one side, light on the other! It would have suited a happy, clandestine couple, but it had fallen to my lot when I was alone and very far from happy.

“Thank you so much. I don’t need an envelope, I’ll fold up the page and put it in my bag.”

The front door, slammed to by an impetuous hand, banged. A sound is always less evocative than a smell, yet I recognized that one and gave a start, as Mademoiselle Barberet did too. Then a second door, the door of my bathroom—was shut more gently.

“Mademoiselle Rosita, if I’ve got through enough work, you’ll see me again on Monday morning around eleven.”

Pretending to make a mistake, I went toward the right of the fireplace. But between the door and myself, I found Mademoiselle Barberet, infinitely attentive.

“Excuse me. It’s the one on the other side.”

Out in the street, I could not help smiling, realizing that I had run heedlessly down the stairs without making a single mistake and that my feet, if I may risk the expression, still knew the staircase by heart. From the pavement, I studied my house, unrecognizable under a heavy makeup of mortar. The hall, too, was well disguised and now, with its dado of pink and green tiles, reminded me of the baleful chilliness of those mass-produced villas on the Riviera. The old dairy on the right of the entrance now sold banjos and accordions. But, on the left, the Palace of Dainties remained intact, except for a coat of cream paint. Pink sugared almonds in bowls, red-currant balls in full glass jars, emerald peppermints, and beige caramels . . . And the slabs of coffee cream and the sharp-tasting orange crescents . . . And those lentil-shaped sweets, wrapped in silver paper, like worm pills, and flavored with aniseed. At the back of the shop I recognized too, under their coat of new paint, the hundred little drawers with protruding navels, the low-carved counter, and all the charming woodwork of shops that date from the Second Empire, the old-fashioned scales whose shining copper pans danced under the beam like swings.

I had a sudden desire to buy those squares of licorice called “Pontefract cakes,” whose flavor is so full-bodied that, after them, nothing seems eatable. A mauve lady of sixty came forward to serve me. So this was all that survived of her former self, that handsome blond proprietress who had once been so fond of sky-blue. She did not recognize me, and in my confusion, I asked her for peppermint creams, which I cannot abide. The following Monday, I would have the opportunity of coming back for the little Pontefract cakes that give such a vile taste to fresh eggs, red wine, and every other comestible.

To my cost, I have proved from long experience that the past is a far more violent temptation to me than the craving to know the future. Breaking with the present, retracing my steps, the sudden apparition of a new, unpublished slice of the past is accompanied by a shock utterly unlike anything else and which I cannot lucidly describe. Marcel Proust, gasping with asthma amid the bluish haze of fumigations and the shower of pages dropping from him one by one, pursued a bygone and completed time. It is neither the true concern nor the natural inclination of writers to love the future. They have quite enough to do with being incessantly forced to invent their characters’ future, which, in any case, they draw up from the well of their own past. Mine, whenever I plunge into it, turns me dizzy. And when it is the turn of the past to emerge unexpectedly, to raise its dripping mermaid’s head into the lights of the present and look at me with delusive eyes long hidden in the depths, I clutch at it all the more fiercely. Besides the person I once was, it reveals to me the one I would have liked to be. What is the use of employing occult means and occult individuals in order to know that person better? Fortune-tellers and astrologers, readers of tarot cards and palmists are not interested in my past. Among the figures, the swords, the cups, and the coffee grounds, my past is written in three sentences. The seeress briskly sweeps away bygone “ups and downs” and a few vague “successes” that have had no marked results, then hurriedly plants on the whole the plaster rose of a today shorn of mystery and a tomorrow of which I expect nothing.

Among fortune-tellers, there are very few whom our presence momentarily endows with second sight. I have met some who went triumphantly backward in time, gathering definite, blindingly true pictures from my past, then leaving me shipwrecked amid a fascinating welter of dead people, children from the past, dates and places, leaped, with one bound, into my future: “In three years, in six years, your situation will be greatly improved.” Three years! Six years! Exasperated, I forgot them and their promises too.

But the temptation persists, along with a definite itch, to which I do not yield, to climb three floors or work a shaky elevator, stop on a landing, and ring three times. You see, one day I might hear my own footsteps approaching on the other side of the door and my own voice asking rudely: “What is it?” I open the door to myself, and naturally, I am wearing what I used to wear in the old days, something in the nature of a dark pleated tartan skirt and a high-collared shirt. The bitch I had in 1900 puts up her hackles and shivers when she sees me double . . . The end is missing. But as good nightmares go, it’s a good nightmare.

For the first time in my life, I had just, by going into Mademoiselle Barberet’s flat, gone back into my own home. The coincidence obsessed me during the days that followed my visit. I looked into it and I discovered something ironically interesting about it. Who was it who had suggested Mademoiselle Barberet to me? None other than my young typist, who was leaving her job to get married. She was marrying a handsome boy who was “taking,” as they say, a Gymnasium in the district of Grenelle and whom she had been anxious I should meet. While he was explaining to me, thoroughly convinced of my passionate interest, that, nowadays, a Gymnasium in a working-class district was a gold mine, I was listening to his slight provincial accent. “I come from B. like all my family,” he mentioned, in passing. “And like the person who was responsible for certain searing disappointments in my life,” I added mentally. Disappointments in love, naturally. They are the least worthy of being brought back to mind, but sometimes they behave just like a cut in which a fragment of hair is hidden; they heal badly.

This second man from B. had vanished, having fulfilled his obligations toward me, which consisted of flinging me back, for unknown ends, into a known place. He had struck me as gentle; as slightly heavy, like all young men made tired and drowsy by injudicious physical culture. He was dark, with beautiful southern eyes, as the natives of B. often are. And he carried off the passionate young girl, thin to the point of emaciation, who had been typing my manuscripts for three years and crying over them when my story ended sadly.

The following Monday, I brought Mademoiselle Rosita the meager fruit—twelve pages—of work that was anything but a labor of love. There was no motive whatever for being in a hurry to have two typed copies of a bad first draft, none except the pleasure and the risk of braving the little flat of long ago. “Worth doing just this once more,” I told myself, “then I’ll put my mind on other things.” Nevertheless, my remembering hand searched the length of the doorjamb for the pretty beaded braid, my pretentious bell pull of the old days, and found an electric button.

An unknown person promptly opened the door, answered me only with a nod, and showed me into the room with two windows, where Mademoiselle Barberet joined me.

“Have you worked well, Madame? The bad weather hasn’t had too depressing an effect on you?”

Her small, cold hand had hurriedly withdrawn from mine and was pulling forward the two sausage curls tied with black ribbon and settling them in their proper place on her right shoulder, nestling in her neck.

She smiled at me with the tempered solicitude of a well-trained nurse or a fashionable dentist’s receptionist or one of those women of uncertain age who do vague odd jobs in beauty parlors.

“It’s been a bad week for me, Mademoiselle Rosita. What’s more, you’ll find my writing difficult to read.”

“I don’t think so, Madame. A round hand is seldom illegible.”

She looked at me amiably; behind the thick glasses, the blue of her eyes seemed diluted.

“Just imagine, when I arrived, I thought I must have come to the wrong floor, the person who opened the door to me . . .”

“Yes. That’s my sister,” said Mademoiselle Barberet as if, by satisfying my indiscreet curiosity, she hoped to prevent it from going any further.

But when we are in the grip of curiosity, we have no shame.

“Ah! That’s your sister. Do you work together?”

Mademoiselle Barberet’s transparent skin quivered on her cheekbones.

“No, Madame. For some time now, my sister’s health has needed looking after.”

This time, I did not dare insist further. For a few moments more I lingered in my drawing room that was now an office, taking in how much lighter it was. I strained my ear in vain for anything that might echo in the heart of the house or in the depths of myself and I went away, carrying with me a romantic burden of conjectures. The sister who was ill—and why not melancholy mad? Or languishing over an unhappy love affair? Or struck with some monstrous deformity and kept in the shade? That is what I’m like when I let myself go.

During the following days, I had no leisure to indulge my wild fancies further. At that particular time F.-I. Mouthon had asked me to write a serial novelette for
Le Journal
. Was this intelligent, curly-haired man making his first mistake? In all honesty, I had protested that I should never be able to write the kind of serial that would have been suitable for the readers of a big daily paper. F.-I. Mouthon, who seemed to know more about it than I did myself, had winked his little elephant’s eye, shaken his curly forehead, shrugged his heavy shoulders and—I had sat down to write a serial novelette for which you will look in vain among my works. Mademoiselle Barberet was the only person who saw the first chapters before I tore them up. For in the long run, I turned out to be right; I did not know how to write a serial novelette.

On my return from my second visit to Mademoiselle Barberet, I reread the forty typed pages.

And I swore to peg away at it, as they say, like the very devil, to deprive myself of the flea market and the cinema and even of lunch in the Bois . . . This, however, did not mean Armenonville or even the Cascade, but pleasant impromptu picnics on the grass, all the better if Annie de Pène, a precious friend, came with me. There is no lack of milder days, once we are in February. We would take our bicycles, a fresh loaf stuffed with butter and sardines, two “delicatessen” sausage rolls we bought at a pork butcher’s near La Muette, and some apples, the whole secured with string to a water bottle in a wicker jacket, filled with white wine. As to coffee, we drank that at a place near the station at Auteuil, very black, very tasteless, but piping hot and syrupy with sugar.