The Collected Stories of Colette (63 page)

Few memories have remained as dear to me as the memory of those meals without plates, cutlery, or cloth, of those expeditions on two wheels. The cool sky, the rain in drops, the snow in flakes, the sparse, rusty grass, the tameness of the birds. These idylls suited a certain state of mind, far removed from happiness, frightened yet obstinately hopeful. By means of them, I have succeeded in taking the sting out of an unhappiness that wept small, restrained tears, a sorrow without great storms, in short a love affair that began just badly enough to make it end still worse. Does one imagine those periods, during which anodynes conquer an illness one believed serious at the time, fade easily from one’s memory? I have already compared them, elsewhere, to the “blanks” that introduce space and order between the chapters of a book. I should very much like—late in life, it is true—to call them “merciful blanks,” those days in which work and sauntering and friendship played the major part, to the detriment of love. Blessed days, sensitive to the light of the external world, in which the relaxed and idle senses made chance discoveries. It was not very long after I had been enjoying this kind of holiday that I made the acquaintance of Mademoiselle Barberet.

It was—and for good reason—three weeks before I went to see her again. Conceiving a loathing for my serial novelette every time I tried to introduce “action,” swift adventure, and a touch of the sinister into it, I had harnessed myself to short stories for
La Vie Parisienne
. It was therefore with a new heart and a light step that I climbed the slopes of her part of Paris, which shall be nameless. Not knowing whether Mademoiselle Barberet liked Pontefract cakes, I bought her several small bunches of snowdrops, which had not yet lost their very faint perfume of orange flowers, squeezed tight together in one big bunch.

Behind the door, I heard her little heels running forward over the uncarpeted wooden floor. I recognize a step more quickly than a shape, a shape more quickly than a face. It was bright outdoors and in the room with the two windows. Between the photographic enlargements, the “studies” of woodland landscapes, and the straw frames with red ribbon bows, the February sun was consuming the last faint outlines of my roses and blue convolvulus on the wallpaper.

“
This
time, Mademoiselle Rosita, I haven’t come empty-handed! Here are some little flowers for you and here are two short stories, twenty-nine pages of manuscript.”

“It’s too much, Madame, it’s too much . . .”

“It’s the length they have to be. It takes thirteen closely written pages, a short story for
La Vie Parisienne
.”

“I was talking of the flowers, Madame.”

“They’re not worth mentioning. And you know, on Monday, I’ve a feeling I’m going to bring you . . .”

Behind her spectacles, Mademoiselle Barberet’s eyes fixed themselves on me, forgetting to dissemble the fact that they were red, bruised, filled with bitter water, and so sad that I broke off my sentence. She made a gesture with her hand, and murmured: “I apologize. I have worries . . .”

Few women keep their dignity when they are in tears. The withered young girl in distress wept simply, decently controlling the shaking of her hands and her voice. She wiped her eyes and her glasses and gave me a kind of smile with one side of her mouth.

“It’s one of those days . . . it’s because of the child, I mean, of my sister.”

“She’s ill, isn’t she?”

“In one sense, yes. She has no disease,” she said emphatically. “It’s since she got married. It’s changed her character. She’s so rough with me. Of course all marriages can’t turn out well, one knows that.”

I am not very fond of other people’s matrimonial troubles, they bear an inevitable resemblance to my own personal disappointments. So I was anxious to get away at once from the sorrowing Barberet and the unhappily married sister. But just as I was leaving her, a little blister in the coarse glass of one of the windowpanes caught a ray of sun and projected onto the opposite wall the little halo of rainbow colors I used once to call the “rainy moon.” The apparition of that illusory planet shot me back so violently into the past that I remained standing where I was, transfixed and fascinated.

“Look, Mademoiselle Rosita. How pretty that is.”

I put my finger on the wall, in the center of the little planet ringed with seven colors.

“Yes,” she said. “We know that reflection well. Just fancy, my sister’s frightened of it.”

“Frightened? What do you mean, frightened? Why? What does she say about it?”

Mademoiselle smiled at my eagerness.

“Oh, you know . . . silly things, the sort that nervous children imagine. She says it’s an omen. She calls it her sad little sun, she says it only shines to warn her something bad is going to happen. Goodness knows what else. As if the refractions of a prism really could influence . . .”

Mademoiselle Barberet gave a superior smile.

“You’re right,” I said weakly. “But those are charming poetic fancies. Your sister is a poet without realizing it.”

Mademoiselle Barberet’s blue eyes were fixed on the place where the rainbow-colored ghost had been before a passing cloud had just eclipsed it.

“The main thing is, she’s a very unreasonable young woman.”

“She lives in the other . . . in another part of the flat?”

Mademoiselle Barberet’s gaze switched to the closed door on the right of the fireplace.

“Another part, you could hardly call it that. They chose . . . Her bedroom and dressing room are separate from my bedroom.”

I nodded “Yes, yes,” as my thorough acquaintance with the place gave me the right to do.

“Is your sister like you to look at?”

I made myself gentle and spoke tonelessly, as one does to people asleep so as to make them answer one from the depths of their slumber.

“Like me? Oh dear, no! To begin with, there’s a certain difference of age between us, and she’s dark. And then, as to character, we couldn’t be less alike in every way.”

“Ah! She’s dark . . . One of these days you must let me meet her. There’s no hurry! I’m leaving you my manuscript. If you don’t see me on Monday . . . Would you like me to settle up with you for the typing you’ve already done?”

Mademoiselle Barberet blushed and refused, then blushed and accepted. And although I stopped in the hall to make some unnecessary suggestion, no sound came from my bedroom and nothing revealed the presence of the dark sister.

“She calls it her sad little sun. She says that it foretells something bad. Whatever can I have bequeathed to that reflection, that looks like a planet in a ring of haze, where the red is never anywhere but next to the purple? In the old days, when the wind was high and the sky cloudy, it would keep vanishing, reappearing, fading away again, and its caprices would distract me for a moment from my state of suspense, of perpetual waiting.”

I admit that, as I descended the slope of the hill, I gave myself up to excitement. The play of coincidences shed a false, unhoped-for light on my life. Already I was promising myself that the “Barberet story” would figure in a prominent place in the fantastic gallery we secretly furnish and which we open more readily to strangers than to our near ones: the gallery reserved for premonitions, for the phenomena of mistaken identity, for visions and predictions. In it I had already lodged the story of the woman with the candle, the story of Jeanne D.; the story of the woman who read the tarot pack, and of the little boy who rode on horseback.

In any case, the Barberet story, barely even roughly sketched, was already acting for me as a “snipe’s bandage.” That is what I used to call, and still call, a particular kind of unremarkable and soothing event that I liken to the dressing of wet clay and bits of twig, the marvelous little splint the snipe binds around its foot when a shot has broken it. A visit to the cinema, provided the films are sufficiently mediocre, counts as a snipe’s bandage. But, on the contrary, an evening in the company of intelligent friends who know what it is to be hurt and are courageous and disillusioned, undoes the bandage. Symphonic music generally tears it off, leaving me flayed. Poured out by a steady, indifferent voice, pronouncements and predictions are compresses and camomile tea to me.

“I’m going to tell the Barberet story to Annie de Pène,” I mentally began. And then I told nothing at all. Would not Annie’s subtle ear and lively bronze eyes have weighed and condemned everything in my narrative that revealed no more than the craving to go over old ground again, to deck out what was over and done with in a new coat of paint? “That window, Annie, where a young woman whose man has left her spends nearly all her time waiting, listening—just as I did long ago.”

I said nothing to Annie. It is as well for a toy to be played with in solitude, if something or other about its color, about its acid varnish, about a chance distortion of its shadow, warns one it may be dangerous. But I went off and translated the “Barberet story” into commonplace language for the benefit of the woman who came by the day to “make and mend” for me, a stout brunette who was relaxing after singing in operetta in Oran by sewing and ironing for other people. In order to listen to me, Marie Mallier stopped crushing gathers under a cruel thumbnail, blew into her thimble, and waited, her needle poised.

“And then what happened?”

“That’s the end.”

“Oh,” said Marie Mallier. “It seemed to me more like a beginning.”

The words enchanted me. I read into them the most romantic omen and I swore to myself I would not delay another moment in making the acquaintance of the dark, unhappily married sister who lived in my gloomy bedroom and was frightened of my “rainy moon.”

Those tugs on my sleeve, those little presents fate has offered me might have given me the power of escaping from myself, sloughing my skin, and emerging in new, variegated colors. I believe they might have succeeded, had I not lacked the society and influence of someone for whom there is hardly any difference between what really happens and what does not, between fact and possibility, between an event and the narration of it.

Much later on, when I came to know Francis Carco, I realized that he would, for example, have interpreted my stay at Bella-Vista and my meeting with the Barberets with an unbridled imagination. He would have plucked out of them the catastrophic truth, the element of something unfinished, something left suspended that spurs imagination and terror to a gallop; in short, their poetry. I saw, years afterward, how a poet makes use of tragic embellishment and lends a mere news item the fascination of some white, inanimate face behind a pane.

Lacking a companion with a fiery imagination, I clung to a rational view of things, notably of fear and hallucination. This was a real necessity, as I lived alone. On some nights, I would look very carefully around my little flat; I would open my shutters to let the nocturnal light play on the ceiling while I waited for the light of the day. The next morning, my concierge, when she brought me my coffee, would silently flourish the key she had found in the lock, on the outside. Most of the time I gave no thought to perils that might come from the unknown and I treated ghosts with scant respect.

That was how, the following Monday, I treated a window in the Barberet flat, which I had entered at the same moment as a March wind with great sea pinions that flung all the papers on the floor. Mademoiselle Rosita put both hands over her ears, and shrieked “Ah!” as she shut her eyes. I gripped the cast-iron mermaid with a familiar hand and closed the window with one turn of my wrist.

“At the very first go!” exclaimed Mademoiselle Barberet admiringly. “That’s extraordinary! I hardly ever manage to . . . Oh, goodness, all these typed copies flying about! Monsieur Vandérem’s novel! Monsieur Pierre Veber’s short story! This wind! Luckily I’d put your text back in its folder . . . Here’s the top copy, Madame, and the carbon. There are several traces of Indian-rubber. If you’d like me to redo some of the scratched pages, it’ll be a pleasure to me, tonight after dinner.”

“Find yourself more exciting pleasures, Mademoiselle Rosita. Go to the cinema. Do you like the cinema?”

The avidity of a small girl showed in her face, accentuating the fine wrinkles around the mouth.

“I adore it, Madame! We have a very good local cinema, five francs for quite good seats, that shows splendid films. But at this moment, I can’t possibly . . .”

She broke off and fixed her gaze on the door to the right of the fireplace.

“Is it still your sister’s health? Couldn’t her husband take on the job of . . .”

In spite of myself, I imitated her prudish way of leaving her sentences unfinished. She flushed and said hastily: “Her husband doesn’t live here, Madame.”

“Ah, he doesn’t live . . . And she, what does she do? Is she waiting for him to come back?”

“I . . . Yes, I think so.”

“All the time?”

“Day and night.”

I stood up abruptly and began to pace the room, from the window to the door, from the door to the far wall, from the far wall to the fireplace; the room where once
I
had waited—day and night.

“That’s stupid!” I exclaimed. “That’s the last thing to do. Do you hear me, the very last!”

Mademoiselle Barberet mechanically pulled out the spiral of hair that caressed her shoulder, and her withered angel’s face followed my movements to and fro.

“If
I
knew her, that sister of yours, I’d tell her straight to her face that she’s chosen the worst possible tactics. They couldn’t be more . . . more idiotic.”

“Ah, I’d be only too glad, Madame, if you’d tell her so! Coming from you, it would have far more weight than from me. She makes no bones about assuring me that old maids have no right to speak on certain topics. In which she may well be mistaken, moreover . . .” Mademoiselle Barberet lowered her eyes and gave a little resentful toss of her chin.

“A fixed idea isn’t always a good idea. She’s in there, with her fixed idea. When she can’t stand it anymore, she goes downstairs. She says she wants to buy some sweets. She says: ‘I’m going to telephone.’ To other people! As if she thought I was deceived for a moment!”