The Collected Stories of Colette (89 page)

One day, so that I could read my mail, which was rich with two letters, an article cut out of
Art et Critique
, and some other odds and ends, Marco tactfully assumed her convalescent pose, shutting her eyes and leaning her head back against the fiber cushion of the wicker chair. She was wearing the ecru linen dressing gown that she put on to save the rest of her wardrobe when we were alone in our bedrooms or out on the wooden balcony. It was when she had on that dressing gown that she truly showed her age and the period to which she naturally belonged. Certain definite details, pathetically designed to flatter, typed her indelibly, such as a certain deliberate wave in her hair that emphasized the narrowness of her temples, a certain short fringe that would never allow itself to be combed the other way, the carriage of the chin imposed by a high, boned collar, the knees that were never parted and never crossed. Even the shabby dressing gown itself gave her away. Instead of resigning itself to the simplicity of a working garment, it was adorned with ruffles of imitation lace at the neck and wrists and a little frill around the hips.

Those tokens of a particular period of feminine fashion and behavior were just the very ones my own generation was in process of rejecting. The new “angel” hairstyle and Cléo de Mérode’s smooth swathes were designed to go with a boater worn like a halo, shirt blouses in the English style, and straight skirts. Bicycles and bloomers had swept victoriously through every class. I was beginning to be crazy about starched linen collars and rough woolens imported from England. The split between the two fashions, the recent one and the very latest, was too blatantly obvious not to humiliate penniless women who delayed in adopting the one and abandoning the other. Occasionally frustrated in my own bursts of clothes-consciousness, I suffered for Marco, heroic in two worn-out dresses and two light blouses.

Slowly, I folded up my letters again, without my attention straying from the woman who was pretending to be asleep, the pretty woman of 1870 or 1875, who, out of modesty and lack of money, was giving up the attempt to follow us into 1898. In the uncompromising way of young women, I said to myself: “If I were Marco, I’d do my hair like this, I’d dress like that.” Then I would make excuses for her: “But she hasn’t any money. If I had more money, I’d help her.”

Marco heard me folding up my letters, opened her eyes, and smiled.

“Nice mail?”

“Yes . . . Marco,” I said daringly, “don’t you have your letters sent on here?”

“Of course I do. All the correspondence I have is what you see me get.”

As I said nothing, she added, all in one burst: “As you know, I’m separated from my husband. V.’s friends, thank heaven, have remained
his
friends and not mine. I had a child, twenty years ago, and I lost him when he was hardly more than a baby. And I’ve never had a lover. So you see, it’s quite simple.”

“Never had a lover . . .” I repeated.

Marco laughed at my expression of dismay.

“Is that the thing that strikes you most? Don’t be so upset! That’s the thing I’ve thought about least. In fact I’ve long ago given up thinking about it at all.”

My gaze wandered from her lovely eyes, rested by the pure air and the green of the chestnut groves, to the little cleft at the tip of her witty nose, to her teeth, a trifle discolored, but admirably sound and well set.

“But you’re very pretty, Marco!”

“Oh!” she said gaily. “I was even a charmer, once upon a time. Otherwise V. wouldn’t have married me. To be perfectly frank with you, I’m convinced that fate has spared me one great trouble, the tiresome thing that’s called a temperament. No, no, all that business of blood rushing into the cheeks, upturned eyeballs, palpitating nostrils, I admit I’ve never experienced it and never regretted it. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said mechanically, looking at Marco’s mobile nostrils.

She laid her narrow hand on mine, with an impulsiveness that did not, I knew, come easily for her.

“A great deal of poverty, my child, and before the poverty the job of being an artist’s wife in the most down-to-earth way . . . hard manual labor, next door to being a maid-of-all-work. I wonder where I should have found the time to be idle and well groomed and elegant in secret—in other words, to be someone’s romantic mistress.”

She sighed, ran her hand over my hair, and brushed it back from my temples.

“Why don’t you show the top part of your face a little? When I was young, I did my hair like that.”

As I had a horror of having my alley cat’s temples exposed naked, I dodged away from the little hand and interrupted Marco, crying: “No, you don’t! No, you don’t!
I’m
going to do
your
hair. I’ve got a marvelous idea!”

Brief confidences, the amusements of two women shut away from the world, hours that were now like those in a sewing room, now like the idle ones of convalescence—I do not remember that our pleasant holiday produced any genuine intimacy. I was inclined to feel deferent toward Marco, yet, paradoxically, to set hardly any store by her opinions on life and love. When she told me she might have been a mother, I realized that our friendly relationship would never be in the least like my passionate feeling for my real mother, nor would it ever approach the comradeship I should have had with a young woman. But at that time, I did not know any girl or woman of my own age with whom I could share a reckless gaiety, a mute complicity, a vitality that overflowed in fits of wild laughter, or with whom I could enjoy physical rivalries and rather crude pleasures that Marco’s age, her delicate constitution, and her whole personality put out of her range and mine.

We talked, and we also read. I had been an insatiable reader in my childhood. Marco had educated herself. At first, I thought I could delve into Marco’s well-stored mind and memory. But I noticed that she replied with a certain lassitude, and as if mistrustful of her own words.

“Marco, why are you called Marco?”

“Because my name is Léonie,” she answered. “Léonie wasn’t the right sort of name for V’s wife. When I was twenty, V. made me pose in a tasseled Greek cap perched over one ear and Turkish slippers with long turned-up points. While he was painting, he used to sing this old sentimental ballad:

I have forgotten the rest.”

I had never heard Marco sing before. Her voice was true and thin, clear as the voice of some old men.

“They were still singing that in my youth,” she said. “Painters’ studios did a great deal for the propagation of bad music.”

She seemed to want to preserve nothing of her past but a superficial irony. I was too young to realize what this calmness of hers implied. I had not yet learned to recognize the modesty of renunciation.

Toward the end of our summer holiday in Franche-Comté, something astonishing did, however, happen to Marco. Her husband, who was painting in the United States, sent her, through his solicitor, a check for fifteen thousand francs. The only comment she made was to say, with a laugh: “So he’s actually got a solicitor now? Wonders will never cease!”

Then she returned the check and the solicitor’s letter to their envelope and paid no more attention to them. But at dinner, she gave signs of being a trifle excited, and asked the waitress in a whisper if it was possible to have champagne. We had some. It was sweet and tepid and slightly corked and we only drank half the bottle between us.

Before we shut the communicating door between our rooms, as we did every night, Marco asked me a few questions. She wore an absentminded expression as she inquired: “Do you think people will be still wearing those wide-sleeved velvet coats next winter, you know the kind I mean? And where did you get that charming hat you had in the spring—with the brim sloping like a roof? I liked it immensely—on
you
, of course.”

She spoke lightly, hardly seeming to listen to my replies, and I pretended not to guess how deeply she had hidden her famished craving for decent clothes and fresh underlinen.

The next morning, she had regained control of herself.

“When all’s said and done,” she said, “I don’t see why I should accept this sum from that . . . in other words, from my husband. If it pleases him at the moment to offer me charity, like giving alms to a beggar, that’s no reason for me to accept it.”

As she spoke, she kept pulling out some threads the laundress had torn in the cheap lace that edged her dressing gown. Where it fell open, it revealed a chemise that was more than humble. I lost my temper and I scolded Marco as an older woman might have chided a small girl. So much so that I felt a little ashamed, but she only laughed.

“There, there, don’t get cross! Since you want me to, I’ll allow myself to be kept by his lordship V. It’s certainly my turn.”

I put my cheek against Marco’s cheek. We stayed watching the harsh, reddish sun reaching the zenith and drinking up all the shadows that divided the mountains. The bend of the river quivered in the distance. Marco sighed.

“Would it be very expensive, a pretty little corset belt all made of ribbon, with rococo roses on the ends of the suspenders?”

The return to Paris drove Marco back to her novelette. Once again I saw her hat with the three blue thistles, her coat and skirt whose black was faded and pallid, her dark gray gloves, and her schoolgirl satchel of cardboard masquerading as leather. Before thinking of her personal elegance, she wanted to move to another place. She took a year’s lease of a furnished flat; two rooms and a place where she could wash, plus a sort of cupboard-kitchen, on the ground floor. It was dark there in broad daylight but the red and white cretonne curtains and bedspread were not too hopelessly shabby. Marco nourished herself at midday in a little restaurant near the library and had tea and bread-and-butter at home at night except when I managed to keep her at my flat for a meal at which stuffed olives and rollmops replaced soup and roast meat. Sometimes Paul Masson brought along an excellent chocolate “Quillet” from Quillet’s, the cake shop in the rue de Buci.

Completely resigned to her task, Marco had so far acquired nothing except, as October turned out rainy, a kind of rubberized hooded cloak that smelled of asphalt. One day she arrived, her eyes looking anxious and guilty.

“There,” she said bravely, “I’ve come to be scolded. I think I bought this coat in too much of a hurry. I’ve got the feeling that . . . that it’s not quite right.”

I was amused by her being as shy as if she were my junior, but I stopped laughing when I had a good look at the coat. An unerring instinct led Marco, so discriminating in other ways, to choose bad material, deplorable cut, fussy braid.

The very next day, I took time off to go out with her and choose a wardrobe for her. Neither she nor I could aspire to the great dress houses, but I had the pleasure of seeing Marco looking slim and years younger in a dark tailor-made and in a navy serge dress with a white front. With the straight little caracul topcoat, two hats, and some underclothes, the bill, if you please, came to fifteen hundred francs: you can see that I was ruthless with the funds sent by the painter V.

I might well have had something to say against Marco’s hairstyle. But just that very season, there was a changeover to shorter hair and a different way of doing it, so that Marco was able to look as if she was ahead of fashion. In this I sincerely envied her, for whether I twisted it around my head “à la Ceres” or let it hang to my skirt hem—“like a well cord” as Jules Renard said—my long hair blighted my existence.

At this point, the memory of a certain evening obtrudes itself. Monsieur Willy had gone out on business somewhere, leaving Marco, Paul Masson, and myself alone together after dinner. When the three of us were on our own, we automatically became clandestinely merry, slightly childish, and, as it were, reassured. Masson would sometimes read aloud the serial in a daily paper, a novelette inexhaustibly rich in haughty titled ladies, fancy-dress balls in winter gardens, chaises dashing along “at a triple gallop” drawn by pure-bred steeds, maidens pale but resolute, exposed to a thousand perils. And we used to laugh wholeheartedly.

“Ah!” Marco would sigh, “I shall never be able to do as well as that. In the novelette world, I shall never be more than a little amateur.”

“Little amateur,” said Masson one night, “here’s just what you want. I’ve culled it from the Agony Column: ‘Man of letters bearing well-known name would be willing to assist young writers both sexes in early stages career.’”

“Both sexes!” said Marco. “Go on, Masson! I’ve only got one sex and, even then, I think I’m exaggerating by half.”

“Very well, I will go on,” said Masson. “I will go on to lieutenant (regular army), garrisoned near Paris, warmhearted, cultured, wishes to maintain correspondence with intelligent, affectionate woman. Very good, but apparently, this soldier does not wish to maintain anything but correspondence. Nevertheless, do we write to him? Let us write. The best letter wins a box of Gianduja Kohler—the nutty kind.”

“If it’s a big box,” I said, “I’m quite willing to compete. What about you, Marco?”

With her cleft nose bent over a scribbling block, Marco was writing already. Masson gave birth to twenty lines in which sly obscenity vied with humor. I stopped after the first page, out of laziness. But how charming Marco’s letter was!

“First prize!” I exclaimed.

“Pearls before . . .” muttered Masson. “Do we send it? Poste Restante, Alex 2, Box 59. Give it to me. I’ll see that it goes.”

“After all, I’m not risking anything,” said Marco.

When our diversions were over, she slipped on her mackintosh again and put on her narrow hat in front of the mirror. It was a hat I had chosen, which made her head look very small and her eyes very large under its turned-down brim.