The Collected Stories of Colette (98 page)

“And then? And then I wait. No, not for death, but for what I’d promised myself before it. It was as if I were on a quay, waiting to embark. No, no, I wasn’t in pain but I could feel myself getting old. The last straw was that my feet—I’d got my shoes on—were getting hot at the bottom of the bed and hurt like fury wherever I’d got a bad place. Even worse than that, I imagine I hear the doorbell ring! I think: ‘It’s happened on purpose, I’ll never get through.’ I sit up and try and remember if someone’s made an appointment for a sitting. I listen hard. But I think it was the buzzings in my ears beginning. I lie down again and I say a little prayer, though I’m not particularly religious: ‘My God, in your infinite goodness, take pity on an unhappy and guilty soul . . .’ Impossible to remember the rest, on my word. But that might have been enough, mightn’t it?

“And I went on waiting. I was waiting for my reward, my great arrival of beautiful thoughts, a great pair of wings to carry me away, to sweep me right away from being myself anymore. My head was going round and round, I thought I saw great circles all around me. For a second it was like when you dream you’re falling from the top of a tower, but that was all. Nothing else, would you believe it, but all my everyday thoughts and fidgets, including that very day’s? For example, I kept worrying like anything that my little Exo would only have cold meat and salad and warmed-up soup when he came in that night. At the same time, I thought: ‘Even that will be too much, he’ll be so upset over my death, it’ll put him off his food. Everyone in the house will be so kind to him. My God, take pity on an unhappy and guilty soul . . .’ I’d never have believed that, when I was dying, it would be my feet that I suffered from most.

“The buzzings and the circles went on going round and round me, but I still kept on waiting. I waited lying down, as good as gold.” She slid toward the middle of the bed, resumed the attitude and the stillness of her postponed death, and closed her eyes so that I could see nothing of them but the feathery black line of the lashes.

“I didn’t lose my head, I listened to all the noises, I went over everything that I had forgotten, everything I had left in a muddle on the other side, I meant the side I was leaving. I reproached myself for those evening walks I used to take without bothering whether my husband might be bored all alone, when his day’s work was over. Trifles, petty little things, uninteresting thoughts that floated on the top of the buzzings and the circles. I remember vaguely that I wanted to put my hands over my face and cry and that I couldn’t, it was as if I hadn’t any arms, I said to myself: ‘This is the end. How sad it is that I haven’t had what I wanted in life even in my death.’

“Yes, I think that’s all, Madame. A terrible icy cold came and cut off the thread of my thoughts and yet I’m not sure even of that. What I am sure of is that never, never again will I commit suicide. I know now that suicide can’t be the slightest use to me, I’m staying here. But without wanting to offend Mademoiselle Devoidy, you can see for yourself that I’m in my right mind and that a neurotic woman and myself are two utterly different things.”

With a jerk, Madame Armand sat up. Her story had left her with a feverish flush that animated her pale skin. Our conversation ended in “Goodbye, see you soon!” as if we were on a station platform, and after exclamations about the “shocking lateness” we parted for a very long time. She held the door of the flat open behind me, so that the light in the studio should illuminate the landing for me. I left the photographer’s wife in her doorway, slender and solitary, but not wavering. I am sure she did not stumble a second time. Whenever I think of her, I always see her shored up by those scruples she modestly called fidgets and sustained by the sheer force of humble, everyday feminine greatness; that unrecognized greatness she had misnamed “a very trivial life.”

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

PREFACE

No real place served as model for Bella-Vista, a small Provençale inn, which I painted to resemble twenty imitation farmhouses planted on a notch on the Mediterranean, draped, in one season, with plumbago, passion flower, and those convolvulus, bluer than the day, whose teeming avidity I measured against pink walls. Bella-Vista is any chimera of those who, leaving the heart of a dense and exhausting city, demand daily sun, undisturbed good weather, and constant heat. Until I found out for myself that good weather is another chimera and another kind of exhaustion, the region around St.-Tropez gave me all I asked for in the way of daily splendor. I was only just discovering it at the time I was writing “Bella-Vista.” With no domain of my own on its shore, I clung to this or that auberge, some Gulf hotel; I didn’t realize that the little port into which the dog, the cock, and the saint sailed had, strangely enough, but one access road, a single entrance, like a lobster pot. So that, fifteen years later, I was still moored to this little peninsula jutting out into the sea. At twilight it appears suspended there, the color of lilacs, looking like new steel beneath the full moon; dawn makes all the walls that face east blush briefly with a powdery pink, whereas, before sunrise, the thick vineyard is but a crimped blackness
.

There, or thereabouts, is where my knowledge of Provence ends. In fifteen years I moved very little. From St.-Tropez to Fréjus, from Pampelonne to Thoronet, from a rosé wine to a golden wine, from
ailloli
to
pissaladière,
from one dawn to one night snowy with stars . . . it is enough to remember enough to be thankful for . . . The prudent weariness of age keeps me from running any risk of forgetting that a sovereign blue color weighs down on the imaginary rooftops of Bella-Vista, or that the west wind rises fresh toward noon, or that sleep, in the breezy shade, is conducive to dreaming and speaks, to the trusting sleeper, of motionless ships and islands free from danger
.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

It is absurd to suppose that periods empty of love are blank pages in a woman’s life. The truth is just the reverse. What remains to be said about a passionate love affair? It can be told in three lines.
He
loved me, I loved
Him
. His presence obliterated all other presences. We were happy. Then
He
stopped loving me and I suffered.

Frankly, the rest is eloquence or mere verbiage. When a love affair is over, there comes a lull during which one is once more aware of friends and passers-by, of things constantly happening as they do in a vivid, crowded dream. Once again, one is conscious of normal feelings such as fear, gaiety, and boredom; once again time exists and one registers its flight. When I was younger, I did not realize the importance of these “blank pages.” The anecdotes with which they furnished me—those impassioned, misguided, simple, or inscrutable human beings who plucked me by the sleeve, made me their witness for a moment, and then let me go—provided more “romantic” subjects than my private personal drama. I shall not finish my task as a writer without attempting, as I want to do here, to draw them out of the shadows to which the shameless necessity of speaking of love in my own name has consigned them.

A house, even a very small house, does not make itself habitable or adopt us in the week which follows the signing of the agreement. As a wise man of few words who makes sandals at St-Tropez once said: “It takes as much work and thought to make sandals for someone aged six as to make them for someone aged forty.”

Thirteen years ago when I bought a small vineyard beside the sea in the South of France with its plumy pines, its mimosas and its little house, I regarded them with the prompt business-like eye of a camper. “I’ll unpack my two suitcases; I’ll put the bathtub and the portable shower in a corner, the Breton table and its armchair under the window, the divan-bed and its mosquito net in the dark room. I’ll sleep
there
and I’ll work
there
and I’ll wash
there
. By tomorrow, everything will be ready.” For the dining room, I could choose between the shade of the mulberry and that of the centuries-old spindle trees.

Having the necessities—that is to say shade, sun, roses, sea, a well, and a vine—I had a healthy contempt for such luxuries as electricity, a kitchen stove, and a pump. More prudent influences seduced me from leaving the little Provençal house in its primitive perfection. I gave in to them and listened to the convincing builder whom I went to see in his own home.

He was smiling. In his garden an all-the-year-round mimosa and purple wallflowers set off to advantage the various objects for sale: concrete benches, upended balusters arranged like skittles, drain pipes, and perforated bricks, the lot under the guardianship of a very pretty bulldog in turquoise Vallauris ware.

“You know how things are here,” said the builder. “If you need your villa by July or August, you’ll have to come and bully the workman on his own ground now and then.”

I remember that I kept blinking my eyelids, which were hurt by the chalky glare of March. The sky was patterned with great white clouds and the mistral was shaking all the doors in their frames. It was cold under the table but a sunbeam, which fell on the estimate covered with red figures and black dots and blue pencil ticks, burned the back of my hand. I caught myself thinking that warm rain is very agreeable in spring in the Ile-de-France and that a heated, draft-proof flat in Paris, staked out with lamps under parchment hats, has an unrivaled charm.

The Midi triumphed. I had indeed just been having attack after attack of bronchitis and the words “warm climate . . . rest . . . open air . . .” became the accomplices of the smiling builder. I decided therefore to try to find a haven of rest, some way away from the port to which I have since become so deeply attached, from which I could sally forth from time to time to “bully the workmen.” This would give me an excuse to escape from the most exhausting of all pleasures, conversation.

Thanks to a decorative painter who takes his holidays alone and makes himself unrecognizable, in the manner of Greta Garbo, by wearing sunglasses and sleeveless tennis shirts, I learned that a certain inn, crowded with odd people in the summer but peaceful for the rest of the year, would take me under its roof. I call it Bella-Vista because there are as many Bella-Vistas and Vista-Bellas in France as there are Montignys. You will not find it on the Mediterranean coast; it has lost its proprietresses and nearly all its charms. It has even lost its old name, which I shall not reveal.

Consequently, at the end of March, I packed a good pound of periwinkle-blue paper in a suitcase. I also put in my heavy wool slacks, my four pullovers, some woolen scarves, and my tartan-lined mackintosh—all the necessary equipment, in short, for winter sports or an expedition to the Pole. My previous stays in the Midi, during a lecture tour at the end of one winter, called up memories of Cannes blind with hail and Marseilles and Toulon as white and gritty as cuttlefish bones under the January mistral. They also evoked bright blue and pale green landscapes, followed by grim recollections of leeches and injections of camphorated oil.

These discouraging images accompanied me almost to the “hostelry” I call Bella-Vista. Concerning Bella-Vista I shall give only certain inoffensive details and draw posthumous portraits such as those of its two proprietresses of whom one, the younger, is dead. Supposing the other to be alive, heaven knows on what work, and in what place of seclusion, those agile fingers and piercing eyes are now employed.

Thirteen years ago, the two of them stood in the doorway of Bella-Vista. One expertly seized my smooth-haired griffon by the loose skin of her neck and back, deposited her on the ground, and said to her: “Hello, dear little yellow dog. I’m sure you is thirsty.”

The other held out her firm hand, with its big ring, to help me out of the car and greeted me by name: “A quarter of an hour later, Madame Colette, and you’d have missed it.”

“Missed what?”

“The
bourride
. They wouldn’t have left you a mouthful. I know them. Madame Ruby, when you can take your mind for one moment off that dog.”