Claudine and Annie

by Colette

  ‘Aha! Saint Annie, I saw you! Run away and play in the park at once or else don’t look as if you understood. No, on second thoughts, smile again!’ (Her harsh voice had suddenly become gentle and sing-song.) ‘When the corners of your mouth go up, your eyelids come down. Your smile is far more ambiguous than Calliope’s stories, little Annie . . .’

  Marthe thrust the screen of an open fan between Claudine and myself.

  ‘If you go on like this, you’ll be calling my sister-in-law “Rézi” in a minute! Thanks, I don’t want that sort of thing going on in my respectable bedroom!’

  Rézi? Whatever did that mean? I plucked up my courage.

  ‘You said . . . “Rézi”? Is that a word in a foreign language?’

  ‘You couldn’t have put it better!’ retorted Claudine, while Marthe and Calliope exchanged knowing smiles. Then, all at once, her gaiety vanished. She stopped sucking her iced coffee through a straw, and fell into a momentary day-dream. Her darkened eyes looked exactly like the eyes of her white cat who was staring pensively into space, as if at some invisible menace . . .

  What else did they say? I can’t remember much . . . I withdrew further and further into the shadow of the shutters. I daren’t write down the scraps I do remember. All sorts of horrors! Calliope retailed them quite naturally, with an exotic shamelessness; Marthe, crudely and bluntly; Claudine with a kind of languid ferocity I found less revolting.

  Finally they began to question me, with much laughter about gestures and positions, about things I daren’t name even to myself. I didn’t understand everything, I stammered and pulled my hands away; in the end they let me alone, though Claudine murmured, looking deep into my pale eyes that are too receptive to other people’s will: ‘This Annie of ours – she’s as engaging as a young girl.’ She was the first to leave, leading her white cat with its green collar and yawning in our faces: ‘It’s too long since I’ve seen my great man; time’s beginning to pall on me!’

  Maugis ‘sticks’ closer and closer. He incenses Marthe with his homage which rises up in fumes of whisky. These meetings at the five o’clock concerts put me out of all patience. Calliope is invariably there, surrounded by men staring at her like a pack of hounds and the Renaud-Claudine couple, amorous and irritating. Yes, irritating! The way they smile into each other’s eyes and sit knee to knee, as if they’d only been married a fortnight! Besides, I have seen people married a fortnight who didn’t behave in a way that attracted attention.

  I remember a very recently married couple dining at a small table in a restaurant; he red-haired, she exaggeratedly dark, whose faces never betrayed desire, whose hands never touched, whose feet never met under the tent of tablecloth . . . Often she would droop her eyelids over her transparent eyes ‘the colour of wild chicory flowers’, she would pick up her fork and put it down again, cool her hand against the beaded side of the water-jug like a fever-patient grown used to fever. He ate with an appetite as healthy as his teeth and spoke in an authoritative voice: ‘Annie, you’re wrong; this meat isn’t underdone. It’s exactly the right degree of rareness . . .’ So blind, so indifferent, he was unaware of that sweet fever, he did not even see those too-heavy lashes veiling the blue eyes. He never guessed my anguish nor how I was longing for, yet dreading, the moment that had not yet come when my pleasure would respond to his . . . How painful it is even to write this . . . It was always the same . . . I yielded myself, frightened and obedient, to his simple, robust caress which broke off too soon, at the instant when, rigid and choking back tears, I thought I must be on the brink of death itself, when my whole being was crying out for and expecting . . . I did not know what.

  I know now. Boredom, loneliness, an afternoon of atrocious migraine and ether have turned me into a sinner full of remorse. A sin which is always threatening me and against which I struggle desperately . . . Ever since I took to writing this diary, I can see myself emerging a little more clearly every day, like a blackened portrait being cleaned by an expert hand. How did Alain, who was so little concerned about my moral miseries, guess what had happened between me and . . . Annie? I have no idea. Perhaps the jealousy of a betrayed animal illuminated him that day . . .

  What is it that has suddenly made me see clearly? His absence? Have a few hundred miles of land and water worked this miracle? Or have I perhaps drunk the philtre that restored Siegfried’s memory to him? But the philtre also restored his love, and, in my case, alas! . . . What have I to cling to now? All the people about me are speeding and striving towards the goal of their life . . . Marthe and Léon are toiling with all their might, he for big editions, she for luxury. Claudine loves and Calliope permits herself to be loved . . . Maugis intoxicates himself – Alain fills his life with a thousand exacting vanities: respectability; cutting a brilliant, but eminently correct figure in society; the necessity of living in a well-ordered house, of weeding out his address-book as one weeds out servants’ references, of training his wife whom he rides on too short a rein like his half-bred English horse . . . They go about, they do things, and I stay here, listless and empty-handed . . .

  Marthe burst in in the middle of this fit of black depression. She herself seemed less cheerful than usual, or else less valiant, and her red mobile mouth drooped at the corners, even when she laughed. But perhaps it was I who was seeing everything warped?

  She sat down without looking at me, arranged the folds of a lace skirt that she wore under a little eighteenth-century jacket of stiff Chinese silk. White plumes quivered in her hat. I don’t much care for that costume – it’s too elaborate, too suggestive of a society wedding. Secretly I prefer my own ivory voile dress with fine tucking everywhere, on the yoke, about the flounce of the skirt, at the top of the sleeves that flare out below it in wings . . .

  ‘Are you coming?’ demanded Marthe brusquely.

  ‘Coming where?’

  ‘Oh, why must you always look as if you’d just dropped from the moon? To the music . . . it’s five o’clock.’

  ‘The fact is I . . .’

  Her gesture cut me short.

  ‘No, spare me that! You’ve said it already. Get your hat on and let’s be off.’

  Normally I would have obeyed, half-unconsciously. But today had been a troubled day and it had changed me.

  ‘No, Marthe, I assure you, I have got a headache.’

  She wriggled her shoulders impatiently.

  ‘Yes, I know. The air will do you good. Come along.’

  Gently, I continued to say no. She bit her lips and her red, brown-pencilled eyebrows drew together in a frown.

  ‘Look here, Annie. The fact is I need you – there!’

  ‘Need me?’

  ‘Yes, need you. I don’t want to be alone . . . with Maugis.’

  ‘Alone with Maugis? You must be joking. There’ll be Claudine and Renaud and Calliope.’

  Marthe fidgeted and turned a little pale; her hands were trembling.

  ‘I implore you, Annie – don’t make me lose my temper.’

  Taken aback, but defiant, I remained seated. She did not look at me but spoke, with her eyes staring at the window.

  ‘I . . . I particularly need you to come because . . . because Léon is jealous.’

  She was lying. I could feel she was lying. She guessed it and, at last, turned her blazing eyes on me.

  ‘Yes, all right, it’s a fib. I want to talk to Maugis without anyone seeing us. I need you to make the others believe you’re accompanying him and me a little way up the path . . . thirty paces behind like an English governess. You can take a book or a piece of needlework or anything you fancy. There! Got it? What’s your answer? Will you do me this small favour?’

  I blushed for her. With Maugis! And she had counted on me . . . for . . . oh, no!

  As I shook my head, she gave me a furious stamp.

  ‘Idiot! Do you imagine I’m going to sleep with him in a ditch in the park? Get it into your head that everything’s gone wrong, that I can’t lay my hands on a penny, that I’ve got
to get not just one article on Léon’s novel that’s coming out in October but two articles . . . three articles . . . in the foreign reviews that’ll get it sold in London and Vienna! That soak is as tricky as a monkey and we’ve been pitting our wits against each other for a month, but he’ll come across with those articles or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’

  She was spluttering with fury, her fist clenched and her face savage. She looked like a stocking-knitter at the foot of the guillotine disguised as an aristocrat. Then, with a magnificent effort, she calmed herself and said coldly,

  ‘That’s the situation. Are you coming to the music now? In Paris, I shouldn’t be reduced to asking you this. In Paris, a woman with her wits about her can manage these things on her own! But here, in this place where we all live in each other’s pockets, where your next-door-neighbour in the hotel counts your dirty nightdresses and the jugs of hot water the maid brings up in the morning . . .’

  ‘Just tell me one thing, Marthe . . . is it out of love for Léon?’

  ‘Out of love that I’m . . . what?

  ‘Doing all this . . . Sacrificing yourself, being friendly with this horrible man . . . it’s for your husband’s glory, isn’t it?’

  She gave a harsh laugh as she powdered her flaming cheeks.

  ‘All right, if you like, for his glory . . . If he’s to wear laurels on his brow, he may have to wear something else. You needn’t look wildly round for your hat. It’s on the bed.’

  How much farther are these women going to lead me astray? There is not one of them I wish to resemble! Marthe who sticks at nothing; Calliope who is as cynical as a harem woman; Claudine who is as unashamed as an animal of all her instincts, even her good ones. Since I can judge them so clearly, heaven preserve me from becoming like any of them!

  Yes, I accompanied Marthe to the band-stand, then into the park, with Maugis walking between us. In a deserted path, Marthe said to me causally: ‘Annie, your shoelace is coming undone.’ Meekly I pretended to re-tie the silk lace, though the knot was perfectly secure, and made no attempt to catch up with them. I walked at some distance behind, my eyes on the ground, not daring to look at their backs and not hearing what they were saying, only a rapid murmur of voices.

  When Marthe, excited and triumphant, came to relieve me of my shameful sentry-duty, I heaved a great sigh of relief. She took my arm in a friendly way.

  ‘It’s done. Thank you, pet. You’ve helped me arrange things satisfactorily. But imagine the difficulty! If I’d asked Maugis to meet me alone in the park or the dairy or at one of those little tables where they served iced coffee, some busybody, male or, worse still, female, would have crashed in on us before we’d been there five minutes. My little game would have been ruined. And seeing him in my room would have been far too risky . . .’

  ‘So you’re going to get them, Marthe?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘The articles in the foreign Reviews.’

  ‘Ah . . . yes . . . Yes, I’m going to get them and everything else I wanted.’

  She was silent for a moment, fluttering her wide sleeves to cool herself. Then she muttered, as if to herself:

  ‘He’s rich, the swine.’

  I stared at her in amazement.

  ‘Rich? Why should that bother you, Marthe?’

  ‘What I meant by that,’ she explained very fast, ‘is that I envy him for being able to write for his own pleasure instead of slaving away like poor old Léon over there. There he is, as usual, laying siege to Calliope without the faintest success. That Cypriot town has no ramparts but it’s amazing how it defends itself!’

  ‘Besides, perhaps the assailant isn’t very heavily armed,’ I risked shyly.

  ‘Mercy, what next! Annie coming out with improper remarks! I didn’t know you were quite so well informed about Léon, dear!’

  All animation, she rejoined the group of friends we had left. However, I pleaded my migraine again as an excuse to get away and here I am back in my bedroom, with my black Toby at my feet, troubled about myself, dissatisfied with everything, humiliated by the menial service I have just rendered my sister-in-law.

  All the things Alain does not suspect! It makes me smile maliciously to think how little he knows about me, even about his favourite sister. I am beginning to hate this Arriège, where my life has been revealed to me with such depressing clarity, where you cannot get away from this restricted little crowd of people who, when you see them so close, seem to be distorted into caricatures of human beings . . . I’ve exhausted any amusement I had in watching these creatures’ antics. In the daily procession to the dairy, I see too much plastered-over ugliness in the women’s faces, and, in the men’s, bestial desires or else utter fatigue. For among them are the sinister faces of the baccarat fiends – drawn and green, with bloodshot eyes. Those faces belong to the numbed bodies of men who have been sitting all night in a chair. As Marthe says, it is not only arthritis that ossifies so many joints here.

  I’ve no longer the least desire to go to the pump-room or to watch Marthe’s douche or to gossip in the hall of the casino or to giggle at Jeanette’s Wedding with Claudine. That perverse creature, who is mad about Debussy, has taken a sadistic fancy to going to the most hackneyed old musical comedies and applauding them frantically. Day after day, at the same hours, the same amusements, the same dressing-up, the same collection of faces . . . I simply cannot stand it any longer. Through the window, my eyes keep straying to the open breach at the western end of the valley – a break in the dark chain that hems us in, a rift of light in which distant mountains, powdered with mother-of-peal, sparkle against a sky whose pure faint blue is the exact blue of my eyes . . . It is through there now that I can fancy I am escaping . . . Through there I can divine (or only imagine, alas!) another life that will be my life, not that broken mechanical doll they call Annie.

  My poor black Toby, what am I going to do with you? Now we are going off to Bayreuth! Marthe has decided this with an emphatic authority that spares me any need to argue. All right, Toby, I’ll take you with me – it’s much the simplest, most honourable thing to do. I promised you I’d keep you, and I need your mute, familiar presence, your short square shadow beside my lone one. You loved me enough to respect my sleep, my sadness, my silence, and I love you like a little guardian monster. I feel young and gay again when I watch you gravely escorting me with your jaw distended by a big green apple that you’ll carry about for a whole day, like a precious treasure, or obstinately scratching a pattern on the carpet to try and make it come off. For you live in a state of ingenuous surprise, surrounded by mysteries. The mystery of the coloured flowers on the upholstery of the armchairs; the deceitfulness of the mirrors out of which a phantom bullterrier glares at you, a black bull-terrier who resembles you like a twin brother; the trap of the rocking-chair that tilts away under your paws . . . You don’t obstinately try to penetrate the unknown. You growl or else you smile rather sheepishly, and you resume your chewed green apple.

  Only two months ago, I too would have said: ‘I give up. My master knows how to deal with it.’ Now I torment myself and I flee from myself. I flee from myself. Understand what I mean by that, please, little dog, full of faith I have lost. It is better, a hundred times better, for me to drivel in this diary and to listen to Claudine and Calliope than to linger dangerously alone with myself . . .

  Nowadays, we talk of nothing but our going away. Calliope keeps dinning into my ears how heart-broken she is over our departure, larding her laments with constant ejaculations of ‘Dio almighty!’ and ‘poulaki mou!’

  Claudine observes all this agitation with kindly indifference. Renaud is with her, what does all the rest matter? Léon, embittered by his failure with Calliope (he cannot forgive her), talks far too much about his novel and about the Bayreuth he means to describe in it – ‘a Bayreuth perceived from a particular angle’.

  ‘It’s a new subject,’ Maugis gravely declared today – Maugis who for ten years has been Bayreuth correspondent to three da
ily papers.

  ‘It’s a new subject when you know how to rejuvenate it,’ Léon affirmed pompously. ‘Bayreuth seen through the eyes of a woman in love with all her sensual perceptions intensely sharpened by gratified – and illicit! – passion . . . All right, laugh . . . it could make a very good subject and run into twenty editions!’

  ‘At least,’ muttered Maugis through a cloud of smoke. ‘Anyway, I always agree with the husband of a pretty woman.’

  The pretty woman was half-asleep, recumbent in a rocking-chair. Marthe never takes more than a cat-nap.

  We were grilling in the park: it was two o’clock, the longest, most stifling hour of the day. The iced coffee was melting in our glasses. I rejoiced in the torrid sun, lying back in a wicker armchair, and I did not even flutter my eyelids – at school they used to call me the lizard . . . Léon kept glancing at his watch, careful not to overstep the time-limit of his recreation. The carcass of Toby, which appeared to be uninhabited, lay prone on the fine sand.

  ‘Are you taking that dog with you?’ Marthe sighed faintly.

  ‘Certainly, he’s such a well-behaved boy!’

  ‘I don’t much care for well-behaved boys, even on railway journeys.’

  ‘Then you can get into another compartment.’

  Having made this reply, I marvelled at myself. Last month I should have answered: ‘Then I’ll get into another compartment.’

  Marthe made no comment and appeared to be asleep. After a moment, she opened her vigilant eyes wide.

  ‘I say, you two, don’t you think Annie’s changed?’

  ‘Hmm . . .’ Maugis mumbled, very vaguely.

  ‘Do you think so?’ asked Calliope, in a conciliating voice.

  ‘I’m delighted to observe you all agree with me,’ mocked my sister-in-law. ‘So I shan’t surprise you by saying that Annie walks faster, stoops her shoulders less, doesn’t keep her eyes always fixed on the ground, and talks almost like a normal human being. Alain’s the one who’s going to get a surprise!’