by Colette
AS USUAL, it’s with a deep sigh that I shut behind me the door of my ground-floor apartment. A sigh of weariness, of relaxation, of relief, or the anguish of loneliness? Let’s not go into it, please!
What’s wrong with me tonight? . . . It’s the glacial December fog, all spangles of frost in suspension, which vibrates around the gas lamps in an iridescent halo, which melts on your lips with a taste of wood tar . . . And then, this brand-new neighborhood I live in, which has sprung up, all white, beyond Les Ternes, disheartens the eyes and the mind.
Beneath the greenish gas, my street at this hour is a creamy mess of burnt almond, mocha brown, and caramel yellow, a dessert that has caved in and melted, with the nougat of the building stones floating on top. Even my house, all alone on its street, has an unreal look. But its spanking new walls and thin partitions offer at a moderate price a shelter that’s sufficiently comfortable for “single ladies” like me.
When you’re a “single lady”—that is, a landlord’s pet aversion, terror, and pariah rolled into one—you take what you find, you reside where you can, you put up with the freshness of the plaster . . .
The house I live in grants merciful asylum to a whole colony of “single ladies.” On the mezzanine floor we have the acknowledged mistress of Mr. Young (of Young Automobiles); on the floor above her there’s the very well “kept” girlfriend of the Comte de Bravailles; above her, two blonde sisters daily receive a visit from one “very respectable gentleman who’s an industrialist”; on the highest floor, a horrible young party girl leads the life of an unleashed fox terrier day and night: yelling, piano playing, singing, empty bottles thrown out of the window.
“She’s the disgrace of the building,” Madame Young Automobiles said one day.
Lastly, on the ground floor, there’s me. I never yell, I don’t play the piano, I seldom receive gentlemen, and ladies even less often . . . The little tart on the fifth floor makes too much noise, and I don’t make enough; my concierge tells me straight to my face:
“It’s odd, I never know if you’re in, I don’t hear you. No one would ever believe you were a performer!”
Oh, what an ugly December night! The radiator smells of strong disinfectant. Blandine has forgotten to put the hot-water bottle in my bed, and even my dog, in a bad mood, surly, and suffering from the cold, merely casts a black-and-white glance at me, without leaving her basket. My goodness! I’m not asking for triumphal arches or street illuminations, but all the same . . .
Oh, I can look all over, in the corners and under the bed, there’s no one here, no one but me. The tall mirror in my bedroom reflects only the grease-painted image of a vaudeville Gypsy; it reflects . . . only me.
So here I am, in my real shape! Tonight, in front of the long mirror, I won’t avoid that soliloquy which a hundred times I’ve evaded, accepted, fled, resumed, and broken off . . . Too bad! I feel in advance that any attempt at diversion will be in vain. Tonight I won’t be sleepy, and the charm of the book—ah, that new book, that just-published book whose fragrance of printer’s ink and fresh paper reminds me of the smell of coal, locomotives, and the beginning of a journey!—the charm of the book won’t keep my thoughts off myself . . .
So here I am, in my real shape! Alone, alone, and no doubt, for my whole life. Already alone! It’s too soon. Without finding myself mortified by it, I’ve passed the age of thirty; after all, this face of mine only gains its value from the expression that enlivens it, from the color of my eyes, and from the wary smile that plays over it, what Marinetti calls my gaiezza volpina, my foxlike cheerfulness . . . None too wily a fox, one that a chicken could catch! A fox devoid of greed, remembering only the trap and the cage . . . Yes, a jolly-looking fox, but only because the corners of her mouth and eyes suggest an involuntary smile . . . A fox tired of dancing in captivity to the sound of music . . .
And yet it’s true that I resemble a fox! But a pretty, delicate fox isn’t ugly, is it? . . . Brague also says I look like a rat when I purse my lips and blink in order to see better . . . None of that makes me angry.
Ah, how I dislike seeing myself with this discouraged mouth and these slack shoulders, my whole gloomy body crooked as it rests on one leg! . . . Look at that bedraggled hair which has lost its curl, and which I’ll presently have to brush for ages to restore its shiny beaver color. Look at those eyes, which retain a blue pencil ring, and those nails, on which the red polish has left an irregular line . . . I won’t get away with less than fifty long minutes of bathing and grooming . . .
It’s already one . . . What am I waiting for? A little whiplash, nice and smart, to make the headstrong animal get moving again . . . But no one will give it to me, since . . . since I’m all alone! How evident it is, in this tall frame that embraces my image, that by now I’ve grown accustomed to living alone!
For an indifferent caller, for a tradesman, even for my chambermaid Blandine, I’d straighten up that drooping neck, that hip off at an angle, I’d clasp these empty hands together . . . But tonight I’m so alone . . .
Alone! I really seem to be pitying myself for it!
“If you live all alone,” Brague has told me, “it’s because you’re willing to, right?”
Of course I’m “willing to,” and I even just plain want to. Only, there it is . . . There are some days when solitude, for a person of my age, is an intoxicating wine that makes you drunk with freedom, other days when it’s a bitter tonic, and still other days when it’s a poison that makes you bang your head on the wall.
Tonight, I’d really like not to choose. I’d like to be satisfied with hesitating, with being unable to tell whether the shiver that will come over me as I slip between my cold sheets will be one of fear or one of comfort.
Alone . . . and for so long. Because I’m now yielding to the habit of soliloquizing, of talking to the dog, to the fire, to my reflection . . . It’s a mania that befalls hermits and long-time prisoners; but I am free . . . And if I talk silently to myself, it’s out of a writer’s need to give his thoughts a rhythm and a form.
Before me, in the mirror, in the mysterious reflected bedroom, I see the image of “a woman of letters who has gone to the dogs.” People also say of me that “I’m in the theater,” but they never call me an actress. Why? It’s a subtle nuance, a polite refusal, on the part of the public and my friends themselves, to assign me a rank in this career which I have chosen, after all . . . A woman of letters who has gone to the dogs: that’s what I must remain for everyone, since I no longer write and deny myself the pleasure and luxury of writing . . .
To write! To be able to write! It means that lengthy reverie over the blank page, that unconscious scribbling, the antics of the pen as it makes circles around an ink blot, as it nibbles away at an incompleted word, scratches it out, makes it bristle with little arrows, adorns it with antennae and legs until it loses its legible appearance as a word and becomes metamorphosed into a fantasy insect and flies away like a fairy butterfly . . .
To write . . . To have your eyes caught up, hypnotized by the reflection of the window in the silver inkwell, to feel that godlike fever rising to your cheeks, your forehead, while a blissful death freezes the writing hand on the paper. To write also means to forget what time it is; it means that lazy spell in the hollow of the couch, the riot of inventiveness that leaves you aching all over and mentally numb, but already rewarded: the bearer of treasures that you slowly unload onto the virgin sheet of paper, in the small ring of light that is sheltered beneath the lamp . . .
To write! To pour out all your sincerest feelings rabidly onto the tempting paper, so quickly, so quickly that your hand sometimes fights back and jibs, overtaxed by the impatient god who guides it . . . and to discover, next day, instead of the golden bough that broke into miraculous blossom in a shining hour, a dry bramble branch, an aborted flower . . .
To write! The pleasure and pain of those with time on their hands! To write! . . . Every so often, I feel the need, as strong as thirst in summertime, to note
down my thoughts, to describe what I observe . . . I take up my pen anew to begin that dangerous, disappointing game, to seize and hold the iridescent, elusive, thrilling adjective with my flexible double nib . . . It’s only a passing fit, the itch from a scar . . .
It takes too much time to write! And then, I’m no Balzac . . . The fragile story that I’m constructing crumbles when the tradesman rings, when the shoemaker presents his bill, when the attorney phones, or the trial lawyer, when the theatrical agent summons me to his office for “a private performance in the home of people who are of the finest quality but who aren’t accustomed to pay high fees” . . .
Now, ever since I’ve been living alone, it’s been necessary, first to live, then to get a divorce, and then to go on living . . . All of that calls for an incredible amount of activity and obstinacy . . . And where does it get you? Is there no other haven for me than this commonplace bedroom furnished with cheap imitation of Louis XVI; any other resting place than this impenetrable mirror which I run up against, forehead to forehead? . . .
Tomorrow is Sunday: matinee and evening performances at the Empyrée-Clichy. It’s already two A.M.! . . . It’s time for bed, for a woman of letters who’s gone to the dogs.
“SHAKE A LEG! Come on, shake a leg! Jadin hasn’t showed up!”
“What do you mean, hasn’t showed up? Is she sick?”
“Sick? Yes—from whooping it up! . . . And it affects us: we go on twenty minutes sooner!”
The mime Brague has just left his cell as I was walking by, frightening in his khaki-colored foundation makeup; and I run to my dressing room, alarmed at the thought that, for the first time in my life, I might be late . . .
Jadin hasn’t showed up. I rush, trembling with nerves. Because our neighborhood audience doesn’t fool around, especially at Sunday matinees! As our stage manager (in his own way an animal tamer) says, if we let it “go hungry” for five minutes between two acts, the howls, cigarette butts, and orange peels will go off spontaneously.
Jadin hasn’t showed up . . . It was only to be expected, one day or another.
Jadin is a young songstress, so green in vaudeville that she hasn’t had time yet to bleach her chestnut hair; she landed from the slums at the edge of town onto the stage in one bound, flabbergasted to find herself earning two hundred ten francs a month for singing. She’s eighteen. Luck (good luck?) has seized her recklessly, and her defensive elbows, her whole stubborn body thrust forward like a gargoyle, seem to be warding off the blows of a brutal fate fond of practical jokes.
She bawls her numbers like a dressmaker’s assistant or a raucous street singer, with no notion that there are other ways of singing. She naively forces her rasping but appealing contralto, which is so suited to her young face, that of a pink, sulky apache. Just as she is, with a dress that’s too long and was bought anywhere, with her chestnut hair that isn’t even waved, with her sloping shoulder that still seems to be dragging a laundry hamper, with the down over her lips all white with cheap powder, the audience is wild about her. The woman who manages the theater has promised her, for next season, her name in lights and second billing; as for a raise, she’ll think about it. Onstage Jadin is radiant and jubilant. Every night she recognizes in the second-balcony audience some fellow who gallivanted around with her when they were kids, and to greet him she can’t resist interrupting her sentimental ditty with a happy shout, a shrill schoolgirl’s laugh, or even a vulgar mocking hand gesture made high up on her thigh . . .
She’s the one awol from the show today. In a half hour, there will be a storm in the auditorium, shouts of “Jadin! Jadin!”, a stamping of clogs, and a tinkling of spoons on iced-coffee glasses . . .
It was bound to happen. It’s said that Jadin isn’t ill, and our stage manager is grumbling:
“Like hell, she’s got the flu! What she did is tumble across a bed! Somebody’s applying a banknote as a compress! Otherwise, she’d have let us know . . . ”
Jadin has found an admirer who’s not from this neighborhood. A girl must live . . . And yet she had been living with this man, with that man, with everybody . . . Will I see any more her little gargoyle figure, with one of the “stylish” bonnets she made herself pulled down to her eyebrows? Just last night, she stuck her badly powdered snoot into my dressing room to show me her latest creation: a toque of rabbit fur, “resembling white fox,” that was too tight and bent Jadin’s small, very pink ears back against both sides of her head.
“The spitting image of Attila the Hun,” Brague said to her, in a very serious tone.
Jadin is gone . . . The long corridor, perforated by small square dressing rooms, is buzzing and sneering; everyone seems to have expected this escapade but me . . . Bouty, the little comedian who sings the songs in Dranem’s style, is walking back and forth in front of my dressing room, made up as an ape, a glass of milk in his hand, and I hear him prophesying:
“It was a sure thing! As for me, I was giving Jadin another five or six days, maybe a month! The boss lady must be making a long face . . . But it will take more than that to convince her to raise the salary of the performers who bring in the money . . . Remember what I’m saying! Jadin will be back: this is just an outing. She’s a girl with her own life style, she’ll never be able to hold onto a sugar daddy . . . ”
I open my door to speak to Bouty, while applying liquid white to my hands:
“She didn’t say anything to you about leaving, Bouty?”
He shrugs his shoulders, turning toward me his face made up as a red gorilla with white-ringed eyes:
“Not very likely! I’m not her mother . . . ”
Saying which, he gulps down his glass of milk a little at a time—milk as bluish as starch.
Poor little Bouty, with his chronic enteritis and the factory-sealed bottle of milk that he parades around everywhere! When his red-and-white makeup is cleaned off, he has a weak, gentle face, delicate and intelligent, beautiful, tender eyes, and a heart like that of a dog without an owner, prepared to love anyone who’ll adopt him. His ailment and his tough profession are killing him; he lives on milk and boiled macaroni, yet finds the strength to sing and do ragtime dances for twenty minutes at a time. When his act is over, he falls onto the floor backstage, completely exhausted and unable to go right down to his dressing room . . . His slender body, stretched out there like a corpse, sometimes blocks my path, and I stiffen, resisting the urge to stoop down, lift him up, and call for help. Our colleagues and the chief stagehand merely shake their heads knowingly as they stand beside him, and say:
“Bouty is a performer whose work really knocks him out.” ”Snappy, snappy! Full steam ahead! The audience didn’t yell for Jadin all that badly. We were in luck!”
Brague pushes me onto the iron staircase; the dusty heat, together with the light from the lamp racks, makes me dizzy; this matinee has gone by like a busy dream; half of my day’s work has melted away somehow, and I retain from it merely that nervous chill and tightening of the stomach which you get when you wake up and rise out of bed quickly in the middle of the night. In an hour it will be dinnertime, then you take a taxi and start all over again . . .
And I still have a month of living like this! The current show has enough drawing power; besides, we’ve got to hold out till the end-of-the-year revue comes on:
“We’re good like this,” Brague says, “forty days with nothing to think about.”
And he rubs his hands together.
With nothing to think about . . . I wish I could be like him! As for me, I’ve got forty days for thinking, the whole year, my whole life . . . How long will I trot out, from vaudeville to the legit, from the legit to the casino, “talents” that people politely consent to find interesting? In addition, they grant me a “precise skill in miming,” “clear diction,” and “a faultless figure.” All very fine. Even more than necessary. But . . . where does it get you?
Look out! I can see another fit of the blues coming . . . I’m awaiting it calmly; my heart is used to it and
I’m sure to diagnose its regular phases and overcome it once again. No one will know about it. Tonight Brague is examining me with his penetrating little eyes without finding anything to say except:
“You’re really up in the clouds, aren’t you?”
Back in my dressing room, I wash my hands, which are tinged with currant blood, in front of the mirror in which my grease-painted adviser and I are measuring each other’s strength, gravely, like mutually worthy adversaries.
To suffer . . . to regret . . . to last out the darkest hours of the night in insomnia and solitary maunderings: this is my destiny tonight. And I proceed toward it with a kind of funereal gaiety, with all the serenity of a person who’s still young and resistant, someone who’s seen much worse . . . Two habits have given me the power to hold back my tears: the habit of concealing my thoughts, and that of blackening my lashes with mascara . . .
“Come in!”
Someone just knocked, and I answered automatically, lost in thought . . .
It isn’t Brague, it isn’t my elderly dresser, it’s a strange man, tall, thin, dark, bowing his bare head and reciting in a single flow:
“Madame, for a week now I’ve been coming to applaud you in your pantomime Dominance. Please forgive me if my visit is at all . . . inopportune, but I feel that my admiration for your talent and . . . your figure . . . justifies so . . . unorthodox an introduction, and that . . . ”
I say nothing to this imbecile. Damp with sweat, still out of breath, my dress half open, I wipe my hands while looking at him with a ferocity so evident that his lovely phrase dies away suddenly, cut short . . .
Should I slap his face? Should I leave on his two cheeks the marks of my fingers, which are still wet from the red-tinged water? Should I raise my voice and hurl at that angular, very bony face, divided by a black mustache, the vulgarity I’ve learned in the wings and on the street?
This invader has the eyes of an unhappy charcoal burner . . .