The Vagabond

by Colette

  She’s right. “They” are her notorious local audience, demanding and jealous; she’s betrayed them somewhat, but they forgive her, provided she reappears before them in lousy clothes and shoes, got up like a rag doll, but the same as before her escapade, before her crime . . .

  After a pause Jadin resumes, completely at ease with Bouty’s embarrassed silence:

  “Me, you know, I bought what I needed most: a hat and a muff and a scarf. But what a hat! You’ll see it in a little while . . . So long. You’re staying, Bouty? . . . Bouty, I’m rich, you know? I’ll pay for anything you like!”

  “I’ll pass on that, thanks.”

  Bouty acts unusually chilly and disapproving. If I said out loud that he’s in love with Jadin, I’d make myself a laughingstock. So I have to make do with just thinking it.

  The little comic leaves shortly afterward, leaving me alone with my bouquet of roses, a large, ordinary bouquet tied with a pale green ribbon . . . It’s truly the kind of bouquet that a “big ninny” like my new admirer would send!

  “With his respectful compliments . . . ” For the last three years I’ve run across plenty of compliments, if I may say so, but there was nothing respectful about them. And my old middle-class sentiments, still on the alert, secretly take over—as if these new compliments, as cloaked with respect as they claim to be, weren’t really after the same thing, always the same thing . . .

  My nearsightedness doesn’t prevent me from spotting in the front row of the orchestra, sitting there stiff and serious, with his dark hair gleaming like the silk of a top hat, Dufferein-Chautel the younger. Happy at being recognized by me, he follows with his head my movements, my comings and goings on the stage, just the way my dog Fossette does when I get dressed to go out . . .

  THE DAYS go by. There’s nothing new in my life except for a man patiently lying in ambush for me.

  We’ve just gotten through Christmas and New Year’s. Christmas eve, very busy, shook up the whole “dump” with wild activity. The audience, more than half drunk, yelled in unison; the socialites in the stage boxes threw mandarin oranges and expensive cigars at the second balcony; Jadin, tipsy since lunch, lost the thread of her song and did a raucous dance on the stage, lifting her skirt to show stockings with runs in them, with a heavy lock of hair tapping her on the back . . . A profitable night, with our boss-lady throning in her box, computing the royal receipts, her eyes on the sticky drinking glasses loading down the shelves nailed to the backs of the seats . . .

  Brague had also been tipsy ever since dinner, and he was sparkling with raunchy imagination, like a little black billygoat. Alone in his dressing room, he improvised an extraordinary monologue in which a hallucinated man was defending himself against ghosts, crying, “Oh! No, enough . . . let me alone!” or “Not that! Not that! Or anyway just once . . . ,” with the sighs and laments of a man being tortured by a diabolical sexual urge . . .

  As for Bouty, writhing with enteritis cramps, he was sipping his bluish milk . . .

  Instead of attending a Christmas party, I ate the lovely hothouse grapes that my old friend Hamond had brought; I was alone with Fossette, who was munching candy sent by the Big Ninny. Making fun of myself, I struggled with a fit of self-pitying jealousy, like a child who hasn’t been invited anywhere . . .

  What would I have preferred? To have supper with Brague, or with Hamond, or with Dufferein-Chautel? Oh, no! What, then? I’m no better or worse than anyone else, and there are times when I’d like to forbid others to have fun while I’m bored . . .

  My friends, the real ones, the loyal ones, like Hamond—I must make this clear—are losers, an incurably sad lot. Is it the “solidarity of unhappiness” that connects us? I don’t believe it.

  It seems to me, rather, that I attract, and hold onto, melancholy people, solitaries dedicated to seclusion or to a wandering life, like me . . . “Birds of a feather . . . ”

  I review these madcap ideas as I return from my visit to Margot.

  Margot is my ex-husband’s younger sister. Since childhood she has mournfully borne that funny pet name, which suits her so very badly. She lives alone and, with her graying hair, cut short below her ears, her blouse with Russian embroidery, and her long black jacket, she strongly resembles Rosa Bonheur—if that painter had also been a nihilist.

  Her fortune squandered by her husband, her brother cadging from her, her attorney robbing her, and her servants stealing from her, Margot has built herself a fortress of funereal calm, consisting of incurable kindness and silent contempt. An old habit of exploitation leads those around her to go on diminishing her annuity income, and she lets it happen, except that she sometimes flies into a sudden rage and fires her cook for gypping her out of ten francs too flagrantly.

  “I consent to their robbing me,” Margot exclaims, “but I want them to show me some consideration!”

  Then, for many days, she relapses into her contempt for everyone.

  While I was married, I hardly knew Margot, who was always aloof, gentle, and incommunicative. In her reserve, she never sought my confidence. Only on the day when my breaking off with Adolphe looked like a certainty did she politely show my astonished husband the door of her home, never to see him again. Then I knew I had an ally, friend, and supporter in Margot, since it’s she who supplies the three hundred francs a month that stand between me and destitution.

  “Take it, go ahead!” Margot had said to me. “You aren’t causing me any loss. It’s the ten francs a day that Adolphe always cheated me out of!”

  It’s certainly not at Margot’s that I’d find consolation, or that healthful cheerfulness prescribed for me like a diet. But at least Margot loves me after her fashion, her discouraged and discouraging fashion, while she predicts the most awful doom for me:

  “You, my girl,” she said to me only today, “will be lucky if you don’t get caught up again in some love affair with a man like Adolphe. You were born to be devoured, like me. I’m a fine one to be preaching to you! Instead of being a cautious, ‘burnt child,’ you’ll head right back to the fire, take my word for it! You’re one of those women for whom one Adolphe isn’t enough of an experience!”

  “But really, Margot, you’re too much! Every time, you accuse me of the same thing!” I laughingly reproached her. “ ‘You’re this, you’re that, you’re one of those women who, you’re one of those women whom . . . ’ At least wait until I’ve sinned, that will be the time to get angry with me!”

  Margot gave me one of those looks which make her seem ten feet tall, which seem to be coming from such a height!

  “I’m not angry with you, my girl. Nor will be I more angry with you after you’ve sinned, as you put it. Only, you’ll have a lot of trouble keeping yourself from committing the folly, because there’s only one: starting over again . . . I know what I’m talking about . . . And, besides,” she adds with a peculiar smile, “I didn’t have senses! . . . ”

  “Then what should I do, Margot? What do you find fault with in the life I’m leading? Should I shut myself up like you for fear of a worse disaster and, like you, love only little short-haired Brabançon terriers?”

  “Make sure you don’t!” Margot exclaimed with childish urgency. “Little Brabançon terriers! There’s nothing so ill-natured! There you see an animal,” she said, pointing to a little russet female similar to a shorn squirrel, “an animal that I tended for two weeks while she had bronchitis. When I take the liberty of leaving her at home alone for an hour, the little monster pretends she doesn’t recognize me and growls at my heels as if I were a hobo! . . . But, aside from that, child, are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m very well, Margot, thanks.”

  “Your tongue? . . . The whites of your eyes? . . . Your pulse? . . . ”

  She turned up my eyelids, she squeezed my wrist with a sure, professional hand, exactly as she’d do with a little Brabançon. Because Margot and I know the value of good health and the sorrow of losing it. You manage all right to live alone, you get used t
o it; but to lie ill, alone and feverish, coughing all the endless night, wobbling over to the window on buckling legs when rain is beating at the panes, and then returning to your rumpled, sagging bed—alone, alone, alone! . . .

  For a few days last year I knew the horror of being a bedridden woman with mild delirium, afraid, in her semilucid mind, of dying slowly, far from everyone, forgotten . . . Since then, following Margot’s example, I’ve been taking care of myself and worrying about my bowels, my throat, my stomach, and my skin with the slightly neurotic stringency of a landowner concerned for his estate . . .

  Today I’m thinking about Margot’s odd words. She “didn’t have senses . . . ” What about me?

  My senses . . . It’s true. I feel as if I hadn’t thought about them for quite some time.

  The “matter of the senses” . . . Margot seems to think it’s important. Both the best and the worst literature tries to teach me that every other voice falls silent when that of the senses has spoken. What is one to believe?

  Brague once said to me, speaking like a doctor:

  “You know, your way of living isn’t healthful!”

  And, like Margot, he added:

  “Anyway, it will happen to you exactly as it happens to all our pals. Remember what I’m telling you!”

  I don’t like to think about it. Brague is fond of making pronouncements and playing the infallible prophet . . . It doesn’t mean a thing . . . All the same, I don’t like to think about it.

  In the vaudeville house, without the least pretense of prudishness, I join in conversations about “the matter of the senses” with a statistical and surgical preciseness, and I take the same detached and respectful interest in it as if I were reading in a paper about the ravages of the plague in Asia. I’m willing to be apprehensive, but I’d rather remain only half-convinced. All the same, I don’t much like thinking about it . . .

  And then, there’s that man—the Big Ninny—who’s intentionally living in my shadow and walking in my footsteps, with the obstinacy of a dog . . .

  I find flowers in my dressing room, Fossette receives a little nickel-plated bowl for her dogfood; three tiny good-luck animals have taken up residence, cheek by jowl, on my writing desk: an amethyst cat, a chalcedony elephant, and a turquoise toad . . . A little jade hoop, green as a tree frog, encircled the stems of the greenish lilies delivered to me on New Year’s Day . . . In the street I too frequently run across the same Dufferein-Chautel, who greets me with a surprise he acts so badly . . .

  He forces me to remember, all too often, that desire exists, an imperious demigod, an unleashed faun who frisks all around Love but doesn’t obey Love; that I’m alone, healthy, still young, and rejuvenated by my long mental convalescence . . .

  Senses? Yes, I have them . . . Or I had when Adolphe Taillandy deigned to concern himself with them. Timid senses, which followed a routine and were grateful for the habitual caress that satisfied them, which feared any rakish refinement or complication . . . which were slow to flare up, but also slow to die down: in short, healthy senses . . .

  His unfaithfulness and my protracted grief dulled them—for how long? On cheerful days of physical ebullience, I exclaim, “Forever!” and I feel ingenuous, freed from that which made me a woman like all the rest . . .

  But there are also lucid days when I reason severely with myself: “Watch out! Be alert at all times! Everyone who approaches you is a suspect, but you are your own worst enemy! Don’t proudly proclaim that you’re dead, empty, weightless: the animal you’re forgetting about is in hibernation and is gaining strength from its long slumber . . . ”

  Then I once more lose the memory of what I used to be, in my fear of coming back to life; I long for nothing, I miss nothing from the past, until the next time my confidence is shattered, until the inevitable fit in which I watch in terror the approach of sadness, with its gentle but powerful hands, that guide and companion of all sensual pleasures . . .

  ***

  For the last few days we’ve been rehearsing a new pantomime, Brague and I. There will be a forest, a cave, an old caveman, a young hamadryad, and a faun in the prime of life.

  Brague will play the faun, I will play the wood nymph; as for the old caveman, it’s too soon to decide. His role is episodic, and, to play him, Brague says: “I’ve got a little eighteen-year-old rascal, one of my pupils, who’ll be perfectly prehistoric!”

  They’re willing to lend us the stage of the Folies-Bergère, mornings from ten to eleven, to rehearse. Devoid of its backdrops, the deep stage shows us its entire bare floor. How gloomy and gray it is there when I arrive, uncorseted, in a sweater instead of a blouse, and with black satin panties beneath my short skirt! . . .

  I envy Brague’s ability to be completely himself at all hours, wide awake, swarthy, bossy . . . I struggle feebly with the chill, with stiffness, and with the nastiness of that atmosphere, imperfectly cleansed of its nocturnal odors and still stinking of humanity and sour punch . . . The dinky rehearsal piano spells out the new music, my hands clutch each other and refuse to separate; my gestures are clipped and too near the body; my shoulders rise in a shiver; I feel mediocre, awkward, lost . . .

  Brague, who’s used to my morning inertia, has also discovered the secret of curing it. He nags at me ceaselessly, running around me like a dog chasing rats, lavishing brief words of encouragement or exclamations that lash me like a cracking whip . . .

  A cloud of dust rises from the auditorium; it’s the hour when the cleaning men sweep out, along with the mud that has dried on the carpets, the small crud of the night before: bits of paper, cherry pits, cigarette stubs, dirt from shoes . . .

  In the far background—because we’re allotted only a slice of the stage, a pathway about two yards wide—a troupe of acrobats is working on their thick rug: good-looking pink Germans with blonde hair, silent and dedicated to their task. They’re wearing filthy work tights, and during the pauses in their act, their repose and their pastimes are still more exercises; two of them, with sleepy laughter, are trying to achieve an impossible miracle of equilibrium . . . maybe they’ll succeed next month. At the end of the session, they very seriously attend to the perilous education of the youngest boy in the troupe, a kid with the face of a little girl and with long bonde curls; they throw him into the air, and he lands on the foot or hand of one of them, a little airy creature who seems to be flying, his curls flung out horizontally behind him or standing straight up over his head like a flame while he falls back again, his feet together in a point, his arms glued to his sides . . .

  “Keep to the beat!” Brague shouts. “You were too late with that gesture again! This is what I call a half-assed rehearsal! Can’t you pay attention to what you’re doing?”

  It’s hard, I admit. Now there are gymnasts soaring above us on three trapezes, exchanging shrill calls, cries like swallows . . . The nickel-plated flashing of the metal trapezes, the squeaking of the rosined hands on the polished bars, all that outlay of elegant, supple strength all around me, that methodical contempt for danger excite me, and finally spur me into a contagious emulation . . . And it’s then that they throw us out, just when I was beginning to feel in myself, like a set of jewelry suddenly put on again, the beauty of my finished gestures, the rightness of an expression of terror or desire . . .

  Galvanized too late, I use up the rest of my fervor by walking home with Fossette, in whom rehearsals store up a silent rage which she then takes out on dogs bigger than she is, when she’s back outdoors. She terrorizes them, like the clever actress she is, with a single convulsion of her Japanese-dragon face, with a hideous grimace that makes her eyes bulge out of her head and curls her floppy lips back, displaying, in their blood-red lining, several white teeth planted at an angle like the pickets of a wind-shaken fence.

  Having grown up in the profession, Fossette knows the vaudeville house better than I do; she trots into dark cellars and bowls down the corridors, guided by the familiar smell of soapy water, rice powder, and ammonia . . . H
er brindled body is used to being hugged by arms coated with pearl white; she condescends to eat the sugar that the supers save from the saucers in the café downstairs. Capriciously she sometimes demands that I take her along at night, while on other days she watches me leave, while rolled up like a turban in her basket, with the scorn of a lady of independent means who has all the time in the world to digest her meal.

  “It’s Saturday, Fossette! Let’s run! Hamond will be there before we are!”

  We’ve run like two lunatics instead of taking a cab: it’s because the air this morning has such a surprising and soft sweetness of early springtime in it . . . And we meet Hamond just as he reaches my white “hut,” which is the color of a butter sculpture.

  But Hamond isn’t alone: he’s chatting on the sidewalk with . . . with Dufferein-Chautel the younger, whose first name is Maxime and who’s known as the Big Ninny . . .

  “What? You again?”

  Without giving him time to protest, I question Hammond severely:

  “You know Monsieur Dufferein-Chautel?”

  “Of course,” says Hamond calmly. “So do you, I see. As for me, I’ve known him since he was a little boy. I still have in some drawer the photo of a kid with a white armband: ‘Souvenir of the First Communion of Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, May 15, 18 . . . ’ ”

  “It’s true!” exclaims the Big Ninny. “Mother sent it to you because she thought I was so handsome!”

  I refrain from joining in their laughter. I’m not pleased that they know each other. And I feel ashamed in the strong light of noon, with my hair losing its curl beneath my fur cap, my shiny nose in need of a powdering, and my mouth dry with hunger and thirst . . .

  Under my skirt I hide my rehearsal boots, shapeless lace-up boots whose scratched kidskin shows blue streaks, but which cling properly to my ankles and whose thinned soles are as flexible as those of ballet slippers . . . Especially since the Big Ninny is studying me as if he’s never seen me . . .