by Colette
Repressing a sudden childish urge to cry, I ask him, as if about to bite him:
“What’s wrong? Do I have a smut on my nose?”
He doesn’t hasten to reply:
“No . . . but . . . it’s odd . . . when someone has seen you only at night, he’d never believe you have gray eyes . . . They look brown when you’re onstage.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve already been told so. You know, Hamond, our omelets will be cold. Goodbye, sir.”
I hadn’t had such a good look at him, either, in full daylight. His deep-set eyes aren’t black, as I thought, but a slightly tawny brown, like those of German shepherd dogs . . .
They shake hands interminably! And Fossette, that little hussy, “says goodbye to the gentleman” with the ear-to-ear smile of an ogress! And, because I’ve mentioned omelets, the Big Ninny puts on a face like a pauper watching a feast! Just let him wait till I invite him! . . .
Unfairly, I’m sore at Hamond. And so I keep silent while rushing through a superficial washing of hands and face, before joining my old friend in the little study in which Blandine is setting the table. Because I’ve eliminated, once and for all, that gloomy, useless room called the dining room, which is occupied only one hour out of the twenty-four. I must explain that Blandine sleeps in my apartment and that an additional room would have been too expensive for me . . .
“Ha, ha! You know Maxime!” Hamond exclaims, unfolding his napkin.
I was expecting it!
“I? I don’t know him at all! I gave a private performance at his brother’s place and I met him there. That’s all.”
I neglect—why?—to mention our first interview, the Big Ninny’s lustful invasion of my dressing room . . .
“Well, he knows you. And he admires you a lot. I even think he’s in love with you!”
My shrewd Hamond! I look at him with that feline feeling, merry and sly, which men’s naïveté inspires in us . . .
“He knows that you like roses and pistachio candy. He’s ordered a collar for Fossette . . .
I’m furious:
“He’s ordered a collar for Fossette! . . . After all, it’s none of my business!” I say, laughing. “Fossette is a completely amoral creature: she’ll accept it, I know she’s capable of it!”
“We spoke about you, naturally . . . I thought you were good friends . . . ”
“Oh! . . . I would have told you, Hamond.”
My old friend lowers his eyes, flattered by his own friendly jealousy.
“He’s a very nice fellow, I assure you.”
“Who is?”
“Maxime. I met his mother, who’s a widow, in . . . Let’s see, it must be thirty . . . no, thirty-five . . . ”
What can I do? I have to hear the entire history of the Dufferein-Chautels, mother and son . . . A masterful woman, it’s she who manages everything . . . sawmills in the Ardennes . . . acres of woodland . . . Maxime, a little lazy, is the youngest and the most spoiled of her sons . . . much more intelligent than he looks . . . thirty-three and a half years old . . .
“Say! Just like me!”
Hamond leans over to me across the little table, with the attention of a painter of miniatures:
“You’re thirty-three, Renée?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Don’t tell anybody. No one would know.”
“Oh, I’m well aware that onstage . . . ”
“Not in person, either.”
Hamond doesn’t dwell on this compliment; he continues the history of the Dufferein-Chautels. Vexed, I suck grapes. The Big Ninny is worming his way into my home more than I’ve allowed him to. By this hour, Hamond and I would ordinarily be hashing over bad old memories, which revive every week in the bitter aroma of our steaming cups . . .
Poor Hamond! It’s for my sake that he’s sacrificing the funereal habit so dear to him. I’m well aware that he fears for my loneliness; if he dared, he’d say to me, like a fatherly go-between:
“This is the lover you need, dear! He’s healthy, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t drink, he’s well-to-do . . . You’ll thank me for it!”
***
Only four more days and I’ll be leaving the Empyrée-Clichy. Every time I end a rather lengthy vaudeville run, in the final days I get the odd impression of a deliverance I haven’t wished for. Happy to be free, to live at home nights, I nevertheless need time to enjoy it, and when I stretch to signify “At last!” my gesture lacks spontaneity.
Yet, this time, I think I’m really pleased; sitting in Brague’s dressing room, I enumerate for my partner, who’s totally unconcerned, the urgent tasks that are going to occupy me on my vacation:
“You understand, I’m having all my couch cushions recovered. Then I’ll push the couch all the way into the corner and I’ll put an electric lamp over it . . . ”
“Nice! Sounds like a streetwalker’s den!” says Brague in a serious tone.
“How dumb you are! . . . Well, anyway, I’ve got loads of things to do. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to pay attention to my home.”
“Oh, sure!” Brague agrees, poker-faced. “And for whose benefit will all that be?”
“What do you mean, for whose benefit? For mine, naturally!”
For a moment Brague turns away from his mirror, revealing a face whose right eye, the only one scrumbled with blue, seems to be sporting the ring left by a terrific punch:
“For yours? Only for yours? . . . Forgive me, but I find that pretty . . . brainless! Besides, do you imagine I’m going to let Dominance rust? Get prepared for one of those ‘departures for the first-class vaudeville houses in the provinces and abroad’ . . . Anyway, our agent Salomon told me to pass the word that he wants to see you.”
“Oh! Already?”
Brague raises his shoulders peremptorily:
“Yes, yes, I know that old refrain! ‘Oh! Already?’ Besides, if I told you we have no prospects, you’d be buzzing around me like a mosquito: ‘When are we leaving? When are we leaving?’ You broads are all the same!”
“And so say I!” are the words of approbation uttered by a melancholy voice behind us—Bouty’s.
He’s grown even thinner since last month, Bouty has, and his act is tiring him out more and more. I look at him on the sly, so as not to hurt his feelings, but what can you detect beneath that red makeup with white-ringed eyes? . . . Silent, we listen to Jadin’s voice above us:
Still in bed, my lazy Lil?
Please let in your loving Bill,
With loads of flow’rs for you!
Don’t you know my knock?
Can’t you tell my cock—
A-doodle-doo?
The experienced professional who wrote this “Lily-of-the-Valley Waltz” skillfully left a smutty pause between the last two lines . . .
“So, we’re hitting the road in four days?” the little comic suddenly asks, raising his head.
“Yes, in four days . . . I liked it fine here. It’s so peaceful . . . ”
“Yes, so peaceful!” Bouty protests skeptically. “There are places even more peaceful. You won’t have any trouble finding a better spot. I’m not saying anything against our audience, but you must admit they’re rather a bunch of roughnecks . . . I’m well aware,” he says in response to my gesture of indifference, “that people can behave correctly anywhere. But all the same . . . There! Hear them yelling? Do you imagine that a woman, I mean a thoughtless young woman whose mind is on nothing but laughs and parties, can acquire the habit of behaving correctly in a place like this? . . . I mean a dizzy dame, a party girl like Jadin, for example . . . ”
Oh, little Bouty, in whom love awakens a sudden aristocracy and contempt for this audience that applauds you, you’re seeking and finding an excuse for Jadin, and all on your own you’ve invented the theory of the influence exerted by one’s environment . . . which I don’t subscribe to!
The Russian dancers have left, “Grand Duke” Antoniev and his dogs have left. Where to? No one knows. None of us has had enoug
h curiosity to inquire. Other acts have come to take their place, some booked for a week, some for only four days—because the revue will be on soon; backstage and in the corridor I run across new faces, with whom I exchange a ghost of a smile or a raising of the eyebrows, by way of a discreet friendly greeting . . .
From the former program, they’ve kept only us, Jadin (who’ll create roles in the revue, heaven help us!), and Bouty . . . We have melancholy chats at night, like veterans of the Empyrée-Clichy forgotten by a departing young regiment . . .
Where will I meet again those I’ve met here? In Paris, Lyons, Vienna, or Berlin? . . . Maybe never, maybe nowhere. The office of our agent Salomon will reunite us for five minutes, with shouts of greeting and hammy handshakes, jut long enough to learn we still exist, and to utter the indispensable “How have you been doing?” and to find out whether “things are cooking” or “things could be better.”
Things could be better . . . With that vague expression my wandering colleagues disguise failure, unwanted unemployment, shortage of funds, poverty . . . They never admit the truth, puffed up and sustained as they are by that heroic vanity which makes them dear to me . . .
A few of them, when pushed to the wall, accept a small part in a real play, but, oddly enough, they don’t boast about it. There, in patient obscurity, they await the return of their luck, a vaudeville booking, that blessed hour which will find them once more in their spangled skirts or dress coats smelling of benzine, once again facing the glare of the spotlights, “in their repertoire”!
“Yes, things could be better,” a few will tell me, and they’ll add:
“It’s back to the flicks for me.”
The movies, which had threatened the humble vaudevillians with ruin, is now saving them. There they bend their backs to an anonymous, unsung labor, which they don’t like, which upsets their habits, changes the hours when they eat, loaf, and work. Hundreds of them live off the movies when they’re laid off, and several remain there. But when the flicks are chock-full of extras and stars, what are they to do?
“Things could be better . . . decidedly, things could be better . . . ”
They toss off the phrase in a manner that’s nonchalant and serious at the same time, never emphatically, never tearfully; their hands are swinging a hat or a pair of old gloves. They swagger, their waists clamped into a long-skirted coat that’s been out of style for years, because the essential, indispensable thing isn’t possessing a clean suit, it’s possessing a fairly “decent” overcoat that conceals everything else: the threadbare vest, the shapeless jacket, the trousers yellowed at the knees—an eye-catching, terrific overcoat that will impress a manager or a booking agent, one that, in short, will allow them to state jauntily, as if they had an independent income: “Things could be better!”
Where will we be next month? . . . At night Bouty prowls helplessly in the dressing-room corridor, coughing, until I open my door partway and invite him to sit down in my room for a minute. He parks his rump, like a skinny dog’s, on a frail chair from which the white paint is peeling, and draws his feet under him so as not to disturb my coming and going. Brague comes and joins us, squatting like a Gypsy, his behind warm, on the radiator pipe. Standing between them, I finish dressing, and my red skirt, embroidered with yellow patterns, fans them as I go by . . . We don’t feel like talking, but we chat, fighting a vague need to keep quiet, huddling together and melting our hearts . . .
It’s Brague who’s best at retaining his lucid curiosity, his businesslike appetite for the future. As for me, wherever the future takes me . . . My belated taste, a somewhat artificial acquisition, for moving and travel is well suited to my middle-class fatalism, fundamental and calm. I’m a Gypsy now, it’s true, whom tours have led from city to city, but an orderly Gypsy who conscientiously sews and brushes her duds; a Gypsy who almost always carries her tiny fortune on her person—but in the little doeskin bag, the coppers are on one side, the silver coins on the other, and the gold coins are carefully hidden in a secret pocket . . .
A vagabond, yes, but one who’s resigned to rotate on one spot, like these comrades and brothers of mine . . . Departures sadden and intoxicate me, it’s true, and some part of me is always left hanging on the places I travel through—new countries, clear or cloudy skies, oceans in the pearly-gray rain—it’s left clinging so passionately that I feel as if I’m leaving behind me a thousand little ghosts that look like me, rolling in the waves, rocking on the leaves, scattered in the clouds . . . But doesn’t one last little ghost, the one most like me, remain seated by my fireplace corner, dreamy and well-behaved, stooped over a book that she’s forgetting to read? . . . .
Part Two
“W,HAT A LOVELY intimate nook! How hard it is to understand your life in vaudeville when I see you here, between this pink lamp and this vase of carnations!”
That’s what my admirer said when leaving, the first time he came to dinner at my place with Hamond the go-between.
For I do have an admirer. The only term I can find for him is this old-fashioned one: he’s neither my lover, nor my flame, nor my gigolo . . . he’s my admirer.
“What a lovely intimate nook! . . .” That night I gave a bitter laugh behind his back . . . A shaded lamp, a crystal receptacle with water sparkling in it, an armchair by the table, the threadbare couch concealed by a skillful disarray of cushions—and a passerby, dazzled and superficial, can picture, within these dull-green walls, the secluded life, thoughtful and studious, of some superior woman . . . Ha, ha! He hasn’t seen the dusty inkwell or the dry pen or the book with uncut pages on the empty box of letter paper . . .
An old holly branch is curling up, as if it had fallen into the fire, at the rim of a stoneware vase . . . The cracked glass covering a small pastel (a sketch by Adolphe Taillandy) is waiting in vain to be replaced . . . My negligent hand has pinned together, and then forgotten, a scrap of paper around the light bulb that illuminates the fireplace . . . A heap of five hundred postcards—scenes from Dominance—in their bands of gray paper, cover a fifteenth-century carved ivory, at the risk of crushing it.
All of this is redolent of indifference, of abandonment, of “What’s the use?,” almost of departure . . . Intimate? What intimacy huddles at night around a lamp with a fading shade?
I laughed and sighed with fatigue after my two guests left, and my night was long, irritated by an obscure feeling of shame deriving from the Big Ninny’s very admiration. That evening, his naive faith, that of an infatuated man, shed light on my own self, just as sometimes an unexpected mirror at a street corner or on a staircase will suddenly reveal certain flaws, certain weaknesses in your face or figure . . .
But other evenings have gone by since then, bringing back Hamond with my admirer, or my admirer without Hamond . . . my old friend is conscientiously working at what he calls his dirty trade. At times he presides over his pupil’s visits with the brilliant ease of an elder statesman—visits which I admit in all sincerity would be too much for me without his presence. At times he keeps in the background, though not for long; he lets us wait for him just the right amount of time, employing for my sake that parlor diplomacy which had been rusting in him . . .
I don’t doll myself up for them; I stick to my pleated blouse and my plain dark skirt. I allow my face to relax in their presence, my mouth slack and closed, my eyes intentionally filmy; to my admirer’s obstinacy I oppose the passive demeanor of a girl whom her parents want to marry off against her will . . . The only cares I take, for myself more than for them, is for those deceptive, summary surroundings in which I spend so little time; Blandine has condescended to dust the corners of the study, and the cushions of the armchair of the table retain the imprint of my repose . . .
I have an admirer. Why him and not someone else? I have no idea. I look with surprise at this man who has succeeded in entering my home. Damn, how he wanted to! Every element of chance served his turn, and Hamond helped him. One day when all alone at home, I opened the door after the bel
l had rung timidly: how could I throw out that fellow who was waiting awkwardly, his arms laden with roses, alongside Hamond and his imploring look? He has succeeded in getting in here; no doubt it was bound to happen . . .
Every time he returns I learn more about his face, as if I’d never seen it before. On either side of his nose he has an already distinct crease which disappears under his mustache; he has lips of a somewhat brownish red, as often found in men who are too swarthy. His hair, his eyebrows, his lashes are all as black as the devil, and it took a really bright sunbeam to teach me one day that, underneath all that black, my admirer has very deep-set eyes of a reddish gray . . .
When he stands up, he’s really a stiff big ninny, gauche, all bone. Seated or semirecumbent on the couch, he seems to loosen up suddenly and acquire the charm of being a different man, lazy, relaxed, with felicitous hand gestures, and an idle way of leaning his neck back onto the cushions . . .
When I’m sure he’s not looking at me, I observe him, vaguely shocked at the thought that I don’t know him at all, and that this man’s presence in my home is as out of place as a piano in a kitchen.
How is it that, taken with me as he is, he’s never upset at knowing so little about me? He obviously feels no need to and seems intent on merely reassuring me first and conquering me later. Because, even if he has learned very quickly how to conceal his lust, how to soften his gaze and voice when addressing me (on Hamond’s advice, I bet!), even if, sly as a fox, he pretends to forget that he desires me, he doesn’t show any urge to discover me, either, to question me, to divine me, and I see him more attentive to the play of light on my hair than to what I’m saying . . .
How strange it is! . . . Here he is sitting next to me, the same sunbeam sliding down his cheek and mine—and if it adds a touch of carmine to that man’s nose, mine must be dyed a bright coral . . . He’s absent, he’s a thousand miles away! Every minute I want to get up and say, “Why are you here? Go away!” But I don’t.