by Colette
As if gripped by the same desire, Brague suddenly says to me:
“You know, I got a note from Salomon the booking agent . . . The tour I mentioned to you is shaping up. He’s finding us a day here, two days there, a week in Marseilles, one in Bordeaux . . . Can you still go?”
“Me? Right away! Why not?”
He shoots me a keen sidelong glance.
“I don’t know . . . No special reason . . . Sometimes . . . I know what life is like . . .”
Now I’ve understood! My partner remembers Dufferein-Chautel and thinks that . . . My burst of laughter, instead of undeceiving him, confuses him more, but tonight I feel like such a tease, so cheerful and unburdened, practically en route already . . . Oh yes, to be on the go, to leave again, to forget who I am and the name of the city that sheltered me yesterday, to think as little as possible, to reflect and retain nothing but the beautiful landscape turning and changing alongside the train, the murky pond in which the blue sky is mirrored in green, the openwork spire of a bell tower encircled by swallows . . .
One day, I recall . . . when leaving Rennes on a May morning . . . The train was going very slowly down a track under repair between hawthorn copses, pink apple trees with blue shadows, and young willows with jade leaves . . . Standing at the edge of the woods, a young girl was watching us go by, a twelve-year-old girl with a striking resemblance to me. Serious, her brows knitted, with round, tanned cheeks—such as I had—her hair slightly bleached by the sun, she was holding a leafy shoot in her sunburned, scratched hands—such as I had. And that unsociable air, those ageless, almost sexless eyes which seemed to take everything seriously—like mine, really like mine! . . . Yes, standing at the edge of the thicket, my savage childhood was watching me go by, dazzled by the rising sun . . .
“Whenever you want, you know!”
My partner’s curt call awakens me in front of the Emp’-Clich’, which is lit up by purple lights, the glare of which, Brague says, hurt “the back of his eyes,” and we reach the basement where the familiar odor of plaster, ammonia, ointment, and rice powder hits me with a disgust that’s almost pleasurable . . . We have come to see our pals in the revue, not the revue itself!
I find that my old dressing room is now occupied by Bouty, and Brague’s is filled with the dazzling presence of Jadin, who is playing three parts in the Emp’-Clich’ Revue.
“Make it snappy,” she yells to us. “You’re just in time for my song in ‘Paris at Night.’”
Too bad! They’ve dressed Jadin as a streetwalker! . . . A black skirt, a black bodice with a deep V-neck, wide-mesh stockings, a red ribbon around her neck, and on her head the traditional helmet-like wig, with a blood-red camellia stuck in it! Truly, there’s nothing left of the contagious plebeian charm of this little girl with the crooked shoulder . . .
I should have expected it: swiftly and surely they’re turning my sulky, youthful apache into a vaudeville-show hooker! Amid the “Things okay? Anything new? Getting along?” I watch Jadin pacing through her dressing room, chagrined to see that she has acquired the same hooker’s walk that’s universally used—belly pulled in and bosom thrust out—that, when she speaks, she “places” her voice, and that ever since we arrived she hasn’t once said “Shit!”
Bouty, who’s going to dance the indispensable “wild waltz” with her, is silently radiant beneath his silk peaked cap. He all but says “What do you think?,” showing us the little creature with a proprietary gesture . . . Has he finally “made” his colleague? At least, as I guess, he’s busy making Jadin commonplace, and now the two of them are talking about doing a “sensational act,” very well remunerated, at the Crystal Palace in London! . . .
How quickly everything changes! . . . Women, especially . . . In a few months, this one will lose almost all of her pungency, her natural, unintentional pathos. Will an underhanded throwback to the concierges and greedy petty shopkeepers in her ancestry overtake this madcap eighteen-year-old Jadin, who gives so much of herself and her wretched money? Why, when seeing her, do I think about the Bells, those German acrobats with an English name whom Brague and I met in Brussels? Matchless in strength and grace in their cherry-red tights that made their light skin even paler, the five of them lived in two rooms without furniture, where they did their own cooking on a little cast-iron stove. And all day long, the agent told us, they held secret palavers, meditating over the stock-market reports, arguing fiercely over goldmines, coalmines in Silesia, and the Egyptian land bank! Money, money, money . . .
With her empty chatter Jadin perks up our visit, which can use it. After Bouty, who’s a little less thin, has given us news about his health and has announced that “things are shaping up” for next winter, there we are, silent and embarrassed, friends whom chance has thrown together and is now separating . . . I fiddle around with the greasepaints and pencils on the shelf with that greedy nervousness and that itch to make up well known to all who have gone on the stage . . . Fortunately the bell rings and Jadin says with a start:
“Out! Up the stairs! The theater fireman will give you his stage box, and you’ll see how I hit it off with my song in ‘Paris at Night’!”
The sleepy fireman does indeed lend me his straw stool and his tiny box. Seated with my nose to the grating that frames a square of warm, reddish light, I, invisible myself, can enjoy the sight of two half-rows in the orchestra, three open ground-floor boxes, and one stage box . . . a stage box in which I can make out a lady in a gigantic hat wearing pearls, rings, and sequins, and two men: Dufferein-Chautel the elder and Dufferein-Chautel the younger, both in black and white, well waxed and polished. They’re under a glaring light, and from the grating through which I single them out they assume an unusual importance.
The woman isn’t a woman, she’s a lady: no doubt Madame Dufferein-Chautel the elder. My admirer seems to be enjoying himself no end with the parade of female ragpickers and the female roving cabbies who follow them on and exit after a song and a brief, careless dance.
Finally, here is Jadin, announcing herself:
“And I, I’m the queen of Paris at night: I’m the streetwalker!”
I see my admirer lean forward quite briskly over his program, then lift his nose and survey my little colleague from her hair, piled up like a helmet, to her wide-mesh stockings . . .
By an odd transposition, he has become the show for me, since all I can see of little Jadin is her profile—which the blinding footlights flatten out, as if the light were nibbling at it—her black nostrils, and her foreshortened upper lip above a row of gleaming teeth . . .
With her neck stretched out like a gargoyle, tied around with a red rag, this young child suddenly resembles some lecherous phantom painted by Rops.
When, her song over, she returns to take two bows, heels together, fingers on lips, my admirer applauds her with his big brown hands, so loudly that, before exiting, she blows him a little private kiss, jutting out her chin . . .
“Hey, are you sleeping? This is the second time I’m telling you that you can’t stay here: they’re putting up the Heliopolis set!”
“Yes, yes . . . I’m coming . . .”
It really feels to me as if I were falling asleep; or else, I’m emerging from one of those moments when a person is free of thought, just before the arousal of a painful idea: the prelude to a small moral slippage . . .
“MAKE UP your mind one way or the other, come on! Is it all right with you or not?”
Both of them, Brague and Salomon, are hustling me about with their voice and their eyes. The agent laughs to instill confidence in me, Brague grumbles. A heavy hand, Salomon’s, is placed on my shoulder:
“I think it’s a really great contract!”
I hold this typewritten contract and reread it for the tenth time, in fear of discovering in its fifteen short lines some hidden trap, some shady clause . . . Most of all, I reread it to gain time. Then I look at the window, its starched net curtains, and, beyond them, the sad, clean courtyard . . .
&nb
sp; I look as if I’m reflecting, but I’m not. Hesitating isn’t reflecting . . . Absentmindedly, I take the inventory of this English-style desk I’ve already seen so often, with its numerous pictures of foreign stars: ladies in half-length with plunging necklines and elaborate coiffures, wearing a Viennese smile; men in evening dress, so you can’t guess whether they’re singers or acrobats, mimes or equestrians . . .
A forty-day tour at a hundred fifty francs a day comes out to . . . six thousand francs. A profitable deal. But . . .
“But,” I finally say to Salomon, “I can’t see myself making you fatter by six hundred francs! After all, ten percent is highway robbery!”
I’ve recovered my power of speech and the way to use it, together with the fitting vocabulary. Salomon turns the color of his hair, brick red; even his unfathomable eyes blush, but from his big friendly mouth there tumbles a flood of almost romantic supplications:
“Darling! Sweetheart! Don’t start saying foolish things! . . . For a month, a month I’ve been working on your itinerary! Ask Brague! For a month I’ve been knocking myself out finding you first-class theaters, really top-class! . . . I’ve arranged posters as if for . . . for . . . Madame Otero! . . . And this is how you thank me? Don’t you have a heart? Ten percent? You ought to give me twelve, you hear?”
“I hear you. But I don’t want to make you fatter by six hundred francs. You’re not worth it.”
Salomon’s little red eyes get even smaller. His heavy hand on my shoulder is patting me, with the urge to crush me:
“Oh, you’re nasty! Look at her, Brague! A kid who I got her first booking!”
“A damn grown-up kid, my good man, and one who needs to refresh her wardrobe! My costume for Dominance has had it, you know. For a decent costume, six hundred francs, plus footwear, plus a dancing veil, not to mention accessories! You’re not going to pay me for them separately, are you, old scoundrel?”
“Look at her, Brague!” Salomon repeats . . . “I’m ashamed for her sake, in front of you! What will you think of her?”
“I think,” Brague says calmly, “that she’d do well to accept the tour, but not to give you six hundred francs.”
“Fine. Give me back the paperwork.”
The big hand releases me. Frowning and pale, Salomon returns to his English-style desk without so much as glancing at us.
“Salomon, you know, no hanky-panky between us! I’m as malicious as can be when I put my mind to it, and I don’t give a damn about missing out on a good deal if I’m annoyed!”
“Madame,” Salomon replies in a dignified but frigid tone, “you’ve spoken to me as to a man beneath contempt, and I’m sore about it!”
“Damn fool!” Brague interjects, without raising his voice. “Are you going to stop sounding off? Six hundred francs’ commission from her, four hundred forty from me . . . do you take us for German acrobats? Give me the papers: we’re not signing today. I request twenty-four hours to consult my family.”
“Then the hell with it!” Salomon blurts out with an impetuous stammer. “All those managers run very stylish houses, they’re people who don’t like dawdling, people . . . ”
“With their behinds in a pan of frying fat, I know!” my partner interrupts. “Well, tell them I’ll stop by again tomorrow . . . Coming, Renée? . . . Salomon, for us two it’s seven and a half percent. And I consider that noble and generous.”
Salomon wipes his dry eyes and his damp forehead:
“Yes, yes, a pretty couple of pigs you two are!”
“Salomon, no one can say there’s anything pretty about you . . . ”
“Let him go, Renée, the man is a honey! He’ll do whatever we want. To begin with, he loves you. Right, Salomon?”
But Salomon is sulking. He turns his back on us like a huge child, and says in a whiny voice:
“No. Leave. I don’t want to see you again. I’m deeply hurt. Ever since I’ve been making bookings, this is the very first time I’ve been so humiliated! Go, go! I need to be alone. I don’t want to see you again.”
“Okay. Till tomorrow!”
“No, no! The three of us are washed up!”
“At five?”
Seated at his desk, Salomon raises his teary pink face in our direction:
“At five? That does it! On top of everything else, I’m supposed to miss my meeting at the Alhambra for your sake? Not before six, get it?”
Defenseless now, I shake his pudgy hand, and we leave.
The crowd on the street making any conversation impossible, we keep silent. I’m apprehensive of the relative solitude of the Boulevard Malesherbes, where Brague will begin to argue and win me over. I’m already won over and determined to set out . . . Hamond won’t like it. Margot will say, “You’re perfectly right, my girl,” but won’t mean a word of it, though she’ll give me excellent advice and three or four bottles of “special remedies” for headaches, constipation, and fever.
And when it comes to Dufferein-Chautel, what will he say? It amuses me to think of the look on his face. He’ll console himself with Jadin, that’s all . . . To set out . . . How soon now?
“The date, Brague? Just imagine, I paid no attention to it!”
Shrugging his shoulders, Brague comes to my side amid the troop of pedestrians waiting submissively for the traffic cop’s white baton to halt the line of cars and open a path for us from the sidewalk of the Boulevard Haussmann to the traffic island in the Place Saint-Augustin.
“If it were left up to you to clinch our contracts, my poor friend! Madame yaps, Madame gets on her high horse, Madame wants this, doesn’t want that, and then, at the end of it: ‘Gosh, I didn’t pay attention to the date!’ ”
Deferentially, I allow him to savor his superiority. One of Brague’s keenest pleasures is to treat me like a beginner, like a blundering pupil . . . Under the policeman’s protection, we run all the way to the Boulevard Malesherbes . . .
“From April fifth to May fifteenth,” Brague finishes. “Do you have any objections? There’s nothing keeping you here?”
“Nothing . . .”
We walk up the boulevard, somewhat stifled by the lukewarm vapor rising from the wet paving stones. A brief shower, practically a storm, has made the thaw set in; the blackish sidewalk reflects the lights, lengthening them and making them iridescent. The far end of the street is lost in an indistinct haze, reddened by the remaining twilight . . . Involuntarily, I turn around and look all about me, seeking . . . what? Nothing. No, nothing is keeping me here or anywhere else. No beloved face will arise out of the fog, the way a bright flower emerges from dark waters, and beg me tenderly: “Don’t go!”
So I’ll be leaving again. April fifth is far off—today is February fifteenth—but it’s as if I were already gone. Brague can murmur in my inattentive ear names of cities, hotels, numbers and more numbers . . .
“Are you at least listening?”
“Yes.”
“So you won’t be working at all between today and April fifth?”
“Not that I know of !”
“You wouldn’t consider doing some short piece, any little bit of nonsense in high-society style, that would keep you busy until then?”
“Not at all.”
“If you like, I could try to find you some little job by the week.”
I thank my partner as I leave him, touched at his wish to avoid unemployment for me, that idleness which discourages, diminishes, and unsettles performers who are out of work . . .
Three heads are raised when I enter my study: those of Hamond, Fossette, and Dufferein-Chautel. Huddling together under the pink lampshade around a little table, they’re playing écarté while waiting for me. Fossette knows how to play cards in bulldog fashion; sitting on a chair, she follows the men’s hands back and forth, ready to catch on the fly a card they tip too far.
Hamond exclaims, “At last!” Fossette says, “Woof!” Dufferein-Chautel says nothing, but he almost barked, too . . .
The cheerful reception and the tempere
d light brighten my heart as I emerge from the smelly fog, and I exclaim in a gush of affectionate happiness:
“Hello! I’m going on tour, you know!”
“On tour? How come? When?”
Without dwelling on the element of curtness and inquisition that my admirer’s tone reveals in spite of himself, I roll up my gloves and remove my hat.
“I’ll tell you everything at dinner. Both of you must stay: it’s practically a farewell dinner, already! . . . Be calm, continue your little game. I’ll send Blandine out for some cutlets and I’ll put on a robe: I’m so tired!”
When I get back, lost in the folds of a pink flannel kimono, I find that both of them, Hamond and Dufferein-Chautel, are wearing that excessively nonchalant look of people who have hatched some scheme . . . what does it matter? Tonight my admirer is reaping the benefit of an optimism that embraces all of nature: in order to drink to the tour, I invite him to offer us the nearby grocer’s Saint-Marceaux, and he dashes off hatless, returning with two bottles under his arms . . .
Restless and a little tipsy, I give my admirer a long, defenseless look he has never seen on my face. I laugh out loud with a laugh he’s never heard from me, I throw my wide kimono sleeve back on my shoulder, revealing an arm that’s “the color of banana pulp,” as he puts it . . . I feel obliging, kindly; for two cents I’d hold out my cheek to him: what does it matter? I’m leaving! I won’t see that fellow again! Forty days? No doubt we’ll all be dead before they’re over!
Poor admirer, how mean I’ve been to him, after all! . . . I find him affable, clean, well groomed, prepossessing, like a man I’ll never see again! Because when I get back, I’ll have forgotten him, and he’ll have forgotten me, too . . . for little Jadin, or for some other woman . . . Probably little Jadin.
“What do you say? That little Jadin!”
I’ve blurted out that exclamation aloud, finding it immensely funny.
My admirer, who’s having trouble laughing tonight, looks at me, knitting up his charcoal burner’s eyebrows: