by Colette
He mops his brow and turns toward me in discouragement:
“I don’t know why I’m busting my behind for this numbskull: when I mention Chaliapin to him, he thinks I’m using dirty language! . . . And, then, what are you doing there wool-gathering?”
“Oh, it’s my turn now? Just as I was saying to myself, ‘Brague hasn’t murmured words of love to me for some time!’”
My colleague and instructor looks me up and down with stagy contempt:
“Words of love! I leave that to others; surely you aren’t lacking for them? Out! The session is over. Tomorrow, dress rehearsal with sets and props. Which means that you’ll have a veil for your dance and that this gentleman will be wheeling-in a candle crate to represent the rock he waves around over our heads. I’m sick and tired of seeing you two, one with a hanky the size of my butt, and this guy with the Paris-Journal rolled into a ball instead of his hunk of granite. Here tomorrow at six. Those are orders.”
Just as Brague finishes speaking, a sunbeam gilds the skylight, and I raise my head as if abruptly summoned from up above.
“You hear me, little Miss Renée?”
“Yes . . .”
“Yes? So get going! It’s chowtime. Go look at the sun outside! You’re dreaming about the country, aren’t you?”
“No one can keep a secret from you. See you tomorrow!”
I am dreaming about the country . . . but not the way my infallible partner imagines. And even the cheerful bustle on Place Clichy at midday won’t let me forget a very recent, very keen, annoying memory . . .
Yesterday Hamond and Dufferein-Chautel took me to the Meudon woods, like two art students taking out a little milliner. My admirer was doing the honors of a brand-new car that smelled of morocco leather and turpentine: a magnificent toy for adults.
His dark young face was radiant with the desire to make me a gift of this lovely polished and vibrant machine, which I absolutely didn’t want. But I laughed because, for this outing to Meudon, Hamond and Dufferein-Chautel were both sporting the same deeply creased, broad-brimmed brown hat, and I looked so small between those two tall devils!
Sitting opposite me on one of the jump seats, my admirer tucked in his legs discreetly to avoid contact between our knees. The bright-gray day, very mild and springlike, showed me every detail of his face, swarthier under the bronze-colored felt hat, and the smoky hue of his eyelids, and his tough, abundant lashes forming a double bar. His mouth, half-hidden beneath his reddish-black mustache, intrigued me, as did the imperceptible network of little wrinkles under his eyes, and his eyebrows that are longer than his eye sockets, thick, irregular eyebrows slightly bristling like those on the griffon terriers they use for hunting . . . With a nervous hand I suddenly looked for the mirror in my little bag . . .
“Lost something, Renée?”
But I was already having second thoughts:
“No, nothing, thanks.”
What would be the good, with him right there, of looking at the blemishes of a face more and more unaccustomed to being studied in broad daylight? And what could my mirror have taught me? Wasn’t a careful makeup with brown pencil, bluish kohl, and red lipstick sufficient, yesterday like every day, to draw attention to my eyes and mouth, the three highlights, the three magnets of my face? No pink on my somewhat hollow cheeks, nor under the eyelids which fatigue and frequent blinking have already delicately checkered . . .
The joy of Fossette, who was sitting on my knees and straining toward the door, supplied us with intermittent conversation, as did the sweetness of that still wintry forest, gray twigs against a chinchilla sky . . . But whenever I leaned out to inhale a bit of the slight breeze, laden with the bitter musk of the old rotting leaves, I felt my admirer’s eyes alighting self-confidently all over me . . .
Between Paris and the Meudon woods we hadn’t exchanged a hundred sentences. The countryside doesn’t make me talkative, and my old friend Hamond gets bored the moment he leaves the city limits of Paris. Our taciturnity might discourage anyone except an admirer selfishly rewarded by having me there before his eyes, a prisoner in his car, passive, vaguely pleased by the ride, and smiling with every jolt from the damp, potholed road . . .
Fossette imperiously decided with a curt yelp that we were to halt, and that some urgent business summoned her deep into those bare woods, on that forest road where the puddles from a recent shower were shining like round mirrors. The three of us followed her without protesting, with the long strides of people who frequently walk . . .
“It smells good,” the Big Ninny suddenly said, sniffing the air. “It smells like back home.”
I shook my head:
“No, not like your home, like ours! Hamond, what does it smell of ?”
“Of autumn,” Hamond said in a weary tone.
At that word we halted and said no more; we looked up at a rivulet of sky tightly enclosed by very tall trees, and through the living murmur and whisper that a forest exhales, we listened to the liquid, clear, shivering song of a winter-defying blackbird . . .
A small reddish animal darted out from where we stood, a marten or a weasel, which Fossette claimed to have flushed, and we followed the excited dog, obtuse and swaggering, while she barked, “I see it! I’ve got it!” as she followed an imaginary track . . .
Finally incited myself, I hastened after her down the avenue of trees, given over to the animal pleasure of the chase, my skunk bonnet pulled firmly down to my ears and my legs free as I lifted my skirt with both hands . . .
When I stopped, out of breath, I found Maxime right behind me:
“Oh, you followed me? How is it I didn’t hear you running?”
He was breathing hard, his eyes gleaming under his irregular eyebrows, his hair falling uncombed from his run, very much the charcoal burner in love, and not at all reassuring.
“I followed you . . . I took great care to run at the same pace as you, so you wouldn’t hear my footfalls . . . It’s very easy . . .”
Yes . . . it’s very easy. But you have to think of it first. I would never have thought of it. Vexed, careless, and still intoxicated with a nymph’s brutality, I laughed right in his face, defying him. Tempted, I wanted to rekindle the malicious yellow light at the bottom of those lovely irises flecked with gray and russet . . . A threat showed up in them, but I didn’t give in, stubborn as those insolent children who wait to be slapped, and even ask for it. And my punishment came, in the form of an angry kiss, poorly administered: in short, an unsuccessful kiss that left my mouth hurt and disappointed . . .
I carefully weigh all these instants of the preceding day as I walk down the Boulevard des Batignolles, not in order to relive them with pleasure, nor to find an excuse. There is no excuse, except for the man I provoked. “It’s so unlike me!” I exclaimed to myself yesterday while we were walking back to where Hamond stood, unhappy with each other and mistrustful . . . Oh, how can I be sure? “You’re your own worst enemy! . . .” Deep down in the most criminally impulsive woman, you’d find feigned thoughtlessness and feigned carelessness, and I’m not even the most guilty woman! People ought to be hard on women who shout, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing any more!” They should detect a healthy dose of premeditated craftiness in their apparent confusion . . .
I don’t deny my responsibility, even partial. What will I say to that man tonight if he wants to take me in his arms? That I don’t want, and have never wanted, to tempt him, that it was all a game? That I offer him my companionship for the period of a month and ten days that separates us from my tour? . . . No, I must make a decision! I must make a decision . . .
And I walk and walk, increasing my pace every time the glass of a show window reflects my image, because I find on my face a somewhat too actressy expression of anxious determination, with insufficiently earnest eyes beneath knitted brows . . . I know that face! It assumes a mask of austerity and renunciation the better to await that small miracle, that sign from my master Chance, the glowing words he’ll write on the blac
k wall after I’ve turned off my lamp tonight . . .
How good the air smells around these little carts full of damp violets and white jonquils! An old man with a very mossy beard is selling entire snowdrop plants, with their bulbs still earth-coated and their pendent, bee-shaped flowers. Their scent is like that of orange blossoms, but very faint, almost imperceptible . . .
Come on, come on! I must make a decision! I walk and walk, as if I didn’t know that, despite my spurts of energy, despite my scruples, and despite all this inner penance that I’m trying to inflict on myself—as if I didn’t already now that I won’t make that decision, but the other one! . . .
OH, HOW tired! . . . I’m so tired! . . . I fell asleep after lunch, as sometimes happens on rehearsal days, and I’m so weary when I wake up! I wake up as if returning from the ends of the earth, surprised, sad, my mind scarcely working, my eyes hating my familiar furniture. Really, an awakening like the most horrible ones in the days when I was suffering. But since I’m not suffering—why? . . .
I can’t budge. I look at my hanging hand as if it didn’t belong to me. I don’t recognize the material of my dress . . . Who, while I was sleeping, undid my diadem of hair that had been rolled around my forehead like the braids of a serious young Ceres? . . . I was . . . I was . . . A garden . . . the sky a peach pink at sunset . . . a high-pitched child’s voice replying to the swallows’ calls . . . Yes, and that sound of distant water, now powerful, now lulled: the breathing of the forest . . . I had returned to the beginning of my life. So long a road just to catch up with myself here! I summon the slumber that has fled, the dark curtain that sheltered me and has just been withdrawn from me, leaving me shivering as if naked . . . Sick people who think they’ve recovered are familiar with these relapses, which find them childishly surprised and plaintive: “But I thought it was all over!” It wouldn’t take much to make me groan out loud the way they do . . .
Baleful, too sweet sleep, which in less than an hour erases the memory of myself! From where am I returning, and on what wings, to accept so slowly, like a humiliated exile, the fact of being myself? . . . Renée Néré, dancer and mime . . . Is that the goal prepared for me by my haughty childhood and my introspective, impassioned adolescence, which greeted love so fearlessly?
O Margot, my discouraging friend, why don’t I have the strength to get up and run to you and say to you . . . But it’s only my courage you value, and I wouldn’t dare show you my weakness. I feel as if your manly eyes and the pressure of your little dry hands, chapped by cold water and common soap, are better able to reward me for overcoming myself than to help me in my day-to-day striving.
My imminent departure? My freedom? . . . Bah! Freedom isn’t really dazzling except at the beginning of love, on the occasion of your first love, on the day you can say, as you offer it up to the man you love, “Take it! I wish I had more to give you . . .”
New cities, new regions, quickly glimpsed, hardly touched on, fading away in your memory . . . Are there new regions for a woman who’s turning in circles like a bird tied to a string? Won’t my feeble flight, resumed each morning, end up every night in the fatal “first-class theater” that Salomon and Brague praise so highly?
I’ve already seen so many “first-class houses!” On the audience side: an auditorium blindingly illuminated, where the heavy smoke barely dulls the gilt of the moldings. On the performers’ side: filthy, airless cubicles and an iron staircase leading to abominable latrines . . .
And so, for forty days, I’ll have to put up with that struggle against fatigue, the joking malevolence of the stagehands, the flaming pride of the provincial conductors, the inadequate food in the hotels and stations? I’ll have to find and renew ceaselessly in myself that hoard of energy required by the life of wanderers and recluses? In short, I’ll have to fight (oh, how can I possibly forget it?) against loneliness itself . . . And to get where? Where? Where? . . .
When I was little, they said to me, “Effort is its own reward,” and I actually expected my bursts of effort to be followed by some mysterious, overwhelming reward, a touch of grace to which I’d succumb. I’m still waiting . . .
The muffled ring of my doorbell, followed by my dog’s barking, finally delivers me from this bitter reverie. And here I am on my feet, surprised at having jumped up so nimbly, surprised at how easy it is to come back to life . . .
“Madame,” Blandine says quietly, “may Monsieur Dufferein-Chautel come in?”
“Not yet . . . give me a minute . . .”
To powder my cheeks, put on lipstick, and push back with my comb the curls that are concealing my forehead is a rapid, mechanical task which I can perform even without the aid of a mirror. You do it the way you brush your nails, out of decency rather than out of coquetry.
“Are you there, Dufferein-Chautel? You may come in. Wait, I’ll switch on the light . . .”
I feel no embarrassment on seeing him again. The fact that our two mouths touched yesterday, unproductively, doesn’t bother me at all right now. An unsuccessful kiss is much less serious than a guilty exchange of glances . . . And I’m almost surprised to see him with an unhappy, frustrated expression. I called him Dufferein-Chautel out of habit, as if he had no first name. I always address him as “vous” or “Dufferein-Chautel” . . . Is it for me to put him at his ease? Very well, then.
“So? You here? Are you feeling well?”
“Yes, I am, thanks.”
“You don’t look it.”
“It’s because I’m unhappy!” he doesn’t fail to reply.
You big ninny! . . . I smile at his unhappiness, that mild unhappiness of a man who has given a clumsy kiss to the woman he loves . . . I smile at him from a considerable distance, across the chaste black river in which I was bathing a few minutes ago . . . I hold out a bowl filled with his favorite cigarettes, made with a sweet yellow tobacco smelling like gingerbread . . .
“Not smoking today?”
“I will. But I’m unhappy all the same.”
Sitting on the couch, his back against the low cushions, he mechanically emits long wisps of smoke from his nostrils—I almost said, from his muzzle. I smoke, too, to put up a good show by behaving like him. He looks better without a hat. A top hat makes him look ugly, whereas a soft fedora makes him look so pretty he almost resembles a “Latin lover” . . . He looks at the ceiling as he smokes, as if the gravity of what he’s preparing to say kept him from being concerned with me. His long, shiny lashes—the only feminine and sensual adornment of an excessively virile face—beat frequently, revealing agitation and hesitation. I can hear his breathing. I also hear the ticking of my little traveling clock, and the hood of my fireplace as it is suddenly shaken by the wind . . .
“Is it raining outside?”
“No,” he says, with a start. “Why do you ask me that?”
“Just to know, I haven’t been out since lunchtime, and I have no idea what the weather is like.”
“It’s ordinary weather . . . Renée! . . .”
Suddenly he has sat up, tossing aside his cigarette. He takes me by the hands and looks at me close up, so close up that his face seems almost too large to me, its features too pronounced, the grain of his skin too clear, like the moist, palpitating corners of his wide eyes . . . How much love—yes, love—there is in those eyes! How expressive, and soft, and entirely enamored they are! And those big hands squeezing mine with a steady, communicative strength, how earnest they feel to me! . . .
It’s the first time I’ve let my hands linger in his. At first, I think I’m subduing my repugnance, then their warmth undeceives me and persuades me, and I’m about to yield to the fraternal and surprising pleasure, unfamiliar for so long, of entrusting myself wordlessly to a friend, of leaning on him for a moment, of comforting myself with the support of a reliable, warm, affectionate, silent being . . . Oh, to be able to throw my arm around the neck of some being, dog or man, some being who loves me! . . .
“Renée! What, Renée, you’re crying?”
“Am I crying?”
But he’s right! The light is dancing, in a thousand broken, crisscross rays, in my hanging tears. With the corner of my handkerchief I deftly wipe them away, but I don’t think of denying them. And I smile at the thought that I was on the verge of tears . . . How long has it been since I’ve wept? It’s been . . . years and years! . . .
My friend is upset, and draws me near him, compelling me (and I don’t put up much of a fight!) to sit next to him on the couch. His eyes are moist, as well, because he’s only a man, no doubt capable of feigning an emotion but not of concealing one . . .
“My dear child, what’s wrong with you?”
Will he ever forget the muffled cry and the shudder that reply to him? I hope so . . . “My dear child . . .” His first tender words are “My dear child!” The same words, in nearly the same tones, as that other man . . .
A childish fear tears me from his arms, as if the other man had just appeared in the doorway, with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, his filmy, lying eyes, his huge shoulders, and his short thighs, like a peasant’s . . .
“Renée! Darling! Won’t you say even a word to me? . . .”
My friend is quite pale, and he doesn’t try to embrace me again . . . At least let him remain ignorant of the pain he has just innocently caused me! I no longer feel like crying. My cowardly, delectable tears slowly return to their source, leaving a burning sensation in my throat and eyes . . . With a gesture I reassure my friend, as I wait for my voice to regain its steadiness . . .
“Have I made you angry, Renée?”
“No, my friend.”
Of my own accord I sit down beside him again, but timidly, fearing lest my gestures or words elicit another loving exclamation, familiar and detested.
His instinct warns him not to take advantage of such prompt docility. The arm that supports me doesn’t try to embrace me, and I no longer feel that contagious, dangerous, comforting warmth . . . No doubt he loves me enough to guess that, even if I lay my obedient head on his strong shoulder, it’s not as a gift, but as an experiment . . .