The Vagabond

by Colette

  How many times have I run away from this ground-floor apartment, running away from myself? Leaving today, loved and in love, I wish I were even more loved, even more loving, and changed, and unrecognizable even to myself. No doubt, it’s too soon, and the right time hasn’t come yet . . . But at least I’m leaving with emotion, overflowing with regrets and hopes, in a hurry to return, reaching out for my new destiny with the shining energy of a snake ridding itself of its dead skin . . .

  Part Three

  “GOODBYE, MY beloved friend. The trunk is locked. My pretty pigskin bag, my traveling suit, and the long veil that will drape my hat are waiting for me to wake up tomorrow; they’re lined up, sad and obedient, on our big couch. Already gone, sheltered from you and from my own weakness, I give myself the pleasure of writing you my first love letter . . .

  “You’ll receive this express letter tomorrow morning, at the very time I leave Paris. It’s nothing but a ‘see you soon,’ written before going to bed, to let you know that I love you so much and care for you so much! I’m heartbroken at leaving you . . .

  “Don’t forget you promised to write me ‘all the time’ and to console Fossette. In turn I promise to bring back to you a Renée who’s tired of touring, thin with loneliness, and free of everything, except you.

  Your

  “RENÉE.”

  The shadow of a bridge passes rapidly across my eyelids, which had been closed and which I reopen to see racing by, to the left of the train, that little potato plot I know so well, huddled against the high wall of the old fortifications at the city limits . . .

  I’m alone in the car. Brague, extremely thrifty, is traveling second class with the Old Caveman. Rainy daylight, weak as a gray dawn, hangs low over the countryside, in which the smoke from factory chimneys trails through the sky. It’s eight, and the first morning of my journey. After a brief spell of dejection that followed the bustle of setting out, I had lapsed into a sullen immobility that made me hope for sleep.

  I sit up straight in order to proceed mechanically with an old campaigner’s preparation: I unfold my camel’s hair rug, I inflate the two silk-covered rubber cushions—one for my lower back, one for the nape of my neck—and I conceal my bare head beneath a veil as bronze as my hair . . . I do this methodically, carefully, while a sudden indescribable anger makes my hands tremble . . . Yes, a real rage, and directed at myself! I’m leaving, every revolution of the wheels is taking me farther away from Paris; I’m leaving, a chilly springtime is forming frozen drops at the trips of the oak twigs, everything is cold and damp in a fog that still smells of winter; I’m leaving, when I could now be beaming pleasurably at the warm side of a lover! I feel as if my anger is arousing in me a devouring appetite for all that’s good, luxurious, easy, selfish, a need to let myself roll down the easiest slope, to embrace with arms and lips a belated, tangible, ordinary, and delicious happiness . . .

  Everything about this familiar suburb bores me, with its pale villas in which the housewives, in their camisoles, are yawning after getting up late to shorten their empty days . . . I shouldn’t have separated from Brague, I should have stayed with him on the dirty-blue upholstery of the second-class compartment, amid the cordial conversation, the human smell of the packed car, and the smoke of cheap cigarettes . . .

  The rat-tat-tat of the train, which I hear unwillingly, acts as an accompaniment to the dance theme from The Dryad, which I hum with obsessive persistence . . . How long will this feeling of inferiority last? Because I do feel myself diminished and enfeebled, as if I had been bled. And yet, even on my saddest days, the sight of a run-of-the-mill landscape—just so long as it sped by rapidly to the right and left of me, just so long as it was veiled at moments by a curl of smoke that became shredded on the hawthorn hedges—used to work on me like a healing tonic. I’m cold. An unpleasant morning slumber is numbing me, and I feel as if I were fainting, not falling asleep, troubled by childish arithmetical dreams, in which this tiresome question recurs: “If you’ve left half of yourself back there, have you lost fifty percent of your original value?”

  ***

  “Dijon, April 3

  “Yes, yes, my health is good. Yes, I found your letter; yes, I’m having success . . . Oh, darling, here’s the whole truth! When I left you, I sank into the most absurd, the most impatient despair. Why did I leave? Why did I abandon you? Forty days! I’ll never be able to stand it now! And I’m only at the third city!

  At the third city,

  In gold, in silver . . .

  Her lover dresses her.

  “Ah, my lover, I have no need of silver or gold, but only you. It rained in the first two towns I played, so that I could more fully savor my abominable solitude, in hotel rooms with chocolate-and-beige wallpaper, in those imitation-oak dining rooms which the gaslight only makes darker!

  “You don’t know what discomfort is, you spoiled son of Madame Keep-Chopping! When we’re back together, to make you angry and to make myself be loved more dearly, I’ll tell you about my midnight walks back to the hotel with my makeup case weighing down my weary arms, my waiting by the door in the thin mist while the night clerk slowly wakes up, the horrible room with sheets not completely dry and a tiny pot of hot water which has had time to get cold again . . . And you want me to share these daily joys with you? No, darling, let me wear out all of my resistance before I cry out to you: ‘Come, I can’t take any more!’

  “Anyway, the weather here in Dijon is good, and I’m timidly greeting this sunshine like a gift that will soon be taken back from me.

  “You promised me you’d console Fossette. She’s yours as much as mine. Please keep in mind that, during my absence, she’d never forgive you if you showed her too much attention. Her bulldog tact extends to the most delicate emotional austerity and, when I leave her behind, she gets offended if an affectionate third party takes notice of her chagrin, even in an attempt to divert her.

  “Goodbye, goodbye! I kiss you and love you. What a cold twilight, if you only knew! . . . The sky is as green and clear as in January, when there’s a heavy frost. Write to me, love me, warm up your

  “RENÉE.”

  “April 10

  “My last letter must have made you unhappy. I’m discontented with myself and with you. Your beautiful handwriting is thick and round, and yet slender, elegant, and curly, like that plant which people out our way call the “flowering osier”; it fills up four pages, eight pages, with just a few repetitions of ‘I adore you,’ with loving curses, with very hot statements about how you miss me. I can read it in twenty seconds! And I’m sure you honestly think you’ve written me a long letter! And besides, you only talk about me! . . .

  “Darling, without stopping in it, I’ve just ridden through a district which is mine, that of my childhood. I felt as if a long caress were warming my heart . . . Promise me that some day we’ll go there together! No, no! what am I saying? We won’t go there! The memory of your forests in the Ardennes would put to shame my copses of oaks, brambles, and service trees, and you wouldn’t see (as I do) trembling above them, and on the shadowy waters of the springs, and on the blue hills adorned by the tall thistle flowers, that narrow rainbow which forms the magical setting for all these jewels of my native land! . . .

  “Nothing has changed there. A few new roofs, with their fresh red, that’s all. Nothing has changed in my homeland—except me. Oh, my darling, how old I am! Can you really love such an old young woman? Here I blush at myself. Why did you never meet the tall girl who wandered through these places with her regal braids and her taciturn moods, like those of a wood nymph? All that I once was I gave to another man, a man who wasn’t you! Forgive me for this outburst, Max, it’s the cry of the torment I’ve been repressing ever since I’ve loved you! And what do you love in me, now that it’s too late, except the things that alter me, the things that tell you lies, my curls as abundant as foliage, my eyes that are lengthened and drowned by blue kohl, the false smoothness of a powdered complexion? What would you say i
f I came back and appeared before you with my heavy lank hair, my blonde lashes cleansed of their mascara, and with the eyes I was born with, topped off by short eyebrows always ready to frown—gray, narrow, horizontal eyes in whose depths there gleams a hard, rapid glance that reminds me of my father’s?

  “Don’t be afraid, darling! I’ll return to you more or less the way I left, a little wearier, a little more loving . . . My homeland charms me with a sad but fleeting intoxication every time I brush up against it, but I’d never dare make a long stop there. Maybe it’s only beautiful because I’ve lost it . . .

  “Goodbye, dear, dear Max. We have to leave for Lyons early tomorrow. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have our orchestra rehearsal, which I supervise while Brague, who’s tireless, sees after the programs, the framing of our posters, and the sale of our postcards . . .

  “Oh, how cold I was again last night in that light Dominance costume! The cold is my enemy: it suspends my life and my thinking—as you well know, since it’s in your hands that mine take refuge when they’re shriveled up like two leaves in the frost! I miss you, my dear warmth, as much as I miss the sunshine. Your

  “RENÉE.”

  ***

  We tour. I eat. I sleep, I walk, I mime, and I dance. Without verve, but also without effort. There’s just one feverish moment in the whole day: the one when I ask the vaudeville-house stage-door keeper whether there’s any mail for me. I read my letters like a starving woman, leaning against the greasy jamb of the stagedoor in the stinking draft that smells of cellars and ammonia . . . The hour that follows is made more oppressive: there’s nothing more to read, I’ve deciphered the date on the postmark, and I’ve turned the envelope inside out, as if I hoped to see a flower or a picture fall out . . .

  I’m paying no attention to the cities we’re playing. I know them and I have no urge to renew the acquaintance. I cling to Brague, who takes renewed possession of these familiar “burgs”—Rheims, Nancy, Belfort, Besançon—like a good-natured conquerer . . .

  “Did you see? That little eatery is still there at the corner of the river embankment: I bet they recognize me when we go there tonight to dig into their sausage in white wine!”

  He breathes deeply, flings himself into the streets with the joy of a vagabond, window-shops, and climbs the cathedral towers. I escort him—I who used to precede him last year. He drags me along in his shadow, and sometimes we also take in tow the Old Caveman, who usually goes off on his own, skinny and shabby in his jacket and too-short trousers . . . Where does he sleep? Where does he eat? I don’t know. When I asked Brague, he gave me a succinct reply:

  “Wherever he wants. I’m not his nursemaid!”

  The other night, in Nancy, I caught sight of the Caveman in his dressing room. On his feet, he was chomping a loaf of bread that weighed a pound, while delicately holding in two fingers a slice of headcheese. That pauper’s meal, and the voracious motion of his jaws . . . It broke my heart, and I went to see Brague:

  “Brague, does the Caveman have anything to live on during the tour? Doesn’t he make fifteen francs a day? Why doesn’t he eat better?”

  “He’s saving money,” Brague replied. “Everyone saves money while on tour! We’re not all Vanderbilt or Renée Néré, able to splurge on five-franc hotel rooms and room-service café au lait! The Caveman owes me for his stage costume; I lent him the dough for it. He’s paying it off, five francs a day. In three weeks he’ll be able to gorge himself on oysters and wash his feet in cocktails, if he wants. That’s his business.”

  After that scolding I kept quiet . . . And I’m being thrifty, too—first of all, out of habit, and then to imitate my colleagues and not arouse their envy or their contempt. Is this Max’s sweetheart, this diner-out reflected in the clouded mirror of a “Lorraine-style beer hall,” this traveler with a ring around her eyes, a big veil tied under her chin, and, from hat to boots, the color of the road, with an indifferent, calm, and unsociable air, like that of people who aren’t from any given place? Is this Max’s darling, the bright darling he used to embrace while she was half-naked in a pink kimono—this weary actress who comes, in a corset and a petticoat, to look for her next day’s slip and underwear in Brague’s trunk, and to put away her spangled togs? . . .

  Every day I wait for my friend’s letter. Every day it both consoles me and disappoints me. He writes in a simple style, but obviously without ease. His beautiful flowery writing slows the impetus of his hand. And, besides, his affectionateness embarrasses him, and he complains of his sadness naively: “After telling you a hundred times that I love you, and that I’m awfully cross with you for leaving me behind, what more can I tell you? My darling wife, my little bluestocking of a wife, you’re going to laugh at me, but I don’t care . . . My brother is leaving for the Ardennes, and I’m going along: write to me at Mother’s place, the Salles-Neuves. I’m going there to ask for some money, money for us, for our home, my little beloved!”

  That’s how he relates his doings to me, without commentaries, without frills. He makes me a part of his life, and he calls me his wife . . . As he suspects, his warm solicitude reaches me in a chilly manner on these sheets of paper, translated into a very well-balanced handwriting: at such a distance, what help are words to us? We’d need . . . I don’t know . . . we’d need some vivid drawing, with burning colors . . .

  ***

  “April 11

  “That takes the cake! Now you’re letting Blandine tell your fortune with a deck of cards! Darling, you’re a lost man! That woman has the habit of predicting the most picturesque catastrophes the minute I leave the house. If I go on tour, she dreams about cats and snakes, muddy water, and folded underwear, and reads in the cards the tragic adventures of Renée Néré (the queen of clubs) with the False Young Man, the Soldier, and the Rustic! Don’t listen to her, Max: count the days as I am doing, and smile—oh, that smile which imperceptibly wrinkles your nose!—at the thought that the first week is almost over . . .

  “In a month and four days, that’s my prediction, I will ‘go a journey’ to rejoin the Sincere Man, and ‘much joy you will have of it,’ and the False Young Man will be ‘vexed’ at it, as will the mysterious ‘Dissolute Woman’—that is, the queen of diamonds.

  “Here we are in Lyons for five days. A rest, you say? Yes, if you mean that, for four mornings in a row, I’ll be able to wake up with a start at daybreak with the wild fear that I’ll miss my train, and then fall back in bed in an unpleasant sloth that won’t let me sleep, while I listen to the very gradual awakening around me of the chambermaids, the room bells, and the cars in the street! Darling, it’s much worse than daily departures at dawn! I feel as if, isolated in my bed, I were present at a renewal of activity from which I was excluded, as if the Earth were starting to turn again without me . . . Besides, it’s also when alone in bed that I miss you most, with no defense against my memories, laid low by boredom and powerlessness . . .

  “My dear enemy, we could have spent these five days here together . . . Don’t think this is a challenge: I don’t want you to come! . . . Say, I’m not going to die of it, no way! You always seem to think that I’ve already died because you’re not here! My handsome peasant, I’m only asleep because of it, only hibernating . . .

  “It’s not raining, it’s mild, muggy, and gray—quite good weather for Lyons. It’s a little stupid, sending you a weather report in each of my letters; but if you knew how dependent our destiny and mood are on the aspect of the sky when we’re on tour! ‘Wet weather, dry pocket,’ Brague says.

  “For four years now, I’ve spent seven or eight weeks in Lyons, dear. And my first visit was to the deer in the Parc Saint-Jean, to see the little tawny fawns with their ignorant, loving eyes. They’re so numerous and so much alike that I can’t single out one of them: they follow me along the iron fence with a trot that makes pockmarks on the soil, and they beg for black bread with a distinct, obstinate, timid bleat. The fragrance of the lawns and of the stirred-up earth is so strong in this park at the
end of the day, in the motionless air, that it alone would be enough to send me back to you if I attempted to escape . . .

  “Goodbye, darling. In Lyons I’ve rediscovered wanderers of my sort, whom I had run across here and elsewhere. It won’t mean very much to you if I specify that one of them is called Cavaillon, a comic singer, and the other is Amalia Barally, who plays the role of dignified older ladies! And yet, Barally is almost a friend, because two years ago we performed together all over France in a three-act play. She used to be beautiful; a brunette with a Roman nose, she’s an old hand and knows the hotels of the whole world by name. She has sung operetta in Saigon, acted in Cairo, and enchanted the nights of some khedive or other . . .

  “Besides her cheerfulness, which is resistant to poverty, I enjoy her protective nature, her skill in looking after people, and the delicate motherliness of her gestures—the prerogatives of women who have sincerely and passionately loved other women: it leaves them with an indefinable attraction, which you men never perceive . . .

  “Goodness, what a long letter! I could spend all my time writing to you; I think it costs me less effort than speaking to you. Hug me! It’s almost night, it’s that bad time. Hug me very tight, very tight! Your

  “RENÉE.”

  “April 15

  “Darling, how nice you are! What a fine idea! Thanks, thanks with all my heart for that washed-out snapshot, yellow with hyposulfite: both of you look charming in it, my dears. Now I no longer want to scold you for having taken Fossette along to Salles-Neuves without my permission. She looks so contented in your arms! She has put on her face for being photographed: a mug like that of a burly wrestler, holder of the gold belt.