by Colette
AVERY distant church bell rings half-past the hour. The Calais train, which is to take me back to Paris, won’t stop here for another fifty minutes . . .
I’m going home alone, at night, without letting anybody know. Brague and the Old Caveman, whom I treated to drinks, are now asleep somewhere in Boulogne-sur-Mer. We killed three quarters of an hour in doing accounts and chatting, in planning a South American tour, then I beached up on this Tintelleries station, so deserted at this hour that it seems to be out of service . . . The electric globes on the embankment haven’t been turned on merely for my benefit . . . A little cracked bell is shivering timidly in the darkness, as if hanging from the neck of a freezing day.
The night is cold and moonless. Near me, in some invisible garden, there are fragrant lilacs crumpled by the wind. Far away I heard the sound of foghorns at sea . . .
Who could guess that I’m here, at the very end of the embankment, huddled in my cloak? How well concealed I am! Neither darker nor lighter than the blackness of the night . . .
At daybreak I’ll be entering my apartment, noiselessly, like a burglar, because I’m not expected this soon. I’ll wake up Fossette and Blandine, and then the hardest moment will come . . .
I purposely imagine the details of my arrival; with necessary cruelty I conjure up the memory of the twofold smell that clings to the wallpaper: English tobacco and somewhat oversweet jasmine; I mentally squeeze the satin cushion that bears, in the form of two pale stains, the trace of two tears that fell from my eyes in a moment of very great happiness . . . On the tip of my tongue I have that little muffled “Oh!” of an injured woman who bumps her wound against something. I do this on purpose. It will hurt less a little while from now.
From a distance I say goodbye to everything that might detain me back there, and to the man who will have nothing more from me than a letter. A cowardly but rational prudence makes me avoid seeing him again: no “honest explanations” for us! A heroine like me, who’s only flesh and blood, isn’t strong enough to vanquish every demon . . . Let him scorn me, let him curse me a little, it will only be better for him: poor darling, he’ll get over me more quickly! No, no, not too much honesty! And not too much phrasemaking, because it’s by keeping quiet that I’ll spare his feelings . . .
A man is walking across the tracks at a sleepy gait, pushing a trunk on a cart, and suddenly the electric globes in the station light up. I stand up numbly, I hadn’t realized I was so cold . . . At the end of the embankment, a lantern is bouncing in the darkness, swung by an invisible arm. A distant whistle replies to the hoarse foghorns: it’s the train. Already . . .
“GOODBYE, DARLING. I’m off to a village not very far from here; then I’ll no doubt leave for the New World with Brague. I won’t see you any more, darling. When you read this, you won’t take it to be a cruel joke, because the day before yesterday you wrote asking me, ‘My Renée, don’t you love me any more?’
“I’m leaving; it’s the smallest pain I can inflict on you. I’m not mean, Max, but I feel all worn out, as if I were incapable of getting used to love again, and frightened at the thought that love might make me suffer again.
“You didn’t think I was such a coward, did you, darling? What a measly little heart I have! And yet, in the past it would have been worthy of yours, which offers itself so candidly. But now . . . what would I be giving you now, my darling? In a few years, the best part of me would be that undirected maternal love which a childless woman transfers to her husband. You wouldn’t accept that, nor would I. Too bad . . . There are days—even for me, though I see myself growing older with resigned terror—days when old age appears to me like a reward . . .
“Darling, some day you’ll understand all this. You’ll understand that I wasn’t cut out to be yours, or anyone’s, and that, in spite of a first marriage and a second love, I’ve remained a kind of old maid . . . an old maid, like some women who are so much in love with Love that no love seems beautiful enough to them and they turn down their suitors without condescending to explain; they reject any misalliance that their feelings urge them into, and go home, to sit by a window as long as they live, bent over their sewing, alone with their matchless fanciful ideal . . . Like them, I wanted everything; a lamentable error has punished me.
“There’s no more venturesomeness in me, darling—that’s it, there’s none left. Don’t be angry if, for some time, I concealed from you how hard it was to revive in myself the enthusiasm, the risk-taking fatalism, the blind hope, and all the qualities that are merry companions of Love. The only fever I experienced was that of my senses. Unfortunately, no other fevers have such clearsighted periods of remission! You would have consumed me in vain, though your gaze, your lips, your long caresses, and your touching silences briefly healed a distress for which you weren’t responsible . . .
“Goodbye, darling. Far from me, seek for some young woman with fresh, intact beauty, seek for faith in your future and in yourself—in short, seek for the kind of love you deserve, the kind I might have given you once. But don’t seek for me. I have just enough strength to run away from you. If you were to walk in right now, while I’m writing this . . . but you won’t!
“Goodbye, darling. You’re the only human being in the world whom I call my darling, and after you I have no one left to give that name to. For the last time, hug me as you did whenever I felt cold, hug me very tight, very tight, very tight . . .
“RENÉE.”
I wrote very slowly; before signing my letter, I reread it, I closed loops, I added dots and accents, and I dated it: “May 15, seven in the morning . . .”
But even when signed, dated, and finally sealed, it’s nevertheless an unfinished letter . . . Shall I open it again? . . . All at once I shiver, as if, by sealing the envelope, I had closed off the bright spyhole through which a warm breath was still wafting . . .
It’s a sunless morning, and the winter chill seems to have taken shelter in this little parlor, behind the shutters that have been locked for forty days . . . Sitting at my feet, my dog silently looks toward the door; she’s waiting. She’s waiting for someone who won’t be back . . . I hear Blandine moving the pots and pans, I smell the aroma of freshly ground coffee: hunger is sullenly tugging at my stomach. A threadbare sheet covers the couch, a damp blue mist clouds the mirror . . . I wasn’t expected back this soon. Everything is veiled in old linens, in dampness, in dust; everything here is still wearing the somewhat funereal garb of departure and absence, and I walk through my apartment furtively, without removing the white covers from the furniture, without writing a name on the velvety layer of dust, without leaving any other trace, as I go by, than this unfinished letter.
Unfinished . . . Dear intruder, whom I tried to love, I’m sparing you. I’m leaving you your only chance to become nobler in my eyes: I’m going far away. On reading my letter, you will merely be chagrined. You’ll never know what a humiliating confrontation you’re escaping from, you’ll never know what a great inner contest had you for a prize, a prize I now reject . . .
Because I do miss you, but I choose . . . anything else but you. I’ve already grown acquainted with you, and I recognize you. Aren’t you a man who thinks he’s giving, but monopolizes everything for himself? You had come in order to share my life . . . Yes, share: to take your share of it! To be a partaker in everything I do, to infiltrate the secret sanctuary of my thoughts at all hours, isn’t that so? Why you rather than anyone else? I have sealed it off from everybody.
You’re kind, and you claimed, with perfect honesty, to be bringing me happiness, because you found me destitute and solitary. But you failed to reckon with my pauper’s pride: I refuse to look at even the loveliest lands on earth reduced in size through the lens of your amorous glances . . .
Happiness? Are you sure happiness is enough for me now? . . . It’s not only happiness that makes life worthwhile. You wanted to illuminate me with your run-of-the-mill dawn, because you pitied my state of darkness. Yes, I was dark, if you like: like a
room viewed from outdoors. Dimmed, not dark. Dimmed and adorned, thanks to my watchful sadness; as silvery and dusk-loving as a screech owl, as a silky mouse, as a clothes moth’s wing. Dimmed, with the red reflection of a heartbreaking recollection . . . But in your presence I’d no longer have the right to be sad . . .
I’m escaping, but I’m not yet rid of you, I know. A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes wish for the shade of your walls . . . How many times shall I look back toward you, as the beloved support I rest on, while wounding myself? For how long shall I conjure up all you could have given me, a long sexual embrace, now suspended, now rekindled and renewed . . . a winged fall, a swoon in which my strength would be reborn from its very death . . . the musical hum of my maddened blood . . . the fragrance of burnt sandalwood and trodden grass . . . Oh, for a long time you will still be one of the thirsts along my path!
I shall desire you: now as a fruit hanging out of reach, now as a distant stream or the little happy house I encounter fleetingly . . . In each place that my wandering desires lead me to, I leave behind a thousand, thousand ghosts that resemble me, that have fallen from me like petals, one on the hot blue stones of my native dells, one in the moist hollow of a sunless valley, and another that follows the bird, the sail, the wind, and the wave. You retain the most tenacious of them: an undulating blue shadow shaken by pleasure like a green plant in the brook . . . But time will dissolve that shadow like all the rest, and you’ll know no more of me, until the day when my footsteps come to a halt and one last little shadow flies away from me . . .