The Lady and the Little Fox Fur
Page 1
Violette Leduc
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THE LADY AND THE LITTLE FOX FUR
Translated from the French by Derek Coltman
With an introduction by Deborah Levy
Contents
Introduction
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur
Follow Penguin
Introduction
Violette Leduc’s novels are works of genius and also a bit peculiar. It is not surprising that Jean Genet was one of Leduc’s early admirers, as were Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. According to Edmund White’s autobiography My Lives, Genet and Leduc even made an amateur film together – a re-enactment of a baptism in which Genet, who was an orphan, played the child and Leduc the mother. Both writers were illegitimate, born at a time – Leduc in 1907 – when such things mattered. The theatre of baptism with its narratives of belonging, of being ordained and claimed, must have been very potent to stage. The mind whirls at the thought of what they might have got up to. What a shame the film has been lost. If, as White points out, both Proust and Genet ‘were dismantling all received ideas about the couple, manhood, love and sexual roles’, I would include Leduc in the rearranging of the social and sexual scaffolding of her time. I don’t think she set out to do this. It was just that her life wasn’t quite bourgeois or stable enough to do anything else.
Leduc can make this reader laugh out loud at her grand themes: loneliness, humiliation, hunger, defeat, disappointment – all of which are great comic subjects in the right hands. Samuel Beckett could do this, too. It requires a sensibility that is totally unsentimental, a way of staring at life and making from it a kind of tough poetry created in part by not having led an existence that makes one believe that the so-called compassionate and tender have any pity.
However, it is female love and desire that are Leduc’s main subjects. She herself stated that she wanted to express ‘as exactly as possible, as minutely as possible, the sensations of physical love’.
In The Lady and the Little Fox Fur it is the sensation of hunger, of loss of a future, of everyday connection to the rhythms of busy Parisian life that concerns the old lady of the title. ‘She was breathing the oxygen meant for people who had spent their day working. To cry out that it was impossible to begin her life all over again would be useless.’
Leduc’s starving old woman isn’t really old by today’s standards. Nevertheless we are told she ‘was handling her sixtieth year as lightly as we touch the lint when dressing a wound’. It is because Leduc profoundly understands how mysterious human beings are that her attention as a writer is always in an interesting place. Her old lady gazes at a calf’s tongue in a butcher-shop window and asks herself, ‘What was there on a calf’s tongue?’
It reminds her of fine sand on the petals of a yellow rose, which makes her think of painting sunsets in her younger days. Her paintings were her equivalent of ‘altars and sacred wafers’. Leduc does not sanitize and flatten a perception and make it more literal than it is; she accepts its own language. Life, like language, is coherent and incoherent, and Leduc knows the only way to do justice to this dynamic is to fold into the texture of her narrative the strange in-between bits of experience.
She is incapable of coming up with a boring sentence. There may be a gushing sentence now and again, perhaps, when she forgets to take a breath and hyperventilates on the page. But even that’s quite exciting. Evelyn Waugh’s definition of fiction as ‘experience totally transformed’ or Hanif Kureishi’s astute observation in My Ear at His Heart that writing is often a substitute for experience, a kind of daydreaming, are fair enough but not completely true for her. Writing, for Leduc, is a concentrated form of experiencing. She is a present-tense sort of writer, and like Virginia Woolf she wants to record ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind’. When her old lady wakes up thirsty one summer morning in Paris she wants to find an orange to suck. So she rummages in the bins and discovers a reeking fox fur in a box labelled tripe. Instead of an orange she had found ‘a winter fur in summer’.
She picks it up and takes it home. What does she do with it?
‘She kissed him, and then went on kissing him, from the tip of his muzzle to the tip of his brush. But her lips were as cold as marble: in her mind these kisses were also an act of religious meditation.’
I laughed at these lines. You are really crazy, Violette, I thought to myself. And then I read the next few lines, where I learn the writer laughs, too. ‘She looked him up and down, then burst into her first fit of uncontrollable laughter: the amusement he filled her with was no less sincere than the love she felt for him.’
Precisely. The amusement Leduc fills this reader with is no less sincere than the admiration she feels for her. Literary provocateurs have always written rather peculiar books, and great publishers have always published them. Much to the delight of readers across a number of generations, Leduc wrote her way out of isolation and invisibility and into the canon of twentieth-century literature. As the old lady remarks at the end of this gentle, bittersweet novel, her ‘world consisted of nothing but what she had invented’.
Deborah Levy
Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six … then the roar. The table shook, the coffee beans fell into her lap.
The overhead Métro was an invader she had never grown used to, though it shook her like that every five minutes during off-hours, every two minutes during rush hours. She had to see the cataclysm again, wait for it, follow it, learn it by heart, remember it, accustom herself to its every detail. She had to hurry out to reach the station at exactly the same moment as the train itself. As soon as she had left her room habit took over and told her exactly what she must do: first get to the kiosk where the old woman sells the lottery tickets, sniff the scent of bad luck through one of its chinks, stand beside the news vendor’s shelter, and then at three o’clock reach the steps of the Jaurès Métro station, after crossing boulevard de la Villette between the lines of silver studs. Once she was standing in front of Les Palmiers, the café on the corner of quai de la Loire and avenue Jean-Jaurès, habit left her to her own devices again. There were some young girls going into the café, and she lowered her eyes – the pavement was as old as she was.
February was a sullen captive in the afternoon mist, and the grey streets were melting indistinguishably into the grey street corners. She wandered around the still empty, still silent Paris–Sevran bus. On tiptoe, avidly, she gazed through the windows at the backs of the seats, at the luggage rack, and thought of the passengers who were not there, whom she had ever known. A hundred yards farther on, the mail vans were setting out to make their rounds through the Île-de-France.
The pale tinkle of a bell. Who was watching her? Was it a warning? Like a sleepwalker guided by her seeing-eye dog, she disappeared towards the lock gates on the canal at twenty minutes past three. The little bells around its neck were the church bells of a town called Sevran that she would never see. She forced herself to become calm again, otherwise she would be too hungry. She retraced her steps back towards Les Palmiers, taking care to keep her distance from it. It was freezing; inside some young girls were drinking Coca-Cola through straws. She walked across avenue Jean-Jaurès between the lines of silver studs, back towards the news vendor who sat huddled beside the entrance to the Jaurès Métro station while the coins tinkled down into his saucer. A quarter of four. Every day at that same time a bread roll fell at her feet in the gutter. Every day she prepared to pick it up, every day she began wiping her fingers on her dirty handkerchief. For nothing, for a dream. She looked for it on the shade of a street lamp, b
ut the roll was already dangling at the top of a plane tree with the last dead leaf: mirages of hunger. The policeman was inviting the pedestrians over to the other pavement. She accepted, she plunged forward into Paris, and as she made her way over the crossing, she proclaimed her corner of the city was a forest. The trees, weary from the blue weight of the sky, rested their branches on the buses to Béthisy, to Royallieu, to Vaud’herland, to Verberie. The cars and their fuel gave off a scent of mimosa: the mimosa of a convalescence at Menton forty years before. She stepped with the others up on to the far pavement, and the mimosa was falling like snow on the fenced-off temple: the old Porte de la Villette.
The rules of habit were in charge again. Without the rules she would have weakened and stumbled, because the children were all eating their after-school snacks in the street. She clenched her fists and banged them against her stomach to keep her hands from snatching the croissants out of their mouths. Paris – millions of children all clutching the same horns of plenty. The edge of her round hat brushed against the sign of the Tout gaze bien café, at 6, avenue Jean-Jaurès. Her coat was turning green with age. So much the better: it was a proof that her verdigris candlesticks in the pawnshop had not abandoned her. When the sun came out, there were two torches to light her way, the sun itself and its reflection in the window of Joris’, the shop that accepted la Semeuse coupons. She hummed in the crystal winter and retraced her steps once more. Suddenly she found that she was holding herself back by clutching tightly on to her handbag, the handbag she had always darned with Chinese silk – in the days when she had been able to afford Chinese silk. As she stood trembling, as she squeezed it to her, as she crushed it out of shape, her handbag wanted what she wanted. Her childhood in the country, suddenly brought back to her by the doorway between Achilles’, the shut-up café, and Joris’, the coupon shop, was making her head swim. Her teeth were chattering and she moaned nostalgically at the sight of the signs on each side of the porte-cochère, two shields on which she read: G. Raymond. Legal proceedings initiated. Defences undertaken. All courts. Open daily for consultation.
She kneaded her poor handbag, she moaned entreaties to G. Raymond. How could he not be interested in her provincial past, since he was defending the provinces with his shields. She buttoned up her gloves, forgetting that the press-studs were worn out. On days when her legs would no longer support her, when the pincers of hunger wrenched and pulled out all manner of nails in her stomach, she imagined herself asking G. Raymond to initiate proceedings for her. She imagined them being made to give her bread, and cheese, and wine. The shields shone in splendour. Her handbag resumed its proper shape, she sang the lullaby she’d learned while she was doing her first cross stitch. Her round hat tilted forward, it fell in front of G. Raymond’s door, she stepped on it, she banged her nose against the door because she thought she was going in to see G. Raymond. She stopped her song and let her plan dissolve away until the following day. If her nose bled, she sniffed: she drew sustenance from her own blood. If someone picked up her hat, she said: ‘Oh, I am so very sorry.’
There was no pain in her parting from G. Raymond, and she hurried on to the pancake shop. She took up her position outside it to wait for the visitor. Why was it taking so long now, when it came so punctually to crush her in her room, every five minutes during off-hours, every two minutes during rush hours? It must come or she would fall, flattened out on the pavement by the smell of the pancake being turned. I’m waiting for it and it’s keeping me waiting, she said to the truck drivers who were staring at her and laughing. There it was. Despite her hunger, despite everything, it made her feel easier inside to see it pierce through the light along boulevard de la Villette, swinging at exactly the right moment round the bend, for her who had no watch. The shuddering of the arches, the vibration of the viaduct was muffled by the noise of the traffic. The roar it made in her room was non-existent as it passed by her up above the square. The thunder was lost: the passers-by had other things on their minds. That cataclysm hurtling past her window towards its terminus, what had it turned into? Into this inoffensive little train from the Jardin d’Acclimatation, with rows of fairy lights along its ceiling. There it went, something that Paris took for granted, something that was simply there. And at that moment she took it for granted too. But before two hours had passed she would be depriving herself of bread for it, she would be buying a Métro ticket so she could be near it and touch it. The stationwoman’s signal, that disc waving at the end of a rod, would intoxicate her as keenly as any ocean liner’s foghorn.
Wheat pancakes, fifty francs. The batter was spreading across the hotplate, the woman was scraping away the drips and making the edges neater with the point of her knife. But she would draw her nourishment later on from the crowd in the Métro: one cannot have everything. Of course the school girls had long hair, coming out of school was still what it had always been: the beating, the breathing of the braids against one’s back. She used to plait hers in front of the open window, and though the lightning flashes used to stab at her face, still there was something honest about a storm. But now she had something she liked even better than storms: the delicate drizzle in the park across from the fenced-off temple, from the old Porte de la Villette. Five schoolgirls bought five pancakes au Grand Marnier. She hadn’t changed her mind: the Métro was better than the pâtisserie. She left, she set off along avenues, along quais, along streets, along boulevards, as busy and curious as a dog out on its own. After turning back and setting off again many times, she at last reached the place where she wanted to be: her bollard on the quai de la Villette. The swarm inside her left off its buzzing, the warmth came back into her heart, the sweat on her back began to dry, her hat fell on to her knees, and her grey hair came undone. A moment of contentment, of self-abandonment as she gazed at what she had gazed at the day before, and the day before that: three men near the edge of the water, beside a sort of greenhouse, hitting their cold chisels with their hammers. They were workmen whose job it was to keep the flagstones level, and they put up with her there because they didn’t know she was there. The bollard she was sitting on had such stability, the place itself was so historic that she became a peasant woman who had ridden in from the Perche country to sell a farmhorse many centuries ago. He will be easy to sell: he has such strong muscles under that coat the colour of a baked potato. She sighed a deep, deep sigh and felt the comfort of it.
Each of the workmen was riveted to his workbench – a rusty barrel – hammering out of time with the others. They were making her a gift of their task, they were wholly immersed in it. The Percheron horse and the peasant woman had crumbled into nothing long, long ago right there where one day she too would crumble into nothing. Contemplating that thought became a well-earned rest. Her hands shook these days when she was threading a needle; her fingers were growing old; life and death were two maniacs locked in a well-matched struggle. The iron grille nearby, the boat stagnating below the quai, the sweepings floating on the ancient water … She melted into the landscape: it became an extension of her own idleness for a while, until the sound of a bus starting up behind her, the rhythm of its turning motor, brought her back to life. Her eyes stared straight ahead for a moment more before coming back to the hat on her knees, to the loose hair falling about her shoulders. A flagstone slightly off from the flagstone next to it caught her attention. A slit throat: the flagstone let a beam of sunlight shine on to her through its wound. The bollard would be there tomorrow.
At five-twenty she was resting from the streets and their noise in the Citroën waiting room, going from bench to bench picking up the newspapers that she would then read and reread for weeks on end. She made a tour of the room, inspecting the traces left by passengers now on their way to Meaux, to Souilly, to Claye, to Nangis; orange peel, an empty sweet packet, the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, a blackened match. They must be kind people, all these fugitives, since they left her these things to remember them by. She would have collected everything they had l
eft and taken it away with her if the ticket clerks had not been watching. But instead she sat down again, hoping that the newspapers she was pressing against her stomach would warm her up. A traveller came in, one vague and solitary man: she heard the clash of cymbals that heralded another presence amid the spectres and the damp stains on the walls. But the solitary traveller was immediately overcome by a dizzying attack of shyness and left again even more quickly than he had arrived. She began putting problems to herself. Not to leave her own neighbourhood, not to travel was a tragedy. But to leave all that she cherished would be another tragedy. Also, what was the point of leaving, since there was no longer for her a distinction between those packets of white mints and a line of chalk cliffs?
Later, down by the canal, she stamped her feet near the lock gates and hugged the big newspapers to her overcoat like layers of aprons. An impressive barge allowed her to yearn for it as she stood, just quietly existing, in the company of a plumber and a workman from the gas company. Her father, swathed in goatskin, drove by in a Panhard. Hello, pretty one, she said to a fragment of poster left on a wall: that loose corner of paper she gazed at so intently, an insignificant martyr being curled and uncurled by the wind, was her acquaintance. The dredger must eat more than she ever did if it could afford to throw up so much sand. The barge Scabre arriving: everyone’s floating hopes of majesty. Leaning on the wall with the others, she was aware that she would feel less hungry if she walked less. Yesterday they had covered up the barge Ré-0I: oh, the carefully calibrated way of life she had seen measured out, rung after rung, by the ladders lying along the black tarpaulin! The dear old thing was suddenly so gay – the bargee’s non-slip boots trotting up and down, the cable being cast off: Antwerp, Amsterdam – the sparkling rudder and the stiff-starched curtains carried the onlookers far off to some distant land. But today the barge was at rest in its slot in the water: ten thousand gliding years of history brought to a halt.