The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

by Violette Leduc

  She felt hungry for a chitterling sausage: that was the extent of her personal epic. Hello, pretty one, she said again to her scrap of poster as it curled and uncurled. Why do I feel so much tenderness, she wondered. For whom? Six o’clock. When she was five years old, at dinnertime Nanny would wipe her chin, then her mouth, then her sticky fingers. They were unloading wood at the C.G.E. warehouse, but it was too late, she would not go. How busy she always was, how much sought-after everywhere … The streets could not live without her, the shop windows she neglected became just so many ruins. Nanny used to do what Mamma told her to; she used to do what Nanny told her to. The handkerchief was passed from hand to hand, her grief was scented with a sachet of lavender. Her forehead was beginning to sweat, her eyes were swimming, she was hungry and they were calling to her. From afar in her mind she gazed at the swings across from the Porte de la Villette, standing still, yet ready to hurl themselves into motion in front of the old temple. She enveloped them with her gaze as the hoarfrost envelops a hedge on the first really cold day of the year. Everything outside in the cold was in need of comfort, and her hunger would soon be a tumour inside her. The sight of some men at a bar telling each other what they had been doing that day, their backs to her, gave her the energy to run as far as the cleaner’s – for how else could she bear the holes in her stockings, hidden inside the shoes that were much too big for her? The cleaner’s on boulevard de la Villette with its ‘Prosperity’ machines was not like any of the others. Twenty-five past six, the day was hurtling downhill. A swift good day on the trot to the hampers of shellfish outside L’huître perlière. Six-thirty, a snick of shears opening a crate: the pale pinewood of her last resting place was already with her. She bumped into women hurriedly buying food for their dinners; she was breathing the oxygen meant for people who had spent their day working. To cry out that it was impossible for her to begin her life all over again would be useless. The young girl in the cleaner’s did not raise her head: she was shutting away the corpses in the machines, transforming the floppy cadavers with her steam iron. Grandpapa, grandmamma, aunts and cousins had given her their blouses, and their shirts … The idea that the dead were capable of such generosity put fresh heart into her; it was like a grain of pepper on her tongue. She went over to the open square of window, and there, as the steam from the cleaner’s billowed out around her, she lamented softly, very softly for her solitary female state, while her stomach cried out its hunger.

  She returned to her post in front of the pancake shop. The placard with the prices printed on it was still the same: Paris had not forgotten her, Paris was lighting up on every side, the night was tender, the light was soft, the neon signs were flickering on, the sky was candid, and she was rewarded for loving Paris so much. Viarmes, Belloy, Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, Bruyères, Villiers-le-Sec were nothing but the whistling of an errand boy to the music of the city. She set off towards the Métro stairs, settling her hat more firmly on her head and pinning up her silver hair. Unconcerned, detached from the whole world by her idleness and her age, she recited the names of all the villages the buses were going to stop at as she flip-flopped along the street in her much-too-big shoes, and the recital became a programme of innumerable happy times that she had never known.

  She sacrificed fifty-five francs for a Métro ticket, she hummed, she took herself for a little butterfly before a storm, she walked down on to the platform of the Jaurès station, and trains arrived to take her on to Strasbourg–Saint-Denis, a station she usually stayed at a long while. At seven o’clock she sat down beside the gate to the platform, near two of the station staff who were chatting together as they watched the trains coming in and going out, the passengers arriving and departing, walking up the stairs and walking down the stairs. She found reassurance in this ebb and flow. The train drivers were giving her what she wanted: their herds of passengers surging past her. But she didn’t want to see their wrinkles, their worries, their sleepwalkers’ gait, their fatigue. No, what she wanted was their warmth: she had deprived herself of bread, now they were to give her their warmth in its place. Motionless, she travelled with them in a tunnel where the typists’ fingers, the packers’ wrists, the bank clerks’ foreheads, the waists of the saleswomen from the shoe shops, the ears of the switchboard operators, and the postmen’s feet filled her with wonder. She turned her head to watch a young lady, or perhaps a young man, who sold paisley or cashmere by the yard: she was walking through an Oriental bazaar.

  She took her key out of her pocket, she dangled it between her thumb and forefinger, showing it off to them all. They were all on their way home, that was next in their future. She had to move along the seat, the key slipped and vanished; suddenly she was unbelievably alone as she searched for it in her lap. Lowering her eyes, dying, then dying again. Quick, quick she was back in position once more. Her hands fastened again around her handbag, around the tiny sum of money inside it, and for one moment she became their beloved. A spectacle case fell to the ground. A tiny sound in the crowd, and the crowd engulfed her again like a lover. The spectacle case was retrieved: apologies, thanks, politeness, conventional phrases. How urbane everyone was … The doors slid together, neatly sealing all the people in. She purred on her bench, she was a cat being stroked by polite phrases exchanged between strangers: ‘You’re too kind,’ ‘Thank you so much,’ ‘You really shouldn’t have.’ Some teenage boys with enormous eyes were staring at her. Then they were dredging inside her: ahh! a drill, ahh! a screwdriver, ahh! sharp points, hammers, pincers, hinges, sourness, swelling, shrinking – she was a howling shadow conscious only of her hunger. The mouse between the rails became a quail trotting about on a hearth and turning a beautiful golden brown. She began to see visions. There was no need to be disheartened. She saw men in rags greeting one another at midnight, counting out the coins they had harvested on the café terraces, all behind a curtain of black rain. It wasn’t much, and yet it was something vast as well, that money in the hollow of each palm. The few passers-by were hurrying to their warm homes. And she saw herself too, living still in an apartment opposite the Luxembourg. Centrally heated of course. It was comfy, as they say. Memories are comfy too, they are swaddling bands, they wrap you up warm like a mummy. What moment is there in life that is not already a memory?

  She came back to the platform on the Strasbourg–Saint-Denis station, she found herself still sitting on her seat and realized that it was time for the multiplication table if she wanted to see him again. Two and two are four, two and two are four, two and two are four … No. One and one are two, one and one are two, one and one are two, one and one are two – until the presentiment that he was about to come flooded through her. After the mental arithmetic, her lips began to move: make him come, make him come now. He would come; there was no torture in asking for his presence in the thunder of a departing train. If the wished-for appearance had coincided with the wish itself, the violence of her pleasure would have set her gazing enquiringly at the backs of men’s heads – preferably thickset ones – to see if what she felt was the same as making love. They had been breathing the same air without her knowing it, for suddenly he was there, passing indifferently in front of the seat where she sat, below the squares with all the titles of the plays and shows in them.

  The lollipop-eater was sitting down, as she had done, taking his place on the same bench, to her left – at the far end, away from her, away from the entrance gate. At first he simply sat there with folded arms, just existing. Just existing seemed to be a duty to him. He wasn’t seeing anything. Two exasperated passengers might come to blows directly in front of him, or a woman might scream, and he would never react. Perhaps he was a sandwich man who had finished his day’s work. His iron-grey overcoat was well on the way to becoming like the topcoats of those ragged auditors she had seen counting their coins on the dark boulevard between Le Dôme and La Coupole. After this period of gentle existence, he was suddenly hidden from her by a gust of hair, his cheek bitten off by the corner of a flapping p
oster. She tried to lose herself with him on the poster, caressing a lock of her silver hair with a decorative gesture of flirtation, imagining herself to be accosting him on a beach where a southern breeze was always blowing.

  It was at that moment every evening that he stood up and advanced with slow steps towards the slot machine. He looked at no one. She pictured an imaginary link between the leaky shoes that were much too big for her feet and the worn-out boots he was dragging across the platform with such a weight of fatigue. She invented dramas, tragic shadows, because the man’s expressionless face was always concealed behind the mask of those who cannot use a razor every day. He was not a brother in poverty but a secretly cherished black sheep. He was her prophet with nothing to prophesy, but it was enough that he was there. Some of the passengers turned to look at him before disappearing through the doors. Should she follow him? Should she put twenty francs into the machine as he was doing? Should she buy what he was buying? She hesitated, feeling a cold sweat break out on her skin. The story would be over if she went up to him. No, she would rather watch the five transparent pictures of the five flavoured icebergs, the fingers unwinding the wrapped, the unreal blue of the ice stick in the other’s hand. He had come back, or he would come back; she could be sure of that as soon as she heard the click inside the slot machine. They sat together on the same bench as train succeeded train, as she nibbled, as she sucked through the teeth and drank down the saliva of a friend to whom she would never speak. One day, she could have sworn it, the lighting on the platform had changed; he looked at her, and then, entirely absorbed by his delicious iceberg, he let his eyes drift away from her again with so much indifference that she felt her own life inside her swinging round the widest, the sweetest of curves. Because he was unaware of the kindness he felt towards her he did not need to look at her: he could see her everywhere! He was meditatively consuming a mint-flavoured lollipop; she was a little mountain pink unfolding her petals. On the days when he produced a second ice stick, when he unwound the second wrapper as diligently as if he were peeling a shrimp, she would lose her head altogether; she would escape into one of the tunnels of the Strasbourg–Saint-Denis station, open out her arms and beat her wings: she was a bird-woman using up her last breath for him. She watched, she waited, she came back on to the platform when he had gone. What was to become of her when she no longer had fifty-five francs to see him again? She shivered in advance.

  She did not sit down on the seat again after he had gone. She went over to the train, she stroked the door handles that had been grasped and lightly brushed by thousands upon thousands of passengers. The stationwoman with the ‘signal’ under her arm waved at her to get into the compartment or else stand back. She did not move. It was the crowd that took the decision for her: the hurricane whirled her back across the platform while she laughed aloud at so much generosity and gazed up enquiringly into the faces of the people who were annoyed. They trampled on her handbag and wrenched a button off her coat. A spitting sound, a whistling sound; the cars shuddered into motion. She gathered up her wreckage.

  She returned to her place on the seat. The stationwoman with the signal was tired and sat down beside her to rest between trains. What would she not have given for a feeling of closeness, for a current of sympathy … She said goodbye to the punched ticket she had been keeping warm, she slipped it with all the furtive caution of a thief under the stationwoman’s thigh: she thought that this Cybele crowned with her stationwoman’s cap would smile at her before hurling forward to brandish her signal. The young woman yawned, then leaped up with her disc on its handle; the ticket fell to the ground and twenty pairs of hobnailed boots walked over it, dirtying it – as they would go on dirtying it until one o’clock in the morning. Every time a foot was raised and she caught a glimpse of it, she saw her life callously leaving her, she felt it was doing what children do: sucking her blood. Never mind, she would draw zigzags down the margins of her newspapers, she would listen to the pizzicati in the frizzy hair of the man who sucked his flavoured lollipops in a dream.

  She went back to her room; she saw a bug cowering underneath a viaduct, and it was herself. What was to become of her now that she no longer had fifty-five francs left over to go down into the Métro?

  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 … the roar. Her hand shook, the coffee beans scattered across the table. She stood up, the beans in her lap scattered across the floor. She was stricken with panic by all that wasted arithmetic. She tilted the table: the dishes smashed among the coffee beans. As she collected up the broken shards of crockery, she longed to try and nibble at the smallest one; it looked so much like one of the pieces of coconut they sold at the stall just along from Joris’, the ten-franc slices they put on a plate. She lay flat on the floor and dislodged the beans under the sideboard with a fork. She imitated the Negro woman and her enormous laugh when she was choosing the coconut with most hair on it. She carried each bean back to the table: thirty-six trips across the room, thirty-six puffs to blow the dust off thirty-six coffee beans. She lined them up on a piece of white paper, glimpsing the meagreness of her resources in each tiny groove. The roar. She was sickened by her own pettiness. She swept the beans off the table with the back of one hand, stepped up on the packing case under the high attic window, and sprinkled all the beans still left in the packet over the floor. The brown hail gave her a sense of importance. It was a promise of opulence. And at the same time she asked herself: why am I doing this? Using her handkerchief as a broom and the lid of a sugar carton as a dustpan, she began to salvage the beans once more. A lock of hair falling in front of her eyes was an unexpected visit; it reminded her that the electric light in her room would never go out. Now she was cleaning off each bean with the cuff of her nightdress. Like all her personal linen, it was no more than a flock of downy tatters of weightless swans.

  She was handling her sixtieth year as lightly as we touch the lint when dressing a wound. She stepped up on the packing case underneath the little window and shook the packet of coffee three hundred times, four hundred times, until she felt that the back of her head was pressed against the stars. It was freezing and the moon was shining. She was dreaming of the pale milky green of that February wheat. She was free, she did what she liked, she told herself that she was just like a whirlwind. Sixteen years old: to bathe in a field of poppies, to feel one’s calf and the back of one’s thigh brushed by one of those old, wrinkly petals with their powers of consolation.

  The concierge used to explain it to her: you can’t have Paris without the roar of the Métro as well, because they go together. The concierge would think it over quietly, then she would explode: the tenants got used to it, they all told her the same thing as they stood there opening their mail, they all said they didn’t know what to do with themselves now when there was no noise. No, the concierge said, Paris isn’t a forest. If Paris were a forest it would be boring for everyone. I beg your pardon, Paris in our neighbourhood is a forest of buses with the trees of Viarmes and Belloy resting on their roofs. The concierge didn’t listen; she put up a card on her door to say she wasn’t at home to anyone. The concierge could not waste her time with silly talk. So why could she not get used to the noise? She preferred the purring aeroplane up above the cracked walls. Was it not just a little, perhaps, that she was refusing to get used to it deliberately? She could remember too well what tranquillity had been like. Oh it had been a love, tranquillity. But the overhead Métro – a grinding of bayonets. Paris can be quiet if one wants to take the trouble, Paris is not lacking in restful little corners. Paris is a muff when it snows. The concierge would shrug her shoulders because her beef stew had to be seen to, because she had guests coming. Oh, you people with so much time on your hands, you people who can go out every afternoon, the concierge answered another day. She did not dare confess to this guardian so anxious to protect her tenants from complications
, from eccentricity, that she also was a guardian, the guardian of a sleepy street, of a street that had grass sprouting between its cobbles, that was always there inside her, her native, childhood wilderness. It was a street chaste as an untold secret: noises grew wan as soon as they entered it; laughter, if it ever found its way in, was impaled on discarded graveyard crowns. She stumbled, she stammered, she tripped over her own apologies: the concierge was wasting her time with her. It was better not to speak at all if she wanted the street to sleep on inside her. The concierge went back into her lodge, still saying that she had no time to lose. But she, she was losing her time as other people lose their jobs or lovers. She walked up the seven flights with lowered head. The Métro that sapped her very being, the Métro to whom she was always faithful was awaiting her. She closed her door. She was cheating the concierge because she could not do without it, because she was expecting revelations from it. Go on, be prophetic for me a little, she murmured in its ear as she listened to the thunder. She brushed her skirt, then stopped when her hand began to shake. She always saw to her clothes after she had been out. Did the concierge whisper nasty things about her to the deliverymen? The overhead Métro didn’t whisper: it crushed you, it rushed through you, it ground you to powder every five minutes during off-hours, every two minutes during rush hours.

  Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … How many in half a pound of coffee? The beans she took out in handfuls from the packet fell into the salad bowl one by one. She counted them, and her concern for economy was so intense that her hand shook with it. She trembled, and her legs gave beneath her. She did too much for one so undernourished. To die after so long a diet. She fed on her own saliva, she tamed her hunger, her head was dripping over one shoulder, her feet were blobs of spittle. The beating in her temples was forcing her eyes shut, the thudding in her ears was wearing her down, she was about to yield. No. The darkness inside her was resting her, it was an unasked-for reprieve.