She opened her eyes again to find that the things in her room had never doubted her. For example: the folding chair she had sat in when she was twelve was still there, just as it had been then, when she sat on the lawn, safe in the folds of her taffeta dress, listening to her mother vocalizing inside the house. When she sat on the folding chair now with her severe features, her silver hair, her modest eyes, she looked like a lady professor on vacation sitting by the edge of a path. It is not only streams and rivers that flow: a street, with a door set back from it, can slide over into the depths of an abyss. The street was her youth, was all the minutes, the seconds of her existence. The grass sprouting between the cobbles, the pinpricks, the needles while her stomach cried its hunger. The closed door, the step she sat on – quietly, for there was nothing she desired. A door set back from the street was enough for her. To grow old is to wrap ourselves up well so we can wander warmly through our private catacombs.
She put the salad bowl on her knees, she was listening, in the groove of each brown coffee bean, to the sharp reverberation of the bell beyond the lawn, beyond the kitchen garden, beyond the woods and the ploughed fields when she deigned to come in from her native wilderness. The inexorable click of her parasol. Day in, day out, she was always tearing herself away from what she had been at eighteen. The roar: her youth was whisked out of sight in an express. Her calculations, her meticulous juggling with minute sums informed her that she was using too much electricity, for one little spoonful of coffee would be enough for breakfast. There were so many spoonfuls to be counted in half a pound of coffee, but it was a way of making a future for herself. She snatched up the cane left behind by the previous lodger and searched for more beans underneath the sideboard, a gift from the concierge when she cleaned out the cellar. The scrap merchant didn’t come around very often these days, and what’s more he had to be begged to take things away. The plates in the cupboard at the bottom shook during rush hour.
The unhealthy heat, our timidity … No, that wasn’t right. Her timidity: a comfortable lining inside her, a furry slipper that warned her: close up, keep silent, protect yourself, don’t give anything away now that they’re letting you sit at the table. She used to dirty her napkin at the end of the meal; she just couldn’t stop herself. No regrets. She had lost nothing and gained nothing. The collector would threaten her when he came around with the electricity bill. She switched off the light, then walked to and fro in the darkness, crushing the coffee beans underfoot. She would pick them up again later, when she had nothing else left. She switched on the light again; that way it was easier to see the hundred and fifty francs lurking between the two worn-out dishcloths. Even if she had only a centime, she would still hide it. Nothing else left: her future, like an epidemic, getting closer. All those galas among the stars while one counts up to sixty. The sky was inviting her to join its festivities again, and this time she switched off the light with more deliberation.
Mariette, Lisette, Odile. The young ladies whose keyholes belonged to her when they were at work four storeys down. She went out on to the landing and listened to the water dripping there. The three young maids took no advantage of it, for how could such harum-scarums appreciate the maxims of monotony taught by a tap. She smiled at the teacher who was dripping his knowledge for her into a sink. Don’t forget your ‘Lemon’ hand lotion after you’ve finished with the dishes, young ladies. The young ladies’ timetable was a source of satisfaction to her. When they went dancing at night she was there in a cloud of face powder. Several times during the day she waited for them hopefully, standing near the drips of water from the tap. When the young ladies came up the stairs, she fled. On Sunday evenings, Mariette, Odile, Lisette would visit one another before going out again. Where would she be next Sunday, when the hundred and fifty francs were already in other hands? She pressed two fingers against her head, first in one place, then in another. Against her forehead: a stethoscope sounding out her situation. Rusks or ordinary bread? The rusks would cost more but then they would keep. Could she live on a quarter of a rusk a day? People can fast completely for forty-five days without dying, and she always had something to eat every day, no matter how little, so what had she to complain of? And anyway, she could always count on that drop of water continuing to fall at regular intervals. Time was a necklace; each bead a gleam on her grave. The sound of Viennese music drove her from the landing and followed her back into her room.
Still she did not go to bed. She stayed up, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, sometimes sailing to and fro beneath the attic window draped in the long dressing gown the concierge had given her. What trouble the concierge had gone to, to give her a present. What thick layers of newspaper it had taken to roll it up in, that dressing gown once worn no doubt by a foreigner, by one of those eccentrics who play at being nabobs in their leisure hours at home. The lapels had a scent of chypre and English tobacco, and on nights when there was a moon the brocade would sparkle in its beams. If the moon was hidden by a russet veil, then the martial gestures of her arms declaimed that she was married to a breastplate and a suit of armour. It was her virginity. She lowered her arms; then, quite suddenly, she felt the weight of her head pressing on one hand. What was she? Two closed eyes: the sum of all that had been. The company of her bare feet lit by a moonbeam on the dirty floorboards … She sat down on the packing case: her trust in them was so great she could have wept, though they were no more than a pool of paleness on the floor. She listened to the humming sounds she could hear when the silences between them stopped: the marches and the halts along her life’s path. A child was still crying in another building; somewhere there was a taxi crossing Paris, the man at the wheel dreaming of a plan for an entire city. The paleness and bareness of her feet: poverty is pity too – it had been snowing on the only primrose while Nanny was taking off her shoes. She stood up on the packing case again, travelling out in search of youth and fragility above the antennae and the chimney pots. That powdering of pink across the sky didn’t mean it was dawn; it came from the neon signs. She stood rubbing her stomach, keeping it amused, as all the fruits and the orchards of the sky fell in upon the hotplate of the pancake shop. What she needed was money, that’s what she told the cars down below and the deep blue up above as it was crowded farther and farther into its corner by the festivities in the sky. Then, the splendour of a surprise: her wish was caught and carried away by an overhead Métro train.
She took out her hairpins and combed her hair with her fingers, smiling a worn smile at the plank left out on a roof. Sometimes she allowed her thoughts to wander, without troubling to speak. To marry. For an hour or two. The husband would have an inspiration, then the iron stay propping the window open wouldn’t be in her way any more. The idea of asking a carpenter to come in and see to it would never enter her mind. She rested awhile on the thought of the potato she would eat tomorrow. She swayed on the packing case, but she refused to notice it: the day she could no longer step up on the packing case to look through the window would mean saying goodbye to her friends … The lighted windows beside the darkened windows invited her, welcomed her. She went in through the windows, she penetrated into the phosphorescent antichambers of the people who were expecting her, whom she would never meet. More than friends. The drip-feed of another presence into her blood when an apartment opposite lit up. To miss the appointments they had made for her … She would die if that happened; a death we cannot know. Habit is even stronger than love. She was filled with a fixed determination to pay the next month’s rent, to sally forth once more to the pawnbroker’s, to offer him the clothes off her back, to sell her teeth, her leg, her arm, but at all costs to go on living against the panes of strangers’ windows. Other people were her hourglasses: the two old men with red-rimmed eyes who sat at their fifth-floor window for example, and their perpetually alternating plants: the ivy and maidenhair being taken in, the onions being put out. And on one of the balconies there was a geranium as bright as a cock or a corrida. Then there was the
woman on the balcony, especially on Sundays, who leaned out and shouted au revoir to her lover. How did she know there was a lover down below? The woman was an aviary; her caresses, her groans set loose whole flights of cooing pigeons. Padam, padam, padam, she had once heard a woman in love sing out of a jukebox, and every Sunday now that same tune rippled around this woman’s flanks. Other people were her opium. How could she go on finding supplies of the drug she needed once she had been thrown out into the street?
One night, as a train was fleeing from winter outside her attic, a window had been opened by five or six bars of trumpet playing. Then the window had closed again. The diamond winter and the glittering brass. She remembered it still in summer, in the gardens of a square, and she thought of herself as the chosen one of winter. She waited for the brazen blare of jazz again, the first night of frost, but the window would not light up. She bared one shoulder, then a breast before dawn came, turning towards the musician who no longer played for her. What did she have to feed him on? Forty years of solitude and life in the wild. Now it was February, she was expecting him still as the attic window fell shut, as she began to feel cold, as she set fire to the newspapers, as the flames tossed the trumpet and the five or six bars it had played for her from one to another, as she celebrated the talent of the trumpet player by warming herself at the blaze.
She switched on the electric light and watched the wheel inside the electric meter. The wheel was turning quicker than the earth, while the earth delegated its power of turning to a tooth-edged thing caught in a mousehole. What is there to trust in if time is a little dog chasing its tail, if the needles of clock faces are dead insects … The wheel, in conclusion, was torturing time.
She divided up six potatoes between eight days. She could eat three quarters of a starchy tuber every day. The quarter of yellow flesh thus saved would go black, and she would throw it away. She clutched her forehead, her heart was beating even in the backs of her thighs; as she soaked the pencil with her sweat she confessed to it in whispers that she hadn’t enough left to buy four pounds of sugar. Eleven o’clock. The roar.
Eleven o’clock. She took off her dressing gown. She walked around in her long nightdress holding a book; the hours chimed out over a pastoral scene, the landscape was a spectre watching her advance; she was walking over tapestries of tiny flowers; her feet were sending up messages of ecstasy; spring was flying away in clouds of white petals. Day was dawning; how did one set about not being old at seventeen? Now, at sixty, she tells herself that that wasn’t living, that it was better than living. A day will dawn. She used to gnaw at her fingernails as the birds covered the monumental mason’s crosses with their droppings. A day would dawn. The earth would be all ashes and gaping burns, and she would smile the smile of an accomplice who had known all along. The smoke would rise and, noiselessly, she laughed, her mouth splitting open as far as her ears: she would go on dying forever along with the others. The roar, after eleven-thirty, came less often.
She folded the dressing gown in three, arranging the pillow thus formed on the mattress lying on the floor. She was trembling as she stood there, shivering in the piece of butter muslin that served her as a nightdress. She was not ridiculous: she did not know that such a thing as being ridiculous existed. A sick feeling from head to toe; quickly, half a lump of sugar moistened with a drop of water from the tap. Mariette, Odile, Lisette … Gone out without changing. She retreated, then stuck her nose slowly out again, reconnoitring a floorboard, a darkened doorway. She closed her hands over the potatoes that were to last a week. To be like a tuber, to be robed in earth, not to have to support the slow dilapidation of one’s entrails. Her hand fell away, the weight of her head was too much for her, a potato rolled under the table. She cried, ‘Oh, oh,’ for if she did not eat she would float away, and the feeling of being as light as a cigarette paper filled her with panic.
She covered herself with the shawl full of holes, hoping that she would weigh a little more that way. But she was weighing less and less. Lucienne had dreamed that she was floating away, just before she died. She lay down, her feet icy. She would have warmed them up with a hot-water bottle, if only the level of the methylated spirits burner would stay the same. She blew on her hands, or she took some warmth from her armpits and carried it down to her heels.
Several times during the night she would grow uneasy about her bedside table: a shoe box. That was where she had hidden the piece of wood she had found when she was seventeen, just as day was breaking. To give birth to oneself. The day was breaking, she could not escape it. The light comes slowly when it is winter and we are pondering. My boat, she said, as others might say my rosary, my prayers. That shapeless object she had carried about with her everywhere for forty years was the ball, the chains that kept her in bondage to the trees. She has said goodnight fifteen hundred times to the same mist of branches and twigs. The boat slid from her hands, from the hands of an old woman crumbling away, a crossroads, a meeting place for all the hissing and thumping in the world. My temples, my stomach, she groaned, addressing the words to her feet, to two warm strangers. Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae.
She smiled a martyr’s smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion. There it was, as punctual as the half-hour chiming from a clock, the cube of sugar moistened with rum swaying at the end of its piece of string … Tap-tap on her cheeks, there it was; tap-tap on her forehead, there it was again. Even if it were only a half-cube of sugar … There were moments when she had no saliva left to remember with, not even the pale pink water ices that her parents used to eat. Just a quarter of a cube of sugar … Why wasn’t she a little doggie? Here is my paw, here is my tongue, here are my eyes, here is the wordless language that they speak, here is my maddening silence. No, there were no takers, and binding her stocking tight round her head did nothing to cure the throbbing. She scattered her limbs across the disorder of the mattress. The roof flew off, and she talked to the owls who do not sleep at night, who gaze down at those who devour and those who are devoured, yet do not see them, and she said: my poor prisoner, if I could set you free … you’ve been in prison for so long … Her blood: that was her prisoner. She gathered herself together again and listened with compassion to her pulse. Then she hunched up tight and added that it was a beggar to whom she never opened the door. Why not? Why not open, why shouldn’t she sprout feathery, spurting fountains? She sat up and looked. That woman coming towards her, scattering feathers, and jewels, and diamanté, with dripping aigrettes emerging from her navel, from her anus … It was herself, it was her blood set free from every orifice. She was still importuned by palpitations of the heart. She was forced to bear with all the young and girlish emotions she had not felt when she was sixteen.
In the silences, longer and longer now, between the roars, she kept intent watch on her room, on the room that every night kept watch on her. Hundreds of little squirrels’ eyes, sparrows’ eyes, frogs’ eyes, toads’ eyes, chickens’ eyes, chicks’ eyes, hens’ eyes looked down from the ceiling, trying to make out what she would do, how she would stand up to it. The eyes bred and multiplied till the walls were papered with them: stupidity on the alert, ruthlessness keeping vigil. She fell forward with her head in her arms: thousands of beady chickens’ eyes were putting the same question to the back of her neck. Dying wouldn’t be so difficult an undertaking; but she would rather just go on being interrogated all the same. They were worse than some farmyard tragedy, those chickens’ eyes drilling so spitefully between her own. She drank a glass of water. Suddenly her attention was caught and held by a slight cracking noise, a signal made by a little insect beginning some methodical task in the woodwork of the sideboard or the skirting board. At the same m
oment, she caught the sound of an aeroplane, flying with its airmail through the sky. It was still possible to purr up in the sky, to fly away, to come back: all was not lost. She caught herself economizing her breath, concentrating on keeping desolation at bay inside her. Despair also meant dilapidation. She swept her forehead, her temples, her eyelids with wide brush-strokes, until she emerged from her mattress, from her room; until all the lights of Paris were giving their performance to one pale flower. The city, despite all its flickering lights, was yielding itself up to the silence of the trees along the avenues, to the desert of the transparent cafés. In a flood of gentleness, the grey statues on the Right Bank and the grey statues on the Left Bank were all posing for the same photographer: the night. The statues were dreaming that they were smiling as the river towed past its vessels built from darkness. She was touching up her picture of Paris. A merry-go-round under a tarpaulin: the epitome of a vast city. The grey monk, the old river, was floating past the gate of a weeping graveyard; the acacia was quivering beside the anthracite saucer of a coalyard; the street in the starveling glow from the street lamps was more than a street: a romance in another world bounded by the two graveyard walls.
Her heart was beating less quickly now, her stomach was listening to reason at last, the level of the methylated spirits in the bottle was still the same, the six potatoes were holding a conference on the table, there were a hundred and fifty francs hiding between the two tea towels, and there were spring mattresses to be bought in bedding shops. Stop there. Spring mattresses only lead one to thoughts of soft eiderdowns and bedcovers. And the hearts of the pastry palm leaves in the restaurants, they may look like iced ivory outside, but inside they too are soft, after you’ve found a thousand-franc note folded in eight on a pavement … She hid under the bedclothes. The total of the bill: nine hundred and sixty francs. She rose back to the surface, dazzled by a meadow filled with gold, a field of cows tearing up buttercups with rasping tongues. She recited her eight times table with a special emphasis on eight times eight is sixty-four; she was blinded by the gilding of a cock on a steeple; she recited Midi, roi des étés; she expanded near a red roof, against the blue sky. That young girl closing her parasol, carrying her straw hat slung on her arm by its ribbons, weighing that fleshy bunch of wistaria in both hands without picking it … Would no tomb be deep enough to swallow that young girl? She sighed with such conviction that her pillow was suddenly filled with all the sleep of all the sleepers in a dead city. Where was she as she remembered that simply allowing herself to float was more restful, more pleasurable than sleeping? To seek without finding is one way of attaining pleasure. She listened. Tears rolled down her cheeks because the little animal in the wood of the sideboard or in the skirting board would no longer be at his methodical task tomorrow. If the room had been less resigned she would have sobbed. Where would she be in a week’s time? She went straight off to sleep, then woke up again five minutes later. The insect had stopped its noise. Her room … it was filled with does, opening and closing their flirtatious eyes. No, it was only the night. Paris, ah, Paris in a silent film, Paris wrapped in Judex’s cloak. The building across the way didn’t play these tricks on her; it was grappling with the silence. She drank another glass of water, then buried her pretty little nose in the empty glass. That was her way of shutting herself off, of shutting out her memories.
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur Page 3