The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

by Violette Leduc

  She might have saved herself the trouble: the memories were in her glottis too. The man who sold futures would be back in early autumn with the metal hand. He took yours and placed it palm down against his metal one. He came in a caravan, bringing his envelopes, ringing his bell. The bell was more leaden than the one outside the Eden cinema, but it could sound very like it if the wind was coming from the right direction, if the gutters had frozen over before it was time for the performance to begin. His bell told all the people that he’d arrived; a shivering foretaste of the futures he had brought them. She used to watch it all, but the only thing she liked was the metal hand because its outspread fingers had such purity of line. She preferred the tenant in the building, the man who trafficked in light and darkness before the first Métro train. He got up before the others, this pioneer, he recreated noise for her, and gestures, and movements, and socks and clothes and hygiene before finally banging the heavy outside door of the house behind him: a whole day over before the dawn had even broken. She must avoid turning over on her mattress. Five to one in the morning is not a kind time; it is a harsh master. The shawl slipped off, the water in the glass spilled, the dressing gown folded in three became recalcitrant. She made herself soft, she tried to be as inert as a lump of lead.

  Mariette, Lisette, Odile would be coming in and going to their separate rooms. They weren’t going to be a bundle of blackened seaweed that the sea has left behind in a room, on a mattress on the floor – but yes, there was something she loved. She loved Mariette’s and Lisette’s and Odile’s sleep. One o’clock. The ticket collectors were closing the zip-fasteners of their holdalls. Caterpillars were safe inside their chrysalises. Something else she loved: this respite from the noise. Paris in repose, Paris a victory for those lying wounded. The day after tomorrow she would imitate the rabbits, she decided; she would live on the outside leaves of cabbages. She’s an eccentric, her father and mother had always said, but there is no such thing as eccentricity: there is what is. She would like to scorn the whole world since the whole world scorned her. Could the old stocking still bound round her forehead tell her what she is? Yes, dried cow dung clinging to dried thistles. She applauded and shouted ‘Bravo’. Since she could talk to herself, since she could shout ‘Bravo’ with the others, all was not lost. What would you like, old woman? Four pancakes. Beef on the tongue, the taste of curdled milk, revulsions, pangs of hunger, heaviness in the stomach, waves of nausea … I’ve taken calomel, I’ve messed myself, she said with a disingenuous whimper. But the idea of the little girl being purged had no power of consolation, and the thought of going to the soup kitchen would never cross her mind. She drank a glass of water sweetened with the quarter-cube of sugar, then felt like throwing up. Her dead would turn in their graves if they could see her at her dolls’ tea party. But she, long accustomed to being her own accomplice, mistress as well as victim of the situation – she laughed. Degradation, she said emphatically. That was the title of the play she announced every night to her darkened room. But it was a cheat: the word bore no relation to anything. The money left by her dead, spent without joy, without ecstasy, without surprises, had never existed. The routine of habit goes beyond reality. Why live, unless to warm oneself in the sunlight … Degradation, she said again, shaping her mouth into a heart. Bunkum, since being born is already a degradation.

  Chasing one another, squeaking through her entrails ran the rats. Her bowels cried out their need, and the sound was like fragments of jazz thrown into a dustbin; one must eat to live, the tiniest insect will tell you that. Her battered hat, her shiny green coat, her tattered umbrella suggested she do something about it. Do what? she answered, pretending she was a bewildered child. All alone, like a dwarf scarcely maintaining her balance on shaky bowlegs, she ran around searching for something to sell. Not that. No, not that. No, she wasn’t alone! Her loyal companion was there: the little insect in the woodwork of the sideboard or the skirting board was at his methodical task again. Oh, the relief from the apprehension that she’d have to say goodbye. The little insect, with estimable tact, had not left her after all. She listened to it as it worked away: delicacy, syncopation, the finest carving, gossamer spun in the darkness, in the darkness of the sideboard or the skirting board. Never had crystal been lighter, never had a solitary task been so conscientiously accomplished. She ate an entire cube of sugar as a toast to the methodical little insect. As soon as she got up, silence returned. She waited for what the little insect was waiting for. Was it the dream of a presence, or was it really there? The silence was worshipping the night, and that was her room’s reply. The day would surely come for the building to be torn down. Her hope was stored in a safe place. The windowpane would break as the attic windows crumbled, but one shard would remain unshattered. That shard would be herself, with her immaterial face, her well-fleshed lips, her wise, limpid eyes as she rested standing up, just as she was doing at this moment. She was so old, and yet so little worn, that beauty looked moth-eaten beside her.

  She marched around her room, left-right, left-right, changed step in military fashion, then dressed to the right. She sang an energetic tune she had once had to practise, making gestures like a snake charmer above her grey hair to work up enthusiasm. Bang – she had stumbled. She fell across her table and felt she had been sacrificed because she had been living almost like other people; when she came out of herself it made her dizzy. It had gone, the methodical little insect, gone to prepare for even greater, even more dedicated diligence the following night, no doubt. She pouted and had to keep from weeping. She had been deserted, and it hurt. She confessed as much to herself in not quite coagulated phrases: what’s the good of looking, one must put up with what one’s got, there’s always someone worse off than oneself … The dripping tap water. Who had been so bold, so impertinent as to repair the tap in the middle of the night? She needed that sermon when she pulled her door ajar, and now she couldn’t hear the tap out of order telling her the story of her life: that drip-drip-drip of unrelieved monotony. She opened the door. The landing wouldn’t deprive her of anything, the landing would never try to trick her: the drops of water were still falling into the basin of all those being born, all those dying.

  At rights with herself once more, she closed the door and fell back on her mattress. She found emotions more and more difficult to cope with: if she went on making demands on herself, all her strength would wash away. She must buy quantities and quantities at the grocer’s; first she must sell something in Paris, then the glow-worms would guide her to the shop. The stone for her stomach that she’d found in the dragonfly dusk on the bank of a stream one autumn. It was a good conductor of heat, that was the explanation. But she hadn’t an oven any more, no kitchen range, no gas stove. The stone would shatter if she heated it directly in the flame of the methylated spirits burner. She saw herself growing old and mad as she watched and waited for the stone to heat up in the stove. But there was a salve for her wound: she could always die now, because she had drawn all her benefits from the apricot trees in autumn. Seeing them was her whole life compressed into an instant’s dream. She could see them still: pink or orange, and over the colour the lightest layer of fur. Her apricot trees, her undying adoration carried on in relays, with herself always taking over from herself to continue the perpetual act of worship. It was a man, and at the same time it was a child that she was loving in them. The sun behind a cloud, everything so delicate. A little pepper, a little salt, three or four roofs, a hamlet down in the valley, a rift of brightness before the rain, and she sallied forth to meet a multitude of futures. Bread, that was the future. If she wanted to live then she must learn not to eat. Take it or leave it. She would chew on a clock; dawn was breaking, milk cans had begun to clang, the city was on its marks for the hurdle race ahead. The sleepless hours: they could never drain her completely, and she could never quite get to the bottom of them. She climbed up on the packing case and let her head fall forward. The guillotine blade of five in the morning brought relief
as it fell glittering on to the back of her neck. Paris was waking up and she … she had finished until the moment came for the iron Métro gates to slither gently open again.

  The first noises of morning are chilly, and she wrapped her shawl around her. Mariette, Lisette, Odile were sleeping far from their unveiling. Angels, come down and pile their bowls high with delicious sleep. Another moment and she would be taking herself for a virgin protecting them. The daylight was lighting up her four walls. What a joke. What daylight does is to force its way into anuses, to sooth ulcers, to lance abscesses. Dawn is a treasure that dusts off the brows of dying men: night is a cesspit for those in pain. At bar counters, the first rum of the day was bringing renewed vigour and squaring customers’ shoulders: night, after all, was nothing but a spider’s web. A moment of old age: her hair a confluence of rivers, the crou-crou-crou of wood pigeons, the leaden sheen of her memories. But the rain in the square gardens would be younger than yesterday. She would sell something, she would make herself a present of a trip to the gardens in one of the squares. Her luggage? A buttered croissant. She laughed with her hand in front of her mouth, the earth would be blue in two months, and the ageratums in their frames laughed with her. I’m off to the flicks. Are you coming to the flicks? Shall I take you to the flicks? She said ‘flicks’ to be like them. Here then, baby, here’s some nice cream of wheat for breakfast; there’s a nice ship that brings in the day, bound from Singapore to the Batignolles with a cargo of flicks. Sick to death of all those silent bandstands in the parks, she would rush to the photos outside the cinemas and soak up some of the drama put out on display. On Wednesdays they always changed the programme, so that on Tuesdays the photographs outside were always neglected, abandoned: she could pretend they were her transfer. A dark-haired man, a blonde woman; a blonde woman, a dark-haired man. The actors’ names left her utterly indifferent: their real names for her were the names of the people she saw kissing one another on the streets. Her forefinger followed the broken line of the hair, stopped up the eyesockets, crushed the mouth, or paused if the lovers’ mouths were pressed together in a kiss. Prudish and indiscreet, at those moments she would look down with blind eyes at the drawing pin in one corner of the photograph. She was a sack of stones holding itself up of its own volition, this woman who had never had anything, who had never asked for anything. If the edge of the wind had caressed her neck at that moment, had caressed her neck just below the ear, then her heart would have stopped. She would have given her life and her death for another’s breath that close.

  She would leave the cinema without going in, she would wander about in the square, she would take up her position near the temple of the old Porte de la Villette. In the garden in the middle of the square, she would hide inside the weeping willow and listen to what her parents used to say about her. She still lives in a dream world, what are we expected to do about it? If she doesn’t snap out of it, that’s her lookout. They are dead now, what am I expected to do about them? she would ask the buttons on the garden attendant’s uniform. Poor lamp, you are burning low now, she said to her hands, her hands that had never lived, because they were the hands of someone entirely useless. Everything was holding back, except the early wheat sown the autumn before. February, when the fruit is spoiling on its straw and the light is as pale as the light in a loft. She crunched up two cubes of sugar in her mouth – how else was she to keep on her feet? Madness. She would grind up a soup spoon of coffee beans, and eat two slices of bread. Madness + madness = madness. By attempting to go on living, she was speeding up the coming of her end. That light suddenly, that light prophesying light to come … Someone was beaming the searchlight of happiness into her room. Happiness. It had been necessary for her to grow old before she could think of it unexpectedly like that, without having learned, without having ever understood what it is. Happiness is something you discover afterwards, she said categorically, as if she had been happy once.

  Her liveliness restored by the two cubes of sugar, feeling lighter for that wasteful inroad upon her stores, she made the grinding of the coffee beans into a ritual celebration of the sun’s return. The water was boiling, the filter was ready, when two bronzed arms spattered with plaster lifted her with a roar off the ground, made a hole in the ceiling for her – she had seen so many scaffoldings, so many workmen, during her daily walks – so that her face and her silver hair were bathed in the sunlight. The roar continued, the overhead Métro thundered around a bullring. She came back to earth and poured the water on the coffee. Living was simple: it was no more than a few habitual actions strung on to a routine. The sun had gone, but there was a shining highlight on the chrome-plated filter. What had happened to her? It was simple: she was going to restore her strength without thinking of economy. She ate; her teeth melted with delight as they sank into the coffee-soaked bread; her stomach was a pit of pleasure – and the passing train was as frivolous as smoke. But the pencil was already beckoning before the last mouthful; figures will not wait, they are executioners intent on torturing their victim. She dozed off beside her bowl, then woke with a start. Mariette, Lisette, Odile had begun their daily traffic with the objects on their dressing tables. She must earn her livelihood. She must earn her idleness. Now that she had eaten, a wave could come and swallow her up if it liked, her and her deficit too. Was it autumn darkening the spring? Was it spring bringing new life to autumn? The seasons always mislead us. If she could only be close to a meteorologist, become intimate with reduced visibilities due to rainfall. He would talk to her about shipping forecasts, about the state of the sky, about low-pressure areas. What was she going to look for … The beauties of the heavens, which were also the immensity of her own ignorance. But she didn’t really believe in these great schemes for companionship. Companionship, for her, meant a man putting down his blowlamp on her bedside table. The dream was lost in the butter-coloured light being reflected off the whitewood packing case under the window. She took her lukewarm bath beside the packing case, and having decided not to hear the roar, she did not hear it.

  Come closer to me, my little one, oh, come closer, hummed the packing case under the window. It was an object, but she lent it her voice so as not to be struck down by a sudden lightning flash of loneliness. This was the twentieth time since the previous evening that she had leaned over the packing case without opening it. A slow journey through her forest with its trees like tall organ pipes. Beginning of dictation. Lean over, look for him, take him out of the packing case. The baker … the grocer … the butcher … their joint statement: ‘… We extend credit to those who earn their livelihoods.’ An affront shot at her like a bullet, a justified humiliation. She worked just as hard as all the people with jobs. She painted them on canvas, she sculptured them in marble; she mounted them, she fitted them into settings. They rose up and up, they forgot themselves as they wore themselves out at their tasks, while she followed their every movement under a magnifying glass, while she thought of nothing but them. She had trembled like a leaf the day the new assistant in the bakery, a mere child only hired that very day, was made to arrange eighty cakes in the store window. ‘Give us some slack, man, give us some slack.’ Lying flat on their stomachs on the roof they watched to see if the slack was coming, gazing down at the hoisted plank from which they would do their rough casting. She had gone down into the street to see the provider of slack. She saw a man pulling at ropes, or letting go of them. Such knots he tied. And the screeching of the pulleys: their death cries set one’s teeth on edge. They were joking and whistling. She was more afraid than they were: she could see the danger more clearly. The pulley was still screeching, the whole thing might give way: she stopped breathing. They could sing as they adjusted the knot of their entire existence. Their lives were saved without their having felt a single pang of alarm. They all discussed the food in a certain restaurant. That was in the days when she used to eat a sardine or a fried egg for lunch, along with her piece of bread. That day she had eaten no lunch. She had stayed at the
window keeping an eye on the pulleys, on the swaying planks, and then, going back to the table already set for lunch, she had taken up the knife, the one she used to cut the stewing steak up into frying steaks, and run back to the window with a plan in mind: to cut the rope, to escape back into her room, and wait. But she had been spared the reality: the window was too small. Then they had come back with another batch of the latest hits, whistling as they scraped at the grimy façade with their trowels.