The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

by Violette Leduc

  She walked to and fro near the whitewood packing case at half past seven in the morning, imitating those patient men and women in the Gare Saint-Lazare, the ones who prowled a long way from the trains, because for them the station was only a pretext. She had the right to imitate them: she had given them all her tears, all the tears she had swallowed down with a choking throat as she watched them come together with gestures and caresses. Is this all there is, she managed to ask herself. For you, this is all there is, answered the cold sweat slithering down her spine. Hooked grimly on to her handbag, stiff as a post, she fussed with them as they made up their minds. They would go into a café, they would hurry off towards the Opéra, or towards Saint-Augustin. What she had, she gave to them as they disappeared: her handbag as it fell, her hands in their black and white patched gloves. They departed in triumph. They took her whole fortune without asking for a thing. They left her the quiver in her lips, the musical laments with which she accompanied their disappearances, the ungloved hand pressed against lips whose silence was more despairing than any cry could have been.

  At the ticket offices, the clerks punched a hole in the town you asked for. Go on a journey? Go on a journey just to be blinded by the glaring intimacy of two sheets as they hung airing over a windowsill three quarters of an hour from Paris? She would rather just close her eyes where she was. The back of her neck after the lovers had left the station: not an ulcer, not a malignant tumour, but something cold and flat. A disease of transparency, a piece of mirror from one of the women’s compacts as she made her finishing touches, as she perfected her appearance while the man approached. As she went down the steps of the Gare Saint-Lazare, everyone could see in the mirror on the back of her neck what it was she lacked, what it was she had stolen. She who considered herself above lipstick and face powder … She didn’t dare brush against anything, no matter how lightly. Not even the edging of grime and soot along the tops of the houses, that furry strip of consolation, that band of astrakhan, the answer at last to so much supplication, a black line of compassion for those who must eat out their own hearts. She would buy some gnocchi at Rey’s; you were supposed to heat it up, but she chewed on it still cold: the piece of mirror on the back of her neck fell off, the city shattered, it was the city she could hear sobbing with dry eyes in cafés, in hotels, at Cook’s, in the museum.

  She was walking back and forth in front of the whitewood packing case because she wanted the fringes of her shawl to brush from time to time against what was awaiting her, against what she was waiting for. Hope: the opposite of death. At night she wanted him to rest, so she wrapped him up. When day came, she ran over to be near him. Then, without looking at him, without going too close, she would cover him with dew. Not so much disturbed as simply moved, she would forget what it was, who he was. Now, at seven-thirty in the morning, she murmured that he was a flock, that she was a part of that flock: a very tired lamb doing its best, still trying to stay on its diligent little legs and not lag behind. She murmured all this with so much conviction that her breath went whirling like a savage gust of wind through all the market gardeners’ houses on the outskirts of the city. Then, as she murmured the same thing again, all the blue-tinged primroses for sale began to lean in the same direction. The act of love going on in her room was a gratification for the distant flowers. If an overhead Métro train whirled past to drown her shouts in its torrent of clanging metal, then she would howl out: I adore you, my adored one. But if there was only the meaningless dripping of the tap, then she would whisper: I’m here beside you, but I don’t want to disturb you. One should never look at what one loves too early in the morning – the things we love are too fragile so early in the day, as fragile as the thread a spider is spinning at the edge of a wood. The delicate waves of her emotion reached so far that whole banks of snowdrops and violet leaves, in Chaville, in Meudon, would lift up their heads and quiver with interest.

  She fell down in front of the packing case as though she were a private in the infantry crumpling with fatigue, shedding his rifle, his webbing, his water bottle. Her trembling body, hugging itself to the case, was saying ‘no’ while her head was saying ‘yes’: the passion of a distant misunderstanding in some far-off region where she could retain her awareness of herself, yet go beyond herself. ‘My angel,’ she said gravely to the creature she didn’t want to disturb, employing the same tone of voice that others use when they say ‘My corporation, my dignity, my security.’ My angel: an expression she had picked up in the street, near the entrance of a cheap, one-night hotel. Two customers had been coming out of the hotel, two kids with briefcases under their arms. My angel. She had pressed his hand, she had thanked him for having made love to her with those words. But her angel, her angel in the packing case was too much like the archangels, though she did not grieve for that. Waves, vibrations, a breeze, a refreshing coolness, spasms of offering in her belly that were almost pains, melting feelings in her flesh, a flame that writhed inside her. That had all stopped at twenty-five.

  Her angel. Here is how she met him, how she brought him back to her room. One night she woke up with her throat dry. Day had begun to break, though it was only half past three; the birds had begun to stir. Like a pregnant woman in the grip of an irresistible fancy, she pulled on her clothes as quickly as she could, and went out to search for a summer orange in the crates full of yesterday’s rotting merchandise. It had become an obsession: the summer was burning implacably in her throat, the whole city was hatching out a drama beneath its broody weight, the dawn was a layer of insipidity over a grey desert. The sun had not yet risen, but it had already begun its daily task of devastation. She made bold, though in vain, with the insides of the dustbins; but she was afraid of stealing anything that belonged to the dustmen: it was their profession, after all, and she was only seeking to satisfy a sudden fancy. Paris at that hour in the morning, with its crushed cabbage leaves lying in the gutters, is a place forlorn. The sky looked down with its white eye, and the white roses in the florist’s window were a mockery: they could do nothing against the heat, against the stifling day in preparation. She lifted the lids, looked in at what the dustmen ought to be the first to see, then replaced them without a sound. Not even a quarter of a summer orange. The stalls, the women shopping, the bunches of yellow balsam wound past her in a dream. A summer without rain, without storms, is so heavy to carry. The trees were full of presentiments too: a warning of the humid, day-long hell ahead. She would lie down, the noise of the overhead Métro would bring a little ventilation … She was so thirsty for an orange. Have a little patience, little girl. But she didn’t want to be patient, she wanted to steal back into her room with furtive steps. The main road was a dungeon with wide-open doors through which floods of light would soon come rushing in. The little side streets were escaping towards the sea. Where were they? Had they been imprisoned? Had they been alive once? The façades of the houses were exchanging across the streets. The light was already stark on the chimney tops: stripped of shadow, they were like crosses wandering across a graveyard. What could she hold on to before she died of the heat? To that big carton standing at her feet. Idiot, it was begging you to notice it all the time your head was in the air. It was blue, with an inscription: ‘Rolande.’ Perhaps it was an orange, there in front of the tripe shop with its iron shutter down.

  Under the attic window, in her room, she felt about inside the whitewood packing case with feverish hands. Under the mauve tissue paper, under the lining material with its rows of pinholes, under the layer of multicoloured scraps. Her angel, the angel she had found in a cardboard box, in front of an iron shutter, as the clock chimed four in the morning. TRIPE SHOP. She could still see the lettering. The dustmen were secret people; they searched the silence with their hooks; they were important; they separated the light from the darkness inside dustbins. She had stolen a march on them by going out to look for a quarter or two of rotting orange. They wouldn’t have held it against her if she had explained how she loved to find a sing
le cool lettuce leaf lying among the limp greenstuff clinging to yesterday’s newspapers. If she took a train early in the morning she never dared to look at them directly or get in their way. They were bigger than ants, but more squat than ordinary men. If one had come towards her, she would show him how she was stroking her cheek with an old lettuce leaf left in the gutter. But that morning she was afraid of them. They might take it away from her. She had been hoping for a quarter of an orange and she had found a winter fur in summer. But a woman who feels the cold, walking along with her little fox around her neck in the dawn, that was quite normal after all. Not that it warmed her at all: it stank. She began to run; the light was becoming brighter; how everything babbles when something unusual happens! She ran as far as the cul-de-sac where the parked lorries stood like a line of inscrutable sphinxes. She shook out the little ragamuffin, the funny little fellow, the tiny furry creature; she banged her hobgoblin against the hood of a Berliet; a window opened slightly; the cul-de-sac reeked of mothballs. She wrapped the fox around her neck and fled. As she did so, she almost fainted, she was so moved by the silk cord, by the shape of the links, by the chain, by the tiny bell between her fingers as it tinkled out instructions on how she must fasten it so as not to lose it. The mountain pink that she became every day for a lollipop-eater on a Métro platform was now lending its scent to the little fox around her neck.

  She emerged with long strides into the main street, ready to slap down the first stone, the first bench, the first attic window that dared to stare at them. Her progress was a dream, because the uniform grey of the city was the stuff of dreams. If she were to dawdle, if she were to slow up, if she were to take her little rascal for too long a walk, the dustmen would spring out at her from the buildings. She could almost hear them coming. There would be loudspeakers howling out that the fur belonged to them. She could see the back of her neck after they had taken it away from her: the livid square of that poster on the door of a grocer’s. She took the fur off, then wrapped it back around her neck, trying to get used to it. That tuft, it was hanging on by no more than a thread – what if it should fall … It would leave a trail; the dustmen would follow the trail and insist that she gave the little fox back. Where is your big sack, they would ask. Where is your fork, your hook? She had nothing but her fingernails. There are times when a moment’s hesitation can lose you everything. She tore off the tuft that was hanging by a thread, and hid it in her handbag. She felt safer again, once the extraction had been performed; but only for an instant: the tripe shop was calling after her.

  As she walked past the windows of the Nouvelles Galeries department store she took fright again: the bread bins, the magazine racks, the pot-holders, the workboxes, the linen baskets … they were her family life, the strata of her past unearthed by archaeologists. It was bright day now and the pavements looked brand new. An arm, a hand, a sponge, a bucket inside a butcher’s shop. The colour of the calf’s tongue that she could not describe to herself was giving her a migraine: there were enemies banging with mallets inside her head whenever she tried to look for the right words. Instead, she spelled out where the little rascal around her neck had come from: t-r-i-p-e s-h-o-p. But the fox was going to disappear back to its cardboard box if she couldn’t find the right words for the colour of the tongue, if she couldn’t capture both things at the same time: the colour of trust, the colour of goodness in its latent state, the colour of warmth in your feet, the colour of a freshly sheared sheep, the colour of the sun between the cracks of a cattle-lorry, the colour of the flannel after a bilious attack.

  Circling in her memory there rose recollections of how the bowls of coffee had tasted – more milk than coffee – at breakfast, in the mornings, after she had dusted talcum powder on to the skin where her poultice had burned it. She spread her arms, she turned so that her back was to the street and flattened herself against the shutter. They might shoot her, but the hell with it; she wanted to examine the surface of the tongue in the butcher’s window while ceaselessly caressing the little rascal round her neck – for already she had learned to caress him by heart. What was there on a calf’s tongue? Ah, have mercy, she thought as the mallets hammered inside her head. There was the freshness, the rainbow sheen of convalescence. Sand … yes, of course, fine sand on the petal of a rose with a hint of yellow at its heart. How far away they were now, those laborious and pleasurable hours spent with her tubes of paint: she had painted so many seascapes, though she hated the sea. But what she had painted best – all of them without a brush – were the thousands and thousands of sunsets she had waited for, followed and finished after they had disappeared: her altars, her sacred wafers while her parents were entertaining their Abbés. Beaches, expanses of ecstatic colour, great trains of Oklahoma – she was sobbing now. Bygone ages, civilizations, ancient tragedies – she had started running again. She clasped a tree in her arms, for the prophecy of light, for the athlete bearing the flaming torch.

  She took the little fox back to her room and examined it beneath her attic window. To find something, no matter how ignorant or how learned one may be, is to dip one’s finger into cerulean blue. And what she found now was warmth, relaxation, and a caressing softness. The fox had offered itself to the first comer, and she had been stronger than the others. They had all been asleep and it was she who had come upon him. 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. 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. The trappers in Vancouver will sell you the coats off their backs without a second thought … Where had she read that? How did she dare make comparisons between a full-length marmot and her decrepit, shabby little tippet?

  She plunged her face into her little one’s naked groin and snuggled there. Who had clung to him like this in the past? Who else had kissed him until she was exhausted, oblivious of the whole world? She invented past passions for her ragamuffin as she sat with him beside the dirty dishes. She did not go out walking with him in her square, in front of her cinema, in her waiting room, outside her café, as she had promised herself she would. Someone might recognize him, they might be separated. She made a setting for him out of her own existence, she mounted him in her private life, this brother, this child, this companion, this lover she had brought into the world. She would take him out on to the quais after dark, when the weather was warm, when the lines of lights on the pleasure boats were drifting past the flags of ivy hanging down the river wall by Notre-Dame. She would give the shopping bag in which she carried him on these jaunts a shake: the church and its towers would quiver with the music of a requiem, and the lighted pleasure boats slid silently along the Seine. They are going to come and search my room, they will find him there, she would say to herself afterwards, as she was walking past the restaurant and café terraces. Who were ‘they’? Don’t know, she would answer, and a feeling of sadness would well up inside her, because she knew that the fox was really nothing but a little dead animal that someone had thrown out into the gutter.

  As each day passed, she kept him more and more closely confined, eventually refusing him even the flattering light of the moon. She would squander a match for him on dark and moonless nights; she would move the flame to and fro along his length, enchanted at burning her fingers for his sake. Then, in the same dark night-time, he would warm up that place behind her ear where we need other people so much. What had to happen happened: he grew more beautiful as he acquired greater value, and he gave her what she asked of him. She would run away with him, and their long transcontinental train would crush the young girl and her parents lying on the rails. The little fox, when they came back, would look into her eyes with the eager and hopeful gaze of cheap jewels. Now that she was a mother by adoption, whose life was all caresses, transports, ecstasy, grief and pain, the slightest
whiff of bindweed was enough to make her start calling this adopted child her beloved, her lover.

  But now the time had come when she must sell him, offer him up for sale, part from him. It would not be difficult to sell him, for he was a unique piece. Then she could buy him back later on, later on when she had made her fortune, and she would enshrine him then in memory of the bad, dark days they had lived through together. She questioned him: could he see that it was Judas he had before him? ‘Judas’ is easily said; but one is obliged to look out for oneself if one wants to eat. Parting from what one loves is normal. What is there in life one doesn’t have to part from? She would be with him again one day: she was going to stride over islands, over rocks, she was going to become rich. Her eyes, when the moment came to find him again, would be roses nestling among laurel leaves: he would hear her when she called to him. He would prick up his ears, they would have become two antennae sensitive even to the murmurs of rising sap in flower stems, to the snowdrop’s soprano, to the alleluia rising from a pool of violets. Tawnier than the flaming sun, he would move towards her between two hedges of trombones and tubas.

  Set forward then! The sacrifice had already become a victory. What should she wrap him in before presenting him to the prospective buyer? In a sheet of brand new paper tied with gift-wrap ribbon. Two purchases = a double folly. She rushed into that folly, she would be rushing into famine if she did not sell him. She would sell him, yes she would, there would be enough time to lament when she had the money he brought her. She had loved him, she would go on loving him. Every day, every night, she would dance round and round the packing case until she was possessed by a tom-tom; she would take his tomb in her arms and she would dance with it. She swore it, she swore she would buy him back with his own weight in gold. One must part from what one loves before one can know its true worth. She could see the whole world peopled with connoisseurs of his merits: buy Little Foxes, they’re a sure thing, they’re the bluest of blue chips. Figures tormented her: the lackeys of the wealth she had in her possession. There was no way out of the dilemma but this: if he succeeded, then she would succeed. They would both fly off on their own wings. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The roar of the overhead Métro. She wondered why she still listened to that irrelevance. How was she to contact the buyer? Rome wasn’t built in a day. Whenever there is a decision to make, all the old proverbs come crowding in upon you uninvited. Proverbs: a limitless capital, the income, the dividends of experience. She delved into this fund, she was reassured by this wealth; she took the hundred and fifty francs out from between the two tattered dishcloths.