The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

by Violette Leduc

  The saleswoman came out from behind her counter. She couldn’t bear the way this customer was looking at her.

  She tried to pick up the rolls she wanted to buy, but they just flaked and crumbled on the chessboard of tiles.

  ‘This mania for mauling everything …’ the saleswoman grumbled to herself.

  ‘I wanted to buy them,’ she said like a penitent child.

  Nimbly, the saleswoman retrieved them with a piece of tissue paper.

  At this, she turned away her head, convinced that she had forgotten herself on the bakery floor, convinced too that the saleswoman had a generous heart, that she always cleaned up other people’s messes.

  ‘Please forgive me … they looked so nice. I wanted them!’

  Outraged, the saleswoman cast her eye over the green overcoat, the battered hat. She did not stare: time is money.

  With a single twisting motion of her wrists, the saleswoman sealed the rolls inside another piece of paper, leaving a pointed spiral sticking out at each end.

  But she derived no benefit from that delicious moment. She was still gazing at the same spot on the tiled floor: the money she had been given in the street was dribbling away in diarrhoea.

  ‘Here!’ the saleswoman said, at the end of her patience.

  She took them, her two little puff-pastry saints, and embarked on an extended thank you to the door. The bakery became an accumulating cloud of gratitude. The saleswoman was mistrustful: was she going to pay, this old maniac?

  ‘Is the twenty francs enough?’ the suppliant asked.

  She lined up her hundred and twenty francs on the marble counter.

  The saleswoman pushed back the twenty-franc piece. ‘It’s a hundred francs,’ she said by way of farewell.

  She ran out into rue d’Hauteville, she set off back towards the building where trying to sell, trying to part from what she loved, had meant being kicked out into the street. The rolls fell once more from her hands.

  ‘We’re too happy, they don’t want anything to do with us,’ she said to the little fox.

  For a moment she allowed herself the pleasure of pretending to abandon the food not earned with the sweat of her brow. ‘You’ll see how much they’ll miss us when we’ve gone!’ she said to him.

  But then she bent and picked them up off the pavement: the two little saints who were always falling down.

  If only she could feed him, share with him, chew with him. If she could only say: one, two, three, both together now, begin! There, in the street, in a field. You see them if you shake a hedge, my angel, my little angel. You see the little insects chewing their holes in the leaves, and though they don’t take any notice of one another, all the same they’re together. She was lost in reverie; her fingers had confused her package with a guitar – she was almost singing to him.

  ‘All I can do is make sure he knows what’s going on,’ she sighed to the bundle of white furs. She looked for a courtyard, for a porte-cochère as anonymous as the seven of diamonds she remembered having seen on a packet of diabetic toast. She halted a second time, felt a second wave of heat, and the beating of her heart suddenly filled her with panic. If, suddenly … if she could not eat them before she died … But then the dizziness and the panic passed off.

  She devoured the roll that had tantalized her yesterday, the day before yesterday, last week and the week before that, dangling at the top of the tree with the last dead leaf, and as she ate it she was also swallowing the plaster from the ceiling of her room, and the wheels and the seats of the overhead Métro. She listened, she looked to see if the well-dressed gentleman and the woman with the high heels were coming back to hook the gifts they had given her back out of her oesophagus with pointed fingers. But there was nothing to be seen or heard, except that the street was becoming young again as the day waned. She pushed even larger pieces into her mouth. She felt the need to pretend as she ate, to pretend that she was climbing up on the rail of the porte-cochere, that she was jumping down from it again into the courtyard, that the beast in her was taking over as she crammed it into her mouth. ‘All the same, we mustn’t lose our heads,’ she said to the earth under the paving stones of the courtyard, for the earth might snatch back the flour, the wheat, out of her mouth. She hid the other roll and chocolate in her hands and brought it up twenty times to her lips without biting into it. She went on playing her game, climbing up the gate and jumping down again, and none of the people passing took any notice, until the moment came for her to devour, to engulf the second roll as well.

  There was only the width of the street between her and the Paradise Apartments … The noise was refreshing. Why should she deprive herself of an oasis surrounded by noise? There were people going into the Paradise Apartments, people coming out. She would be like them: she would go in there with him, for him. She had shut him away, she had deprived him of the light, she had brought him to rue d’Hauteville and made him look ridiculous beside all the costly furs there, her little one. No, it wasn’t she who had done it: it was a finger pointing to the name on a street, to a man’s name. Her angel, her little angel, why shouldn’t he have lived in the Paradise Apartments? She invented a past for him, she delved into her imagination; she was so stripped of everything now that she wanted to be able to give. The man in the car there, just coming out of the Paradise Apartments in a flawless curve, then driving off towards rue du Quatre-Septembre, that was him, that was him too: the little fox fur, the lollipop-eater, the man who hadn’t wanted to see her in his office …

  She withdrew into the same courtyard as before, where everything was grimy and grousy, where everything became childlike again as the gentle rain she was accustomed to in the gardens by the old Porte de la Villette began to fall inside it. She was trembling as she walked, and she promised herself never to look over towards the Paradise Apartments again.

  Some creatures, when threatened, take refuge in burrows, in caves, in the bilges below the holds, in the eyes of needles, under coal heaps, under mud, behind a trigger, in the cannon’s mouth. Some set to work fortifying themselves with the bone they have been gnawing, or reinforcing their bars, or hardening their rock. She took refuge in mendicity: the warm feel of the coin that someone would place in her palm – a hand in hers. For a banquet she needed five hundred francs: she settled down to her task methodically, as methodically as the little insect in the woodwork of the sideboard or the skirting board. All she had to do was be patient and keep her eyes fixed in front of her. There was no need any more to give food to the birds – now it was the birds who were going to feed her, crumb after crumb. The passers-by had wings, they could hear what her lips did not murmur: pay for my meal, Little Father; give me enough for my meat pie from the bakery, Little Mother. I am on the side of light hearts and light wallets; look over here, you too can be made light. I never gave anything away, I deserve to be where I am. The idea did not cross her mind that a policeman might arrest her. ‘The package under my arm is what the furriers have thrown away as garbage,’ she said to a gentleman who had dropped fifty francs into her fleshy bowl. The stranger continued on his way without wasting time even on a shrug; beggars usually talk oddly, why should he express surprise? That first fifty francs attracted a hundred more, and those hundred and fifty became a magnet in their turn for an additional hundred. She stowed it all carefully away, this money she was earning with ever increasing facility; she was nursing a hoard of two hundred and fifty francs. Life, when you take the trouble to think about it, is an Ice Palace, she said to herself. Begging and skating. Skating and begging.

  ‘We shall eat this evening, my little one,’ she said. ‘I shall smile at you, and you, you will laugh.’ They said that foxes were cunning, but hers had never been so. He was her little one.

  She crossed the road, then spat without spittle, as a cat spits, at another furrier’s window: inside, wound around a tree trunk, was another fox fur glistening in a spotlight, as imposing as a dying lion in the tawny rays of a setting sun.

  ‘Don�
�t look, my darling. Whatever you do, don’t look,’ she said to her shabby companion through the paper.

  She pushed her battered hat down over her eyes, she shrugged her mouldy green coat back on to her shoulders with a twitch that made her look as though she’d been bitten by a flea, she put out her claws, and she spat out sparks of hate at that splendour basking in the window.

  The man in the dairy in rue d’Hauteville conveyed to her wordlessly that she was acceptable as a customer. She did not hesitate.

  ‘A slice of ham, a tin of fruit cocktail, and some cream cheese,’ she said.

  He did not take his eyes off her: a successful female hobo, that’s not something you see every day of the week. He gave her a carrier bag for her purchases, and she handed over her two hundred and seventy francs. She sensed that he was checking to make sure there was no vermin crawling over the money.

  ‘And here is what I owe you,’ the man said.

  He lined up three one-franc coins on the counter. She accepted them as the last alms of the day.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said.

  ‘Good evening, madame,’ he replied.

  And he locked the door after her, anxious to protect himself from latecomers. And she shut away the three francs in her handbag, anxious to protect herself from thieves.

  She lengthened her stride along rue du Quatre-Septembre, imagining herself a nanny from half a century before, with a fresh apron on … so white … over a bluish skirt, so full, so full … She walked on, she opened her eyes, she discovered once again that a glow in the sky at the end of a street is the most fragile of prayers when we are not in prison. She walked on, and on; her face was a camellia as she passed a fruit-seller pushing his barrow home from the open-air market, as his bright red apples disappearing into a side street brought everyone’s day to a close. Love me now, since you loved me before, she said to the little fox, taking him out of the package. Abruptly, the winter had become implacable: a stream of colder air suddenly emerging from the side street. The passers-by were bending into the wind as they fled; she felt less courageous about holding out her hand. No, she wouldn’t stop in place de l’Opéra. She had come there for the cakes in the Maison du Café, for a pair of gloves from avenue de l’Opéra. Perrin for gloves: such a reliable firm, you know. Gloves from Perrin. She began to recite the phrase aloud; she decided to go on reciting it without drawing breath until she reached place du Palais-Royal, her packages banging and bouncing against her thighs with ever increasing violence as she progressed. She continued to recite as she walked through the rain that had begun along avenue de l’Opéra; she wept, she laughed; she was a dromedary in a desert with her bouncing packages – the rhythmic jouncing of her rider’s heels against her flanks.

  She sat down on the steps of the Palais-Royal Métro station. It was raining, she would eat dinner out tonight, to the accompaniment of the amens and alleluias rising from the earth at the end of a shower. It was raining; she tried to make herself completely colourless, completely odourless, with that tiny, adored object she was clutching round her waist inside her coat. As the water streamed in lavish cascades from her hat, she sat fainting with pleasure at the touch of her old accquaintances: the little bell, the chain, the links, the silk cord. Intermission; the curtain fell. A young girl waiting nearby was looking at her with eyes full of sadness. To become free again she was forced to wait for what the young girl was waiting for: a young man with two pink tickets. She had promised: she opened the front of her coat slightly and he was sitting at the table with her for their meal of ham and cream cheese. She smiled, and the little fox laughed with his eyes. Around her, in a corner of place du Palais-Royal, the streams of country rain fell and splashed in wild disorder. ‘I’m not going to stay here forever, you know,’ she remarked to the bright globes on their metal arms – dream fruit on dream trees. But she did stay for another five minutes, for the sake of her shoes, which had not always let in the water. Then she threw down her greasy paper and left her dining room in a great burst of laughter, thinking how her dining table would be snapped up later by a great automatic dustcart …

  She walked through into the ordered beauty of the Louvre courtyard to look at the snowy cornices there. It seemed to be snowing decorations on to the roofs. Was it because she had nothing beautiful to look at at home that she tightened her fingers round an architect’s pencil as she walked across the courtyard of the Louvre? Probably. Eating after one has been hungry is like convalescing after being ill.

  She walked along the quais of the Left Bank with her feet sloshing about inside her shoes, and when she stumbled against one of the chestnut trees it was M. Dumont-Boigny emerging from the telephone book to wound her yet again: a thick-skinned man inside an old tree. Then, quite suddenly she flung her free arm around the tree, forgetting the telephone book, oblivious of M. Dumont-Boigny. Suddenly she was discovering again, as she always did, the movement, the fragility, the gentle palpitation of the lights reflected in the waters of the Seine. It was a river reflecting light, but it was also a breast heaving with emotion. She tried to explain this to the tree. The tree was deaf, but she would not give up; with her closed fist she tapped out her message on the hollows and ridges of its trunk: this continual movement of the lights on the surface of the water is the volume, the weight of a breast in a nativity. Paris, with its thousands and thousands of splintering lights, was dancing on the water. She opened her coat and compared. The little bell, the chain, the links, the dark brown silk cord. She wrapped the little fox up in his paper again, deciding that she preferred the stillness of death to glittering movement. The charcoal smudges of the trees beside the Seine brought her reassurance. What cause could she possibly have for apprehension? Her world consisted of nothing but what she had invented. Her arm was brushing against the padlocks on the booksellers’ boxes; it had stopped raining; the clock swelled its throat and called out the hour in dove-like tones. She hugged the package tighter in her arms and told the little fox that the rain had stopped, just as a mother might have told a child. It had stopped in Paris, outside Paris, around them, and far into the distance. She stroked her forehead as she walked, enjoying the gentle touch of infinity against it that comes after rain. ‘Goodnight, my little ones,’ she said as she passed the towers of Notre-Dame, the organs, the Masses, the fugues, the toccatas. A dark black swarm emerged from the hanging ivy, then went back in: all the sounds that had reverberated through Notre-Dame a little while ago, or the day before. She raised her head; she had never in her life been tender, tall, and nuptial like those two towers in the sky. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said to the little fox. But she didn’t; she threw down her handbag and her packages on the wet wooden top of a bookseller’s box and let herself sink into the dark green of its paint; she herself, with her gently beating heart, was the throbbing of that deep green colour, as deep and as calm as meditation. The whole of rue d’Hauteville collapsing into nothing at the bottom of a dying stove.

  She was accustomed to coming on foot from all over Paris to visit the River Customs building. But now the River Customs building had changed: she found herself sighing beside a compound in which lines of cars were waiting for their masters. On to the side of the building, once always secret and solitary, by day as well as by night, there had been built a shelter for two policemen. They were talking to one another, and two policemen in conversation was a sight that always sent her gliding noiselessly off into the shadows. She turned towards the cars and their drivers flashing past at sixty miles an hour. At the end of that speed lay silence; but the drivers of those missiles would never attain the dank silence of the River Customs building as it stood in contemplation of its own inner calm. She had come there three times a year for twenty years. Now there were all sorts of cars driving up and down on both sides of the entrance steps. She would not come there again.

  She continued her way across Paris on foot, and eventually arrived back in her own room, with three one-franc pieces, at eleven in the evening.

&nb
sp; Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries. She let herself melt into her furniture and her things. Why expend her love elsewhere when they loved her all the time, when they were waiting for her? The world is a heavy burden, and yet we carry it. As soon as we are back in our burrows, whether joyful or discontented, we close the door upon it, we turn our backs upon it. The fidelity of things is only an expression of our own infidelity. Sitting on the whitewood packing case under the little attic window, still fully dressed, her packages on her lap, she discovered that the afternoon just past had been the longest journey of her life, that her room was becoming obsolete. No time for rest after those hours and hours of walking. She was being harassed even by the pale yellow silence of a crust on the corner of the table. She threw her hat down on the mattress and rose from the packing case. Past, present, future: they were but a single toboggan, and she must cling to the bar with both hands. Desertion is not as easy as all that.

  What have I done? she asked each piece of furniture, each of her possessions, as she walked slowly round the room with her packages. Her voice echoed down a long corridor formed by the pieces of furniture and the things that were threatening her. She picked up the funnel from the sideboard and blew into it: not a sound came out. What’s the matter? she asked the iron bar of the little window as it rattled to draw attention to itself. At that moment came the roar, the invader who never tired, who was always there, always ready to remind her of everything. The ribbon, the brand-new sheet of paper, herself wrapping up the little fox before she set out. She had wanted to sell him, but things had been too much for her. Those minutes this morning, these minutes now in the evening: the sameness, the virginity of time. The roar of the overhead Métro was an old acquaintance who could always be counted on for a visit. All this sad wreckage had to be transformed into a marriage feast. She put her angel to bed, she tucked his rags and old clothes around him inside the packing case, and then she consented to undress. The stars were less curious than they had been the night before, except for a single eye still open among all the darkened windows of the building opposite. She was back home at last, yet she was trembling and her teeth were chattering. She told herself that it was because she was still hungry, and she began padding round and round the tin of fruit in syrup – in vain, because she had no can opener, no hammer, not even a pair of pliers. She followed the shuffling of her slippers around and around, by herself she formed a ring of hungry beggars circling the table. She counted, she decided she must stop after she had walked around the table fifteen times. She was trembling more and more, she could no longer see clearly, she felt that her furniture, her things were all leaving her. But no, that was not how she imagined death coming to her. Death was a presence in disguise who had been nibbling away at her ever since they cut her umbilical cord.