by Colette
What has happened to him is the same thing that has happened to you! He doesn’t recognize you. He steals glances at you, over his newspaper, stunned and revolted, to discover you suddenly, to examine, with a cold and lucid eye, this woman who is there in his home, who sings as she pushes the tortoiseshell hairpins into her chignon, rings for the maid, gives orders, makes decisions, arranges things . . . I swear to you, my friend, that in these fugitive moments there are looks, from lover to mistress, from wife to husband, which are frightening . . .
I remember a delightful remark my mother made one day, as she was being upbraided by my father.
“I forbid you,” she said, “to speak to me that way: you’re not even related to me!”
My childish ears remembered this singular remark and I have thought about it often since.
At this moment, you little pest, you’re quite capable of reading this with a pretty, wicked little smile which means: “You can understand why she bad-mouths marriage, she who . . .” I who what? I who never had any reason to congratulate myself for it? What of it! I won’t let you sidestep the question in a ladylike way. I will quote for you, as I remember it, the little sermon my mother gave me the night before I married the man I loved, and who loved me.
“So, my poor little toutou, you’re going to go away and leave me? You’re going away, and with who?”
“But, Mama, with the man I love!”
“I know perfectly well that you love him, and that’s not the worst part of this whole business. Believe me, it would be much better if you loved him less. And afterward?”
“Afterward? Well, that’s all!”
“That’s all. A lot of good it’ll do you! What I see most clearly is that you’re going off with some man, and I don’t find that very pretty, my daughter going off with some man.”
“But, Mama, he’ll be my husband!”
“Him being your husband doesn’t mean a thing to me. I myself have had two husbands and I’m none the prouder for it . . . A man whom you don’t even know!”
“Oh, but I do, Mama, I do know him!”
“You do not know him, you silly little thing, because you love him! You are going to go away, all alone, with a man, and we’ll watch you leave, your brothers and I, with long, sad faces. It’s disgusting that things like this are allowed.”
“Oh really, Mama, you’re extraordinary! What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want, naturally. But it’s not right. The whole thing’s set up so badly. Look at it for a minute! He tells you he loves you, and since you love him too, there you are in his arms, ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. But let him tell you all of a sudden, ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ and he looks different to you! You discover he has the short nose of people who lack judgment and balance, the short, thick neck of those who kill in a fit of anger, the subtle and seductive voice of a liar, the weak and sensual chin of a woman . . . My darling little toutou, don’t cry! I’m just an old killjoy. What can I do? I always say outrageous things, but the truth is that you’d have to marry your own brother if you wanted to marry with full knowledge of the facts, and even then! All this strange blood that comes into a family, and makes you look at your own son and say, ‘Where does he get those eyes, and that forehead, and his wild fits of anger, and his talent for lying?’ Ah, my poor darling toutou, I’m not trying to explain, or to make the world over, as they say, but the whole thing’s set up so badly!”
Forgive me, my friend. I’m letting myself get carried away by memories which might be lacking in happiness. I’m not trying to change what exists any more than my charming, crazy mother. Solitude, an intoxicating sense of freedom, and the absence of corsets has, as you can see, quickly turned me into a preacher of the worst sort. I only wanted to moralize a little, in my turn, purely as a tease.
And I bring to the game a lamentable conviction. It seems as if I can see, ten years or so from now, an old, dried-up, quibbling Colette, with hair like a Russian schoolgirl, in a reformist dress, who’ll go into the towns advocating free love, proud loneliness, and patatipatata, and a whole pile of nonsense! Brrrr! But what demon shows me the image, still more terrible, of a forty-year-old Colette, burning with a new love, ripe and soft beneath her makeup, combative and desperate? With both arms outstretched I push both phantoms away from me, and I look for a sheltered narrow path between the two of them, where a friendly hand guides me.
Goodbye, my dear Valentine. I am afraid you won’t like this letter. We will never understand one another, my friend. And I hope each of us will search, all our lives, for the other, with aggressive, unselfish tenderness. You no longer hope to “bring me back to the fold”; I don’t count on ever converting you. It provides our conversations with an artificial and inoffensive warmth, which gives us comfort and no illusions.
Goodbye! Go back to your tennis, in your Joan of Arc cuirass. I am going fishing for flatfish, which you find under your bare feet, in the deep holes left by the low tide. There’s a strong wind up, the sand is blowing in long, swift streams which run parallel to the horizon, and their rippling locomotion is dizzying. Beneath the low sky, the beach is an endless desert, the color of ash, and the pale dunes smoke in the wind which scatters them. You would perish from desolation here, my dear, and yet it pleases me . . . I hug and kiss you; come back very beautiful and very happy.
Your friend,
Colette Willy
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Sémiramis Bar
What has to happen happens . . . Accused of every sin, I appeared before my friend Valentine, after having received from her this enigmatic communication by pneumatique: “I have a lot of things to scold you for. You grieve me . . .”
How could I, unworthy person, have distressed that lithe young woman, so very elegant, without a doubt sewed into her woolen dress, for it looked as though she could neither quite sit down nor quite bend over nor quite walk in it . . . What in the world had I done? My pretty judge collected her thoughts, searched in the depths of herself for an exceptional amount of courage, and finally spoke.
“Well, then, this is it. You dined at the Sémiramis bar day before yesterday.”
“That’s true. But so what?”
“So what? That’s all. Isn’t it enough for you?”
“Yes, it’s enough, since I dine there two or three times a week. One eats well there.”
The aigrette—what could it be made of? steel wool?—on the top of the bonnet of woven wood and American cloth shuddered, danced, saluted.
“Why, you unhappy creature, that is a place . . . a place . . .”
“With a bad reputation. Heavens, yes.”
My friend Valentine abandons declamatory means and looks at me with sudden gentleness, a superior solicitude.
“Really, my poor dear, it looks as though you wanted to make your friends’ task of defending you impossible.”
“Who imposed that task on you? I certainly didn’t.”
“I mean, well, that . . . you know I’m very fond of you. What would you have me say when someone comes to tell me you were dining at the Sémiramis?”
“Tell them the plain truth—that it’s none of your business.”
My little judge blushes, hesitates. Dear me, how much easier is the role of the accused! I revel in the situation, I settle myself complacently, I sink into the most luxurious of my errors, and Valentine lacks the confidence needed to dislodge me from them.
“Of course, it’s none of my business. It’s in your interest. That sort of thing can do you harm. You seem to be doing it on purpose. And then, I will say, it’s all right if you just drop in there by chance. But it’s quite another thing to make a habit of it, to become as it were a subscriber to the place . . . If at least you went there with a group of people occasionally . . . But all alone in your corner there, with your newspaper and your dog, and all those people who speak to you, those odd little men in weird jackets, who wear rings and have bracelets on their ankles . . . A
nd besides,” she adds, plucking up courage, “they tell me that the suppers at that place are . . . frightful!”
“I don’t know anything about that, my dear. I don’t go there for supper.”
“That’s true, you don’t eat supper. But you surely know that the suppers . . .”
“I know all about it. Sémiramis tells me.”
“She tells . . .”
“Why, yes. She’s a great person, Sémiramis. You don’t know her? Haven’t you ever seen her little snub nose, like a bulldog’s, and her auburn chignon, and her fringe like the visor of a helmet, and her bosom like a Spanish balcony?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Too bad. She exudes an air of impudence, good nature, patience, and ridiculous good health. She charges very little for her leek-and-potato soup, her roast chicken with sausages, and her loin of veal—she even gives it away to a crowd of hard-ups in weird jackets, poor little paupers all dolled up, and they can get at her place their plate of food and la thune—a thune, Valentine, is a five-franc piece . . .”
“Oh, I know that, everyone knows that, for goodness’ sake.”
“Excuse me. Well, you see, in her ‘ill-famed’ bar, Sémiramis reigns, helmeted, armored in an apron with pockets. And ill-famed it is, according to your way of seeing things, which is the way of everyone, moreover.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Me, too. She knows all her customers by name, and knows the names of their friends. She doesn’t like strangers and will bark at the people who drop in just by chance. ‘There’s no chow here for you!’ I’ve heard her tell them. She knows all the scandals, all the gossip of all the bars, but is discreet, for one day, after telling me the sad and scandalous story of a brave little woman sitting there, Sémiramis added, ‘I’m the only one in the world who knows her story, she’d be terribly upset if anyone else in Paris knew it!’”
“Charming.”
“And I’ll bet you do the same every day! At any rate, with Sémiramis it’s only thoughtlessness. Then what can I do about it, my dear? I’m a homebody, I’m finicky, I like my quiet habits. I’m often obliged to dine out, before the theater, and I don’t willingly go into a big restaurant in the boulevards or into a fashionable grill room where you hear the people at other tables being named in whispers and gossiped about, skinned alive. I go to the bar kept by Sémiramis, appropriately named—Sémiramis, warrior queen, helmeted in bronze, armed with the meat cleaver, who speaks a colorful language to her crowd of long-haired young lads and short-haired girls . . .”
“That’s exactly what I reproach you for—associating with that low-class crowd!”
“Why?”
“Every night in that bar there are scenes: orgies, fistfights, even.”
“I repeat, I know nothing about all that. What’s it to me? The orgies at the Sémiramis bar must be, like all orgies, so banal they would convert the most far-gone to virtue. I’m only interested in the people who dine there. Valentine, it’s about them I’d like to talk to you, since I goodheartedly consent to give you an explanation. True, you find there a majority of young men who are not at all interested in women. At dinnertime there they are, comfortably at home, enjoying a rest. They are recovering their strength for suppertime. They have no need to waggle their hips or cry out shrilly or flutter a handkerchief soaked in ether, or dance together, or call out their order in a loud voice: ‘Sémiramis, another sherry for me, on Monsieur’s bill!’ They are gentle, weary, with their painted eyelids heavy with sleep. There’s one who bestows upon himself the name of a genuine princess; he asks for Vittel mineral water, and a lot of leeks in the soup, because it’s a depurative. Another one has the pathetic face of an anemic little girl, and he goes to the Sémiramis bar for his bouillon and his noodles, and the coarse ruler of the place fills his plate twice, crassly maternal. Then she exclaims, arms akimbo, standing in front of the lean and lanky young fellow with hallucinated blue eyes, who pushes aside his full plate: ‘There you go! You’ve been hitting dope again, eh? What’s your mother thinking about to let you destroy yourself like this? Doesn’t she have a heart?’ And there’s another one who, with his dark blue eyes and his innocent little nose, looks like Suzanne Derval; he barely pecks at his food and says, ‘Oh hell, don’t give me any sauce. I don’t want to ruin my stomach! And, Waiter! Once and for all, take away these pickles and bring me some benzonaphthol tablets.’
“Yes, there they are, not posing, but gentle and indolent and melancholy, like out-of-work prostitutes, but laughing easily and playing with the dog that Sémiramis found one night in the street. But if a stranger manages to get inside the bar for dinner, they become uneasy, with the sulky manners of shopkeepers wakened too early, exchanging from one table to another their shrill cries, forced laughs, obscene and trite remarks, the hanky-panky that attracts . . . Then, when the stranger or the group of thirsty and curious sightseers have emptied their beer steins, sipped their kümmels on ice, and left, as the door shuts upon them there is a whoop of relief, and afterward a settled calm and the murmured gossip, the thin chests bedizened with loud cravats and bright pocket handkerchiefs lean once more against the tables, relaxed and slothful, like circus animals after the exercise.”
Valentine is not very fond of having people talk to her at great length. The animation, the brightness of her face dims after a few minutes of attention and is replaced by a rigidity, a drowsy effort to keep the eyes wide open. I notice this now and fall silent. But decidedly she has not said all she has to say.
“Yes, yes, that’s all very nice. When you want to exonerate something you adorn it with literature and you tell yourself, ‘If I talk very fast and insert some fancy words, Valentine won’t see the fire for the smoke!’ It’s easier than telling me to go to the devil, isn’t it?”
This kind of gentle feminine trickery always disarms me, and Valentine, who often exasperates and sometimes astounds me, as if I suddenly glimpsed through her coils of false hair or through her cloche hats or extravagantly big and gauzy hats the pointed tip of a sly little animal’s ear. I cannot help laughing.
“But I’m not defending myself, you little beast! Defend myself for what and against whom? Against you? Would I condescend to that, megalomaniac that you are?”
She puts on her most seductive expression, as if responding to a man’s overtures.
“You see, you see? Now I’m the one that’s being attacked! Now, really! Because I allowed myself to say that the Sémiramis bar is not exactly a provincial branch of a convent and lacked respect when I spoke of that Queen of Babylon and other such places!”
“Sémiramis doesn’t ask for respect. What would she do with it? Respect can’t be eaten, can’t be sold, and it takes up room. But she allots to me a portion of her grumpy motherliness, which transforms her regular customers into a progeny pampered, knocked about, and submissive. Besides, her capricious humor, both grasping and spendthrift, renders her in my eyes worthy of an authentic scepter. For example, take this exchange I overheard one night. ‘What do I owe you, Sémiramis?’ asked a wretched-looking regular customer with anxious eyes and in a low voice. ‘No idea,’ Sémiramis growled. ‘I haven’t made out your bill. Do you imagine I have no one but you to think about?’ ‘But I happen to have some money on me tonight, Sémiramis.’ ‘Money, money, money! You’re not the only one who has money!’ ‘But, Sémiramis . . .’ ‘Oh, shut up, that’s enough! I can always find money when I need it, you know. That yokel down there at the farthest table, he’s just paid me a gold louis for his chicken-in-the-pot, that’s one hundred sous more than he’d pay at Paillard’s, just look at that bigmouth now, he’s getting ready to leave. His lordship didn’t want anything on my menu! His lordship had to order à la carte! His lordship thinks this is a restaurant!’ As she spoke, she focused her brown eyes on the intimidated and fugitive back of the ‘yokel,’ and if looks could kill he’d have dropped dead. Just imagine! He thought that by paying a golden louis he could eat poulet cocotte at S�
�miramis’s bar . . . Am I boring you, Valentine?”
“Not at all. On the contrary.”
“I didn’t hope for so much! This is success! Well now, I can tell you that while dining at Sémiramis’s bar I enjoy watching the girls dancing together, they waltz well. They’re not paid for this, but dance for pleasure between the cabbage soup and the beef stew. They are young models, young scapegraces of the neighborhood, girls who take bit parts at the music hall but who are out of work. Under their big umbrella hats or cloches pulled down to their eyes, their faces are hidden, I have no idea what the waltzers’ faces are like, so I can forget their no doubt dubious little fizzes, their slightly prognathous little fizzes, blue-white with powder. I see only two graceful bodies united, sculptured beneath thin dresses by the wind of the waltz, two long adolescent bodies, skinny, with narrow feet in fragile slippers that have come without a carriage through the snow and the mud . . . They waltz like the habitués of cheap dance halls, lewdly, sensuously, with that delicious inclination of a tall sail of a yacht . . . I can’t help it! I really find that prettier than any ballet . . .
“And that, dear Valentine, is when I leave the Sémiramis bar, with Sémiramis herself sometimes detaining me with a friendly hand as I reach the doorway. ‘Hush! don’t say a word,’ she whispered the other night, slipping over my finger the string of a bumpy parcel. ‘Not a word! These are apples dug out for you, some old pippins the way you like them, wrinkled like the hind end of a pauper . . .’ That makes you laugh, doesn’t it? I thought it was very nice of her. You see, she’d found out that I like old wrinkled apples with that musky smell of the cellar where I used to line them up when I was a child . . .”