The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  No matter. Our goal, though difficult to attain, is not inaccessible. Words, as we cease to feel their urgency, become detached from us, like graceless vein stones from a precious gem. Invested with a subtler task than those who speak classical verse or exchange witticisms in lively prose, we are eager to banish from our mute dialogues the earthbound word, the one obstacle between us and silence—perfect, limpid, rhythmic silence—proud to give expression to every emotion and every feeling, and accepting no other support, no other restraint than that of Music.

  The Circus Horse

  “Dressing room 17, shall I find it along here?”

  “. . .”

  “Thank you very much, Madame. Coming straight in out of the street, one is quite dazed by the darkness of this corridor . . . So, as things are, it looks like our being neighbors!”

  “. . .”

  “True, it’s nothing to write home about, but I’ve seen worse, as artistes’ dressing rooms go. Oh, please, don’t bother, I can drag it alone; it’s my costume trunk. Anyway, my husband won’t be long now: he’s engaged at present in speaking to the management. You’ve turned your dressing room into something quite pretty, Madame. Ah! and there’s your poster. I caught sight of it on the walls on our way from the station. A full-length poster, and in three colors, that always spells class. So you’re the lady with the detective dogs?”

  “. . .”

  “Oh, sorry, I was confusing you. Pantomime, that’s it, and very interesting too. It was actually in that line I first worked, before I took up the weights! Come to think of it, I had a little pink apron with pockets, and patent-leather shoes, something after the soubrette style, you know. Pantomime’s not much of a bind, when all’s said and done. One hand on your heart, a finger to your lips, which goes for ‘I love you,’ and then you take your bow, that’s all there is to it! But I very soon got married, and off I went, to serious work!”

  “. . .”

  “Yes, weights are my job. I don’t look the part? Because I’m so small, you mean? That’s just what deceives people, but you’ll see for yourself tonight. We’re billed as ‘Ida and Hector,’ you’ve heard of us, surely? We’ve just done Marseilles and Lyons, on our way up from Tunis.”

  “. . . !”

  “Lucky? Because we’ve done a fortnight in Tunis? I don’t see what’s lucky about that. Far rather play Marseilles and Lyons, or even St.-Etienne. Hamburg! There’s a proper town for you! Naturally I’m not talking of big capitals, like Berlin or Vienna, places one can call big cities, especially when it comes to real slap-up establishments.”

  “. . . ?”

  “Why, of course, we’ve moved around, gone places! You make me laugh, speaking so envious-like! As far as traveling goes, I’d willingly let you have my share, and no tears shed!”

  “. . . ?”

  “Not that I’ve had enough of it, but that I’ve just never cared for travel. I’m the cozy sort. So’s my husband, Hector. But, you see, there’s just the two of us in our show and the best we can hope for is three weeks in the same town, or a month at most, in spite of our number being very good to look at, very well presented. Hector with his athletics, all very flexible and light, and me with my weights, and a very special whirlwind waltz, very new, very stylish, to finish off our number. So—what more d’you want? We get around quite a bit, the way things go!”

  “. . . !”

  “It’s Tunis that gets you, that’s clear enough! And I wonder why, considering the establishment there’s no great shakes!”

  “. . . !”

  “Oh, it’s to see the town? and the surroundings too? Well, if that’s your idea, I’m hardly the one to inform you; I’ve not seen much of it.”

  “. . . ?”

  “Yes, I’ve been a little bit here, a little bit there. It’s a big enough town. There are lots of Arabs. Then there are the small booths—souks they call them—along the covered streets; but they’re all badly kept, crammed one on top of the other, and downright lousy too. Why, it made me itch all over when I had to clean and throw away half the stuff! All that’s sold there, I mean, rugs that are not even new, cracked pottery, everything secondhand, so to speak. And the children, Madame! Scores of them, crawling on the bare ground, and half naked too! And what about the men! Handsome fellows, Madame, who stroll along, never in a hurry—with a little bunch of roses, or violets, in their hand, or even tucked behind their ear, like a Spanish dancer! And nobody puts them to shame.”

  “. . . ?”

  “The country round about? I don’t know. It’s like here. The land is cultivated. When the weather’s good it’s quite pretty.”

  “. . . ?”

  “What sort of plants? Exotic? Oh, yes, like in Monte Carlo? Yes, yes there are palm trees. And also little flowers that I don’t know the names of. And then, lots of thistles. The people over there pick them and stick them onto long thorns, pretending they smell like white carnations. White carnations may be all right for you, but for me, smells just give me a headache!”

  “. . . ?”

  “No. I’ve not seen nothing else. What do you take us for? We have our work, and that comes first. My routine in the morning, to start with, then a friction, then my complete toilet, and by then it’s breakfast time. Coffee and the daily papers, then I get busy with my work. D’you think it’s a joke to keep two people spotless, underwear and all, without mentioning our stage tights and costumes? I couldn’t stand a stain or a missing stitch . . . that’s how I am! Between St.-Etienne and Tunis I made myself six slips and six pairs of underpants, and I’d have completed the dozen, had Hector not fancied he needed flannel waistcoats! And then there’s the dressing room to be kept clean, the hotel room has to be tidied up, expenses accounted for, money to be banked. I’m very particular, you see.”

  “. . .”

  “Now you, who talk so much of travel, now you just take Bucharest! Never did a town bring me such trouble! The Establishment had recently been renovated and the damp plasterwork sweated. At night, what with the heating and the lights, the walls of our dressing room simply dripped water. I noticed that at once, and lucky I did, for imagine the mess it would have made of our stage costumes! You should have seen me every evening, at midnight, dragging about my two sequinned dresses, the ones I wear in the whirlwind waltz, one in each hand, on a couple of coat hangers! And every day at nine I had to bring them back. Now, please tell me if I could come away with happy memories of that town.”

  “. . . ?”

  “Oh, you just leave me alone with your travel mania! You won’t make me change my mind on that subject, and I’ve visited enough countries, I can tell you. Towns, the world over, they’re all the same! You’ll always find, first, a music hall to work in; second, a tavern, Munich-style, to eat in; third, a bad hotel to sleep in. When you’ve been all around the world, you’ll think like me. Over and above that, there are nasty people everywhere, so one has to learn to keep one’s distance; and one can count oneself lucky when one comes into contact, like today, with people who are good company and have class.”

  “. . . !”

  “But not at all! No flattery intended, believe me. Au revoir, Madame, until tonight. When you’ve finished your number, I’ll have the pleasure of introducing you to my husband, who will be as delighted as I was myself to make your acquaintance.”

  The Workroom

  A small third-floor dressing room, little more than a cramped closet with a single window opening on a narrow side street. An overheated radiator dries up the air, and every time the door opens, the funnel of the spiral staircase belches up, like a chimney stack, all the heat from the lower floor, saturated with the human odor of some sixty performers and the even more potent stench of a certain little place, situated nearby.

  Five girls are packed in here, with five rush-seated stools jammed between the makeup table and the recess in which are hung, hidden and protected by a grayish curtain, their costumes for the revue. Here they live every night from seven-thirty till twent
y minutes after midnight and, twice a week, for matinees, from half past one till six. Anita is the first to come in, rather out of breath, but with cool cheeks and moist lips. She shrinks back and exclaims: “Lord above! It’s not possible to stay in here, it turns you up!”

  She soon becomes accustomed to it, coughs a little, then doesn’t give it another thought, since she only just has time to undress and make up. Her frock and underslip are removed quicker than a pair of gloves and can be hung up anywhere. But there comes a moment when she curbs her haste and her face assumes a serious expression. Anita cautiously extracts two long pins from her hat, and carefully sticks them back through the same holes. Then, under the four turned-up corners of an outspread newspaper, she religiously protects that garish yet mingy edifice that contrives to look like a combination of a Red Indian headdress, a Phrygian cap, and a dressed salad. For everyone knows that grease powder, flying in clouds from shaken puffs, spells death to velvet and feathers.

  Wilson, the second on the scene, enters with a vacant look, hardly awake.

  “Listen! Hell! I’d got something to tell you . . . I must have swallowed it on the way.”

  She, too, takes off her hat according to established rites, then lifts a fringe of fair hair off her forehead, to disclose an incompletely healed scar.

  “You can’t imagine how my head still throbs from it!”

  “Serves you right,” interrupts Anita in a dry tone. “If you will go and get half the scenery on your ‘nut,’ and if this happens in a joint where the managers are mean enough to send you home with tuppence worth of ether on a handkerchief—without even paying the cab fare or the doctor’s fee—so that you have to stay put, half dead, for a whole week, and if you haven’t even the self-respect to sue the management, then you do not complain, you just shut up. Now, had it been me!”

  Wilson does not reply, too busied—her features distorted by the effort—in trying to detach a long golden hair that is wickedly sticking to her wound. Besides, it is useless to answer back Anita, a born termagant and anarchist, always ready to “sue” or “get the story into the newspapers.”

  The three others arrive simultaneously: Régine Tallien, whose plump little housemaid’s figure, abundantly furnished in front and behind, ironically casts her for page-boy parts, or “stylish male impersonations”; Marie Ancona, so dark she really believes herself a genuine Italian; and little Garcin, an obscure supernumerary, rather alarming, who flashes dark glances partly insincere, partly apprehensive, and is as thin as a starved cat.

  They don’t bother to pass the time of day, they meet too often. No rivalry exists between them because, with the exception of Maria Ancona, who has a small solo in the tarantella, they all vegetate in chorus routine. Nor is it Maria Ancona’s “part” that little Garcin envies her, but much more the brand-new dyed fox fur around her neck. They are not friends either, yet from being thus thrown together, crowded and almost choked to death in their cribbed cabin, they have developed a sort of animal satisfaction, the cheerfulness of creatures in captivity. Maria Ancona sings as she unfastens her garters, held together by safety pins, and her stays with broken laces. She laughs to find that her slip is torn under the arm, and nettled by Régine Tallien, who wears the embroidered linen and stout cotton corsets of a well-behaved maid-servant, she retorts: “Can’t help it, my dear. I’m an artist by temperament! And d’you suppose I can keep my underwear clean with that horrible tin armor of mine!”

  “Then do like me,” whispers sly little Garcin; “don’t wear any, any underslips, I mean.”

  She is clothed only in a pair of trellised tights, all gold and pearls, with two openwork metal discs stuck over her non-existent breasts. The rough edges of her jeweled ornaments, the coarsely punched copper pendants, the clinking chain armor she wears, scratch and mark her lean and apparently insensitive bare skin without her even noticing.

  “Just admit,” shouts Anita, “that the management ought to provide the slips worn on the stage! But you’re all so thin-skinned, you’re not even capable of claiming your dues!”

  She turns a half-made-up face toward her companions, a dead-white mask with bright red goggles, that makes her look like a Polynesian warrior, and without even interrupting her tirade, she ties around her head a filthy silk rag, all that remains of a “wig-kerchief,” intended to protect the hair from the brilliantine on the stage wigs.

  “It’s like this tattered duster I’ve got on my nut,” continues Anita. “Yes, yes, go on saying it disgusts you, but I-will-not-change-it! The management owes me one, and this thing can jolly well rot on my head, I will not replace it! My dues, that’s all I care about.”

  Not one of them is carried away by her anarchic rage, knowing it to be merely verbal, and even little Wilson, wounded as she is, simply shrugs her shoulders.

  The hour flies by, the unbreathable dryness of the air is now permeated by a hot dormitory smell. From time to time a dresser squeezes sideways into the room, somehow managing to move about, fastening a hook, tying the strings of stage tights or the ribbons of a Greek buskin. Régine Tallien and Wilson have already fled, halberd in hand, to their medieval parade. Anita hastens behind Maria Ancona, because a voice from the staircase is calling out: “Ladies of the Tarantella, have I to come in person to fetch you?”

  Little Garcin, whose asexual graces are kept in store for a “Byzantine Festival,” now remains alone. Out of her sordid handbag she extracts a thimble, a pair of scissors, a piece of needlework already begun, and, perched on her rush-seated stool, she begins to sew with avid concentration.

  “Oh!” cries Maria Ancona, returning hot and out of breath. “So she’s already settled down to it!”

  “What d’you expect,” jealously echoes Anita, “for all the work she has to do on the stage!”

  The sound of a cavalcade on the stairs and a shrill distant bell announce the end of the first act, bringing back Wilson, still slightly dazed and with an aching forehead, and Régine Tallien with her red man-at-arms wig. The daily break for the intermission, instead of bringing relaxation, seems to excite the girls. Off fly bicolored tights and Neapolitan skirts, to be replaced by spongy dressing gowns or cotton kimonos, mottled with the stains of cosmetics. Bare feet, unexpectedly bashful, grope under the makeup table for shapeless old slippers, while hands, pale or red, suddenly become cautious in unrolling lengths of linen and bits of imitation lace. They all inquisitively bend over Maria Ancona’s unfinished “combination,” the cynical little garment of a poor prostitute, outrageously transparent, sewn with broad, clumsy stitches. Little Garcin smocks fine muslin with the patience of a persistent mouse. Régine fills in her time hemming white handkerchiefs.

  The five of them, now seated on their high rush stools, are busy and quiet, as if they had at last reached their goal at the end of the day. This half hour is theirs. And during this half hour they allow themselves, as a respite, the candid illusion of being cloistered young women who sew.

  They suddenly fall silent, pacified by some unknown spell, and even the rowdy Anita gives no thought to her “dues,” and smiles mysteriously at a tablecloth embroidered in scarlet. In spite of their gaping wraps, of their high-pitched knees, of the insolent rouge still blossoming on their cheeks, they have the chaste attitude and bent backs of sedate seamstresses. And it is from the lips of little Garcin, naked in her beaded-net pants, that a childish little song, keeping time with her busy needle, involuntarily finds its way.

  Matinee

  “You see all those people in the char-à-bancs, don’t you?—and those others in four-wheelers?—and again those in taxis? And you see the ones over there, in shirt sleeves on their doorsteps, and those sitting outside the cafés? Very well, then! All that crowd do not have to play in a matinee. D’you hear me?”

  “. . . give a damn.”

  “But you are playing in a matinee!”

  “Don’t go on so, Brague!”

  “I am playing in a matinee, too. We are playing in a matinee. On Thursdays, and o
n Sundays too, we have a matinee.”

  I could slap him—were it not for the effort of lifting my arm. He continues, relentlessly. “There are also those who are not here, those who decamped to the country yesterday evening and won’t come back to town till Monday. They’re out under the trees, or taking a dip in the Marne. Well, they’re doing what they’re doing, but . . . they are not appearing in a matinee!”

  As our taxi jerks to an abrupt stop, the dry wind, which had been baking our faces, suddenly drops. I feel the pavement burning through the thin soles of my shoes. My cruel companion stops talking and purses his mouth, as much as to say: “Now it’s becoming serious.”

  At the dark and narrow stage door there is still a trace of musty coolness. The doorman, dozing in his chair, wakes up as we pass to brandish a newspaper.

  “Ninety-six in the shade, eh!”

  He throws this figure at us, in triumph, yet scared, as if it were the death roll in some grand-scale catastrophe. But we pass in silence, sparing of speech and movement, in fact jealous of this old man who keeps watch in a shady paradise, a paradise invaded by stale cellar smells and ammonia, on the threshold of our own inferno. Anyhow, what do ninety-six degrees mean? Ninety-six, or ninety-six thousand, it’s all the same. We have no thermometer up there on our second floor. Ninety-six degrees on the tower of St.-Jacques? And what will it rise to during this afternoon’s matinee? How high will it be in my dressing room, with its two windows, two right royal windows facing due south and shutterless?

  “There’s no saying,” sighs Brague, as he enters his cubicle, “we must jolly well be ‘above normal’ up here!”

  After a dismal glance, devoid even of entreaty, at the panes set ablaze by the sun, I let my clothes drop off without any relief: my skin can no longer look forward to the biting little draft between door and window that only a month ago nipped my bare shoulders.