The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  “I wanted to thank you for having gotten me that curtain call,” answered Lola.

  He had almost no accent, only rolling his r’s like a Spaniard and saying “dhank you.” But he spoke to the star-idol without a trace of shyness, and his gray-green eyes moved from Florie’s eyes to her teeth, and from her teeth down to her famous legs, slowly and deliberately.

  “That’s an unusual act you’ve got,” said Florie.

  He did not acknowledge the compliment but merely pursed his lips with disdainful modesty, and Florie, who was looking straight at the man’s dangerous mouth, pouting like a child’s, felt herself shiver.

  “Is Madame catching cold?”

  “No,” said Florie. “If I’m not used to it by now . . .”

  She broke off with this “by now . . .” which evoked the length of her career, and started up again: “How did you come up with the idea of working with things that fly?”

  “God knows,” said Lola. “In my country, you know, the rosebushes are very big, you see them flying, the . . . the . . . petals.”

  He raised his arm and snapped his fingers in the air. Florie, following his gesture, searched overhead for a flight of wind-plucked roses, but all her eyes met with was the blank stare of little “Second Empire Crinoline,” drained and motionless.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said mechanically, offering the juggler her hand.

  Her calm and restful sleep, the sleep of a hardworking woman, was made fitful by dreams and memories, and by huge rosebushes whose petals were scattered by the wind.

  The nights went by, marked for Florie by a passing word or a few seconds’ banal exchange with the juggler. But the warmth that came to her from a tone of voice, from a look that had no rival was enough for her, gave her the strength to dance faultlessly, to change costumes feverishly, to incite “her” public in the second balcony, squeezed high up into the cupola like bees about to swarm.

  “You amaze me, you know that?” said Sutter. “What’s gotten into you lately?”

  The night when Florie detected in Lola’s clear gray-green eyes a kind of irresistible rancor, a menace that dispensed with words, a restlessness like that which troubled her own dreams, she trod the boards with the footsteps of a ballerina, abandoned herself to a gracefulness, to an ardor which seemed no more than twenty-five years old. Beneath the blue lantern she turned her beautiful, delirious face up toward Lola, and confessed everything.

  “I’d be very happy if you’d stop by my dressing room later for a glass of champagne . . .”

  “I only drink water,” replied Lola, who suddenly resembled a man intoxicated, for Florie’s knee was pressing against his for the first time. Weakened, Florie gave in and ran her finger over the delicious contour of the mouth she so desired, and murmured: “Well then, let’s get through the Easter holidays and these six performances in three days. Monday at midnight, you can drink some ice water . . . in my room . . . if you want . . .”

  He grabbed hold of her with artful strength, pressing to himself a long body which had not lost its enchanting proportions, and Florie closed her blue eyelids tragically.

  The next night the juggler missed three of his most seductive miracles in a row and the audience, after murmuring some, decided to laugh instead and applauded just the same. Florie heard about the incident from Sutter, who always knew everything.

  “Who the hell stuck me with a nut like that?” said Sutter, knitting his red eyebrows.

  “I’m not the one who hired him,” replied Florie, not without treachery.

  “What was he saying to you last night in the wings?”

  Florie feigned nearsightedness, pretending to look off into the distance stage right at the preparations for “Les Jeunes Filles en Trapèze”:

  “Last night? . . . Oh, yeh. He told me he never drinks anything but water. Can you imagine?”

  “That’s very interesting,” grumbled Sutter.

  “Would you rather he’d pinched my ass?”

  Sutter was about to respond, but he looked at Florie and kept quiet. In the past, when they had been lovers, he had seen that look before, the look of an insolent lioness, that flaring of the nostrils, those eyes that knew how to defy a man’s raised fist . . .

  Behind the wing Florie and Lola sized each other up, mute and seething like two enemies. “Day after tomorrow . . .” said Florie in a low voice, and Lola, who had let three gold balls roll into the orchestra and had fluffed a whole swarm of feathers and butterflies, exited to boos, impervious and superior.

  “Strange house tonight,” said Florie as she was leaving the stage after her sketch. “I can’t get any feel from the audience, it’s like walking on eggshells out there. What’s wrong with them?”

  Someone explained it to her. She knitted her aquamarine eyebrows, then counted the hours that separated her and the rendezvous, the supper of rare fruits, an orgy of ice water sparkling in the thin glasses, as intoxicating as champagne . . .

  The next to last morning was devoted to a valiant and minute self-examination. She usually spent only a minimum of time on essentials and gave the more familiar ravages a rough once-over. “I treat myself like a piece of furniture,” she said. But that morning, in a sort of laboratory wide open to the chaste and pitiless light of spring, Florie found it difficult to look at her reflection in the mirror. She scrutinized her face for a long time, confessing to it a late, great folly, and humbly vowed that this time would be no mere whim, not just pleasure, but the passion and pain she had long since kept from herself.

  It had been a long time since she had seen tears well up, then fall over the edges of her eyelids with a little leap. She was unable to master them in time and all her features shipwrecked in the mirror . . .

  She arrived in her dressing room a bit earlier than usual, and shut herself inside. When she recognized Lola’s nonchalant footstep in the passageway, she held her breath and waited. Then she opened her door just enough to catch a glimpse of the figure moving away down the hall, the perfect nape, the shoulders that could easily have carried home the day’s kill . . .

  From within her closed dressing room, she heard the commotion in the audience exasperated by the clumsy juggler. What was needed to calm them down and to win them over was Florie’s infallible humor, her taming influence. After her sketch her legs trembled slightly while she waited for Arsène to come by.

  “Have you heard the latest, Arsène?”

  “The juggler? Of course.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “From my box.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Him? He just laughs it off. Says he doesn’t give a damn.”

  Florie leaned over toward her mirror and slipped a little roll of blotting paper between her lashes to drink up the tears.

  “Is that right? Well, as for me, if there’s one thing I do give a damn about, it’s finding my audience in an uproar after that guy’s act . . . Arsène, you want to do me a favor?”

  “Switch the acts?”

  Florie hesitated for only a second. “No. He’s not worth it. No matter where you put him he’s going to cause us trouble.”

  “Fire him?”

  “Yes, Arsène. Right now. Will it cost a lot?”

  “Next to nothing. Should we let him do tonight’s show?”

  “No . . . No, Arsène. Pay him off. Do it nicely . . . be generous. Arsène . . . Listen, Arsène.”

  “Fine, fine. You know perfectly well that all you have to do is say the word and it’s yours. Don’t let it bother you, darling. Hey, why don’t you come have a little something to eat with my wife and me after the show tonight?”

  “No . . . My stomach’s all tied up in knots, Arsène . . .”

  “Exactly. Six oysters and a little steak will untie it.” He looked at her. “I have a feeling your sketch is going to be sensational today.”

  Florie raised her face, protected by makeup, toward Sutter. “Do you want me to be sensational, Arsène?”

  “More than an
ything in the world.”

  She threw off her dressing gown, and across her shoulders her dresser hung an imponderable spray of rose plumes, which cascaded slowly and noiselessly to the ground; then came the high heels, and along with them the arrogant strut that was Florie’s alone.

  “Don’t leave me, Arsène!”

  “I won’t leave you, darling.”

  “Walk me to the wings. Give me your arm, Arsène . . .”

  Arm in arm, they reached the wings, through which escaped a loud gust of music.

  Not until the moment when a ritornel lifted Florie up and onto the stage did the big, friendly hand of the director open its fingers. Hidden behind an azalea made of painted canvas, Sutter turned his keen ear to the noises coming from on stage. Between two flowers, his eye caught Florie’s trademarks: Florie with her face awash in light, teeth flashing, Florie in profile, the narrow waist, a certain pawing of the foot, a certain waltz tempo that was Florie . . .

  Relieved, he wiped his forehead, let out a long sigh, and retired to the director’s office.

  [Translated by Matthew Ward]

  Gribiche

  I never arrived before quarter past nine. By that time, the temperature and the smell of the basement of the theater had already acquired their full intensity. I shall not give the exact location of the music hall in which, some time between 1905 and 1910, I was playing a sketch in a revue. All I need say is that the underground dressing rooms had neither windows nor ventilators. In our women’s quarters, the doors of the rows of identical cells remained innocently open; the men . . . far less numerous in revues than nowadays . . . dressed on the floor above, almost at street level. When I arrived, I found myself among women already acclimatized to the temperature, for they had been in their dressing rooms since eight o’clock. The steps of the iron staircase clanged musically under my feet; the last five steps each gave out their particular note like a xylophone—B, B flat, C, D, and then dropping a fifth to G. I shall never forget their inevitable refrain. But when fifty pairs of heels clattered up and down like hail for the big ensembles and dance numbers, the notes blended into a kind of shrill thunder which made the plaster walls between each dressing room tremble. Halfway up the staircase a ventilator marked the level of the street. When it was occasionally opened during the day, it let in the poisonous air of the street, and fluttering rags of paper, blown there by the wind, clung to its grating, which was coated with dried mud.

  As soon as we reached the floor of our cellar, each of us made some ritual complaint about the suffocating atmosphere. My neighbor across the passage, a little green-eyed Basque, always panted for a moment before opening the door of her dressing room, put her hand on her heart, sighed: “Positively filthy!” and then thought no more about it. As she had short thighs and high insteps, she gummed a kiss-curl on her left cheek and called herself Carmen Brasero.

  Mademoiselle Clara d’Estouteville, known as La Toutou, occupied the next dressing room. Tall, miraculously fair, slim as women only became twenty-five years later, she played the silent part of Commère during the first half of the second act. When she arrived, she would push back the pale gold swathes of hair on her temples with a transparent hand and murmur: “Oh, take me out of here or I’ll burst!” Then, without bending down, she would kick off her shoes. Sometimes she would hold out her hand. The gesture was hardly one of cordiality; it was merely that she was amused by the involuntary start of surprise which an ordinary hand like my own would give at the touch of her extraordinarily delicate, almost melting fingers. A moment after her arrival, a chilly smell like toothpaste would inform us all that the frail actress was eating her half pound of peppermints. Mademoiselle d’Estouteville’s voice was so loud and raucous that it prevented her from playing spoken parts, so that the music hall could only use her exceptional beauty; the beauty of a spun-glass angel. La Toutou had her own method of explaining the situation.

  “You see, on the stage I can’t say my a’s. And however small a part, there’s nearly always an a in it. And as I can’t say my a’s . . .”

  “But you do say them!” Carmen pointed out.

  La Toutou gave her colleague a blue glance, equally sublime in its stupidity, its indignation, and its deceitfulness. The anguish of her indigestion made it even more impressive.

  “Look here, dear, you can’t have the cheek to pretend you know more about it than Victor de Cottens, who tried me out for his revue at the Folies!”

  Her stage costume consisted of strings of imitation diamonds, which occasionally parted to give glimpses of a rose-tinted knee and an adolescent thigh or the tip of a barely formed breast. When this vision, which suggested a dawn glittering with frost, was on her way up to the stage, she passed my other neighbor, Lise Damoiseau, on her way back from impersonating the Queen of Torments. Lise would be invariably holding up her long black velvet robe with both hands, candidly displaying her bow legs. On a long neck built like a tower and slightly widening at the base, Lise carried a head modeled in the richest tones and textures of black and white. The teeth between the sad voluptuous lips were flawless; the enormous dark eyes, whose whites were slightly blue, held and reflected back the light. Her black, oiled hair shone like a river under the moon. She was always given sinister parts to play. In revues, she held sway over the Hall of Poisons and the Paradise of Forbidden Pleasures. Satan, Gilles de Rais, the Nightmare of Opium, the Beheaded Woman, Delilah, and Messalina all took on the features of Lise. She was seldom given a line to speak and the dress designers cleverly disguised her meager and undistinguished little body. She was far from being vain about her appearance. One night when I was paying her a perfectly sincere compliment she shrugged her shoulders and turned the fixed glitter of her eyes on me.

  “M’m, yes,” said Lise. “My face is all right. And my neck. Down to here, but no farther.”

  She looked into the great cracked glass that every actress consulted before going up the staircase and judged herself with harsh lucidity.

  “I can only get away with it in long skirts.”

  After the grand final tableau, Lise Damoiseau went into total eclipse. Shorn of her makeup and huddled into some old black dress, she would carry away her superb head, its long neck muffled in a rabbit-skin scarf, as if it were some object for which she had no further use till tomorrow. Standing under the gas lamp on the pavement outside the stage door, she would give a last smoldering glance before she disappeared down the steps of the métro.

  Several other women inhabited the subterranean corridor. There was Liane de Parthenon, a tall big-boned blonde, and Fifi Soada, who boasted of her likeness to Polaire, and Zarzita, who emphasized her resemblance to the beautiful Otero. Zarzita did her hair like Otero, imitated her accent, and pinned up photographs of the famous ballerina on the walls of her dressing room. When she drew one’s attention to these, she invariably added, “The only difference is that I can dance!” There was also a dried-up little Englishwoman of unguessable age, with a face like an old nurse’s and fantastically agile limbs; there was an Algerian, Miss Ourika, who specialized in the danse du ventre and who was all hips; there was . . . there was . . . Their names, which I hardly knew, have long since vanished. All that I heard of them, beyond the dressing rooms near me, was a zoo-like noise composed of Anglo-Saxon grunting, the yawns and sighs of caged creatures, mechanical blasphemies, and a song, always the same song, sung over and over again by a Spanish voice:

  Tou m’abais fait serment

  Dé m’aimer tendrement . . .

  Occasionally, a silence would dominate all the neighboring noises and give place to the distant hum of the stage; then one of the women would break out of this silence with a scream, a mechanical curse, a yawn, or a tag of song: Tou m’abais fait serment . . .

  Was I, in those days, too susceptible to the convention of work, glittering display, empty-headedness, punctuality, and rigid probity which reigns in the music hall? Did it inspire me to describe it over and over again with a violent and superficial lov
e and with all its accompaniment of commonplace poetry? Very possibly. The fact remains that during six years of my past life I was still capable of finding relaxation among its monsters and its marvels. In that past there still gleams the head of Lise Damoiseau and the bottomless, radiant imbecility of Mademoiselle d’Estouteville. I still remember with delight a certain Bouboule with beautiful breasts who wept offendedly if she had to play even a tiny part in a high dress and the magnificent, long, shallow-grooved back of some Lola or Pepa or Concha . . . Looking back, I can rediscover some particular acrobat swinging high up from bar to bar of a nickeled trapeze or some particular juggler in the center of an orbit of balls. It was a world in which fantasy and bureaucracy were oddly interwoven. And I can still plunge at will into that dense, limited element which bore up my inexperience and happily limited my vision and my cares for six whole years.

  Everything in it was by no means as gay and as innocent as I have described it elsewhere. Today I want to speak of my debut in that world, of a time when I had neither learned nor forgotten anything of a theatrical milieu in which I had not the faintest chance of succeeding, that of the big spectacular revue. What an astonishing milieu it was! One sex practically eclipsed the other, dominating it, not only by numbers, but by its own particular smell and magnetic atmosphere. This crowd of women reacted like a barometer to any vagary of the weather. It needed only a change of wind or a wet day to send them all into the depths of depression; a depression which expressed itself in tears and curses, in talk of suicide and in irrational terrors and superstitions. I was not a prey to it myself, but having known very few women and been deeply hurt by one single man, I accepted it uncritically. I was even rather impressed by it although it was only latent hysteria; a kind of schoolgirl neurosis which afflicts women who are arbitrarily and pointlessly segregated from the other sex.

  My contribution to the program was entitled “Maiou-Ouah-Ouah. Sketch.” On the strength of my first “Dialogues de Bêtes,” the authors of the revue had commissioned me to bark and mew on the stage. The rest of my turn consisted mainly of performing a few dance steps in bronze-colored tights. On my way to and from the stage I had to pass by the star’s dressing room. The leading lady was a remote personage whose door was only open to her personal friends. She never appeared in the corridors except attended by two dressers whose job was to carry her headdresses, powder, comb, and hand mirror and to hold up her trailing flounces. She plays no part in my story but I liked to follow her and smell the trail of amazingly strong scent she left in her wake. It was a sweet, somber scent; a scent for a beautiful Negress. I was fascinated by it but I was never able to discover its name.