by Colette
It approached, with a slow, muffled, yet incisive tread, which was echoed by the ancient floorboards. It entered, after a moment that seemed interminable, into the luminous path of moonlight. It was almost white, gigantic: the biggest nocturnal bird I have ever seen, a great horned owl, the kind we call “grand duke,” taller than a wolfhound. He walked emphatically, lifting his feathered feet, his hard bird’s talons, which gave off the sound of a human footstep. The top of his wings gave him the shoulders of a man, and two little feather horns that he raised or lowered trembled like grass in the gust of air from the dormer window. He stopped, puffed out his chest, and all the feathers of his magnificent face swelled out around a fine beak and the two golden pools of his eyes, bathed in moonlight. He turned away from us, showing his speckled white and pale yellow back. He must be quite old, I thought, this solitary and powerful creature. He resumed his parade march and interrupted it to do a kind of war dance, shaking his head from right to left, making fierce right-about turns, which no doubt threatened the rat that had eluded him. For a moment he apparently thought he had his prey, and he jostled the skeleton of a chair, shaking it as if it were a dead twig. He jumped with fury, fell back again, scraped the floor with his fanned-out tail. He had the mien of one used to command, and the majesty of a sorcerer.
No doubt he sensed our presence, for he turned toward us as if outraged. Unhurriedly he went to the window, half opened his angel wings, let out a kind of cooing sound, very low, a short incantation, pressed against the air, and melted into the night, taking on its color of snow and silver.
Thursday. The younger of the boys, at his desk, writes a long travel story. Title: “My Experiences Hunting the Horned Owl in Eastern Africa.” The older boy has left on my worktable the beginning of “Stanzas”:
A fluttering, a ponderous vision in the night,
Gray apparition, coming from the dark into the light.
Things have returned to normal.
[Translated by Herma Briffault]
The Hollow Nut
Three shells like flower petals, white, nacreous, and transparent as the rosy snow that flutters down from the apple trees; two limpets, like Tonkinese hats with converging black rays on a yellow ground; something that looks like a lumpy, cartilaginous potato, inanimate but concealing a mysterious force that squirts, when it is squeezed, a crystal jet of salt water; a broken knife, a stump of pencil, a ring of blue beads, and a book of transfers soaked by the sea; a small pink handkerchief, very dirty . . . That is all. Bel-Gazou has completed the inventory of her left-hand pocket. She admires the mother-of-pearl petals, then drops them and crushes them under her espadrille. The hydraulic potato, the limpets, and the transfers earn no better fate. Bel-Gazou retains only the knife, the pencil, and the string of beads, all of which, like the handkerchief, are in constant use.
Her right-hand pocket contains fragments of that pinkish limestone that her parents, heaven knows why, name lithothamnion, when it is so simple to call it coral. “But it isn’t coral, Bel-Gazou.” Not coral? What do they know about it, poor wretches? Fragments, then, of lithothamnion, and a hollow nut, with a hole bored in it by the emerging maggot. There isn’t a single nut tree within three miles along the coast. The hollow nut, found on the beach, came there on the crest of a wave, from where? “From the other side of the world,” affirms Bel-Gazou. “And it’s very ancient, you know. You can see that by its rare wood. It’s a rosewood nut, like Mother’s little desk.”
With the nut glued to her ear, she listens. “It sings. It says: ‘Hu-u-u . . .’”
She listens, her mouth slightly open, her lifted eyebrows touching her fringe of straight hair. Standing thus motionless, and as though alienated by her preoccupation, she seems almost ageless. She stares at the familiar horizon of her holidays without seeing it. From the ruins of a thatched hut, deserted by the customs officer, Bel-Gazou’s view embraces, on her right hand the Pointe-du-Nez, yellow with lichens, streaked with the bluish purple of a belt of mussels which the low tide leaves exposed; in the center a wedge of sea, blue as new steel, thrust like an ax head into the coast. On the left, an untidy privet hedge in full bloom, whose oversweet almond scent fills the air, while the frenzied little feet of the bees destroy its flowers. The dry sea meadow runs up as far as the hut and its slope hides the shore where her parents and friends lie limply baking on the sand. Presently, the entire family will inquire of Bel-Gazou: “But where were you? Why didn’t you come down to the shore?” Bel-Gazou cannot understand this bay mania. Why the shore, always the shore, and nothing but the shore? The hut is just as interesting as that insipid sand, and there is the damp spinney, and the soapy water of the washhouse, and the field of lucerne as well as the shade of the fig tree. Grown-up people are so constituted that one might spend a lifetime explaining to them—and all to no purpose. So it is with the hollow nut: “What’s the use of that old nut?” Wiser far to hold one’s tongue, and to hide, sometimes in a pocket, and sometimes in an empty vase or knotted in a handkerchief, the nut that a moment, impossible to foresee, will divest of all its virtue, but which meanwhile sings in Bel-Gazou’s ear the song that holds her motionless as though she had taken root.
“I can see it! I can see the song! It’s as thin as a hair, as thin as a blade of grass!”
Next year, Bel-Gazou will be past nine years old. She will have ceased to proclaim those inspired truths that confound her pedagogues. Each day carries her farther from that first stage of her life, so full, so wise, so perpetually mistrustful, so loftily disdainful of experience, of good advice, and humdrum wisdom. Next year, she will come back to the sands that gild her, to the salt butter and the foaming cider. She will find again her dilapidated hut, and her citified feet will once more acquire their natural horny soles, slowly toughened on the flints and ridges of the rough ground. But she may well fail to find again her childish subtlety and the keenness of her senses that can taste a scent, feel a color, and see—“thin as a hair, thin as a blade of grass”—the cadence of an imaginary song.
[Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod]
The Patriarch
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, Achille, my half-brother by blood—but wholly and entirely my brother by affection, choice, and likeness—was extremely handsome. Little by little, he became less so as a result of leading the hard life of a country doctor in the old days; a life which lacked all comfort and repose. He wore out his boot soles as much as the shoes of his gray mare; he went out by day and he went out by night, going to bed too tired to want any supper. In the night he would be woken up by the call of a peasant banging his fists on the outer door and pulling the bell. Then he would get up, put on his woolen pants, and his great plaid-lined overcoat, and Charles, the man-of-all-work, would harness the gray mare, another remarkable creature.
I have never known anything so proud and so willing as that gray mare. In the stable, by the light of the lantern, my brother would always find her standing up and ready for the worst. Her short, lively, well-set ears would inquire: “Châteauvieux? Montrenard? The big climb up the hill? Seventeen kilometers to get there and as many on the way back?” She would set off a little stiffly, her head lowered. During the examination, the confinement, the amputation, or dressing, she leaned her little forehead against the farmhouse doors so as to hear better what He was saying. I could swear that she knew by heart the bits of Le Roi d’Ys and the Pastoral Symphony, the scraps of operas and the Schubert songs He sang to keep himself company.
Isolated, sacrificed to his profession, this twenty-six-year-old doctor of half a century ago had only one resource. Gradually he had to forge himself a spirit which hoped for nothing except to live and enable his family to live too. Happily, his professional curiosity never left him. Neither did that other curiosity which both of us inherited from our mother. When, in my teens, I used to accompany him on his rounds, the two of us would often stop and get out to pick a bunch of bluebells or to gather mushrooms. Sometimes we would w
atch a wheeling buzzard or upset the dignity of a little lizard by touching it with a finger: the lizard would draw up its neck like an offended lady and give a lisping hiss, rather like a child who has lost its first front teeth. We would carefully detach butterfly chrysalises from branches and holes in walls and put them in little boxes of fine sand to await the miracle of the metamorphosis.
The profession of country doctor demanded a great deal of a man about half a century ago. Fresh from medical school in Paris, my brother confronted his first patient: a well-sinker who had just had one leg blown off by an explosion of dynamite. The brand-new surgeon came out of this difficult ordeal with honor but white-lipped, trembling all over, and considerably thinner from the amount he had sweated. He pulled himself together by diving into the canal between the tall clumps of flowering rushes.
Achille taught me to fill and to stick together the two halves of antipyrine capsules, to use the delicate scales with the weights which were mere thin slips of copper. In those days, the country doctor had a license to sell certain pharmaceutical products outside a four-kilometer radius of the town. Meager profits, if one considers that a “consultation” cost the consultant three francs plus twenty sous a kilometer. From time to time, the doctor pulled out a tooth, also for three francs. And what little money there was came in slowly and sometimes not at all.
“Why not sue them?” demanded the chemist. “What’s the law for?”
Whatever it was for, it was not for his patients. My brother made no reply but turned his greenish-blue eyes away toward the flat horizon. My eyes are the same color but not so beautiful and not so deeply set.
I was fifteen or sixteen; the age of great devotions, of vocations. I wanted to become a woman doctor. My brother would summon me for a split lip or a deep, bleeding cut and have recourse to my slender girl’s fingers. Eagerly, I would set to work to knot the threads of the stitches in the blood which leaped so impetuously out of the vein. In the morning, Achille set off too early for me to be able to accompany him. But in the afternoon I would sit on his left in the trap and hold the mare’s reins. Every month he had the duty of inspecting all the babies in the region and he tried to drop in unexpectedly on their wet or dry nurses. Those expeditions used to ruin his appetite. How many babies we found alone in an empty house, tied to their fetid cradles with handkerchiefs and safety pins, while their heedless guardians worked in the fields. Some of them would see the trap in the distance and come running up, out of breath.
“I was only away for a moment.” “I was changing the goat’s picket.” “I was chasing the cow who’d broken loose.”
Hard as his life was, Achille held out for more than twenty-five years, seeking rest for his spirit only in music. In his youth he was surprised when he first came up against the peaceful immorality of country life, the desire which is born and satisfied in the depths of the ripe grass or between the warm flanks of sleeping cattle. Paris and the Latin Quarter had not prepared him for so much amorous knowledge, secrecy, and variety. But impudence was not lacking either, at least in the case of the girls who came boldly to his weekly surgery declaring that they had not “seen” since they got their feet wet two months ago, pulling a drowned hen out of a pond.
“That’s fine!” my brother would say, after his examination. “I’m going to give you a prescription.”
He watched for the look of pleasure and contempt and the joyful reddening of the cheek and wrote out the prescription agreed between doctor and chemist: “Mica panis, two pills to be taken after each meal.” The remedy might avert or, at least, delay the intervention of “the woman who knew about herbs.”
One day, long before his marriage, he had an adventure which was only one of many. With a basket on one arm and an umbrella on the other, a young woman almost as tall as himself (he was nearly six foot two) walked into his consulting room. He found himself looking at someone like a living statue of the young Republic; a fresh, magnificently built girl with a low brow, statuesque features, and a calm, severe expression.
“Doctor,” she said, without a smile or a shuffle, “I think I’m three months pregnant.”
“Do you feel ill, Madame?”
“Mademoiselle. I’m eighteen. And I feel perfectly all right in every way.”
“Well, then, Mademoiselle! You won’t be needing me for another six months.”
“Pardon, Doctor. I’d like to be sure. I don’t want to do anything foolish. Will you please examine me?”
Throwing off the skirt, the shawl, and the cotton chemise that came down to her ankles, she displayed a body so majestic, so firm, so smoothly sheathed in its skin that my brother never saw another to compare with it. He saw too that this young girl, so eager to accuse herself, was a virgin. But she vehemently refused to remain one any longer and went off victorious, her head high, her basket on her arm, and her woolen shawl knotted once more over her breasts. The most she would admit was that, when she was digging potatoes on her father’s land over by the Hardon road, she had waited often and often to see the gray mare and its driver go past and had said “Good day” with her hand to call him, but in vain.
She returned for “consultation.” But far more often, my brother went and joined her in her field. She would watch him coming from afar, put down her hoe, and stooping, make her way under the branches of a little plantation of pine trees. From these almost silent encounters, a very beautiful child was born. And I admit that I should be glad to see, even now, what his face is like. For Sido confided to me, in very few words, one of those secrets in which she was so rich.
“You know the child of that beautiful girl over at Hardon?” she said.
“Yes.”
“She boasts about him to everyone. She’s crazy with pride. She’s a most unusual girl. A character. I’ve seen the child. Just once.”
“What’s he like?”
She made the gesture of rumpling a child’s hair.
“Beautiful, of course. Such curls, such eyes. And such a mouth.”
She coughed and pushed away the invisible curly head with both hands.
“The mouth most of all. Ah! I just couldn’t. I went away. Otherwise I should have taken him.”
However, everything in our neighborhood was not so simple as this warm idyll, cradled on its bed of pine needles, and these silent lovers who took no notice of the autumn mists or a little rain, for the gray mare lent them her blanket.
There is another episode of which I have a vivid and less touching memory. We used to refer to it as “The Monsieur Binard Story.” It goes without saying that I have changed the name of the robust, grizzled father of a family who came over on his bicycle at dusk, some forty-eight years ago, to ask my brother to go to his daughter’s bedside.
“It’s urgent,” said the man, panting as he spoke. His breath reeked of red wine. “I am Monsieur Binard, of X.”
He made a sham exit, then thrust his head around the half-shut door and declared: “In my opinion, it’ll be a boy.”
My brother took his instrument case and the servant harnessed the gray mare.
It turned out indeed to be a boy and a remarkably fine and well-made one. But my brother’s care and attention were mainly for the far too young mother, a dark girl with eyes like an antelope. She was very brave and kept crying loudly, almost excitedly, like a child. Around the bed bustled three slightly older antelopes, while in the inglenook, the impassive Monsieur Binard superintended the mulling of some red wine flavored with cinnamon. In a dark corner of the clean, well-polished room, my brother noticed a wicker cradle with clean starched curtains. Monsieur Binard only left the fire and the copper basin to examine the newborn child as soon as it had been washed.
“It’s a very fine child,” Achille assured him.
“I’ve seen finer,” said Monsieur Binard in a lordly way.
“Oh, Papa!” cried the three older antelopes.
“I know what I’m talking about,” retorted Binard.
He raised a curtain of the cradle wh
ich my brother presumed empty but which was now shown to be entirely filled by a large child who had slept calmly through all the noise and bustle. One of the antelopes came over and tenderly drew the curtain down again.
His mission over, my brother drank the warm wine which he had well and truly earned and which the little newly confined mother was sipping too. Already she was gay and laughing. Then he bowed to the entire long-eyed troop and went out, puzzled and worried. The earth was steaming with damp, but above the low fog, the bright dancing fire of the first stars announced the coming frost.
“Your daughter seems extremely young,” said my brother. “Luckily, she’s come through it well.”
“She’s strong. You needn’t be afraid,” said Monsieur Binard.
“How old is she?”
“Fifteen in four months’ time.”
“Fifteen! She was taking a big risk. What girls are! Do you know the . . . the creature who . . .”
Monsieur Binard made no reply other than slapping the hindquarters of the gray mare with the flat of his hand, but he lifted his chin with such an obvious, such an intolerable expression of fatuity that my brother hastened his departure.
“If she has any fever, let me know.”
“She won’t,” Monsieur Binard assured him with great dignity.
“So you know more about these things than I do?”
“No. But I know my daughters. I’ve four of them and you must have seen for yourself that there’s not much wrong with them. I know them.”
He said no more and ran his hand over his mustache. He waited till the gray mare had adroitly turned in the narrow courtyard, then he went back into his house.
Sido, my mother, did not like this story, which she often turned over in her mind. Sometimes she spoke violently about Monsieur Binard, calling him bitterly “the corrupt widower,” sometimes she let herself go off into commentaries for which afterward she would blush.