by Colette
Behind the door, I heard her little heels running forward over the uncarpeted wooden floor. I recognize a step more quickly than a shape, a shape more quickly than a face. It was bright outdoors and in the room with the two windows. Between the photographic enlargements, the “studies” of woodland landscapes, and the straw frames with red ribbon bows, the February sun was consuming the last faint outlines of my roses and blue convolvulus on the wallpaper.
“This time, Mademoiselle Rosita, I haven’t come empty-handed! Here are some little flowers for you and here are two short stories, twenty-nine pages of manuscript.”
“It’s too much, Madame, it’s too much . . .”
“It’s the length they have to be. It takes thirteen closely written pages, a short story for La Vie Parisienne.”
“I was talking of the flowers, Madame.”
“They’re not worth mentioning. And you know, on Monday, I’ve a feeling I’m going to bring you . . .”
Behind her spectacles, Mademoiselle Barberet’s eyes fixed themselves on me, forgetting to dissemble the fact that they were red, bruised, filled with bitter water, and so sad that I broke off my sentence. She made a gesture with her hand, and murmured: “I apologize. I have worries . . .”
Few women keep their dignity when they are in tears. The withered young girl in distress wept simply, decently controlling the shaking of her hands and her voice. She wiped her eyes and her glasses and gave me a kind of smile with one side of her mouth.
“It’s one of those days . . . it’s because of the child, I mean, of my sister.”
“She’s ill, isn’t she?”
“In one sense, yes. She has no disease,” she said emphatically. “It’s since she got married. It’s changed her character. She’s so rough with me. Of course all marriages can’t turn out well, one knows that.”
I am not very fond of other people’s matrimonial troubles, they bear an inevitable resemblance to my own personal disappointments. So I was anxious to get away at once from the sorrowing Barberet and the unhappily married sister. But just as I was leaving her, a little blister in the coarse glass of one of the windowpanes caught a ray of sun and projected onto the opposite wall the little halo of rainbow colors I used once to call the “rainy moon.” The apparition of that illusory planet shot me back so violently into the past that I remained standing where I was, transfixed and fascinated.
“Look, Mademoiselle Rosita. How pretty that is.”
I put my finger on the wall, in the center of the little planet ringed with seven colors.
“Yes,” she said. “We know that reflection well. Just fancy, my sister’s frightened of it.”
“Frightened? What do you mean, frightened? Why? What does she say about it?”
Mademoiselle smiled at my eagerness.
“Oh, you know . . . silly things, the sort that nervous children imagine. She says it’s an omen. She calls it her sad little sun, she says it only shines to warn her something bad is going to happen. Goodness knows what else. As if the refractions of a prism really could influence . . .”
Mademoiselle Barberet gave a superior smile.
“You’re right,” I said weakly. “But those are charming poetic fancies. Your sister is a poet without realizing it.”
Mademoiselle Barberet’s blue eyes were fixed on the place where the rainbow-colored ghost had been before a passing cloud had just eclipsed it.
“The main thing is, she’s a very unreasonable young woman.”
“She lives in the other . . . in another part of the flat?”
Mademoiselle Barberet’s gaze switched to the closed door on the right of the fireplace.
“Another part, you could hardly call it that. They chose . . . Her bedroom and dressing room are separate from my bedroom.”
I nodded “Yes, yes,” as my thorough acquaintance with the place gave me the right to do.
“Is your sister like you to look at?”
I made myself gentle and spoke tonelessly, as one does to people asleep so as to make them answer one from the depths of their slumber.
“Like me? Oh dear, no! To begin with, there’s a certain difference of age between us, and she’s dark. And then, as to character, we couldn’t be less alike in every way.”
“Ah! She’s dark . . . One of these days you must let me meet her. There’s no hurry! I’m leaving you my manuscript. If you don’t see me on Monday . . . Would you like me to settle up with you for the typing you’ve already done?”
Mademoiselle Barberet blushed and refused, then blushed and accepted. And although I stopped in the hall to make some unnecessary suggestion, no sound came from my bedroom and nothing revealed the presence of the dark sister.
“She calls it her sad little sun. She says that it foretells something bad. Whatever can I have bequeathed to that reflection, that looks like a planet in a ring of haze, where the red is never anywhere but next to the purple? In the old days, when the wind was high and the sky cloudy, it would keep vanishing, reappearing, fading away again, and its caprices would distract me for a moment from my state of suspense, of perpetual waiting.”
I admit that, as I descended the slope of the hill, I gave myself up to excitement. The play of coincidences shed a false, unhoped-for light on my life. Already I was promising myself that the “Barberet story” would figure in a prominent place in the fantastic gallery we secretly furnish and which we open more readily to strangers than to our near ones: the gallery reserved for premonitions, for the phenomena of mistaken identity, for visions and predictions. In it I had already lodged the story of the woman with the candle, the story of Jeanne D.; the story of the woman who read the tarot pack, and of the little boy who rode on horseback.
In any case, the Barberet story, barely even roughly sketched, was already acting for me as a “snipe’s bandage.” That is what I used to call, and still call, a particular kind of unremarkable and soothing event that I liken to the dressing of wet clay and bits of twig, the marvelous little splint the snipe binds around its foot when a shot has broken it. A visit to the cinema, provided the films are sufficiently mediocre, counts as a snipe’s bandage. But, on the contrary, an evening in the company of intelligent friends who know what it is to be hurt and are courageous and disillusioned, undoes the bandage. Symphonic music generally tears it off, leaving me flayed. Poured out by a steady, indifferent voice, pronouncements and predictions are compresses and camomile tea to me.
“I’m going to tell the Barberet story to Annie de Pène,” I mentally began. And then I told nothing at all. Would not Annie’s subtle ear and lively bronze eyes have weighed and condemned everything in my narrative that revealed no more than the craving to go over old ground again, to deck out what was over and done with in a new coat of paint? “That window, Annie, where a young woman whose man has left her spends nearly all her time waiting, listening—just as I did long ago.”
I said nothing to Annie. It is as well for a toy to be played with in solitude, if something or other about its color, about its acid varnish, about a chance distortion of its shadow, warns one it may be dangerous. But I went off and translated the “Barberet story” into commonplace language for the benefit of the woman who came by the day to “make and mend” for me, a stout brunette who was relaxing after singing in operetta in Oran by sewing and ironing for other people. In order to listen to me, Marie Mallier stopped crushing gathers under a cruel thumbnail, blew into her thimble, and waited, her needle poised.
“And then what happened?”
“That’s the end.”
“Oh,” said Marie Mallier. “It seemed to me more like a beginning.”
The words enchanted me. I read into them the most romantic omen and I swore to myself I would not delay another moment in making the acquaintance of the dark, unhappily married sister who lived in my gloomy bedroom and was frightened of my “rainy moon.”
Those tugs on my sleeve, those little presents fate has offered me might have given me the power of escaping from myself
, sloughing my skin, and emerging in new, variegated colors. I believe they might have succeeded, had I not lacked the society and influence of someone for whom there is hardly any difference between what really happens and what does not, between fact and possibility, between an event and the narration of it.
Much later on, when I came to know Francis Carco, I realized that he would, for example, have interpreted my stay at Bella-Vista and my meeting with the Barberets with an unbridled imagination. He would have plucked out of them the catastrophic truth, the element of something unfinished, something left suspended that spurs imagination and terror to a gallop; in short, their poetry. I saw, years afterward, how a poet makes use of tragic embellishment and lends a mere news item the fascination of some white, inanimate face behind a pane.
Lacking a companion with a fiery imagination, I clung to a rational view of things, notably of fear and hallucination. This was a real necessity, as I lived alone. On some nights, I would look very carefully around my little flat; I would open my shutters to let the nocturnal light play on the ceiling while I waited for the light of the day. The next morning, my concierge, when she brought me my coffee, would silently flourish the key she had found in the lock, on the outside. Most of the time I gave no thought to perils that might come from the unknown and I treated ghosts with scant respect.
That was how, the following Monday, I treated a window in the Barberet flat, which I had entered at the same moment as a March wind with great sea pinions that flung all the papers on the floor. Mademoiselle Rosita put both hands over her ears, and shrieked “Ah!” as she shut her eyes. I gripped the cast-iron mermaid with a familiar hand and closed the window with one turn of my wrist.
“At the very first go!” exclaimed Mademoiselle Barberet admiringly. “That’s extraordinary! I hardly ever manage to . . . Oh, goodness, all these typed copies flying about! Monsieur Vandérem’s novel! Monsieur Pierre Veber’s short story! This wind! Luckily I’d put your text back in its folder . . . Here’s the top copy, Madame, and the carbon. There are several traces of Indian-rubber. If you’d like me to redo some of the scratched pages, it’ll be a pleasure to me, tonight after dinner.”
“Find yourself more exciting pleasures, Mademoiselle Rosita. Go to the cinema. Do you like the cinema?”
The avidity of a small girl showed in her face, accentuating the fine wrinkles around the mouth.
“I adore it, Madame! We have a very good local cinema, five francs for quite good seats, that shows splendid films. But at this moment, I can’t possibly . . .”
She broke off and fixed her gaze on the door to the right of the fireplace.
“Is it still your sister’s health? Couldn’t her husband take on the job of . . .”
In spite of myself, I imitated her prudish way of leaving her sentences unfinished. She flushed and said hastily: “Her husband doesn’t live here, Madame.”
“Ah, he doesn’t live . . . And she, what does she do? Is she waiting for him to come back?”
“I . . . Yes, I think so.”
“All the time?”
“Day and night.”
I stood up abruptly and began to pace the room, from the window to the door, from the door to the far wall, from the far wall to the fireplace; the room where once I had waited—day and night.
“That’s stupid!” I exclaimed. “That’s the last thing to do. Do you hear me, the very last!”
Mademoiselle Barberet mechanically pulled out the spiral of hair that caressed her shoulder, and her withered angel’s face followed my movements to and fro.
“If I knew her, that sister of yours, I’d tell her straight to her face that she’s chosen the worst possible tactics. They couldn’t be more . . . more idiotic.”
“Ah, I’d be only too glad, Madame, if you’d tell her so! Coming from you, it would have far more weight than from me. She makes no bones about assuring me that old maids have no right to speak on certain topics. In which she may well be mistaken, moreover . . .” Mademoiselle Barberet lowered her eyes and gave a little resentful toss of her chin.
“A fixed idea isn’t always a good idea. She’s in there, with her fixed idea. When she can’t stand it anymore, she goes downstairs. She says she wants to buy some sweets. She says: ‘I’m going to telephone.’ To other people! As if she thought I was deceived for a moment!”
“You’re not on the telephone?”
I raised my eyes to the ceiling. A little hole in the molded comice still showed where the telephone wire had passed through it. When I was in this place, I had the telephone. I could beg and implore without having to bother to go outside.
“Not yet, Madame. We’re going to have it put in, of course.”
She blushed, as she did whenever there was a question of money or of lack of money, and seemed to make a desperate resolve.
“Madame, since you think as I do that my sister is wrong to be so obstinate, if you have two minutes . . .”
“I have two minutes.”
“I’ll go and tell my sister.”
She went out through the hall instead of opening the door on the right of the fireplace. She walked gracefully, carried on small, arched feet. Almost at once, she came back, agitated and with red rims to her eyelids.
“Oh, I don’t know how to apologize! She’s terrible. She says, ‘Not on your life’ and ‘What are you sticking your nose in for?’ and ‘I wish to goodness everyone would shut up.’ She says nothing but rude things.”
Mademoiselle Barberet blew her distress into her handkerchief, rubbed her nose, and became ugly, as if on purpose. I had just time to think: “Really, I’m being unnecessarily tactful with these females,” before I turned the handle of the right-hand door which recognized me and obeyed me without a sound. I did not cross the threshold of my room whose half-closed shutters filled it with a faintly green dusk. At the far end of the room, on a divan-bed that seemed not to have moved from the place I had chosen for it in the old days, a young woman, curled up like a gun dog, raised the dim oval of her face in my direction. For a second, I had that experience only dreams dare conjure up: I saw before me, hostile, hurt, stubbornly hoping, the young self I should never be again, whom I never ceased disowning and regretting.
But there is nothing lasting in any touch of the fabulous we experience outside sleep. The young me stood up, spoke, and was no longer anything more than a stranger, the sound of whose voice dissipated all my precious mystery.
“Madame . . . But I told my sister— Really, Rosita, whatever are you thinking of? My room’s untidy, I’m not well. You must understand, Madame, why I couldn’t ask you to come in.”
She had only taken two or three steps toward me. In spite of the gloom, I could make out that she was rather short, but square-shouldered and self-assured. As a cloud outside uncovered the sun, the construction of her face was revealed to me: a straight, firm nose, strongly marked brows, a little Roman chin. It is a double attraction when well-modeled features are both youthful and severe.
I made myself thoroughly amiable to this young woman who was throwing me out.
“I understand perfectly, Madame. But do realize that your sister’s only crime was to imagine I might be of some use to you. She made a mistake. Mademoiselle Rosita, it’ll be all right, won’t it, to fetch the typescript as usual, next Monday?”
The two sisters did not notice the ease with which I found the curtained door at the far end of the room, crossed the dark little hall, and shut myself out. Downstairs, I was joined by Rosita.
“Madame, Madame, you’re not angry?”
“Not in the very least. Why should I be. She’s pretty, your sister. By the way, what’s her name?”
“Adèle. But she likes to be called Délia. Her married name is Essendier, Madame Essendier. Now she’s heartbroken, she’d like to see you.”
“Very well, then! She shall see me on Monday,” I conceded with dignity.
As soon as I was alone, the temptation to be entrapped in this snare of resemblances lost its
power; the strident glare of the rue des Martyrs at midday dissipated the spell of the bedroom and the young woman curled up “day and night.” On the steep slope, what quantities of chickens with their necks hanging down, small legs of mutton displayed outside shops, fat sausages, enameled beer mugs with landscapes on them, oranges piled up in formation like cannon balls for ancient artillery, withered apples, unripe bananas, anemic chicory, glutinous wads of dates, daffodils, pink panties, bloomers encrusted with imitation Chantilly, little bags of ingredients for homemade stomach remedies, mercerized lisle stockings. What a number of postiches—they used to call them “chichés”—of ties sold in threes, of shapeless housewives, of blondes in down-at-heel shoes and brunettes in curlers, of mother-of-pearl smelts, of butcher boys with fat, cherubic faces. All this profusion, which had not changed in the least, awakened my appetite and vigorously restored me to reality.
Away with these Barberets! That chit of a girl with no manners was a sniveler, a lazy slut who must have driven her husband’s patience beyond all bounds. Caught between a prim, fussy old maid and a jealous young wife, what a charming life for a man!
Thus, wandering along and gazing at the shops, did I indict Madame Délia Essendier, christened Adèle . . . “Adèle . . . T’es belle . . .” Standing in front of a sumptuous Universal Provision Store, I hummed the silly, already hoary song, as I admired the oranges between the tumbled rice and the sweating coffee, the red apples and the split green peas. Just as in Nice one longs to buy the entire flower market, here I would have liked to buy a whole stall of eatables, from the forced lettuces to the blue packets of semolina. “Adèle . . . T’es belle . . .” I hummed.