by Colette
“If you ask me,” said an insolent-eyed local girl, right under my nose, “I’d say The Merry Widow was a lot more up-to-date than that old thing.”
I did not reply, for this strapping blonde with her hair curled to last a week, planted solidly on her feet and sugared with coarse powder, was, after all, speaking for the whole generation destined to devour my own.
All the same I was not old, and above all, I did not look my real age. But a private life that was clouded and uncertain, a solitude that bore no resemblance to peace had wiped all the life and charm out of my face. I have never had less notice taken of me by men than during those particular years whose date I dissemble here. It was much later on that they treated me again to the good honest offensive warmth of their looks, to that genial concupiscence which will make an admirer, when he ought to be kissing your hand, give you a friendly pinch on the buttock.
The following Monday, on a sultry March morning when the sky was a whitish blue and Paris, dusty and surprised, was spilling her overflow of jonquils and anemones into the streets, I walked limply up the steep slope of Montmartre. Already the wide-open entrances to the blocks of flats were ejecting the air that was colder inside than out, along with the carbonic smell of stoves that had been allowed to go out. I rang the bell of Mademoiselle Rosita’s flat; she did not answer it and I joyfully welcomed the idea that she might be out, busy buying a pale escallop of veal or some ready-cooked sauerkraut . . . To salve my conscience, I rang a second time. Something brushed faintly against the door and the parquet creaked.
“Is that you, Eugène?” asked the voice of Mademoiselle Barberet.
She spoke almost in a whisper and I could hear her breathing at the level of the keyhole.
As if exculpating myself, I cried: “It’s me, Mademoiselle Rosita! I’m bringing some pages of manuscript . . .”
Mademoiselle Barberet gave a little “Ah!” but did not open the door at once. Her voice changed and she said in mincing tones: “Oh, Madame, what can I have been thinking of. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
A safety bolt slid in its catch and the door was half opened.
“Be very careful, Madame, you might stumble . . . My sister’s on the floor.’
She could not have spoken more politely and indifferently had she said: “My sister’s gone out to the post.” I did, in fact, stumble against a body lying prone, with its feet pointing skyward and its hands and face mere white blurs. The sight of it threw me into a state of cowardice which I intensely dislike. Drawing away from the body stretched out on the floor, I asked, to give the impression of being helpful, “What’s the matter with her? Would you like me to call someone?”
Then I noticed that the sensitive Mademoiselle Rosita did not seem to be greatly perturbed.
“It’s a fainting fit . . . a kind of dizziness that isn’t serious. Just let me get the smelling salts and a wet towel.”
She was already running off. I noticed she had forgotten to turn the light on and I had no trouble in finding the switch to the right of the front door. A ceiling light in the form of a plate with a crinkled border feebly lit up the hall and I bent down over the prostrate young woman. She was lying in an extremely decent attitude, with her skirt down to her ankles. One of her bent arms, whose hand lay palm upward, beside her ear, seemed to be commanding attention, and her head was slightly averted on her shoulders. Really, a very pretty young woman, taking refuge in a sulky swoon. I could hear Mademoiselle Rosita in the bedroom, opening and shutting a drawer, slamming the door of a cupboard.
And I found the seconds drag heavily as I stared at the tubular umbrella stand, at the cane table; in particular, at a door curtain of Algerian design that roused a regret in my heart for a rather pretty strip of leafy tapestry that used to hang there in the old days. As I looked down at the motionless young woman, I realized, from a narrow gleam between her eyelids, that she was secretly watching me. For some reason, I felt disagreeably surprised, as if by some practical joke. I bent over this creature who was shamming a faint and applied another approved remedy for swoons—a good, hard, stinging slap. She received it with an offended snarl and sat up with a jerk.
“Well! So you’re better?” cried Rosita, who was arriving with a wet towel and a liter of salad vinegar.
“As you see, Madame slapped my hands,” said Délia coldly. “You’d never have thought of that, would you? Help me to get up, please.”
I could not avoid giving her my arm. And supporting her thus, I entered the bedroom she had practically asked me to leave.
The room reverberated with the noises of the street that came up through the open window. There was just the same contrast I remembered so well between the cheerful noises and the mournful light. I guided the young pretender to the divan-bed.
“Rosita, perhaps you’d have the charity to bring me a glass of water?” *
I began to realize that the two sisters adopted a bitter, bantering tone whenever they spoke to each other. Rosita’s small steps went off toward the kitchen and I prepared to leave her younger sister’s bedside. But, with an unexpected movement, Délia caught hold of my hand, then clasped her arms around my knees and wildly pressed her head against them.
You must remember that, at that period of my life, I was still childless and that friendship, for me, wore the guise of undemonstrative, offhand, unemotional comradeliness. You must also take into account that, for many months, I had been starved of the coarse, invigorating bread of physical contact. A kiss, a good warm hug, the fresh touch of a child or anyone young had remained so long out of my reach that they had become distant, almost forgotten joys. So this unknown young woman’s outburst, her surge of tears, and her sudden embrace stunned me. Rosita’s return found me standing just where I was and the imploring arms unloosed their grip.
“I let the tap run for two minutes,” explained the older sister. “Madame, how can I apologize . . .”
I suddenly resented Mademoiselle Barberet’s air of business-like alacrity; her two ringlets bobbed on her right shoulder and she was slightly out of breath.
“Tomorrow morning,” I interrupted, “I’ve got to buy some remnants in the St-Pierre market. So I could come and collect the typed copies and you can give me news of . . . this . . . young person. No, stay where you are. I know the way.”
What stirred just now in the thicket? No, it isn’t a rabbit. Or a grass snake. Or a bird that travels in shorter spurts. Only lizards are so agile, so capable of covering a long distance fast, so reckless . . . It’s a lizard. That large butterfly flying in the distance—I always had rather bad eyesight—you say it’s a Swallowtail? No, it’s a Large Tortoiseshell. Why? Because the one we’re looking at glides magnificently as only the Large Tortoiseshell can, and the Swallowtail has a flapping flight. “My husband, such a placid man . . .” a friend of mine used to tell me. She did not see that he sucked his tongue all day long. She thought he was eating chewing gum, not differentiating between the chewing of gum and the nervous sucking of the tongue. Personally, I thought that this man had cares on his mind or else that the presence of his wife exasperated him.
Ever since I had made the acquaintance of Délia Essendier I had found myself “recapping” in this way lessons I had learned from my instinct, from animals, children, nature, and my disquieting fellow beings. It seemed to me that I needed more than ever to know of my own accord, without discussing it with anyone, that the lady going by has a left shoe that pinches her, that the person I am talking to is pretending to drink in my words but not even listening to me, that a certain woman who hides from herself the fact that she loves a certain man cannot stop herself from following him like a magnet whenever he is in the room, but always turns her back to him. A dog with evil intentions sometimes limps out of nervousness.
Children, and people who retain some ingenuous trait of childhood, are almost indecipherable, I realize that. Nevertheless, in a child’s face, there is just one revealing, unstable area, a space comprised between the nostril, the eye, and the upper
lip, where the waves of a secret delinquency break on the surface. It is as swift and devastating as lightning. Whatever the child’s age, that little flash of guilt turns the child into a ravaged adult. I have seen a serious lie distort a little girl’s nostril and upper lip like a harelip . . .
“Tell me, Délia . . .”
. . . but on Délia’s features nothing explicit appeared. She took refuge in a smile—for me—or in bad temper directed against her older sister, or else she entered into a somber state of waiting, installing herself in it as if at the window of a watchtower. She would half sit, half lie on her divan-bed, which was covered with a green material printed with blue nasturtiums—the last gasps of the vogue for Liberty fabrics—clutching a big cushion against her, propping her chin on it, and scarcely ever moving. Perhaps she was aware that her attitude suited her often cantankerous beauty.
“But tell me, Délia, when you got married, didn’t you have a presentiment that . . .”
Propped up like that, with her skirt pulled down to her ankles, she seemed to be meditating, rather than waiting. Since profound meditation is not concerned with being expressive, Délia Essendier never turned her eyes to me, even when she was speaking. More often than not, she looked at the half-open window, the reservoir of air, the source of sounds, a greenish aquarium in the shade of the green-and-blue curtains. Or else she stared fixedly at the little slippers with which her feet were shod. I, too, in the old days, used to buy those little heelless slippers of imitation silk brocade, adorned with a flossy pompon on the in-step. In those days they cost thirteen francs seventy-five and their poor material soon tarnished. The young voluntary recluse I saw before me did not bother herself with shoes. She was only half a recluse, going out in the morning to buy a squirrel’s provisions, a provender of fresh bread, dry nuts, eggs, and apples, and the little meat that sufficed for the appetite of the two sisters.
“Didn’t you tell me, Délia . . .”
No. She had told me nothing. Her brief glance accused me of imagining things, of having no memory. What was I doing there, in a place which ought to have been forbidden ground for me, at the side of a woman young enough to give no indication of being a wife and who manifested neither virtues nor nobility of mind nor even as much intelligence as any lively, gentle animal? The answer, I insist, is that this was a period in my life which motherhood and happy love had not yet enriched with their marvelous commonplace.
People might already have taken me to task for my choice of associates—those who tried to got an extremely poor reception—and my friends might have been surprised, for example, to find me pacing up and down the avenue du Bois in the company of a shabby groom who brought and took away the horses hired out by a riding school. A former jockey who had been unlucky and come down in the world and who looked like an old glove. But he was a mine of information on everything to do with horses and dogs, diseases, remedies, fiery beverages that would kill or cure, and I liked his meaty conversation even though he did teach me too much about the way animals are “made up” to get a better price for them. For example, I would gladly have been dispensed from knowing that they pour sealing wax into a French bulldog’s ears if it has slightly limp auricles . . . The rest of his expert knowledge was fascinating.
With less fundamental richness, Marie Mallier had considerable charm. If any of my circle had decided to be captious about all the things Marie Mallier did in the course of what she broadly described as “touring in operetta,” I would not have stood for it. Reduced to accepting all and sundry, the only transgressions Marie Mallier really enjoyed were the unprofitable delights of sewing and ironing. For the spice of an occupation, generally considered innocent, can be more exciting than many a guilty act performed out of necessity.
“To make a darn so that the corners don’t pucker and all the little loops on the wrong side stand out nice and even,” Marie Mallier used to say. “It makes my mouth water like cutting a lemon!” Our vices are less a matter of yielding to temptation than of some obsessive love. Throwing oneself passionately into helping some unknown woman, founding hopes on her that would be discouraged by the wise affection of our friends, wildly adopting a child that is not ours, obstinately ruining ourselves for a man whom we probably hate, such are the strange manifestations of a struggle against ourselves that is sometimes called disinterestedness, sometimes perversity. When I was with Délia Essendier, I found myself once again as vulnerable, as prone to giving presents out of vanity as a schoolgirl who sells her books to buy a rosary, a ribbon, or a little ring and slips them, with a shy note, into the desk of a beloved classmate.
Nevertheless, I did not love Délia Essendier, and the beloved class-mate I was seeking, who was she but my former self, that sad form stuck, like a petal between two pages, to the walls of an ill-starred refuge?
“Délia, haven’t you got a photograph of your husband here?”
Since the day when her arms had clasped my knees, Délia had made no other mute appeal to me except, when I stood up to go, a gesture to hold me back by the hand, the gesture of an awkward young girl who has not learned how to grip or offer a palm frankly. All she did was to pull on my fingers and hurriedly let them go, as if out of sulkiness, then turn away toward the window that was nearly always open. Following the suggestion of her gaze, it was I who would go over to the window and stare at the passers-by, or rather at their lids, for in those days, all men wore hats. When the entrance down below swallowed up a man with a long stride, dressed in a blue overcoat, in spite of myself I would count the seconds and reckon the time it would take a visitor in a hurry to cross the hall, walk up to our floor, and ring the bell. But no one would ring and I would breathe freely again.
“Your husband, does he write to you, Délia?”
This time, the reticent young person whom I continued to ask tactless questions, whether she left them unanswered or not, scanned me with her insulting gaze. But I was long past the stage of taking any notice of her disdain, and I repeated: “Yes, I’m asking if your husband writes to you sometimes.”
My question produced a great effect on Rosita, who was walking through the bedroom. She stopped short, as if waiting for her sister’s reply.
“No,” said Délia at last. “He doesn’t write to me and it’s just as well he doesn’t. We’ve nothing to say to each other.”
At this, Rosita opened her mouth and her eyes in astonishment. Then she continued her light-footed walk and, just before she disappeared, raised both her hands to her ears. This scandalized gesture revived my curiosity, which at times died down. I must also admit that, going back to the scene of my unhappy, fascinating past, I found it shocking that Délia—Délia and not myself—should be lying on the divan-bed, playing at taking off and putting on her little slippers, while I, tired of an uncomfortable seat, got up to walk to and fro, to push the table closer to the window as if by accident, to measure the space once filled by a dark cupboard.
“Délia, was it you who chose this wallpaper?”
“Certainly not. I’d have liked a flowered paper, like the one in the living room.”
“What living room?”
“The big room.”
“Ah, yes. It isn’t a living room, because you don’t live in it. I should be more inclined to call it the workroom, because your sister works in it.”
Now that the days were growing longer, I could make out the color of Délia’s eyes—around her dilated pupils there was a ring of dark gray-green—and the whiteness of her skin, like the complexion of southern women who are uniformly pale from head to foot. She threw me a look of obstinate mistrust.
“My sister can work just as well in a living room if she chooses.”
“The main thing is that she works, isn’t it?” I retorted.
With a kick, she flung one of her slippers a long way away.
“I work too,” she said stiffly. “Only nobody sees what I do. I wear myself out; oh, I wear myself out. In there . . . In there . . .”
She was touch
ing her forehead and pressing her temples. With slight contempt, I looked at her idle woman’s hands, her delicate fingers, long, slim, and turned up at the tips, and her fleshy palms. I shrugged my shoulders.
“Fine work, a fixed idea! You ought to be ashamed, Délia.”
She gave way easily to tempers typical of an ill-bred schoolgirl with no self-control.
“I don’t only just think!” she screamed. “I . . . I work in my own way! It’s all in my head!”
“Are you planning a novel?”
I had spoken sarcastically but Délia, quite unaware of this, was flattered and calmed down.
“Oh! Well, not exactly so . . . it’s a bit like a novel, only better.”
“What is it you call better than a novel, my child?”
For I allowed myself to call her that when she seemed to be pitchforked into a kind of brutal, irresponsible childishness. She always flinched at the word and rewarded me with an angry, lustrous glance, accompanied by an ill-tempered shrug.
“Ah, I can’t tell you that,” she said in a self-important voice.
She went back to fishing cherries out of a newspaper cornet. She pinched the stones between her fingers and aimed at the open window. Rosita passed through the room, busy on some errand, and scolded her sister without pausing in her walk.
“Délia, you oughtn’t to throw the stones out into the street.”
What was I doing there, in that desert? One day, I brought some better cherries. Another day, having brought Rosita a manuscript full of erasures, I said: “Wait. Could I redo this page on . . . on a corner of a table, doesn’t matter where. There, look, that’ll do very well. Yes, yes, I can see well enough there. Yes, I’ve got my fountain pen.”
Leaning on a rickety one-legged table, I received, from the left, the light of the solitary window and, from the right, the attention of Délia. To my amazement, she set to work with a needle. She was doing the fine beadwork that was all the rage at the moment for bags and trimmings.
“What a charming talent, Délia.”