The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  “Young ones? What kind of bird?”

  She shrugged her plump shoulders.

  “I haven’t any idea. He got off with some bruises and he’s been here ever since. It’s fifteen days now, isn’t it, Ruby?”

  “Two weeks,” answered Madame Ruby managerially. “He paid his second the day before yesterday.”

  “And what’s Monsieur Daste’s job in life?”

  Neither of the two friends answered immediately and their silence forced me to notice their uncertainty.

  “Well,” said Madame Suzanne. “He’s the head of a department in the Ministry of the Interior.”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her eyes fastened on mine as if she expected me to protest.

  “Does that seem very unlikely, Madame Suzanne?”

  “No! Oh, no! But I did not know that civil servants were usually so good at climbing. You should just see how that man can climb. Really climb.”

  The two friends turned simultaneously toward the window, which was darkening to blue as the night came in.

  “What do you mean, really climb?”

  “Up a tree,” said Madame Ruby. “We is not seen him go up, we is seen him coming down. Backward, a tiny step at a time, like this.”

  With her hands she mimed an acrobatic descent down a mast on a knotted rope.

  “A tall tree in the wood, over toward the sea. One evening before you arrived. One of those days when it was so hot, so lovely you is no idea.”

  “No,” I said sarcastically. “I certainly haven’t any idea. For over a week I’ve been disgusted with your weather. I suppose Monsieur Daste was trying to dazzle you with his agility?”

  “Just imagine!” cried Madame Suzanne. “He didn’t even see us. We were under the tamarisks.”

  She blushed again. I liked that violent way she had of blushing.

  “Madame Suzanne,” said Madame Ruby phlegmatically, “you is telling your story all upside down.”

  “No, I’m not! Madame Colette will understand me, all right! We were sitting side by side and I had my arm around Ruby, like that. We felt rather close to each other, both in the same mood and not spied on all the time as we are in this hole.”

  She cast a furious glance in the direction of the kitchen.

  “After all, it’s worth something, a good moment like that! There’s no need to talk or to kiss each other like schoolgirls. Is what I’m saying so very absurd?”

  She gave her companion a look which was a sudden affirmation of loyal love. I answered no with a movement of my head.

  “Well, there we were,” she went on. “Then I heard a noise in a tree, too much noise for it to be a cat. I was frightened. I’m brave, really, you know, but I always start by being frightened. Ruby made a sign to me not to move, so I don’t move. Then I hear someone’s shoe soles scraping and then poof! from the ground. And then we see Daddy Daste rubbing his hands and dusting the knees of his trousers and going off up to Bella-Vista. What do you think of that?”

  “Funny,” I said mechanically.

  “Very funny indeed, I think,” she said. But she did not laugh.

  She poured herself a second cup of tea and lit another cigarette. Madame Ruby, sitting very upright, went on embroidering with agile fingers. For the first time, I noticed that, away from their usual occupations, the two friends did not seem happy or even peaceful. Without going back on the instant liking I had felt for the American, I was beginning to think that Madame Suzanne was the more interesting and more worth studying of the two. I was struck, not only by her fierce, indiscreet jealousy which flared up on the least provocation, but by a kind of protective vigilance, by the way she made herself a buffer between Ruby and all risks, between Ruby and all worries. She gave her all the easy jobs which a subordinate could have done, sending her to the station or to the shops. With perfect physical dignity, Madame Ruby drove the car, unloaded the hampers of eggs and vegetables, cut the roses, cleaned out the parakeets’ cage, and offered her lighter to the guests. Then she would cross her sinewy legs in their thick woolen stockings and bury herself in an English or American magazine. Madame Suzanne did not read. Occasionally she would pick up a local paper from a table, saying: “Let’s have a look at the Messenger,” and, five minutes later, drop it again. I was beginning to appreciate her modes of relaxing, so typical of an illiterate woman. She had such an active, intelligent way of doing nothing, of looking about her, of letting her cigarette go out. A really idle person never lets a cigarette go out.

  Madame Ruby also dealt with the letters and, when necessary, typed in three languages. But Madame Suzanne said that she “inspired” them and Madame Ruby, nodding her beautiful faded chestnut head, agreed. Teatime cleared Madame Suzanne’s head and she would communicate her decisions in my presence. Whether from trustfulness or vanity, she did not mind thus letting me know that her eccentric summer clients did not mind what they paid and demanded privacy even more than comfort. They planned their stays at Bella-Vista a long time ahead.

  “Madame Ruby,” said Madame Suzanne suddenly, as if in response to a sudden outburst of the mistral, “I hope to goodness you haven’t shut the gate onto the road? Otherwise Daddy Daste won’t see it and he’ll crash into it with his car.”

  “I asked Paulius to light the little arc lamp at half past six.”

  “Good. Now, Madame Ruby, we’ll have to think about answering those two August clients of ours. They want their usual two rooms. But do remember the Princess and her masseur also want rooms in August. Our two Boche hussies, and the Princess, and Fernande and her gigolo—that’s a whole set that’s not on speaking terms. But they know each other . . . they’ve known each other for ages . . . and they can’t stand one another. So, Madame Ruby, first of all you’re to write to the Princess.”

  She explained at considerable length, knitting her penciled eyebrows. She addressed Ruby as “Madame” and used the intimate “tu” with a bourgeois, marital ceremoniousness. As she spoke, she kept looking at her friend just as an anxious nurse might scrutinize the complicated little ears, the eyelids, and the nostrils of an immensely well-looked-after child. She would smooth down a silvery lock on her forehead, straighten her tie, flatten her collar, or pick a stray white thread off her jacket.

  The expression on her face—it was tired and making no attempt just then to hide its tiredness—seemed to me very far from any “perverted” fussing. I use the word “perverted” in its usual modern sense. She saw that I was watching her and gave me a frank, warm smile which softened the blue eyes that often looked so hard.

  “It’s no news to you,” she said, “that our clientele’s rather special. After all, it was Grenigue who gave you our address. At Christmas and Easter, you won’t find a soul. But come back in July and you’ll have any amount of copy. You realize that, with only ten rooms in all, we have to put up prices a bit; our real season only lasts three months. I’ll tell you something that’ll make you laugh. Last summer, what do you think arrived? A little old couple, husband and wife, at least a hundred and sixty between them. Two tiny little things with an old manservant crumbling to bits, who asked if they could inspect the rooms, as if we were a palace! I said to them—as nicely as possible—‘There’s some mistake. You see this is a rather special kind of inn.’ They didn’t want to go. But I insisted, I tried to find words to make myself understood, old-fashioned words, you know. I said, ‘It’s a bit naughty-naughty, so to speak. People come here and sow their wild oats, as it were. You can’t stay here.’ Do you know what she answered, that little old grandmother? ‘And who told you, Madame, that we don’t want to sow some wild oats too?’ They went away, of course. But she had me there, all right! Madame Ruby, do you know what the time is? Time you gave that embroidery a rest. I can’t hear a sound in the dining room and the courtyard’s not lit up. Whatever’s the staff thinking about?”

  “I’ll go and ask Lucie,” said Madame Ruby, promptly getting to her feet.

  “No,” shouted Madame Su
zanne. “I must go and see to the dinner. You don’t suppose the leg of mutton’s anxiously waiting for you, do you?”

  She was trembling with sudden rage. Her lips were quivering with desire to burst out into a furious tirade. To stop herself, she made a rush to the door. As she did so, there was the sound of a motor engine and the headlights of a car swept the courtyard.

  “Daddy Daste,” announced Madame Suzanne.

  “Why isn’t that man switched off his headlights to come in? He might at least do that.”

  Pati, suddenly woken up, flung herself at the french window, from etiquette rather than from hostility. The dry breath of the mistral entered along with Monsieur Daste. He was rubbing his hands, and his impersonal face at last bore an individual accent. This was a small newly-made wound, triangular in shape, under his right eye.

  “Hello, Monsieur Daste! You is wounded? Pebble? A branch? An attack? Is the car damaged?”

  “Good evening, ladies,” said Monsieur Daste politely. “No, no, nothing wrong with the car. She’s going splendidly. This,” he put his hand to his cheek, “isn’t worth bothering about.”

  “All the same, I’m going to give you some peroxide,” said Madame Suzanne, who had come up to him and was examining the deeply incised little wound at close range. “Don’t cover it up, then it’ll dry quicker. A nail? A bit of flying flint?”

  “No,” said Monsieur Daste. “Just a . . . bird.”

  “What, another one?” said Madame Ruby.

  Madame Suzanne turned to her friend with a reproving look.

  “What do you mean, another one? There’s nothing so very astonishing about it.”

  “Quite so. Nothing so very astonishing,” agreed Monsieur Daste.

  “It’s full of night birds around here.”

  “Full,” said Monsieur Daste.

  “The headlights dazzle them and they dash themselves against the windshield.”

  “Exactly,” concluded Monsieur Daste. “I’m delighted to be back at Bella-Vista again. That Corniche road at night! To think that there are people who actually drive on it for pleasure! I shall do justice to the dinner, Madame Suzanne!”

  Nevertheless we noticed at dinner that Monsieur Daste ate nothing but the sweet. I noticed this mainly because Madame Ruby kept up a stream of encouragement from her table.

  “Hello, Monsieur Daste! Is good for you to keep your strength up!”

  “But I assure you I don’t feel in the least weak,” Monsieur Daste kept politely assuring her.

  In fact, his abstinence had endowed him with the bright flush of satiety. He was drinking water with a slightly inebriated expression.

  Madame Ruby raised her large hand sententiously.

  “Leg of mutton Bretonne is very good against birds, Monsieur Daste!”

  I remember it was that evening that we played our first game of poker. My three partners loved cards. In order to play better, they retired into the depths of themselves, leaving their faces unconsciously exposed. Studying them amused me more than the game. In any case, I play poker extremely badly and was scolded more than once. I was amused to note that Monsieur Daste only “opened” when forced to and then only with obvious reluctance, but good cards gave him spasms of nervous yawns which he managed to suppress by expanding his nostrils. His little wound had been washed and around it a bruised area was already turning purple, showing how violent the impact had been.

  Madame Ruby played a tough game, compressing her full lips, and asking for cards and raising the bid by signs. I was astonished to see her handling the cards with agile but brutal fingers, using a thumb which was much thicker than I had realized. As to Madame Suzanne, she seemed set in her tracks like a bloodhound. She showed not the slightest emotion, pulled each card out slowly before declaring with an air of detachment: “Good for me!”

  The smoke accumulated in horizontal layers and between two rounds I reproached myself for the inertia which kept me sitting there. “Perhaps I’m still not quite well,” I told myself with a kind of hopefulness.

  Suddenly the mistral stopped blowing and the silence fell on us so brutally that it awakened the sleeping griffon. She emerged from her knitted hood and asked clearly, with her eyes and her pricked ears, what time it was.

  “Huisipisi, huisipisi!” said Monsieur Daste maliciously.

  She stared at him, sniffed the air about his person, and put her two front paws on the table. From there, by stretching her thick little neck, she could just reach Monsieur Daste’s hands.

  “How she loves me!” said Monsieur Daste. “Huisipisi . . .”

  The dog seemed to be searching for a particular spot and to find it just under the edge of Monsieur Daste’s cuff. She smelled it with her knowing black nostrils, then she tasted it with her tongue.

  “She’s tickling me! Madame Suzanne, you pray too long to the goddess of luck while you’re shuffling the cards. On with the game!”

  “Monsieur Daste, why do you always say ‘huisipisi’ to my dog? Is it a magic password?”

  He fluttered his little hands about his face.

  “The breeze,” he said. “The wind in the fir trees. Wings . . . Huisipisi . . . Things that fly . . . Even things that skim over the ground in a very . . . very silky way. Rats.”

  “Boo!” cried Madame Suzanne. “I’ve a horror of mice. So, imagine, a rat! On with the game yourself, Monsieur Daste. Madame Colette, don’t forget the kitty. I believe you’re thinking more about your next novel than our little poker game.”

  In this she was wrong. Alone in this equivocal guest house, during the pause before the harvest of its summer debauch, I was aware of a complex and familiar mental state. In that state a peculiar pleasure blunts the sharp edge of my longing for my friends, my home, and my real life. Yet is there anyone who is not deluded about the setting of their “real” life? Was I not breathing here and now, among these three strangers, what I call the very oxygen of travel? My thoughts could wander as lazily as they pleased; I was free of any burden of love; I was immersed in that holiday emptiness in which morning brings a lighthearted intoxication and evening a compulsion to waste one’s time and to suffer. Everything you love strips you of part of yourself: the Madame Suzannes rob you of nothing. Answering the few careless questions they ask takes nothing out of you. “How many pages do you do a day? All those letters you get every day and all those ones you write, don’t you have to cudgel your brains over them? You don’t happen to know an authoress who lives all the year round at Nice—a tall woman with pince-nez?” The Madame Suzannes don’t catechize you; they tell you about themselves. Sometimes, of course, they keep aggressively silent about some great secret which is always rising to their lips and being stifled. But a secret is exacting and deafens us with its clamor.

  In many ways, I found Bella-Vista satisfying. It revived old habits from my solitary days: the itch for the arrival of the postman, my curiosity about passers-by who leave no permanent trace. I felt sympathetic toward the discredited pair of friends. At Bella-Vista I ate admirably and worked atrociously. Moreover, I was putting on weight there.

  “Four last rounds,” announced Madame Suzanne. “Monsieur Daste, you open for the last time. Afterward, I’ll stand you a bottle of champagne. I think that ought to wake Madame Ruby up. There hasn’t been a sound from her all the evening.”

  Her blue eyes shot a glance of fierce reproach at her impassive friend.

  “You is usually hear me play poker at the top of my voice?”

  Madame Suzanne did not answer and, as soon as the last round was over, went off to get the champagne. While she was going down to the cellar, Madame Ruby stood up, stretched her arms and her firm shoulders till the joints cracked. Then she opened the door between the dining room and the boudoir, listened in the direction of the kitchen, and came back again. She seemed absentminded, preoccupied by some care which made her full mouth look ugly and dulled the large gray eyes under the eyebrows which were paler than her forehead. That evening, the ambiguity of all her features
, always disturbing, seemed almost repellent. She was biting the inside of her cheek but forced herself to stop gnawing it when her friend returned, out of breath, with a bottle of brut under each arm.

  “This is really old,” announced Madame Suzanne. “Some remains of the ‘06. You don’t think I pour that down the gullets of the summer visitors. It’s not iced but the cellar’s cool. I don’t know if you agree with me that it’s nice to have a wine now and then that doesn’t make a block of ice in your stomach. Madame Ruby, where are there some pliers? These bottles are wired in the old-fashioned way.”

  “I’ll call Lucie,” suggested the American.

  Madame Suzanne looked at her almost furiously.

  “For God’s sake, can’t you give Lucie a little peace? For one thing, she’s gone to bed. For another, you’ll certainly find some sort of pliers in the office.”

  We drank each other’s health. Madame Ruby magically gulped down a large glass in one swallow, throwing her head back in a way which proved how much drinking was a habit with her. Madame Suzanne mimicked the toasts with which drinkers in the Midi raise their glasses: “To your very good!” “Much appreciated! Likewise!” Monsieur Daste closed his eyes like a cat afraid of splashing itself when it laps. Sitting opposite me in the depths of one of the English armchairs, he drank the perfect old champagne, whose bubbles gave out a faint scent of roses as they burst, in tiny sips. The bruise which was now clearly visible around the little triangular wound on his cheek made him seem, for some reason, likable, less definitely human. I like a fox terrier to have a round spot by its eye and a tortoiseshell cat to show an orange crescent or a black patch on its temple. A large mole or freckle on our cheek, a neat well-placed scar, one eye that is slightly larger than the other: all such things mark us out from the general human anonymity.

  Madame Suzanne inclined the neck of the second bottle over our goblets and drew our attention to the mushroom-shaped cork, which had acquired the texture of hard wood with age.

  “Two bottles among four of us. Quite an orgy! But we’ll see better than that in this house this summer.”