The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette
After a short silence, the car drove up to my house and Josette gave the man an order: “Get out, then, can’t you see your seat is blocking the lady’s way?”
He was quick to obey, excused himself, and Josette, as she left me, promised to come see me. “As soon as rehearsals at the Edouard VII are over, I’ll come by.”
She came a few days later, dressed all in lawn and “summer furs,” with a single strand of pearls around her neck, and dangling a moiré handbag set with brilliants. But she hadn’t changed her coiffure at all, and her hair, unwaved and uncurled, still clung to her temples like a Japanese child’s.
“My little Josette, I don’t need to ask what’s happened to you.”
She shook her head. “Every disaster possible! I’ve fallen into the ranks of the nouveaux riches.”
“It looks that way. Are you in dried beans or projectiles?”
“Me? I’m not in anything—him . . . oh, he can buy and sell anything—what’s it to me, he doesn’t interest me.”
“Listen, for a war supplier, he’s very nice.”
“Yes, he is very nice. Despite everything, he’s very nice.”
Without really seeing them, she was contemplating her beautiful white suede shoes, and her face, though lit up by pearls, snow-white lawn, pale fur, and silk, seemed to have lost its glow.
“If I understand you correctly, Josette, you miss the days when . . .”
“Not at all,” she interrupted sharply. “You can’t believe that! Why should I miss the days when I was cold, when I didn’t have enough to eat, when I was running around in the filth and the snow, when without you and these ladies I’d’ve fallen ill or worse? Not at all. I’m no fool, I like what’s good. Since I don’t have anyone at the front anymore, except for a few young friends I’m looking after in Paul’s memory, why shouldn’t I be the lady with the ear and the necklace, instead of the woman downstairs? Fair is fair. Doing as much of what I do, I think I’m worth all the blue foxes and tulle chemises . . . That’s the least of it, since compared with that man, whom you’ve seen, I’m the victim!”
I said nothing. She sensed, acutely, that her words were driving me away from her and she burst out: “Madame, Madame, you don’t know . . . You think bad of me . . . I swear to you, Madame . . .”
She was near tears but controlled herself. “You saw him, Madame. You don’t have to be a genius to realize there’s not a better man than him. He is a good man. He’s refined and well-groomed, everything—which doesn’t change the fact that I’m the victim.”
“But why, my dear?”
“Why? Simply because I don’t love him and I never will love him, Madame! If he were ugly and disgusting and stingy, I could console myself, I could tell myself, ‘It’s perfectly natural I can’t stand the sight of him. He buys me, I loathe him—everything’s out in the open.’ But with this man, Madame, whom I don’t love because I don’t love him, my God, the things I could do to myself fretting over him . . .”
She was quiet a moment, searching for words, examples!
“Look, he gave me this ring the day before yesterday. And in such a nice way! So I started to cry . . . He called me ‘My sensitive little girl!’ and I cried thinking of the pleasure it would have given me to get a ring from a man I could love; it made me so furious I could have bitten him . . .”
“What a child you are, Josette.”
She struck the arm of the chair in irritation. “No, Madame, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong! One isn’t that much of a child, in Paris, at twenty-five. I know what love is, I’ve been through it. I have a very loving nature, even if it doesn’t show. That’s what makes me think of myself as his victim, and I’m jealous of him, so jealous it makes me sick.”
“Jealous?”
“Yes, envious, I envy everything he has, everything I can’t have, since he’s the one who’s in love. The other day at rehearsal the little Peloux girl said to me, ‘Your friend’s got a nice mouth, he must kiss pretty well.’ ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say to her. And it’s true, I wouldn’t know. It’s not for me to know. It’s for the woman who finds him to her liking. I’ll die without ever knowing whether he kisses good or bad, if he makes love good or bad. When he kisses me, my mouth becomes like . . . like . . . nothing. It’s dead, it doesn’t feel anything. My body either. But him, with what little I give him—you should see his face, his eyes . . . Oh, it’s a thousand times more than all I get! Ten thousand times more!
“. . . So, of course, my nerves . . . I end up getting mean. I take my revenge, I’m cruel to him. I was so mean to him once that he cried. That was the last straw! I didn’t say another word to him, I might have gone too far. Because I know what it’s like to have someone in your life who only has to say one word to put you in heaven or hell! I’m that person for him. He has everything, Madame, he has everything. And there’s nothing he can do for me, nothing—not even make me unhappy!”
She burst into sobs, mixing her vehement tears with, “Tell me, Madame, am I wrong? Tell me . . .” But I could find nothing—and I’ve found nothing since—to say to her.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Tenor
He is beautiful. He dresses in the fashionable colors of the day: black and white. White shirtfront and black tuxedo, a gardenia in his lapel. A white face with regular features, Roman nose, black hair reflecting the stagelights, and large, tranquil black pupils set in the huge whites of his eyes. His mouth, set off by rich, dark makeup, his teeth, his hair, and his tremendous eyes, all shine with a slick flash, as if made lustrous by some rare oil. He is beautiful.
As he appears, introduced by the plaintive harmony of the violins, and stops directly in the center of the stage, only the claque applaud him. But I would swear that if the music and the bravos were silenced, one would hear a discreet, strictly feminine murmuring: sighs of pleasure and desire, a rustling of dresses as one settles down and leans forward, and whisperings which would be the hissing of the s’s in his name.
He sings the waltzes demanded by the current vogue and gives a precise rendition of a sentimental ballad in which a heroic gigolette dies to save the young man who has made her a mother—all in a lovely, easy voice, which he uses carefully, for the smoke and dust of the music hall make a tenor’s glory brief. He is no less careful with his gestures and leaves it to his eyes to do the seducing. As he sings, his black-and-white eyes survey the boxes, slowly, confidently, veiled with sensual disdain, and then, in the same way, they caress the orchestra seats. Now and then, his gaze stops, fixes on a precise spot, where one is sure to see a woman lower her lorgnette and lean back suddenly in her seat, as if drawing away from an overly strong fire. It is only for an instant: the eyes have already resumed their professional stroll; regardless of any sentimental waltz, any love song, I would swear they seem oblivious to the fact that the tenor is singing . . .
Having acknowledged the applause, heels together, one hand resting on some bush made of flowering canvas and wood, he joins us in the wings and strolls around a bit. The clock has just struck ten, and the tenor yawns at the prospect of half an evening yet to kill. A chipped and frameless mirror hangs on the wall: the tenor looks at his teeth, at his clean-shaven chin powdered to mask the blue of his heavy beard. He checks the callboard, yawns again, and says out loud, to no one in particular: “Good house tonight.”
He coughs and adds: “I don’t know what this is I’ve had in my throat since this morning.”
The prostrate comedian comes up with some trite response, or maybe it’s the unappreciated diseuse who is about to distill the “Lovely Songs of France,” or maybe it’s me . . .
And still the tenor remains. He lingers in the sinister half-darkness, the strange silence, disturbed only by the orchestra, in the wings of a “caf’ conc’.” Occasionally, the young messenger boy hands him a letter, which he opens slowly with an indiscreet smile.
But I see no sign of haste, or excitement, and this “heartbreaker” never seems to behave like a man for w
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
The Quick-Change Artist
I hear her dancing, I cannot see her from the wings, for she dances on a closed set, one of those strange sets found only in a music hall. This one represents a unique place, painted in a putrid pink color with gold highlights, bringing together a mantelpiece loaded with candelabra, a staircase of blue-veined marble imitating a bar of soap, a Persian portico entwined with rare flowers, and two large blue vases, both empty. A curtain of glass beads closes off the back of the stage; that is where the “cosmopolitan, dancing quick-change artist” disappears and reappears, dressed each time in a new costume.
I see only her in the wings, where each of her disappearances takes her. I remain in the background behind the long table on which her costumes are laid out in neat little piles. Dresses, hats, wigs, promise the audience a new idol every two minutes; I make myself inconspicuous, so as not to bother her, but she seems totally unaware of my presence anyway . . .
The end of a cakewalk hurls back at me, from between the tinkling beaded curtain, a slender Greenaway doll in blue tulle, breathing heavily. With a rough slap to her forehead, the English doll tears off her hat and wig, as the faded blue lampshade serving as a skirt falls. Before I can get a good look at her face—violet makeup under the lunar light from a row of blue electric bulbs—a silent, black, kneeling specter is fastening the hooks of a Spanish dress. In the orchestra, the pizzicati and the Sevillian tambourines are quivering, and the dancer groans with impatience: quick, the black wig with the red rose, shawl across the shoulders, the castanets . . . With a leap, she opens the beaded curtains and I hear, mingled with the sounds from the orchestra, the rhythmic language of her clever feet . . .
Two minutes: here she is again. She’s breathing harder and she leans back for a moment against the wooden framework to take off her skirt with the chenille balls, head thrown back . . . The ritornell, longer than a tarantella, gives me time to look at her: it’s an Italian face, with somewhat thick but regular features and heavy eyelids, looking drunk with exhaustion. My eyes, by now accustomed to the darkness, can make out the slight brown shoulders, the bare breasts, young and tired, not quite filled out enough, above a frayed corset belt of gray twill . . . A Neapolitan fisherman’s castoffs—silk skirt, fringed sash, cap tilted over one ear—hide all that, as if by magic. The haggard face revives, and a Neapolitan fisherman shaking a tambourine steps out on stage.
During the tarantella, I count the number of costumes left on the table; the silent attendant, preparing the Egyptian dancing girl’s veils, follows my gaze and shakes her head . . . Almost instantly, the Neapolitan fisherman falls into her arms, breathless. The dancer’s forehead bears the sweat and pallor of someone being suffocated by his own heart. I want to say something, to help somehow, but there is something tragic about the two women’s haste: one must, despite the trembling hands and the heaving sides, one must go on to the end . . .
Helpless, I witness the final “transformations”: I see pass before me a Plains Indian, bristling with feathers, who has just had a lemon pressed into her mouth the way boxers do, then a reeling Egyptian dancing girl, who lets up an “ululu,” then a muzhik in a red shirt, sobbing nervously, weeping big round tears because her legs are going to give out on her, then finally, finally, there is nothing more left in front of me, in that cold blue moonlight, at that inert hour, except the frame for all those costumes: the body of an exhausted young girl, half naked against the back of the set, who, seeking a breath of air, lifts her breast, as St. Sebastian offered his, to the arrows.
[Translated by Matthew Ward]
Florie
“Why a juggler, Arsène? Will a juggler go over?”
“What can I do? You don’t want a singer, do you? Or a dancer? I have an empty spot in my revue. I have to fill it.”
“Yeh,” said Florie thoughtfully, “yeh . . .”
When she was preoccupied, she would revert to the familiar accent of the working-class district she grew up in.
“How’s that guy who fell, Arsène?”
“Jackie? He’s all right, if you can believe what they say at the hospital. Fractured kneecap, occupational hazard. It happens . . .”
Florie stroked her knee, her own leg’s precious joint, superstitiously.
“Well, I hope it never happens to me . . .”
“So,” Sutter continued, “I’ll give this juggler a try. His work is different. And he’ll always bring women around, seeing as how he’s a good-looking kid.”
“Do what you want,” said Florie indifferently.
Arsène Sutter and the ever-popular Florie, looking greenish and drowned beneath a blue running light, leaned against each other, squeezed between two flats in the wings. Director and star, shoulder to shoulder, exchanged few words, professionally accustomed as they were to resting on their feet and waiting. Sutter nevertheless turned toward Florie.
“You want to sit down?”
“On what?” asked Florie ironically.
Above them, atop a strange pyramid made of flounced skirts of rose muslin, sat a motionless figurante buried waist-deep in ruffles. She was waiting to portray the part of “Crinoline” in the tableau called “Fashions of the Second Empire.” Because of the congestion in the wings, she was hoisted up every night twelve feet in the air and stayed planted up there, isolated from the world, for twenty-five minutes.
“I’m not tired,” Florie added.
Sutter slipped her a look of affectionate and commercial regard. For close to thirty years, Florie had endured three hundred evening performances, two matinees on holidays, three months of rehearsals, costume changes, and sketches danced and sung without any lessening of either her vitality or her beauty.
“The juggler’s on next,” said Sutter.
“What’s his name, anyway?” asked Florie.
“Lola.”
“Lola? Another androgyne bit?”
“Hardly,” said Sutter. “Lola is a man’s name in Russian, or so he says.”
Florie burst out laughing. A blue spark alighted on each of her flawless teeth, and two blue sparks danced in her periwinkle eyes.
“She’s incredible,” thought Sutter admiringly. Thick makeup, sticky and smooth, revealed little of the real Florie. She held her head high, out of habit, and so as to smooth out the wrinkles in her neck. But up close, Sutter could make out, beneath the star’s ear and chin, the tendons lengthwise, the “necklaces” crosswise, a whole play of loosening skin and slackening muscles. The cheeks held up well, thanks to their high cheekbones and a magnificent rouge of gay, bright red, above which the eyelids were all lashes in diverging rays, a deftly muted purplish color, and the dark blue eyebrows, straight-edged and severely horizontal. Arsène Sutter placed a heavy and careful hand on Florie’s bare shoulder, as if he were touching a costly and unbeatable racehorse. The stage crew revolved around them discreetly, on old, worn-out shoes and frayed espadrilles, with the respect due a couple from whom could rain a shower of abuse or praise.
“Here’s Lola,” prompted Sutter. “He enters stage right and exits stage left.”
Florie followed the juggler through his act with serious scrutiny as he tossed a bizarre variety of light objects into the air, interspersed with heavy gold balls. Paper rose petals, plumes, little feathered arrows which soared up, then dived point first toward the ground, ribbons, and cellophane butterflies all floated slowly between the speeding balls and seemed tamed by the juggler’s hands.
“That’s really funny,” Florie decided.
Lola finished with a release of boomerangs and withdrew as he had entered,
Sutter consulted Florie.
“O.K.?”
“O.K.,” said Florie, stepping over the rubber-encased electric cables.
“And good-looking too, which doesn’t hurt any,” she added.
During the next day’s afternoon performance, the juggler made a mistake, and then exited stage left, almost knocking down Florie, who was standing behind the wing under the blue light.
“Oh, excuse me, Madame Florie . . . I just came from doing my act in Brussels, where I had to enter and exit on the same side, so . . .”
“They’re calling for you,” interrupted Florie. “Go take a bow.”
When the curtains closed again, Florie had left her post. On the summit of the edifice of rose muslin, the stylistic figurante considered all things human with the serenity of a sad angel, and the assistant stage manager yelled out: “Madame Florie, you’re on!” just as the juggler was walking off.
“Why did you send me flowers?” Florie asked Lola the following day. She was standing under the somber blue light, which streamed down over her, flowing from her raised chin onto her shoulder, moistening the slight outcurving of her hip and her sequined slippers.