The Collected Stories of Colette (12 page)

[
Translated by Herma Briffault
]

“If I Had a Daughter
 . . .”

“In the first place, if I had a daughter . . .”

“But you don’t have a daughter!”

My friend Valentine shrugs her shoulders, vexed. I’ve broken one of the rules of her favorite game: the game of If I Had. I already know how this peremptory young woman would behave
if
she had an automobile,
if
she had a yacht,
if
her husband were Minister of War,
if
she inherited ten million francs,
if
she were a great actress . . .

When she enters my home, it’s as though the wind were rising, and I squint as I do at the seashore. She arrives, out of breath, and looks around her, sighing each time, “You can say what you like, my dear, but Passy is the middle of nowhere!”

Even if she asks me to, I won’t say anything about what I want . . . but I let her spout off anything that comes into her head.

Since the Ballets Russes, my friend Valentine has been stiffly wearing fashions that the softest Oriental grace would barely excuse. She perfumes herself with jasmine and rose, swears by Teheran and Isfahan, and—wrapped in a Byzantine dress set off with a Marie Antoinette fichu, with a Cossack bonnet on her head and American shoes sharpened into sabots on her feet—is quick to exclaim: “How can anyone not be Persian!”

She is earnest, fickle, and spirited. Once in the door, she showers me with streams of words, endless strings of contradictory axioms. I am dear to her because I don’t put up a struggle, and it pleases her to think I’m timid when I’m only flabbergasted. She talks while I read or write . . . Today, the warm and rainy autumn afternoon brings her to me very well behaved and stiff—she is playing the part of the bourgeoise and is despotically raising the children she doesn’t have.

“If I had a daughter . . . Oh, my dear, I’d show people what I think of modern education and this mania for sports, and these Americanized young girls! It all makes for some very sorry wives, I can tell you, and absolutely pitiful mothers! What are you looking at in the garden?”

“Nothing . . .”

Nothing . . . I am silently asking the russet trees and the softened earth where my friend Valentine could have gotten her facts about modern education. I am not looking at anything, except my neighbors’ narrow garden and their house, a brick and wooden chalet forgotten among the last gardens left in Passy.

“A return to family life, my dear, it’s the only way! And family life like our grandmothers understood it! They didn’t worry about baccalaureates for girls back then, and nobody was any the worse for it; on the contrary!”

I look up for a moment at my houri in the green caftan, searching in vain for the morbid trace of a poorly healed baccalaureate.

“Yes, you can be sure if I had a daughter, I’d make her a little provincial girl, healthy and quiet, the old-fashioned way. A little piano, not too much reading, but lots of sewing! She would know how to mend, embroider, and take care of the linen. My dear, I can see her as if she were right here—my daughter! Her smooth hair, with a flat collar . . . I swear to you, I can see her!”

I can see her, too. She has just sat down, as she does every afternoon, in the house next door, near the window: she is little more than a child, with sleek hair and a pale complexion, who lowers her eyes over some embroidery . . .

“I would dress her in those nice little fabrics, you know, with a somewhat subdued background and silly little patterns. Not to mention what a great hit she would be in them! And every day, every day, instead of classes at the Sorbonne or fashionable lectures, she would sit down by a window, or near a lamp—I have a little oil lamp, it’s just the thing, made of tinted porcelain, it’s gorgeous!—she would sit down with her embroidery or her crocheting. A young lady who plies her needle isn’t looking for trouble, believe me!”

What is she thinking of, this diligent child, of whom, at this moment, all I can see is her smooth dark hair, tied at the back with a black ribbon? Her hand rises and falls, pulling on a long silk thread, and flutters like a bird on the end of a string . . .

In the middle of her attack of Platonic motherhood, my friend Valentine delivers a peroration: “Needlework, woman’s work, oh, yes, my dear, needlework! People have joked about it enough, without realizing that, back then, it was responsible for the security of many a family, the moral well-being of many an adolescent!”

The child embroidering there in the little house has raised her head. She is looking out at the damp garden, where wet leaves are raining down, as if she doesn’t even see it. She has deep-set and serious eyes, dark eyes, which are all that move in her motionless face . . .

“Don’t you agree, deep down?”

 . . . Big velvety eyes, which scan the garden, searching between the trees for a corner of sky, and turn back distrustfully toward the room drowned in shadow . . .

“Oh, when you’re having one of your absentminded days, nobody can come near you! Well, I’m sorry, very sorry indeed! Good night!”

 . . . and return to the embroidery she had begun, sheltered under the heavy eyelids. Every day this dark-haired little girl sits and embroiders until it is time to light the lamps.

If the weather’s nice, her window is open, and as night falls, I can hear someone calling her.

“Lucy, come here now, you’ll ruin your eyes!”

Reluctantly, she leaves her chair, and her light work—and I wait till the next day for the reappearance, against the obscure background of an old-fashioned room, of this pretty phantom from my own far-off adolescence . . .

A provincial girl with long, smooth hair, plying the needle . . . Very good, isn’t she? and willingly silent, and not very curious . . . Do they call this girl “little dreamer” too? Does this girl go to her low chair, as to the threshold of the forbidden garden which she enters alone, each day, under the blind eyes of those around her? Between them and the dangerous lands she wanders through, does she spread out the handkerchief she is scalloping or the stiff toile, as if to bar all access?

Needlework, woman’s work, the safety of confident mothers . . . For a solitary little girl, what immoral book can equal the long silence, the unbridled reverie over the openwork muslin or the rosewood loom? Overly precise, a bad book might frighten, or disappoint. But the bold daydream soars up, sly, impudent, varied, to the rhythm of the needle as it bites the silk; it grows, beats the silence with burning wings, inflames the pale little hand, the cheek where the shadow of the eyelashes flutters. It fades away, draws back, seems to dissolve when a word is spoken out loud, when a thread breaks, or a ball of thread rolls away—it becomes diaphanous in order to let the familiar furnishings, the passerby who brushes against the window, show through from time—but the newly threatened needle, the virgin canvas, the task resumed, assures its return, and it is that which always bends the necks of so many diligent girls, that which secretly dwells in so many “waking dreamers”—that which I recognize in the gaze of my little neighbor, the little girl-child leaning forward, the beautiful feminine gaze, astray, moving in a motionless face . . .

“You don’t mind if I dress in front of you?”

“Not at all.”

“You’re so nice . . . I’m so glad to see you,” adds my friend Valentine.

But I can see her reflection in the slanted mirror, her reflection with which she has just exchanged an anxious glance, an exasperated movement of her eyebrows . . . I’m annoying her . . . I’ve come at a bad time . . . She’s telling me to go to the devil . . . Even farther: to the depths of Passy, where I live! She’s wishing me there, she’s getting me settled and locking me in, with a book on my knees, in front of a good summer fire.

“You see,” she concludes aloud, not without ingenuity, “I’m dining out and our whole party will be going to the dress rehearsal of
The Wisteria Vine
, so . . .”

“Don’t jabber, just get dressed as if I weren’t here.”

In fact, she tosses off her dress and her little underpants, her Valencia-lace brassiere, scratches her bare arms, and runs the palm of her hand over her rumpled chemise, with the shocking immodesty of a woman undressing in front of another woman. But she slips into the mystery of the shadows, to take off her shoes with her back turned. She recovers her self-assurance with a pair of purple tulle stockings and two glittering gold shoes, so beautiful that my friend smiles at them tenderly, as she walks around the room, graceful and lightly clad. A shooting pain pulls down the corners of her mouth and she lets out a very sincere and common “Ouch! my feet,” as she collapses in front of the dressing table.

The work which is about to follow is quite familiar to me: it is the skillful, almost theatrical application of makeup, which completes and banalizes fashion-conscious young women-about-town. I say
young
women, because the others apply it with more discretion, leaving to their younger sisters the feverish taste for heavy makeup, the dabbling joy of children fingering the white, red, and blue paints, staining themselves with it up to the ears.

But I’m not going to open my mouth. There is a time for everything, and I know that one does not gossip while “doing” one’s face. I have to settle for impatient little sounds and the tail ends of sentences which my friend Valentine drops, dry, in a heap, like the little wads of cotton she rubs over her cheeks and eyelids, and then throws away afterward . . .

“Everything’s all right with you? . . . That’s good . . . It really is very strange that I can’t get my maid to fill my pot of cold cream when it’s empty . . . Please, darling, tell me it isn’t eight o’clock or I’ll scream! . . . So, everything’s all right with you? . . . Naturally, when I want to hurry, I mess up the tip of my nose . . . Why no, I don’t have too much rouge on . . . Please, darling, don’t talk to me right now, I’ll end up with mascara in my eye . . .”

The activity and chatter of the theater, the nervousness of an actress about to miss her entrance . . . Except for the elegant boudoir, you couldn’t tell the difference. I answer just enough so that my friend almost forgets my presence, so that she’ll let me follow and record the transformations of her tilting reflection.

First there is her real face, completely naked, cleansed with Vaseline, the face her mother gave her. She shows it to her husband, to her maid, and to me, since I’m not important either. It’s a little, fair-skinned face, with bright blue eyes and tired-looking eyelids, a little red in the cheekbones and the wings of the nose. The eyelashes are very blond and must shine in the sun like crushed glass—but when do they see the sun? They’re just about to regain their artificial blackness and starch. A comb, which she has just stuck in place with a firm hand, holds my friend’s delicately tinted, almost pink hair both up and back. Within the silver frame of the mirror, the whole effect is luminous, with a pretty neatness to it, anemic and distinguished. A neck that slender would need a white collar of fairly stiff, fresh-looking lace. The comb, stuck in sideways for this hasty toilette, would have to bite further into her beautiful hair, so as to draw it tighter, to smooth it back into a bold upsweep, high above the long graceful neck. I would like to see my friend Valentine keep the acid charm of a gleaming, genuine blonde, keen, sharp, and cambered like a vermeil fork. I would like . . .

But that is neither here nor there! Before my eyes, with imbecilic fervor, she is performing the rites ordained by Fashion. Her hair hangs down, lowering her forehead, hiding her little childish ears and the silvery nape of her neck. If it makes her chin look heavier, and her neck shorter, it’s none of my business . . . A skillful “shading” of color, from white to crimson, covers her cheeks so richly that I feel the urge to write my name, with the tip of my fingernail, right in the powder.

Over the long elastic corset the maid slips the evening dress—a kind of complicated
zaïmph
, embroidered and re-embroidered, painted, slashed, torn to luxurious shreds, one of which restrains the breasts, another the knees, and a third which comes up the front of the skirt to fasten it, halfway up, in the most ludicrous and most indiscreetly precise manner.