The Collected Stories of Colette (13 page)

A colorist’s heated and barbaric imagination lavished this fabric with orange and purple, the green of Venetian necklaces, and the blue-black of sapphires, intermingled with gold; but a “master of fashion” tore it all up with the freakish imagination of an evil and illiterate gnome. Then a woman came along—my friend Valentine came along—and cried out, “I’m Scheherazade, too—like everybody else!”

She struts around in front of me, in knock-kneed rhythm. She has loaded down her light, blond beauty with everything befitting a sultana as pale and round as the moon. A precious and tear-shaped jewel from the Orient sparkles between her eyebrows, astonished that with its glimmering fires it should extinguish two Western eyes of a modest blue. What’s more, my friend has just fixed a long aigrette sprinkled with stardust on her head . . .

The peris, in the Persian paradise, had both this star on their foreheads and this wispy cloud. But my friend’s feet disappear under a very Greek petticoat, with regular and supple pleats, tightened at the knees by a Hindu drapery. Her hand teases and tucks the squared-off Byzantine sash with beaded Egyptian designs.

Satisfied and serious, she admires herself, without suspecting that something is happening to her . . . Well, for heaven’s sake, it’s the same thing that happens to so many young Parisiennes with light complexions, pointed noses and chins, poor skin, and thin eyelashes, as soon as they disguise themselves as Asian princesses: she looks like a little maid.

My friend Valentine sat down, powdered the wings of her nose, the hollow of her chin and, after a friendly exchange of compliments, was silent. I viewed this with some surprise, for on days when we have nothing to say to each other, my friend Valentine embroiders with ease on the theme “Ah, subjects of conversation are becoming so rare!”—a good three-quarters of an hour of scintillating palaver . . .

She was quiet and I saw that she had changed something about the carriage of her head. With a slightly timid air, she had lowered her head and was looking at me from under her jutting brow.

“I’ve cut my hair,” she confessed suddenly, and took off her hat.

The beautiful blond hair on the nape of her neck showed its fresh cut, still rebelling against the metal, and from a part on the left a big Chateaubriand-style wave swept down across her forehead.

“It doesn’t look too bad on me, does it?” my friend asked with false daring.

“Surely not.”

“I was just at the Hickses’, they gave me hundreds of compliments, Monsieur Hicks told me I look like . . . guess.”

“Like someone convalescing from typhoid fever?”

“Very funny, really . . . but that’s not it.”

“Like Dujardin-Beaumetz, only more shorn? Like Drummont, without his glasses?”

“Wrong again. Like an English peeress, my dear!”

“The Hickses know some English peeresses, do they?”

“You’re sidestepping the question, as usual. Does it look good or bad on me?”

“Good. Very good, in fact. But I’m thinking about that long hair which is nothing but dead, golden grass now. Tell me, why did you have your hair cut too, like everybody else?”

My friend Valentine shrugged her shoulders. “How do I know? . . . Just an idea, that’s all. I couldn’t stand myself in long hair anymore . . . And then, it’s the fashion. In England, it seems that . . .”

“Yes, yes, but why else?”

“Well, Charlotte Lysès cut hers,” she says evasively. “And even Sorel. I haven’t seen her, but I heard that she’s wearing her hair ‘like a Roman gladiator.’ And Annie de Pène, and hundreds of other women of taste whose names I could mention, and . . .”

“And Polaire.”

My friend paused in astonishment. “Polaire? She hasn’t had her hair cut.”

“I thought she had.”

“She has very long short hair. That doesn’t have anything to do with the current fashion. Polaire wears her hair like Polaire. I didn’t think of Polaire for a minute when I was having my hair cut.”

“What did you think of? I would like to try and understand, through you, why women are contagiously clipping their hair, level with the ear, so much hair which until now was pampered, waved, perfumed . . .”

She stood up impatiently, and walked around, tossing her romantic forelock.

“You’re funny . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t stand my long hair anymore, I’m telling you. And besides it’s hot. And at night that long braid would pull at the back of my neck, and it would get rolled up around my arm . . .”

“Thirty years wasn’t long enough for you to get used to that thick, beautiful cable?”

“It seems that way. You question me, and I answer you, only because I’m so nice. Oh, yes, the other morning, my braid got caught in a dresser drawer I’d pushed shut. I hate that. And when we were having those air-raid alerts, it became a scourge; no one enjoys looking grotesque even in a cellar, now do they, with a chignon that’s collapsing on one side and unraveling on the other. I could have died a thousand deaths because of that hair . . . And then, in the end, it can’t be reasoned about. I cut my hair because I cut my hair.”

In front of the mirror, she subdued her curls, and aired her 1830s wave, with newly acquired gestures. How many newly shorn women have already invoked, in order to excuse the same vandalism, reasons of coquetry, herd instinct, anglophilia—and even economy—before arriving at: “How do I know?”

One came up with “My neuralgia . . .”

“You understand, I had had it with bleaching, I just had to do something new with my hair . . .” explained another.

“It’s cleaner,” imagined a third. “You can wash your hair at the same time as the rest, in the bath . . .”

My friend Valentine did not add a novel lie of her own to this lot of modest verities. But her attitude, like theirs, is that of a prisoner who has just broken her chains. So I can assume myself—in the free coquetry of a head no longer weighed down by a pinned-up coil of hair, in the pride of a forehead on which the wind scatters a slightly masculine curliness—I can amuse myself by reading or imagining in it the joy of having shaken off an old fear that the war, the approach of the enemy, had roused from a long oblivion, and the barely conscious memory of the frantic flight of women before the barbarians when they ran naked and the flag of their hair, behind them, was suddenly knotted in the fist of their ravisher . . .

I had written to my friend Valentine: “Come, they’ll be harvesting the grapes.” She came, wearing flat-heeled canvas shoes and an autumn-colored skirt; one bright-green sweater, and another pink one; one hat made of twill and another made of velvet, and both, as she said, “invertebrate.” If she hadn’t called a slug a snail, and asked if bats were the female of the screech owl, she wouldn’t have been taken for ‘someone from Paris.”

“Harvesting the grapes?” she asked, astonished. “Really? Despite the war?”

And I understood that deep down she was finding fault with all that the pretty phrase “harvesting the grapes” seems to promise and call forth of rather licentious freedom, singing and dancing, risqué intentions, and overindulgence . . . Don’t people traditionally refer to it as “the festival of the grape”?

“Despite the war, Valentine,” I confessed. “What can you do? They haven’t found a way of gathering the grapes without harvesting them. There are a lot of grapes. With the full-flavored grapes we’ll make several casks of the wine that’s drunk young and doesn’t gain anything from aging, the wine that’s as rough on the mouth as a swear word, and which the peasants celebrate the way people praise a boxer: ‘Damn strong stuff,’ being unable to find any other virtues in it.”

The weather was so beautiful the day of the harvest, it was so enjoyable to dally along the way, that we didn’t reach the hillside until around ten o’clock, the time when the low hedges and the shady meadows are still drenched in the blue and the cold of dripping dew, while the busy Limousin sun is already stinging your cheeks and the back of your neck, warming the late peaches under their cottony plush, the firmly hanging pears, and the apples, too heavy this year, which are picked off by a gust of wind. My friend Valentine stopped at the blackberries, the fuzzy teasel, even at the forgotten ears of maize whose dry husks she forced back and whose kernels she gobbled down like a little hen.

Like the guide, in the desert, walking ahead and promising the lagging traveler the oasis and the spring, I cried out to her from a distance, “Come on, hurry up, the grapes are better, and you’ll drink the first juice from the vat, you’ll have bacon and chicken in the pot!”

Our entry into the vineyard caused no commotion. The work pressed on, and moreover, our attire warranted neither curiosity nor even consideration. My friend had agreed, in order to sacrifice herself to the blood of the grape, that I lend her an old checked skirt, which since 1914 had seen many other such sacrifices, and my personal adornments didn’t go beyond an apron-smock made of polka-dot sateen. A few weather-beaten heads were raised above the cordons of vines, hands held out two empty baskets toward us, and we set to work.

Since my friend Valentine was thinning her bunches of grapes like an embroideress, with delicate snips of her scissors, it pleased a jovial and mute old faun, popping up opposite her, to give her something of a fright, and then silently show her how the clusters of grapes come off the stock and drop into the basket, if one knows how to pinch a secret suspension point, revealed to the fingers by a little abscess, a swelling where the stem breaks like glass. A moment later, Valentine was gathering the grapes,
sans
scissors, as quickly as her instructor the faun, and I didn’t want her doing better or more than I, so the eleven o’clock sun wasted no time in moistening our skin and parching our tongues.

Whoever said grapes quench one’s thirst? These Limousin grapes, grafted from American stock, so ripe they had split, so sweet they were peppery, staining our skirts, and being crushed in our baskets, inflamed us with thirst and intoxicated the wasps. Was my friend Valentine searching, when she straightened up to rest from time to time, was she searching the hillside, amid the well-regulated comings and goings of the empty and full baskets, for the child cupbearer who might bring an earthen jar filled with cool water? But the children carried only bunch after bunch of grapes, and the men—three old caryatids with muscles bared—transported only purple-stained tubs toward the gaping storeroom of the farm at the bottom of the hill.

The exuberance of the pure morning had gone away. Noon, the austere hour when the birds are silent, when the shortened shadow crouches at the foot of the tree. A cope of heavy light crushed down on the slate roofs, flattened out the hillside, smoothed out the shady fold of the valley. I watched the sluggishness and melancholy of midday descend over my energetic friend. Was she looking around her, among the silent workers, for a gaiety she might find fault in perhaps? Some relief—which she didn’t wait for long.

A village clock was answered by a joyful murmuring, the sound of clogs on the hardened paths, and a distant cry:

“Soup’s on! soup’s on! soup’s on!”

Soup? Much more and much better than soup, in the shelter of a tent made of reed thatch draped with ecru sheets, pinned up by twigs with green acorns, blue convolvulus, and pumpkin flowers. Soup and all its vegetables, yes, but boiled chicken too, and short ribs of beef, and bacon as pink and white as a breast, and veal in its own juices. When the aroma of this feast reached my friend’s nose, she smiled that unconscious, expansive smile one sees on nurslings who have had their fill of milk and women who have had their fill of pleasure.

She sat down like a queen, in the place of honor, folded her purple-stained skirt under her, rolled back her sleeves, and cavalierly held out her glass to her neighbor to the right, for him to fill, with a saucy laugh. I saw by the look on her face that she was about to call him “my good man” . . . but she looked at him, kept quiet, and turned toward her neighbor to the left, then toward me as though in need of help and advice . . . As it was, country protocol had seated her between two harvesters who between them carried, slightly bent under such a weight, a hundred and sixty-six years. One was thin, dried up, pellucid, with bluish eyes and impalpable hair, who lived in the silence of an aged sprite. The other, still a giant, with bones fit for making clubs, singlehandedly cultivated a piece of land, boasting ahead of time, in defiance of death, about the asparagus he’d get out of it “in four or five years”!