The Collected Stories of Colette (14 page)

I saw the moment when Valentine, between her two old men, began losing her cheerfulness, and I had a liter of cider taken to her by a page who was just the sort to distract her, one of those beaming boys a little ungainly for their sixteen years—with a submissive and deceitful forehead, brown eyes, and a nose like an Arab—and every bit as handsome as the hundred-times-praised shepherds of Italy. She smiled at him, without paying him much attention, for she was in the grip of a statistical preoccupation. She asked the wispy old man, then the powerful octogenarian, their ages. She leaned forward to learn that of another frizzy-haired and wrinkled laborer who only admitted to seventy-three years. She gathered still other figures known to all from the far ends of the table—sixty-eight and seventy-one—began muttering to herself, adding up lustra and centuries, and was laughed at by a strapping young wench five times a mother, who shouted to her from where she sat: “Say, then, you like ’em like wine, huh, with cobwebs on the cork!”—provoking cracked laughter and young laughter, remarks in dialect and in very clear French as well, which made my friend blush and renewed her appetite. She wanted some more bacon, and cut into the peasant bread, made of pure wheat, brown but succulent, and demanded from the gnarled giant an account of the war of 1870. It was brief.

“What’s to say? It wasn’t a very pretty sight . . . I remember everybody falling all around me and dying in their own blood. Me, nothin’ . . . not a bullet, not a bayonet. I was left standing, and them on the ground . . . who knows why?”

He fell into an indifferent silence, and the faces of the women around us darkened. Until then, no mother deprived of her sons, no sister accustomed to double work without her brother, had spoken of the war or those missing, or groaned under the weariness of three years . . . The farmer’s wife, tight-lipped, busied herself by setting out thick glasses for the coffee, but she said nothing of her son, the artilleryman. One gray-haired farmer, very tired, his stomach cinched up with a truss, said nothing about his four sons: one was eating roots in Germany, two were fighting, the fourth was sleeping beneath a machine-gunned bit of earth . . .

From a very old woman, seated not far from the table on a bundle of straw, came this remark: “All this war, it’s the barons’ fault . . .”

“The barons?” inquired Valentine with great interest. “What barons?”

“The barons of France,” said the cracked voice. “And them of Germany! All the wars are the fault of the barons.”

“How’s that?”

My friend gazed at her avidly, as if hoping that the black rags would fall, and that the woman would rise up, a hennin on her head, her body in vair, croaking, “I, I am the fourteenth century!” But nothing of the kind happened, the old woman merely shook her head, and all that could be heard were the drunken and confident wasps, the puffing of a little train off in the distance, and the mawing gums of the pellucid old man . . .

Meantime, I had broken the maize
galette
with my hands, and the tepid coffee stood in the glasses, which the harvesters were already turning away from, back toward the blazing hillside . . .

“What,” said Valentine, astonished, “no siesta?”

“Yes, of course! But only for you and me. Come over under the hazelnut trees, we can let ourselves melt away, ever so gently, with heat and sleep. The grape harvest isn’t allowed the siesta that goes with the wheat harvest. There they are already back at work, look . . .”

But it wasn’t true, for the ascending column of men and women had just halted, attentive . . .

“What are they looking at?”

“Someone’s coming through the field . . . two ladies. They’re waving to the harvesters . . . They know them. Did you invite any of your country neighbors?”

“None. Wait, I think I know that blue dress. Why . . . Why, it’s . . .”

“They’re . . . Why, yes, certainly!”

Unhurried, coquettish, one beneath a straw hat, the other beneath a white parasol, our two maids moved toward us. Mine was swinging, above two little khaki-colored kid shoes, a blue serge skirt which set off the saffron-colored lawn of her blouse. My friend’s soubrette, all in mauve, was showing her bare arms through her openwork sleeves, and her belt, made of white suede like her shoes, gripped a waist which fashion might perhaps have preferred less frail . . .

From our hideaway in the shade, we saw ten men run up to them, and twenty hands hail them on the steep slope, while envious little girls carried their parasols for them. The aged giant, suddenly animated, sat one of the maids down on an empty tub and hoisted the whole thing onto his shoulder; a handsome, suntanned adolescent smelled the handkerchief he had snatched from one of the two young women. The heavy air seemed light to them, now that two women’s laughter, affected, deliberately prolonged, had set it in motion . . .

“They’ve gone to considerable expense, heavens!” murmured my friend Valentine. “That’s my mauve Dinard dress from three years ago. She’s redone the front of the bodice . . .”

“Really?” I said in a low voice. “Louise has on my serge skirt from two years ago. I would never have believed it could look so fresh. You could still find magnificent serge back then . . . The devil if I know why I ever gave her my yellow blouse! I could use it on Sundays this year . . .”

I glanced involuntarily at my polka-dot apron-smock, and I saw that Valentine was holding, between two contemptuous fingers, my old checked skirt, covered with purple stains. Above us, on the roasting hillside, the mauve young woman and the yellow one were walking amid flattering laughter and happy exclamations. The elegance, the Parisian touch, the chatelaine’s dignity, of which we had deprived the grape harvest, were no longer missing, thanks to them, and the rough workers once again became gallant, youthful, audacious, for them . . .

A hand, that of a man kneeling, invisible, between the vine stocks, raised a branch laden with blue grapes up to our maids, and both of them, rather than fill any basket, plucked off what pleased them.

Then they sat down on their unfolded handkerchiefs on the edge of a slope, parasols open, to watch the harvesting of the grapes, and each harvester rivaled the other in ardor before their benevolent idleness.

Our silence had lasted a long time, when my friend Valentine broke it with these words, unworthy, to be sure, of the great thought they expressed: “What I say is . . . bring back feudalism!”

In my friend Valentine’s Restoration boudoir—for her the “Restoration” embraces, generously and anachronistically, the fifteenth century, the Directorate, the Second Empire, and on to the Grévy style—there is a little painting by Velvet Brueghel. Snow turned to smoky gold, a little house with a pointed roof from which stream miraculous beams of light, and, converging on the little house, theories of bourgeois gnomes in fur bonnets; in short, a
Nativity
by Velvet Brueghel, what an antique dealer might call a “pretty curio” or a “little wonder,” depending on whether he’s easygoing or distinguished.

At my friend Valentine’s, I often drink tea I don’t like, while looking at the Brueghel, which I do like. Yesterday, I asked my friend distractedly, “Valentine, how is it you came by this little painting?”

She blushed. “Why do you ask that?”

“I didn’t think I was being indiscreet.”

She blushed more. “What an idea! . . . It wasn’t the least bit indiscreet, really . . . It’s a family memento. It was given to me in 1913, by my Aunt Poittier.”

“Your Aunt Poittier? Which one? You have as many aunts and uncles named Poittier as there are seeds in a watermelon!”

She fidgeted uneasily.

“Well, yes . . . it’s quite true . . . Do you really have to remind me of that story, in which the role I played was . . . was . . .”

“Doubtful?”

“Almost. You won’t leave me in peace until I’ve told you the story, will you? It was in 1913 that my Aunt Poittier . . .”

“Which one?”

“Aunt Olga. You don’t know her. In 1913 my Aunt Olga lost her only son.”

“A little boy, if I remember correctly?”

“Yes, a little boy of about forty-eight. So, since there was nothing keeping her at Chartres anymore, she came to live in Paris, with Uncle Poittier. They settled in the rue Raynouard, but since they felt very lonely, they spent almost all their time at my other Uncle Poittier’s . . .”

“Which one?”

“The one in the Place d’Iéna, Paul Poittier, the brother . . . I’m telling you, you don’t know him! And since at that time Aunt Marie was living in the Boulevard Delessert . . .”

“Who? Aunt Marie?”

“Oh! . . . Aunt Marie Poittier, really now, the wife of the third brother, you don’t know her! If you insist on interrupting me all the time . . .”

“I’ll shut up.”

“. . . So they were quite content to visit as they liked; it was convenient for me when I was making my monthly round of family visits. In 1913 I had gone to spend Easter vacation with Charles’s family . . .”

“Charles who? Charles Poittier’s family?”

“No, the Charles Loisillons.”

“Oh, good, I like that better.”

“Why?”

“I like having those Loisillons in there among all those nondescript Poittiers, like a poplar on a barren plain. Go on, please.”

“What was I saying? Oh, yes . . . ! So, while I was at Charles’s, I received a wire from Mama!
UNCLE DIED YESTERDAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW
.
MEET PLACE D
’
IÉNA
,
TOMORROW MORNING
,
TEN O
’
CLOCK PRECISELY
. So I borrow my cousin’s crepe veil, black cape, and black gloves, and jump on the train, where I spend the night. I arrive at the house of the deceased, at my poor Aunt Olga’s, half an hour late. A night on the rails, an empty stomach, my crepe veil . . . I could hardly see through it and I couldn’t stand up, and then that odor of mortuary flowers as soon as I reached the staircase . . . In Aunt Olga’s big drawing room there was a wall of seated women, veiled down to their feet in thick crepe. I started kissing all of them and was mumbling, ‘Oh, poor uncle . . . Can you believe it . . .’ You act so silly when you don’t feel any grief, don’t you . . .

“All the same, I recognized Mama’s good, firm hand, and her violet perfume, and I clung to her skirt as I did when I was little. I said to her very softly, ‘Well, how did it happen?’ She didn’t have time to answer, because another black wall, taller than the other, the men in full mourning, started moving toward us, and we stood up. Uncle Edme . . .”

“Who’s Uncle Edme?”

“A distant uncle—you don’t know him—came over to kiss me, and then another cousin, and then two schoolboys wearing woolen gloves, and other relatives, and finally a tall, dried-up old man, with red eyes, who kissed my hand and said to me: ‘My dear niece, how good of you to have come back . . .’

“He straightened up: I let out a loud scream and fell back into I don’t know whose arms.”

“Why?”

“The dead man was standing in front of me, in a white tie, and was thanking me for having come back . . . Come back! And there
he
was! I was carried off, in a dead faint, and I only pulled myself together when I learned that I had gotten my uncles mixed up, that the real dead man had died of an embolism, at his brother’s, he hadn’t been brought to the rue Raynouard and . . .”

“I understand. But how does the little Brueghel painting fit in?”

My friend lowered her eyes. “Well . . . You can imagine what disorder the ceremony was thrown into by my attack of nerves and my fainting spell. As she was fanning me and making me breathe smelling salts, my mother said to Aunt Olga, the dead man’s wife . . .”

“The wrong dead man?”

“No, the right one! Heavens, you are so annoying! . . . She said to my Aunt Olga, ‘It’s grief . . . shock . . . my poor little girl is so sensitive, so loving . . .’ A month later, Aunt Olga sent me this Brueghel ‘as a memento’—it still makes me feel ashamed—’as a memento of Uncle Poittier, whom his little Valentine loved so much.’ What could I do? Admit I had gotten my uncles mixed up? I kept the Brueghel. It’s so pretty . . .”

My friend picked up her tea napkin to gently wipe the gilded snow of the
Nativity
, and let out a sigh in which I tried to hear as much remorse as delight.