The Collected Stories of Colette (19 page)

In a short while the luminous bar between the curtains will brighten, redden . . . In a few more minutes I will be able to read, on your lovely forehead, your delicate chin, your sad mouth, and closed eyelids, the determination to appear to be sleeping . . . It is the hour when my fatigue, my nervous insomnia can no longer remain mute, when I will throw my arms outside this feverish bed, and my naughty heels are already preparing to give a mischievous kick.

Then you will pretend to wake up! Then I shall be able to take refuge in you, with confused and unjust complaints, exasperated sighs, with clenched hands cursing the daylight that has already come, the night so soon over, the noises in the street . . . For I know quite well that you will then tighten your arms about me and that, if the cradling of your arms is not enough to soothe me, your kiss will become more clinging, your hands more amorous, and that you will accord me the sensual satisfaction that is the surcease of love, like a sovereign exorcism that will drive out of me the demons of fever, anger, restlessness . . . You will accord me sensual pleasure, bending over me voluptuously, maternally, you who seek in your impassioned loved one the child you never had.

[
Translated by Herma Briffault
]

Leave me alone. I’m sick and cranky, like the sea. Tuck this tartan around my legs, but take away this steaming cup, with its bouquet of wet hay, lime blossom, stale violet . . . I don’t want anything, I just want to turn my head away, and not see the sea anymore, nor the wind which runs, visible, in flurries on the sand, in spray on the sea. Sometimes it hums, patient and restrained, crouched down behind the dune, hidden beyond the horizon . . . Then it rushes out with a war cry, humanly rattling the shutters, pushing in under the door, in an impalpable fringe, the dust of its eternal tread . . .

Oh, how it hurts me! I no longer have one secret place left in me, not one sheltered corner, and my hands pressed flat against my ears do not keep the wind from getting through and chilling my brain . . . Naked, swept aside, routed, I tighten the tatters of my thoughts in vain; they escape me, beating, like a coat torn halfway off, like a gull held by its feet which frees itself by flapping its wings . . .

Leave me alone, you who come gently, pitiably, to place your hands on my forehead. I hate everything, and most of all the sea! Go and look at it, you who like it! It thrashes the terrace, it ferments, it shoots up in yellow foam, it glistens, the color of dead fish, it fills the air with a smell of iodine and fertile decay. Below the leaden waves, I can make out the abominable populace of feetless beasts, flat, slippery, icy . . . So you don’t smell the flood and the wind carrying, as far as this room, the odor of rotting shellfish? . . . Oh, come back, you who can do almost everything for me! Don’t leave me alone! Hold, beneath my nostrils, pinched and discolored by disgust, hold your perfumed hands, hold your fingers, dry and warm and delicate as mountain lavender . . . Come back! Stay close to me, order the sea to go away, make a sign to the wind, so that it will lie down on the sand, and play there in circles with the shells . . . Make a sign: it will sit down on the dune, gently, and amuse itself, with a puff, by changing the shape of the moving . . .

Ah, you’re shaking your head . . . You don’t want to—you can’t. Well then, go away, leave me helpless in the tempest, and let it knock down the wall and come and carry me off! Leave the room, so that I don’t hear the useless sound of your footsteps anymore. Oh no, no caresses! Your magician’s hands and your overwhelming gaze, and your mouth, which dissolves the memory of other mouths, would be powerless today. Today I long for someone who possessed me before all others, before you, before I was a woman.

I belong to a country which I have left. You cannot change the fact that there, at this moment, a whole canopy fragrant with forests is opening up to the sun. Nothing can change the fact that at this moment the deep grass there laps the foot of the trees, with a delicious and soothing green for which my soul thirsts . . . Come, you who do not know it, come let me tell you in a whisper: the fragrance of the woods in my country equals the strawberry and the rose! You would swear, when the bramble patches there are in bloom, that a fruit is ripening somewhere, over there, here, close by, an elusive fruit one inhales through wide-open nostrils. You would swear, when autumn penetrates and bruises the fallen foliage, that an overripe apple had just fallen, and you search for it and you smell it, here, over there, close by . . .

And if, in June, you passed between the new-mowed meadows, at the hour when the moon streams down on the round haystacks which are my country’s dunes, you would feel, with the first whiff of that fragrance, your heart unfold. You would close your eyes, with that grave pride with which you veil your sensuousness, and you would let your head fall, with a muted sigh . . .

And if, one summer’s day, you were to arrive in my country, at the back of a garden I know, a garden black with greenery and without flowers, and if you would see, off in the distance, a round mountain turn blue where the rocks, the butterflies, and the thistles are tinted with the same mauve and dusty azure, you would forget me, and you would sit down, never to move from there again till the end of your days.

There is also, in my country, a valley narrow as a cradle where in the evenings there stretches out and floats a stream of mist, a fine, white, living mist, a graceful specter of fog lying on the humid air . . . Enlivened by a gentle undulation, it melts into itself and becomes, by turns, a cloud, a sleeping woman, a languorous snake, a horse with a neck like a chimera’s . . . If you stay too late, leaning toward it over the narrow valley, to drink in the cold air which carries this loving mist like a soul, a shudder will seize you, and all night your dreams will be mad . . .

One thing more, put your hand in mine: if you were to follow, in my country, a little path I know of, yellow and bordered with burning pink foxglove, you would think you were climbing the enchanted path which leads away from life . . . The bounding song of the velvet-furred hornets leads you to it and beat in your ears like the very blood of your heart, as far as the forest, up there, where the world ends . . . It is an ancient forest, forgotten by men, and exactly like paradise, listen now, for . . .

How pale you are and with such big eyes! What did I say to you? I don’t know anymore . . . I was speaking, I was speaking about my country, in order to forget the sea and the wind . . . And here you are pale, with jealous eyes . . . You call me back to you, you can feel how far away I am . . . I must retrace my steps, I must once more tear up, all my roots, which bleed . . .

Here I am! Once again I belong to you. I wanted only to forget the wind and the sea. I spoke in a dream . . . What did I say to you? Don’t believe it! No doubt I told you of a country of wonders, where the savor of the air intoxicates? . . . Don’t believe it! Don’t go there: you would search for it in vain. You would see only a rather sad countryside, darkened by the forests, a poor and peaceful village, a humid valley, a bluish and bare mountain which cannot feed even the goats . . .

Take me back! I’ve come back. Where did the wind go, while I was away? In what hollow of the dunes is it sulking, wearily? A sharp ray of light, squeezed between two clouds, pricks the sea and ricochets off here, into this flask where it does its cramped dance . . .

Throw aside this tartan, it’s suffocating me; look! the sea is already turning green . . . Open the window and the door, and let us run toward the gilded end of this gray day, for I want to gather on the beach the flowers of your country brought here by the waves, imperishable flowers strewn about like petals of pink mother-of-pearl, O shells . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

Kindle, in the hearth, the last fire of the year! The sun and the flame together will illuminate your face. Beneath your gesture, an ardent bouquet shoots up, ribboned with smoke, but I no longer recognize our winter fire, our arrogant and chatty fire, fed with bundles of dry wood and splendid stumps. That is because a more powerful star, having entered with a flash through the open window, has been living as master of our room since this morning . . .

Look, the sun cannot possibly favor other gardens as much as ours! Look closely! For nothing here compares to our garden of last year, and this year, still young and shivering, is already busy changing the decor of our sweet, secluded life . . . It is lengthening each branch of our pear trees with a horned and glossy bud, each lilac bush with a tuft of pointed leaves . . .

Oh, look how big they’re getting, especially the lilacs! Come May, you will not be able to smell their flowers, which last year you kissed as you passed, except by rising up on the tips of your toes, you will have to lift your hands to lower their clusters toward your mouth . . . Look closely at the shadow, on the sand of the path, drawn by the delicate skeleton of the tamarisk: next year, you will not recognize it anymore . . .

And the violets themselves, budding as if by magic tonight, do you recognize them? You lean over, and like me, you are astonished; aren’t they bluer this spring? No, no, you’re mistaken, last year they looked less dark to me, an azured mauve, don’t you remember? . . . You protest, you shake your head with your serious laughter, the green of the new grass lightens the lustrous bronze water of your gaze . . . More mauves . . . no, more blues . . . Stop this teasing! Rather carry to your nose the unchanging fragrance of these changing violets and watch, while inhaling the philter which dispels the years, watch like me the springs of your childhood rise up and quicken before you . . .

More mauves . . . no, more blues . . . I can see meadows, deep woods, which the first outburst of buds mists over with an elusive green, cold streams, forgotten springs drunk up by the sand as soon as they are born, Easter primroses, daffodils with the saffron-colored heart, and violets, violets, violets . . . I can see a silent little girl whom spring had already enchanted with a wild happiness, with a bittersweet and mysterious joy . . . A little girl imprisoned by day in a schoolhouse, and who exchanged toys and pictures for the first bouquets of violets from the woods, tied with a red cotton thread, brought by the little shepherdesses from the surrounding farms . . . Short-stemmed violets, white violets and blue violets, and white-blue violets veined with mauve mother-of-pearl, big anemic cowslip violets, which raise their pale, odorless corollas on long stems . . . February violets, blooming beneath the snow, ragged-edged, burned with frost, ugly, poor fragrant little things . . . O violets of my childhood! You rise up before me, all of you, you lattice the milky April sky, and the quivering of your countless little faces intoxicates me . . .

What are you thinking about, with your head tilted back? Your tranquil eyes are lifted toward the sun which they brave . . . Why, it is only to follow the flight of the first bee, sluggish, lost, in search of a honeyed peach-tree blossom . . . Chase it away! it will get stuck in the sap of that bud on the chestnut tree! No, it is lost in the blue air, the color of periwinkle milk, in this misty yet pure sky, which dazzles you . . . O you, who perhaps were satisfied with this little strip of azure, this rag of sky hemmed in by the walls of our narrow garden, dream that, somewhere in the world, there is an envied place where one discovers the whole sky! Dream, as you would dream of an unreachable kingdom, dream of the borders of the horizon, of how exquisitely pale the sky grows as it meets the earth . . . On this hesitant spring day, I can make out, over there, beyond the walls, the poignant line, slightly wavy, of what, as a child, I named land’s end. It turns pink, then blue, in a gold sweeter at the heart than the sweet juice of a fruit . . . Do not feel sorry for me, beautiful pathetic eyes, for evoking so vividly what I long for! My voracious longing creates what it is missing and feeds on it. I am the one who smiles kindly at your idle hands, empty of flowers. Too soon, too soon! We and the bee and the peach-tree blossom are looking for spring too soon . . .