The Collected Stories of Colette (20 page)

The iris is sleeping, furled into a little cornet under a triple greenish silk, the peony pierces the earth with a stiff branch of bright coral pink, and the rosebush still dares put out only suckers of a pink maroon, the bright color of an earthworm. Nevertheless, gather the brown gillyflower, ruddy, uncouth, and clad in solid velvet like a digger wasp, presaging the tulip . . . Do not look for the lily of the valley yet; between two valves of leaves, shaped like elongated mussel shells from which the sovereign odor will soon flow, its green Orient pearls mysteriously grow round . . .

The sun has walked on the sand. An icy breath, which feels like hail, is rising from the purple-and-blue east. The peach blossoms fly off horizontally. I’m so cold! The Siamese cat, a few minutes ago dead with ease on the mild warmth of the wall, suddenly opens her sapphire eyes set in her dark velvet mask . . . Crouched down, belly to the ground, she creeps off toward the house, her sensitive ears folded back on her head against the cold. Let’s go now! I’m afraid of that violet, copper-edged cloud menacing the setting sun . . . The fire you lit a few minutes ago is dancing in the room, like a joyful, imprisoned animal watching for our return.

O last fire of the year! The last, the most lovely! Your peony pink, disheveled, fills the hearth with an endlessly blossoming shower of sparks. Let us lean toward it, offer it our hands, which its glow penetrates and bloodies. There is not one flower in our garden more beautiful than it, a tree more complicated, a grass more full of motion, a creeper so treacherous, so imperious! Let us stay here, let us cherish this changing god who makes a smile dance in your melancholy eyes . . . Later on, when I take off my dress, you will see me all pink like a painted statue. I will stand motionless before it, and in the panting glow my skin will seem to quicken, to tremble and move as in the hours when love, with an inevitable wing, swoops down on me . . . Let’s stay! The last fire of the year invites us to silence, idleness, and tender repose. With my head on your breast, I can hear the wind, the flames, and your heart all beating, while at the black windowpane a branch of the pink peach tree taps incessantly, half unleaved, terrified, and undone like a bird in a storm . . .

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

In bygone times the nightingale did not sing at night. He had a sweet little thread of voice that he skillfully employed from morn to night with the coming of spring. He awoke with his comrades in the blue-gray dawn, and their flustered awakening startled the cockchafers sleeping on the underside of the lilac leaves.

He went to bed promptly at seven o’clock or half past seven, no matter where, often in the flowering grapevines that smelled of mignonette, and slept solidly until morning.

One night in the springtime he went to sleep while perched on a young vine shoot, his jabot fluffed up and his head bowed, as if afflicted with a graceful torticollis. While he slept, the vine’s gimlet feelers—those imperious and clinging tendrils whose sharp taste, like that of fresh sorrel, acts as a stimulant and slakes the thirst—began to grow so thickly during the night that the bird woke up to find himself bound fast, his feet hobbled in strong withes, his wings powerless . . .

He thought he would die, but by struggling he managed after a great effort to liberate himself, and throughout the spring he swore never to sleep again, not until the tendrils of the vine had stopped growing.

From the next night onward he sang, to keep himself awake:

He varied his theme, embellishing it with vocalizations, became infatuated with his voice, became that wildly passionate and palpitating songster that one listens to with the unbearable longing to
see
him sing.

I have seen a nightingale singing in the moonlight, a free nightingale that did not know he was being spied upon. He interrupts himself at times, his head inclined, as if listening within himself to the prolongation of a note that has died down . . . Then, swelling his throat, he takes up his song again with all his might, his head thrown back, the picture of amorous despair. He sings just to sing, he sings such lovely things that he does not know anymore what they were meant to say. But I, I can still hear, through the golden notes, the melancholy piping of a flute, the quivering and crystalline trills, the clear and vigorous cries, I can still hear the first innocent and frightened song of the nightingale caught in the tendrils of the vine:

Imperious, clinging, the tendrils of a bitter vine shackled me in my springtime while I slept a happy sleep, without misgivings. But with a frightened lunge I broke all those twisted threads that were already imbedded in my flesh, and I fled . . . When the torpor of a new night of honey weighed on my eyelids, I feared the tendrils of the vine and I uttered a loud lament that revealed my voice to me.

All alone, after a wakeful night, I now observe the morose and voluptuous morning star rise before me . . . And to keep from falling again into a happy sleep, in the treacherous springtime when blossoms the gnarled vine, I listen to the sound of my voice. Sometimes I feverishly cry out what one customarily suppresses or whispers very low—then my voice dies down to a murmur, because I dare not go on . . .

I want to tell, tell, tell everything I know, all my thoughts, all my surmises, everything that enchants or hurts or astounds me; but always, toward the dawn of this resonant night, a wise cool hand is laid across my mouth, and my cry, which had been passionately raised, subsides into moderate verbiage, the loquacity of the child who talks aloud to reassure himself and allay his fears.

I no longer enjoy a happy sleep, but I no longer fear the tendrils of the vine . . .

[
Translated by Herma Briffault
]

PART II

Backstage at the Music Hall

Was I, in those days, too susceptible to the convention of work, glittering display, empty-headedness, punctuality, and rigid probity which reigns over the music hall? Did it inspire me to describe it over and over again with a violent and superficial love with all its accompaniment of commonplace poetry? Very possibly
.

ON TOUR

Here we are at Flers . . . A bumpy, sluggish train has just deposited our sleepy troupe and abandoned us, yawning and disgruntled, on a fine spring afternoon, the air sharpened by a breeze blowing from the east, across a blue sky streaked with light cloud and scented with lilac just bursting into bloom.

Its freshness stings our cheeks, and we screw up our smarting eyes like convalescents prematurely allowed out. We have a two-and-a-half-hour wait before the train that is to take us on.

“Two and a half hours! What shall we do with ourselves?”

“We can send off picture postcards . . .”

“We can have some coffee . . .”

“We might play a game of piquet . . .”

“We could look at the town . . .”

The manager of our Touring Company suggests a visit to the park. That will give him time for forty winks in the buffet, nose buried in his turned-up collar, heedless of his peevish flock bleating around him.

“Let’s go and see the park!”

Now we are outside the station, and the hostile curiosity of this small town escorts us on our way.

“These people here have never seen a thing,” mutters the ingenue, in aggressive mood. “Anyhow, the towns where we don’t perform are always filled with ‘bystanders.’”

“And so are those where we do,” observes the disillusioned duenna.

We are an ugly lot, graceless and lacking humility: pale from too-hard work, or flushed after a hastily snatched lunch. The rain at Douai, the sun at Nìmes, the salty breezes at Biarritz have added a green or rusty tarnish to our lamentable touring “outer garments,” ample misery-hiding cloaks which still pretentiously boast an “English style.” Trailing over the length and breadth of France, we have slept in our crumpled bonnets, all of us except the
grande coquette
, above whose head wave pompously—stuck on the top of a dusty black velvet tray—three funereal ostrich plumes.

Today I gaze at these three feathers as if I had never seen them before; they look fit to adorn a hearse, and so does the woman beneath them.

She seems out of keeping in the “town where we don’t perform,” rather ludicrous, with her Bourbon profile and her recurrent “I don’t know why everyone tells me I resemble Sarah! What do you think?”

A gay little squall tugs at our skirts as we turn the corner into a square, and the carefully waved tresses of the ingenue’s peroxide hair stream out in the wind. She utters a shriek as she clutches her hat, and I can see across her forehead—between eyebrows and hair—a carelessly removed red line, the trace of last night’s makeup!

Why have I not the strength to look away when the duenna’s bloomers brave the light of day! They are tan-colored bloomers and fall in folds over her cloth booties! No mirage could distract my attention from the male star’s shirt collar, grayish white, with a thin streak of “ocher foundation” along the neckline. No enchanted drop curtain of flowers and tremulous leafage could make me overlook the comic’s pipe, that fat, old, juicy pipe; the fag end stuck to the undermanager’s lip; the purple ribbon, turning black, in the makeup man’s buttonhole; the senior lead’s matted beard, ill dyed and in part discolored! They are all so crudely conspicuous in the “town where we don’t perform”!

But what about myself? Alas, what made me dawdle in front of the watchmaker’s shop, allowing the mirror there time to show me my shimmerless hair, the sad twin shadows under my eyes, lips parched with thirst, and my flabby figure in a chestnut-brown tailor-made whose limp flaps rise and fall with every step I take! I look like a discouraged beetle, battered by the rains of a spring night. I look like a molting bird. I look like a governess in distress. I look . . . Good Lord, I look like an actress on tour, and that speaks for itself.

At last, the promised park! The reward justifies our long walk, dragging our tired feet, exhausted from keeping on our boots for eighteen hours a day. A deep, shady park; a slumbering castle, its shutters closed, set in the midst of a lawn; avenues of trees, just beginning to unfurl their sparse tender foliage; bluebells and cowslips studding the grass.

How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor! The filtered light, kind to raddled faces, imposes a relaxed silence. Suddenly a gust of keen air falls from the treetops, dashes off down the alley chasing stray twigs, then vanishes in front of us, like an impish ghost.

We are tongue-tied, not for long enough.