The Collected Stories of Colette (29 page)

Seated opposite one another, they shrilly exchange the remarks of a prearranged dialogue.

“Now, if I had the money, I’d treat myself to a fat ham sandwich!”

“Yes, but you’ve not got a sou. I’ve got none neither, but supposing I had, I’d certainly order myself a nice grilled black pudding, with lots of mustard and a hunk of bread . . .”

“Oh, I’d far rather have sauerkraut, with plenty of sausage . . .”

It so happens that the sauerkraut and the grilled black pudding, so feverishly evoked, providentially descend between the two little ballerinas, escorted by the generous donor, whom they welcome with thanks, with a joke and a smile, and then leave in the lurch, all before the half hour has struck.

This innocent method of begging is the invention of Bastienne, whose “interesting condition” earns her a curiosity not so far removed from consideration. Her comrades count the weeks and consult the cards concerning the child’s fortune. They make a fuss over her, helping to tighten her dancing stays with a heave-ho as they pull on the lace, one knee pressed against her robust thighs. They freely bestow on her preposterous advice, recommending her to take witch’s potions, ever helpful, and shouting after her, as tonight, down the long dark corridors, “Run, Bastienne, run!”

They keep an anxious eye on her imprudent dancing, insist above all on escorting her back to her dressing room, to be there at the moment when, unhooking her torturous breastplate, she laughingly threatens the youngest, silliest, and most inquisitive with “Take care, or he’ll pop out and perch on your nose!”

Today, in the warmest corner of the big dressing room, there stands, supported on two chairs, the tray of an old traveling trunk with a canopy of flowered wallpaper. It is the piteous crib of a tiny little Bastienne, hardy as a weed. She is brought to the theater by her mother at eight, and is removed at midnight under her cloak. This much-dandled, merry little mite, this babe with scarcely a stitch of clothing, who is dressed by small clumsy hands that knit for it, awkwardly, pilches and bonnets, enjoys, despite her environment, the gorgeous childhood of a fairy-tale princess. Ethiopian slaves in coffee-colored tights, Egyptian girls hung with blue jewelry, houris stripped to the waist, bend over her cot and let her play with their necklaces, their feather fans, their veils that change the color of the light. The tiny little Bastienne falls asleep and wakes in scented young arms, while peris, with faces the rose-pink of fuchsias, croon her songs to the rhythm of a far-distant orchestra.

A dusky Asian maid, keeping watch by the door, shouts down the corridor, “Run, Bastienne, run! Your daughter is thirsty!”

In comes Bastienne, breathless, smoothing her tense billowing skirts with the tips of her fingers, and runs straight to the tray of the old traveling trunk. Without waiting to sit down or unfasten her low-cut bodice, she uses both hands to free from its pressure a swollen breast, blue in color from its generous veins. Leaning over, one foot lifted in the dancer’s classical pose, her flared skirts like a luminous wheel around her, she suckles her daughter.

2

“Look, Bastienne, the Serbs are here, and over here is Greece. This part streaked with thin lines is Bulgaria. All this bit marked in black shows the advance made by the Allies, while the Turks have been forced to retreat as far as here. Now d’you understand?”

Bastienne’s huge eyes, the color of light tobacco, are wide open and she nods her head politely, muttering, “Mmm . . . mmm . . .” She takes a long look at the map over which her companion Peloux is running a thin, hardened finger, and finally exclaims, “Lord, how small it is, how very small!”

Peloux, who was hardly expecting this conclusion, bursts out laughing, and it is on her now that Bastienne focuses in astonishment her huge orbs, always a little slow in registering any change of thought.

The complicated map, covered with dotted lines and hatching, represents to Bastienne nothing but a confused design for embroidery. Fortunately Constantinople is there, printed in capitals. She knows of its existence, it’s a town. Peloux has a sister, an older sister of twenty-eight, who once played in a comedy at Constantinople, in the presence of . . .

“In whose presence was it, Peloux, your sister played in Constantinople?”

“In front of the Sultan, of course!” comes the lie direct from Peloux.

Bastienne, incredulous and deferential, spends another moment or two deciphering the newspaper. What a lot of unreadable names! What a lot of unknown countries! For, after all, she did once dance in a divertissement which brought together the five parts of the world. Very well, those five parts were: America, which had meant a foundation makeup of terra-cotta; Africa, brown tights; Spain, fringed shawls; France, a snow-white tutu, and for Russia, red leather boots. If the map of the world had now to be cut up like a jigsaw puzzle, and from each small section had to be conjured up a fully armed, wicked little nation nobody had ever heard of, then it made life far too complicated . . . Bastienne casts a hostile glance at the nebulous photographs around the edge of the map and declares, “To start with, all those fellows there look like the cycle cops in their flat caps! Now, Peloux, supposing you give the child a good slap, just to teach her not to eat your thread!”

Tired of staring so long at “small print,” Bastienne gets to her feet, sighs, and winds around her ear, like a ribbon, a strand of her long black hair. She deigns to cast a majestic animal glance upon her daughter, crawling on all fours at her feet, then bends down and, lifting a corner of the petticoat and chemise, administers by the count, on a round rosy little behind, a good half dozen resounding slaps.

“Oh!” protests Peloux, in rather a frightened whisper.

“Don’t you worry,” Bastienne retorts, “I’m not killing her. Besides, she minds pain so little, it’s unbelievable.”

Indeed, there’s no sound to be heard either of the dramatic tears or the piercing shrieks of very young children when they sob to the point of suffocation: nothing but the furious drubbing of two small shoes against the floorboards, where the tiny little Bastienne rolls herself into a ball like a caterpillar knocked off a gooseberry bush, and no more.

 . . . Bastienne is today a truly magnificent creature, due to her premature motherhood, and to having recovered the habit of regular meals now that she has a warm lodging. A gallant tradesman, as much out of pity as dazzled by her beauty, had brought home mother and child on Christmas Eve when Bastienne was reveling on tuppence worth of hot roasted chestnuts.

His reward is to come back every evening to the small apartment from which can be seen a gray flowing river and find there a tall, friendly Bastienne, gay, a little standoffish but faithful, busied over her career and her daughter. She thrives in a home of her own, at ease in one of those aprons such as are worn by girls who deliver bread, and tied, as it is today, over her kimono, her hair hanging over her shoulders with that newly washed but still uncombed look that enhances her nineteen years.

This is a lovely holiday afternoon for Bastienne and her friend. Peloux. No ballet is in rehearsal at the Grand-Théâtre, the dry December weather makes the stove roar, and ahead of them lie four good hours of freedom, while drop by drop the coffee fills the tinplate filter. Peloux is puckering the “underskirts” of a workaday costume in coarse bluish-white tarlatan, and without pricking her finger or making a mistake, she contrives to keep an eye on the war news, the deserted street, and a catalogue of novelties.

“You know, Bastienne, we won’t have any more roasted pistachio nuts, on account of the war: that old Turk who sells them told me as much . . . That’s the third time that lieutenant down there has repassed the house . . . Bastienne, what about an astrakhan cloak like this one here, when you’re rich? You’d look stunning in it!”

But Bastienne’s placid soul, her stay-at-home, domesticated little dancer’s soul, yearns for no furs. When she goes window-shopping, her eye lingers on unbleached linen rather than on velvets, and she lets her fingers run over rough scarlet-bordered dusters . . . At present she is smiling in an honestly sensuous way over her favorite chore: standing over a small basin, her lovely arms covered in lukewarm froth, looking as beautiful as a queen in a washhouse, she is soaping her daughter’s underwear, without spilling a drop around her . . . Why could not life, her future, that is, and even her duty, be contained within the four gaily papered walls of this small dining room, scented with coffee, white soap, and orris root? Life, for a now flourishing though once misery. racked Bastienne, means dancing in the first place, then working, in the humble and domestic sense of the word given it by the race of thrifty females. Jewelry, money, fine clothes . . . these are things not so much rejected by stern choice as postponed by Bastienne. They lie somewhere far away in her thoughts, and she does not call them forth. One day they may just happen, like a legacy, like a chimney pot falling on your head, or like the arrival of the mysterious little daughter now playing on the rug, whose healthy growth still gives Bastienne a daily increasing awareness of the miraculous and unforeseen.

A year ago everything in life had seemed simple: to suffer hunger and cold, to have leaky shoes, to feel lonely and miserable and heavily burdened in body, “all that might well happen to anyone,” Bastienne had blandly remarked. All was simple then, and still is, except for the existence of her fifteen-month-old child, except for the blond little angel, curly-headed and up to every trick, now in a silent rage on the rug. To so young and inexperienced a mother, a child is a lovely warm little creature, dependent, according to its age, on milk, soup, kisses, and slaps. So things go on and on until . . . good heavens, until the time comes for the first dancing class. But it so happens that before her very eyes, under her warm kisses and stinging smacks, a small being is fast developing an independent personality, thinking, struggling, and arguing even before knowing how to talk! And that Bastienne had not foreseen. “A chit of fifteen months, who already has ideas of her own!”

Peloux shakes her head with the earnest, pinched expression that gives her at twenty an old-maidish look, and starts to tell stories of infant prodigies and criminal children. The truth is that the surprising little Bastienne, aged fifteen months, already knows how to captivate, fib, make pretense of tummyache, or, sobbing loudly, stretch out a plump hand nobody has trodden on; knows, too, the power of obstinate silence, and above all knows how to pretend to be listening to the grownups’ conversation, eyes wide open, mouth tight shut, so much so that Peloux and Bastienne sometimes behave like frightened schoolgirls and suddenly stop talking, because this disturbing witness, with its mop of fair curls, looks less like a baby than a mischievous little Eros.

It is on the face of the tiny little Bastienne, far more than on her mother’s lovely tranquil face or Peloux’s already faded features, that are mirrored all the worldly passions: uncontrolled covetousness, dissimulation, beguiling seductiveness.

“Oh, how peaceful we should be,” sighs Peloux, “were it not for this magpie of a child gobbling up all my needles.”

“Catch her, if you can leave your stitching,” Bastienne answers. “My hands are covered with suds.”

But the “magpie of a child” has parked itself behind the sewing machine, and all that can be seen, between the treadle and the platform, is a pair of deep blue eyes, which, in their isolation, might be fifteen months, or fifteen years, or older still.

“Come here, you delicious lump of poison!” Peloux begs.

“Will you come here, you fiend incarnate!” Bastienne scolds.

No answer. The blue eyes move only an instant to cast their insolent light on Bastienne. And if Peloux redoubles her entreaties and Bastienne her invective, it will not be from fear that the fair chubby-checked Eros ambushed behind the sewing machine may devour a gross of needles; it will be rather to hide the constraint, the embarrassment imposed on outspoken grownups when under scrutiny from a small unfathomable child.

[
Translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi
]

CHEAP-JACKS

“Madame Barucchi is on her way, Madame, please don’t be impatient with her: she’s just telephoned to say she can’t help being a little late for your lesson, on account of the dress rehearsal of the ballet at the Empyrée. You have a few minutes to spare, I’m sure.”

“. . .”

“In any case, we’re a little fast in here, it’s only ten to . . . When I say ‘we,’ well, I’m always on time myself. I hardly ever move from here the whole day long.”

“. . . ?”

“No, it’s not that the work is really hard; but it is sometimes a little dreary in this large, bare studio. And then, in the evening, I must say I do feel a bit tired in the back from sitting on the piano stool.”

“. . .”

“So young? But I’m not so young, I’m twenty-six! Sometimes I feel old, from doing the same thing day after day! Twenty-six, a little boy of five, and no husband.”