The Collected Stories of Colette (39 page)

“M’m, yes,” said Lise. “My face is all right. And my neck. Down to here, but no farther.”

She looked into the great cracked glass that every actress consulted before going up the staircase and judged herself with harsh lucidity.

“I can only get away with it in long skirts.”

After the grand final tableau, Lise Damoiseau went into total eclipse. Shorn of her makeup and huddled into some old black dress, she would carry away her superb head, its long neck muffled in a rabbit-skin scarf, as if it were some object for which she had no further use till tomorrow. Standing under the gas lamp on the pavement outside the stage door, she would give a last smoldering glance before she disappeared down the steps of the métro.

Several other women inhabited the subterranean corridor. There was Liane de Parthenon, a tall big-boned blonde, and Fifi Soada, who boasted of her likeness to Polaire, and Zarzita, who emphasized her resemblance to the beautiful Otero. Zarzita did her hair like Otero, imitated her accent, and pinned up photographs of the famous ballerina on the walls of her dressing room. When she drew one’s attention to these, she invariably added, “The only difference is that
I
can dance!” There was also a dried-up little Englishwoman of unguessable age, with a face like an old nurse’s and fantastically agile limbs; there was an Algerian, Miss Ourika, who specialized in the
danse du ventre
and who was all hips; there was . . . there was . . . Their names, which I hardly knew, have long since vanished. All that I heard of them, beyond the dressing rooms near me, was a zoo-like noise composed of Anglo-Saxon grunting, the yawns and sighs of caged creatures, mechanical blasphemies, and a song, always the same song, sung over and over again by a Spanish voice:

Occasionally, a silence would dominate all the neighboring noises and give place to the distant hum of the stage; then one of the women would break out of this silence with a scream, a mechanical curse, a yawn, or a tag of song:
Tou m’abais fait serment
 . . .

Was I, in those days, too susceptible to the convention of work, glittering display, empty-headedness, punctuality, and rigid probity which reigns in the music hall? Did it inspire me to describe it over and over again with a violent and superficial love and with all its accompaniment of commonplace poetry? Very possibly. The fact remains that during six years of my past life I was still capable of finding relaxation among its monsters and its marvels. In that past there still gleams the head of Lise Damoiseau and the bottomless, radiant imbecility of Mademoiselle d’Estouteville. I still remember with delight a certain Bouboule with beautiful breasts who wept offendedly if she had to play even a tiny part in a high dress and the magnificent, long, shallow-grooved back of some Lola or Pepa or Concha . . . Looking back, I can rediscover some particular acrobat swinging high up from bar to bar of a nickeled trapeze or some particular juggler in the center of an orbit of balls. It was a world in which fantasy and bureaucracy were oddly interwoven. And I can still plunge at will into that dense, limited element which bore up my inexperience and happily limited my vision and my cares for six whole years.

Everything in it was by no means as gay and as innocent as I have described it elsewhere. Today I want to speak of my debut in that world, of a time when I had neither learned nor forgotten anything of a theatrical milieu in which I had not the faintest chance of succeeding, that of the big spectacular revue. What an astonishing milieu it was! One sex practically eclipsed the other, dominating it, not only by numbers, but by its own particular smell and magnetic atmosphere. This crowd of women reacted like a barometer to any vagary of the weather. It needed only a change of wind or a wet day to send them all into the depths of depression; a depression which expressed itself in tears and curses, in talk of suicide and in irrational terrors and superstitions. I was not a prey to it myself, but having known very few women and been deeply hurt by one single man, I accepted it uncritically. I was even rather impressed by it although it was only latent hysteria; a kind of schoolgirl neurosis which afflicts women who are arbitrarily and pointlessly segregated from the other sex.

My contribution to the program was entitled “Maiou-Ouah-Ouah. Sketch.” On the strength of my first “
Dialogues de Bêtes
,” the authors of the revue had commissioned me to bark and mew on the stage. The rest of my turn consisted mainly of performing a few dance steps in bronze-colored tights. On my way to and from the stage I had to pass by the star’s dressing room. The leading lady was a remote personage whose door was only open to her personal friends. She never appeared in the corridors except attended by two dressers whose job was to carry her headdresses, powder, comb, and hand mirror and to hold up her trailing flounces. She plays no part in my story but I liked to follow her and smell the trail of amazingly strong scent she left in her wake. It was a sweet, somber scent; a scent for a beautiful Negress. I was fascinated by it but I was never able to discover its name.

One night, attired in my decorous kimono, I was dressing as usual with my door open. I had finished making up my face and my neck and was heating my curling tongs on a spirit lamp. The quick, hurried little step of Carmen Brasero (I knew it was Carmen by the clatter of her heels) sounded on the stone floor and stopped opposite my dressing room. Without turning around, I wished her good evening and received a hasty warning in reply.

“Hide that! The fire inspectors. I saw those chaps upstairs. I know one of them.”

“But we’ve all got spirit lamps in our dressing rooms!”

“Of course,” said Carmen. “But for goodness’ sake, hide it. That chap I know’s a swine. He makes you open your suitcases.”

I put out the flame, shut the lid, and looked helplessly around my bare cell.

“Where on earth can I hide it?”

“You’re pretty green, aren’t you? Do you have to be told every single thing? Listen . . . I can hear them coming.”

She turned up her skirt, nipped the little lamp high up between her thighs, and walked off with an assured step.

The fire inspectors, two in number, appeared. They ferreted about and went off, touching their bowler hats. Carmen Brasero returned, fished out my lamp from between her thighs, and laid it down on my makeup shelf.

“Here’s the object!”

“Marvelous,” I said. “I’d never have thought of doing that.”

She laughed like a child who is thoroughly pleased with itself.

“Cigarettes, my handbag, a box of sweets . . . I hide them all like that and nothing ever drops out. Even a loaf that I stole when I was a kid. The baker’s wife didn’t half shake me! She kept saying, ‘Have you thrown it in the gutter?’ But I held my loaf tight between my thighs and she had to give it up as a bad job. She wasn’t half wild! It’s these muscles
here
that I’ve got terrifically strong.”

She was just going off when she changed her mind and said with immense dignity: “Don’t make any mistakes! It’s nothing to do with the filthy tricks those Eastern dancers get up to with a bottle! My muscles are all on the
outside
!”

I protested that I fully appreciated this and the three feathers, shading from fawn to chestnut, which adorned Carmen’s enormous blue straw hat went waving away along the corridor.

The nightly ritual proceeded on its way. “The Miracle of the Roses” trailed its garlands of dusty flowers. A squadron of eighteenth-century French soldiers galloped up the staircase, banging their arms against the walls with a noise like the clatter of tin cans.

I did my own turn after these female warriors and came down again with whiffs of the smoke of every tobacco in the world in my hair. Tired from sheer force of habit and from the contagion of the tiredness all around me, I sat down in front of the makeup shelf fixed to the wall. Someone came in behind me and sat down on the other cane-topped stool. It was one of the French soldiers. She was young and, to judge by the color of her eyes, dark. Her breeches were half undone and hanging down; she was breathing heavily through her mouth and not looking in my direction.

“Twenty francs!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Twenty francs’ fine! I’m beyond twenty francs’ fine, Monsieur Remondon! They make me laugh!”

But she did not laugh. She made an agonized grimace which showed gums almost as white as her teeth between her made-up lips.

“They fined you twenty francs? Why on earth?”

“Because I undid my breeches on the stairs.”

“And why did you undo . . .”

The French soldier interrupted me: “Why? Why? You and your whys! Because when you can stick it, you stick it, and when you can’t anymore, you can’t!”

She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. I was afraid she was going to faint, but at the buzz of an electric bell, she leaped to her feet.

“Hell, that’s us!”

She rushed away, holding up her breeches with both hands. I watched her down to the end of the passage.

“Whoever’s that crazy creature?” asked Mademoiselle d’Estouteville languidly. She was entirely covered in pearls and wearing a breastplate in the form of a heart made of sapphires.

I shrugged my shoulders to show that I had not the least idea. Lise Damoiseau, who was wiping her superb features with a dark rag thick with Vaseline and grease paint, appeared in her doorway.

“It’s a girl called Gribiche who’s in the chorus. At least that’s who I think it is.”

“And what was she doing in your dressing room, Colettevilli?” asked Carmen haughtily.

“She wasn’t doing anything. She just came in. She said that Remondon had just let her in for a twenty-franc fine.”

Lise Damoiseau gave a judicious whistle.

“Twenty francs! Lord! Whatever for?”

“Because she took her breeches down on the staircase when she came off the stage.”

“Jolly expensive.”

“We don’t know for certain if it’s true. Mightn’t she just have had a drop too much?”

A woman’s scream, shrill and protracted, froze the words on her lips. Lise stood stock-still, holding her makeup rag, with one hand on her hip like the servant in Manet’s
Olympe
.

The loudness and the terrible urgency of that scream made all the women who were not up on the stage look out of their dressing rooms. Their sudden appearance gave an odd impression of being part of some stage spectacle. As it was near the end of the show, several of them had already exchanged their stork-printed kimonos for white embroidered camisoles threaded with pale blue ribbon. A great scarf of hair fell over the shoulder of one bent head and all the faces were looking the same way. Lise Damoiseau shut her door, tied a cord around her waist to keep her kimono in place, and went off to find out what had happened, with the key of her dressing room slipped over one finger.

A noise of dragging feet announced the procession which appeared at the end of the passage. Two stagehands were carrying a sagging body: a limp, white, made-up lay figure which kept slipping out of their grasp. They walked slowly, scraping their elbows against the walls.

“Who is it? Who is it?”

“She’s dead!”

“She’s bleeding from the mouth!”

“No, no, that’s her rouge!”

“It’s Marcelle Cuvelier! Ah, no, it isn’t . . .”

Behind the bearers skipped a little woman wearing a headdress of glittering beads shaped like a crescent moon. She had lost her head a little but not enough to prevent her from enjoying her self-importance as an eyewitness. She kept panting: “I’m in the same dressing room with her. She fell right down to the bottom of the staircase . . . It came over her just like a stroke . . . Just fancy! Ten steps at least she fell.”

“What’s the matter with her, Firmin?” Carmen asked one of the men who was carrying her.

“Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” answered Firmin. “What a smash she went! But I haven’t got time to be doing a nurse’s job. There’s my transparency for the Pierrots not set up yet!”

“Where are you taking her?”

“Putting her in a cab, I s’pose.”

When they had gone by, Mademoiselle d’Estouteville laid her hand on her sapphire breastplate and half collapsed on her dressing stool. Like Gribiche, the sound of the bell brought her to her feet, her eyes on the mirror.

“My rouge has gone and come off,” she said in her loud schoolboy’s voice.

She rubbed some bright pink on her blanched cheeks and went up to make her entrance. Lise Damoiseau, who had returned, had some definite information to give us.

“Her salary was two hundred and ten francs. It came over her like a giddy fit. They don’t think she’s broken anything. Firmin felt her over to see. So did the dresser. More likely something internal.”

But Carmen pointed to something on the stone floor of the passage: a little star of fresh blood, then another, then still others at regular intervals. Lise tightened her mouth, with its deeply incised corners.

“Well, well!”

They exchanged a knowing look and made no further comment. The little “Crescent Moon” ran by us again, teetering on her high heels and talking as she went.

“That’s all fixed. They’ve packed her into a taxi. Monsieur Bonnavent’s driving it.”

“Where’s he driving her to?”

“Her home. I live in her street.”

“Why not the hospital?”

“She didn’t want to. At home she’s got her mother. She came to when she got outside into the air. She said she didn’t need a doctor. Has the bell gone for ‘Up in the Moon’?”

“It certainly has. La Toutou went up ages ago.”

The Crescent Moon swore violently and rushed away, obliterating the little regularly spaced spots with her glittering heels.

The next day nobody mentioned Gribiche. But at the beginning of the evening show, Crescent Moon appeared breathlessly and confided to Carmen that she had been to see her. Carmen passed the information on to me in a tone of apparent indifference.