The Collected Stories of Colette (45 page)

“Yes, yes, I believe so . . .” she said hastily. She blinked her eyes and gave me a smile of frozen grace, her eyes overtaken by a cold emptiness.

“What a shame!”

We left, carrying with us autumn roses and black dahlias. Monsieur B. walked alongside the car, which started slowly, as far as the first turn in the drive. Madame B. stood on the lighted terrace, smiling at us from a face abandoned by the momentary certainty of being alive; one of her hands, rising up beneath a transparent scarf, clasped her bare arm above the elbow.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

He had fallen asleep on his young wife’s shoulder, and she proudly bore the weight of the man’s head, blond, ruddy-complexioned, eyes closed. He had slipped his big arm under the small of her slim, adolescent back, and his strong hand lay on the street next to the young woman’s right elbow. She smiled to see the man’s hand emerging there, all by itself and far away from its owner. Then she let her eyes wander over the half-lit room. A veiled conch shed a light across the bed the color of periwinkle.

“Too happy to sleep,” she thought.

Too excited also, and often surprised by her new state. It had been only two weeks since she had begun to live the scandalous life of a newlywed who tastes the joys of living with someone unknown and with whom she is in love. To meet a handsome, blond young man, recently widowed, good at tennis and rowing, to marry him a month later: her conjugal adventure had been little more than a kidnapping. So that whenever she lay awake beside her husband, like tonight, she still kept her eyes closed for a long time, then opened them again in order to savor, with astonishment, the blue of the brand-new curtains, instead of the apricot-pink through which the first light of day filtered into the room where she had slept as a little girl.

A quiver ran through the sleeping body lying next to her, and she tightened her left arm around her husband’s neck with the charming authority exercised by weak creatures. He did not wake up.

“His eyelashes are so long,” she said to herself.

To herself she also praised his mouth, full and likable, his skin the color of pink brick, and even his forehead, neither noble nor broad, but still smooth and unwrinkled.

Her husband’s right hand, lying beside her, quivered in turn, and beneath the curve of her back she felt the right arm, on which her whole weight was resting, come to life.

“I’m so heavy . . . I wish I could get up and turn the light off. But he’s sleeping so well . . .”

The arm twisted again, feebly, and she arched her back to make herself lighter.

“It’s as if I were lying on some animal,” she thought.

She turned her head a little on the pillow and looked at the hand lying there next to her.

“It’s so big! It really is bigger than my whole head.”

The light, flowing out from under the edge of a parasol of bluish crystal, spilled up against the hand, and made every contour of the skin apparent, exaggerating the powerful knuckles and the veins engorged by the pressure on the arm. A few red hairs, at the base of the fingers, all curved in the same direction, like ears of wheat in the wind, and the flat nails, whose ridges the nail buffer had not smoothed out, gleamed, coated with pink varnish.

“I’ll tell him not to varnish his nails,” thought the young wife. “Varnish and pink polish don’t go with a hand so . . . a hand that’s so . . .”

An electric jolt ran through the hand and spared the young woman from having to find the right adjective. The thumb stiffened itself out, horribly long and spatulate, and pressed tightly against the index finger, so that the hand suddenly took on a vile, apelike appearance.

“Oh!” whispered the young woman, as though faced with something slightly indecent.

The sound of a passing car pierced the silence with a shrillness that seemed luminous. The sleeping man did not wake, but the hand, offended, reared back and tensed up in the shape of a crab and waited, ready for battle. The screeching sound died down and the hand, relaxing gradually, lowered its claws, and became a pliant beast, awkwardly bent, shaken by faint jerks which resembled some sort of agony. The flat, cruel nail of the overlong thumb glistened. A curve in the little finger, which the young woman had never noticed, appeared, and the wallowing hand revealed its fleshy palm like a red belly.

“And I’ve kissed that hand! . . . How horrible! Haven’t I ever looked at it?”

The hand, disturbed by a bad dream, appeared to respond to this startling discovery, this disgust. It regrouped its forces, opened wide, and splayed its tendons, lumps, and red fur like battle dress, then slowly drawing itself in again, grabbed a fistful of the sheet, dug into it with its curved fingers, and squeezed, squeezed with the methodical pleasure of a strangler.

“Oh!” cried the young woman.

The hand disappeared and a moment later the big arm, relieved of its burden, became a protective belt, a warm bulwark against all the terrors of night. But the next morning, when it was time for breakfast in bed—hot chocolate and toast—she saw the hand again, with its red hair and red skin, and the ghastly thumb curving out over the handle of a knife.

“Do you want this slice, darling? I’ll butter it for you.”

She shuddered and felt her skin crawl on the back of her arms and down her back.

“Oh, no . . . no . . .”

Then she concealed her fear, bravely subdued herself, and, beginning her life of duplicity, of resignation, and of a lowly, delicate diplomacy, she leaned over and humbly kissed the monstrous hand.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

He had taken her from another man, this slim magnificent blonde who looked like a greyhound on a leash. He had followed her everywhere, approached her romantically, and carried her off. They did not even know what had become of the other man and never bothered to find out. The other man conducted himself properly in defeat and ceased to exist for them. The victor—let us say he was called Armand and the woman Elsie—gave little thought to the other man, for Elsie loved
him
, and besides, his only concern was proving his love and his naïveté by organizing the jail called “life together.” She helped him do it, flattered as she was, like all women who are told they are being sequestered in the name of love. The natural end to a few weeks of hotels and traveling was a villa on the edge of a lake where, in good faith, they believed they would make their happy home.

A certain laziness, her beauty care, the slowness of her gestures shortened the hours of the day for Elsie. Those of the night, given over to sleep or love, seemed all too brief. Having both agreed, in due time, that between lovers silence is golden, they were able to remain silent with impunity, for the time being. They never went out, returned home, or wandered through the woods unless they were together, leaning against one another, or he behind her, she trailing a ribbon, the tip of a veil, or the train of her dress at his feet, like a broken leash.

Away from Paris they had no difficulty ensuring their solitude; the spectacle of love is enough to drive away even the best of friends. One can seek out the company of a man or a woman in love—but being around a happy couple who show their happiness bores and shocks our taste for moderate diversions and healthy harmony.

So they lived together, alone, with the thoughtless and foolish bravura of lovers. She was not afraid, on certain days at twilight, with the sky closing in and the wind dying down, waiting for the storm when all nature seems to be brewing up some tragedy, she was not afraid to find herself with this strange man, with his broad shoulders, his fierce brow, and his swift movements. For deep within herself a woman places great trust in her ravisher.

Armand hardly thought about the woman’s past, since he held her in his arms night and day, and since he knew nothing about the past of this woman whom he loved. For Armand, Elsie’s past was some poor deceived man swallowed up by darkness and oblivion. Now and then he asked himself, as if out of duty, “and before that poor man . . . ?” and quickly returned to the present, where there were neither clouds nor secrets.

The suffering began one morning while he was looking out from behind a hedge, ablaze with crimson geraniums, at the lake and its mist the color of pink pewter, and Elsie was singing in a low voice, up on the second floor, as she dressed. He suddenly realized that he did not know the song, and that Elsie had never sung it before. It surprised him and he conjectured that she was thinking, as she sang, of a bygone time, of people with names he did not know, perhaps of some unknown man . . .

When his mistress rejoined him, he found her somehow different from the woman he was expecting, and told her so with tender solicitude. She replied, unsuspectingly, that the first rains of autumn made her feel cold, and she spoke about central heating, big wood fires, and fur coats, with an air of covetousness and coquettish fright. Then he stopped looking at her and, lowering his eyes, began to count the months they had now spent together, and he thought that maybe she felt like leaving again. The image he formed of Elsie’s absence carried him back to when he lived without her, and he shuddered to think that during that time long past he had been capable of living another life.

He raised his eyes toward Elsie again and his heart did not melt with love, but pounded painfully, “because,” he thought, “I’ve been a man like other men. Elsie’s a woman like other women, except that she’s more beautiful. No doubt the one I took her from has gone back to being a man like other men, a man stripped of happiness, an average, sad, fickle man. And the one who comes after me . . .”

He stumbled mentally, stopped reasoning, and felt himself, abject and broken, entering into that aimless jealousy which not even innocence can cure.

He did his best to hide his suffering, redoubling his amorous advances. But what he gained for all the pains he took to hide his misgivings was a mental exhaustion quickly perceived by the keen senses of his mistress. He struggled on, sure of the expression on his face and of the words he spoke, and it was Elsie who suffered from uneasiness, who yawned nervously and trembled, one moonlit night, when she saw Armand’s shadow standing there, on the wall, as expressive and alive as a third person . . . He took note of her weaknesses, attributed them to regret, a desire to escape, and one day, he deeply insulted his mistress, who was reassured and filled with pride by his outburst.

“Like a prison . . . the harem door bolted shut . . .” he muttered angrily.

But at the same time he doubted that there was any remedy, and anxious over a few moments’ separation, he nonetheless felt no gratitude at the reappearance of her whom he could not manage without. Now he looked for faults in her, and desperate for peace of mind, he wished the marks of age on her, but hated her when, less beautiful one day than the day before and the day after, she seemed to obey his hostile will.

He lived in the distraction which is the punishment for those whom love has abused by inspiring them to re-create the earthly paradise. He even tried to get away from Elsie, on idle pretexts, but came back more troubled and more vindictive each time, for he was never gone long enough to set foot on the firm ground of normal sorrow, the sorrow of privation, and his relief at having left his mistress would immediately give way to the intolerable supposition that she had run away during his absence.

One day when he had left Elsie at the villa, and was walking alone, by the edge of the lake, putting his distraction through a kind of hopeless discipline, he heard someone running behind him, turned around, and saw one of Elsie’s servants coming toward him, extremely upset. She stopped, breathless, a few steps away.

“Oh, Monsieur . . . it’s Madame . . .” And he cried out to her in a loud, artificial tone of voice, “Madame? . . . Yes? She’s just left, hasn’t she?”

The servant opened and closed her mouth, unable to speak immediately, then uttered a few words in which he understood her to say that there had been an accident . . . a fall on the stone steps . . . a fractured skull . . . died instantly . . . death . . . He sat down, relaxed, on the grassy bank.