The Collected Stories of Colette (53 page)

“She looks like a man,” André said to himself. “How is it I hadn’t noticed it before?”

At the same moment, the beautiful Madame Issard leaned forward, her chin in her hand, and turned and faced the audience, where her attention seemed to gather powerful acolytes, here, there, and there. Then she went on with her conversation in a low voice and André Issard noticed her chin working like a tribune’s, her closed fist beating out the rhythm of her sentence on the back of chair.

“She’s a man,” Issard repeated to himself. “I was wondering what it was I had against her, unjustly . . . That’s what it is, my wife is a man—and what a man! I only have what I deserve; I should have realized it sooner.”

The dance was ending. A fatalist, he made his way toward the dais where the little dancers, scattered about, were being subjected at close range to the Europeans’ wounding curiosity. He heard Pierre Guesde speaking in Cambodian with Soun, a singer in the chorus, not wearing makeup, but whose black eyes and white teeth sparkled; he allowed himself to be introduced to Ith, who was dressed as a Burmese prince—Ith, whose pure, innocent face a hundred photographs had glorified; he touched Sarrouth’s melting, moving hands . . . André Issard held them in his, while Sarrouth listened to Pierre Guesde, hands as passive and cool as flesh-covered leaves. She responded with a short chirping sound, a little deferential greeting, a childish laugh, and particularly with a single syllable: “Châ . . . Châ . . .”

“Sha . . .” repeated Issard, imitating Sarrouth’s liquid pronunciation. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” explained Pierre Guesde, “‘very-respectfully-yes.’”

The dancers were leaving, and Issard made an interrogatory sign to his wife: “Are we leaving?” She responded in kind, a furious and barely visible “no.” Ten minutes later, he caught her scent nearby and heard the swishing of her scaly dress.

“The marshal’s leaving,” she said.

He jumped up. “I’ll run over . . .”

“No,” she said. “Leave it. I’ve arranged a private meeting for you tomorrow.”

“It’s only proper that I . . .”

“No,” she said. “Leave it, I’m telling you. Believe me. Everything’s fine. I’ve planted the seed and planted it well.”

She was shining with a mineral-like brightness, and led him off toward the exit. In the car, she shouted to the chauffeur, “Go back past the Prado!” and put her arm under her husband’s with a kind of condescending cordiality, a despot’s good humor. The full moon sprinkled her pale hair with silver, and the big yellow feathers of her fan rippled like waves in the wind. But André Issard was not looking at her. He was humming a little song imitating Oriental music and broke off to murmur under his breath, “Châ . . . Châ . . .”

“What did you say, Dede?”

He gave his wife a smile, with the look of a disloyal slave.

“Oh, nothing . . . It’s a Cambodian word that doesn’t really translate . . . A word that doesn’t mean anything here.”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“. . . Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . . There really are twenty-nine . . .”

Madame Augelier mechanically counted and recounted the little
pavé
diamonds. Twenty-nine square brilliants, set in a bracelet, which slithered between her fingers like a cold and supple snake. Very white, not too big, admirably matched to each other—the pretty bijou of a connoisseur. She fastened it on her wrist, and shook it, throwing off blue sparks under the electric candles; a hundred tiny rainbows, blazing with color, danced on the white tablecloth. But Madame Augelier was looking more closely instead at the other bracelet, the three finely engraved creases encircling her wrist above the glittering snake.

“Poor François . . . what will he give me next year, if we’re both still here?”

François Augelier, industrialist, was traveling in Algeria at the time, but, present or absent, his gift marked both the year’s end and their wedding anniversary. Twenty-eight jade bowls, last year; twenty-seven old enamel plaques mounted on a belt, the year before . . .

“And the twenty-six little Royal Dresden plates . . . And the twenty-four meters of antique Alençon lace . . .” With a slight effort of memory Madame Augelier could have gone back as far as four modest silver place settings, as far as three pairs of silk stockings . . .

“We weren’t rich back then. Poor François, he’s always spoiled me so . . .” To herself, secretly, she called him “poor François,” because she believed herself guilty of not loving him enough, underestimating the strength of affectionate habits and abiding fidelity.

Madame Augelier raised her hand, tucked her little finger under, extended her wrist to erase the bracelet of wrinkles, and repeated intently, “It’s so pretty . . . the diamonds are so white . . . I’m so pleased . . .” Then she let her hand fall back down and admitted to herself that she was already tired of her new bracelet.

“But I’m not ungrateful,” she said naïvely with a sigh. Her weary eyes wandered from the flowered tablecloth to the gleaming window. The smell of some Calville apples in a silver bowl made her feel slightly sick and she left the dining room.

In her boudoir she opened the steel case which held her jewels, and adorned her left hand in honor of the new bracelet. Her ring had on it a black onyx band and a blue-tinted brilliant; onto her delicate, pale, and somewhat wrinkled little finger, Madame Augelier slipped a circle of dark sapphires. Her prematurely white hair, which she did not dye, appeared even whiter as she adjusted amid slightly frizzy curls a narrow fillet sprinkled with a dusting of diamonds, which she immediately untied and took off again.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not feeling all that well. Being fifty is a bore, basically . . .”

She felt restless, both terribly hungry and sick to her stomach, like a convalescent whose appetite the fresh air has yet to restore.

“Really now, is a diamond actually as pretty as all that?”

Madame Augelier craved a visual pleasure which would involve the sense of taste as well; the unexpected sight of a lemon, the unbearable squeaking of the knife cutting it in half, makes the mouth water with desire . . .

“But I don’t want a lemon. Yet this nameless pleasure which escapes me does exist, I know it does, I remember it! Yes, the blue glass bracelet . . .”

A shudder made Madame Augelier’s slack cheeks tighten. A vision, the duration of which she could not measure, granted her, for a second time, a moment lived forty years earlier, that incomparable moment as she looked, enraptured, at the color of the day, the iridescent, distorted image of objects seen through a blue glass bangle, moved around in a circle, which she had just been given. That piece of perhaps Oriental glass, broken a few hours later, had held in it a new universe, shapes not the inventions of dreams, slow, serpentine animals moving in pairs, lamps, rays of light congealed in an atmosphere of indescribable blue . . .

The vision ended and Madame Augelier fell back, bruised, into the present, into reality.

But the next day she began searching, from antique shops to flea markets, from flea markets to crystal shops, for a glass bracelet, a certain color of blue. She put the passion of a collector, the precaution, the dissimulation of a lunatic into her search. She ventured into what she called “impossible districts,” left her car at the corner of strange streets, and in the end, for a few centimes, she found a circle of blue glass which she recognized in the darkness, stammered as she paid for it, and carried it away.

In the discreet light of her favorite lamp she set the bracelet on the dark field of an old piece of velvet, leaned forward, and waited for the shock . . . But all she saw was a round piece of bluish glass, the trinket of a child or a savage, hastily made and blistered with bubbles; an object whose color and material her memory and reason recognized; but the powerful and sensual genius who creates and nourishes the marvels of childhood, who gradually weakens, then dies mysteriously within us, did not even stir.

Resigned, Madame Augelier thus came to know how old she really was and measured the infinite plain over which there wandered, beyond her reach, a being detached from her forever, a stranger, turned away from her, rebellious and free even from the bidding of memory: a little ten-year-old girl wearing on her wrist a bracelet of blue glass.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

The light from the declining sun struck the curtains, shone across the drawing room from one end to the other, and Irene’s friends cried out in admiration.

“It’s like a fairy tale!”

“What a find!”

“And the Seine is on fire!”

“The sky’s turning pink . . .”

One of them, more honest, muttered vindictively, as she took it all in with a single glance—the Seine, the old drawing room lengthened by a rustic dining room, the purple-and-silver curtains, the orange cups, the wood fire—“There’s no justice . . .”

And poor little Madame Auroux, who had gotten divorced so she could get married again and who couldn’t get married because she couldn’t find an apartment, had two such heartfelt tears in her blue eyes that Irene hugged her to her breast.

“And this one’s in such a hurry to start some silliness all over again! You know, my dear, I believe that it was getting divorced that brought me luck. Because you could say to have found a marvel like this was pure luck.”

She triumphed shamelessly and played up her lovely dwelling for all it was worth, she who had never dared flash a new ring in front of a poorer friend. She stretched in order to confess in the tone of a guilty confidence, “Ladies, ladies, if you knew what the mornings here are like! The boats, the reflection of the water dancing on the ceiling . . .”

But they had had enough. Green with envy and stuffed with cake, they all left together. Leaning on the wrought-iron banister, “an eighteenth-century gem, my dear,” Irene called out to them, “Goodbye, goodbye,” waving her hand like someone out in the country standing on the terrace of a château. She went back in and leaned her forehead on the windowpane. A brief winter twilight was rapidly extinguishing the pink-and-gold reflection of the sky in the water, and the night’s first star twinkled brightly, foretelling a night of bitter cold.

Behind her, Irene heard the clattering of cups being gathered by an overly eager hand and the hurried footsteps of her maid. She turned around.

“Are you in a hurry, Pauline?”

“It’s not that I’m in a hurry, Madame, but there’s my husband . . . It’s Saturday and Madame knows they have a five-day week.”

“Go on, then, go on . . . You can leave the dishes for tomorrow. No, don’t set a place for me, I ate so much I’ll never be hungry tonight.”

Since moving in she had put up with makeshift dinners, or cold meat from the local charcuterie, because Pauline was a general but not a “live-in” housemaid. On certain, particularly busy evenings, Irene would wrap the blue apron around her waist, grill herself some fresh ham, and break two eggs into the buttered skillet . . .

She heard the door slam and Pauline’s clogs on the stairs. A tram sang on its rails along the quay opposite. The solid old house hardly shook at all as the cars passed, and its thick walls blocked out both the barking of the dog next door and the piano being played upstairs. Irene put another log on the fire, and arranged the little desk-table, the big armchair, the books, the screen around the fireplace—“period shell marble, my dear”—and stood there, contemplating the decor of her happiness . . . A clock outside tolled the hour in evenly measured strokes.

“Seven o’clock. Only seven o’clock. Thirteen more hours till tomorrow . . .”

She shivered humbly before her silent witnesses—the purple curtains, the monument which cut into the night sky like the prow of a ship, the useless armchair, and the book which had lost its magic—abdicating her condition as the happy woman about whom people say, “She has a quiet life” and “a unique apartment.”