The Collected Stories of Colette (55 page)

Her loneliness weakened her. She let herself moan softly as she walked along, mumbling childishly: “I want the dogs . . . I want the morning . . . I want to get up early . . . I want warm milk and rum at the refreshment stand near the lake, the day it rained so hard. I want . . .”

She turned around, waiting for some whim of Andrée’s or for the dogs to bring back to the path the image of a time now forever out of reach, only to find, without seeking, the words for her longing, the expression of her anguish: “I want last year . . .”

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“Have you seen that poor Alix lately?”

“Yesterday, my dear, and it’s frightening. She looks like she’s a hundred years old.”

“A hundred wouldn’t be so bad. The worst thing is that she looks her age! What is all this . . . discouragement, this refusal to do anything to make herself attractive? Did she take a vow? She isn’t in mourning for anyone, is she?”

“Yes, her second youth.”

And they laughed. For even the most serious situations cannot keep women from picking at their fellow creatures, especially their fellow female creatures. It is a pastime as monotonous as sarcasm. When two women get together to disparage another woman, they first cite her vintage, then raise questions about her health, her marital fidelity, her monetary situation, fortunate or unfortunate . . .

It so happens that I knew not only these two women here but, better still, their victim, and it’s the backbiters who, for once, I think are right.

As resistant as it is to every sort of shock, the precious and mysterious feminine constitution has had no lack of reasons to stagger and die out for quite some time. A woman is not destroyed by material wretchedness alone. She who endures despite near-poverty, despite hard work, disintegrates beneath the weight of an obsession. It will be enough, in order for her to consummate her own ruin, that a sort of false point of honor displace, in her mind, a hard-won sense of order. Such is the case of the person on whom these two women, in a moderately compassionate tone, had turned their attention.

A case which seemed curable, since “poor Alix” has neither fallen into the fire nor been ravaged by lupus, nor has she been wounded at the source of her livelihood. The crisis she is going through is merely one of discouragement, of whatgoodisitism—Rabelais has a beautiful word for it, one that creates an image, “
déflocquement
.” Women who have suffered are afflicted by this sort of weakness less often than women who have not suffered enough. Having climbed to the half-century mark, a woman, hundreds of women, all women, are faced with another, more dizzying slope and begin to plan their defense. Most turn away from it, hiding their heads under their wings. There is hardly a woman who feels threatened by her age who does not know, after a period of trial and error, how first to try on, then how to give her face a characteristic look, a style which will defy the work of time for ten, fifteen years.

What a reprieve! I am careful not to speak lightly of these renovations, these twilight triumphs which Balzac denied. “Though already thirty-two years old,” he writes, “she could still give the illusion of youth.” What! At thirty, at the age of an old horse, the age of a tree in its most resplendent foliage, of a young elephant, of an adolescent crocodile, a woman should pack away her most ardent dreams and retire from the dance, for fear of being called an aged bacchante!

I give my indulgence—and I am not the only one—and approval to those who wear the colors of their survival, the signs of their activity, into the arena. Too much courage has shone among the female kind, and for too many years, for women, under the pretext of loyalty, to break the contract they signed with beauty. You all seem to have this new “Alix way” about you, a look of embarrassment and apology which is not yours. “But it’s my real face!” No. Your real face is in the drawer of your dressing table, and sadly enough, you have left your good spirits in with it. Your real face is a warm, matte pink tending toward fawn, set off high on the cheeks by a glimmer of deep carmine, well blended and nearly translucent—which stops just under the lower eyelid, where it disappears deep into a bluish gray, barely visible, spread up to the brow; the thick eyebrow, carefully drawn out at the end, is brown like your thick, curling lashes between which your gray eyes look blue. I’m not forgetting the mouth whose design—equally well corrected—is a bold arc, its scarlet color making the teeth whiter. To work, my poor Alix! Show a little confidence in yourself, the inner smile you were known for will blossom all at once over the whole of you. One will only have to see you to be certain that the false Alix was that bland, retiring, discouraged, somewhat bletted woman . . . The true Alix is the one who always had a taste for adorning herself, defending herself, and pleasing others, for savoring the bitterness, the risk, and the sweetness of living—the true Alix, you see, is the young one.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“Do you mean to say your daughter is
nine years old
,” said a friend, “and she doesn’t know how to sew? She really must learn to sew. In bad weather sewing is a better occupation for a child of that age than reading storybooks.”

“Nine years old? And she can’t sew?” said another friend. “When she was eight, my daughter embroidered this tray cloth for me, look at it . . . Oh, I don’t say it’s fine needlework, but it’s nicely done all the same. Nowadays my daughter cuts out her own underclothes. I can’t bear anyone in my house to mend holes with pins!”

I meekly poured all this domestic wisdom over Bel-Gazou.

“You’re nine years old and you don’t know how to sew? You really must learn to sew . . .”

Flouting truth, I even added: “When I was eight years old, I remember I embroidered a tray cloth . . . Oh, it wasn’t fine needlework, I dare say . . . And then, in bad weather . . .”

She has therefore learned to sew. And although—with one bare sunburned leg tucked beneath her, and her body at ease in its bathing suit—she looks more like a fisherboy mending a net than an industrious little girl, she seems to experience no boyish repugnance. Her hands, stained the color of tobacco juice by sun and sea, hem in a way that seems against nature; their version of the simple running stitch resembles the zigzag dotted lines of a road map, but she buttonholes and scallops with elegance and is severely critical of the embroidery of others.

She sews and kindly keeps me company if rain blurs the horizon of the sea. She also sews during the torrid hour when the spindle bushes gather their circles of shadow directly under them. Moreover, it sometimes happens that a quarter of an hour before dinner, black in her white dress—“Bel-Gazou! your hands and frock are clean, and don’t forget it!”—she sits solemnly down with a square of material between her fingers. Then my friends applaud: “Just look at her! Isn’t she good? That’s right! Your mother must be pleased!”

Her mother says nothing—great joys must be controlled. But ought one to feign them? I shall speak the truth: I don’t much like my daughter sewing.

When she reads, she returns all bewildered and with flaming cheeks, from the island where the chest full of precious stones is hidden, from the dismal castle where a fair-haired orphan child is persecuted. She is soaking up a tested and time-honored poison, whose effects have long been familiar. If she draws, or colors pictures, a semiarticulate song issues from her, unceasing as the hum of bees around the privet. It is the same as the buzzing of flies as they work, the slow waltz of the house painter, the refrain of the spinner at her wheel. But Bel-Gazou is silent when she sews, silent for hours on end, with her mouth firmly closed, concealing her large, new-cut incisors that bite into the moist heart of a fruit like little saw-edged blades. She is silent, and she—why not write down the word that frightens me—she is thinking.

A new evil? A torment that I had not foreseen? Sitting in a grassy dell, or half buried in hot sand and gazing out to sea, she is thinking, as well I know. She thinks rapidly when she is listening, with a well-bred pretense of discretion, to remarks imprudently exchanged above her head. But it would seem that with this needleplay she has discovered the perfect means of adventuring, stitch by stitch, point by point, along a road of risks and temptations. Silence . . . the hand armed with the steel dart moves back and forth. Nothing will stop the unchecked little explorer. At what moment must I utter the “Halt!” that will brutally arrest her in full flight? Oh, for those young embroiderers of bygone days, sitting on a hard little stool in the shelter of their mother’s ample skirts! Maternal authority kept them there for years and years, never rising except to change the skein of silk, or to elope with a stranger. Think of Philomène de Watteville and her canvas, on which she embroidered the loss and the despair of Albert Savarus . . .

“What are you thinking about, Bel-Gazou?”

“Nothing, Mother. I’m counting my stitches.”

Silence. The needle pierces the material. A coarse trail of chain stitch follows very unevenly in its wake. Silence . . .

“Mother?”

“Darling?”

“Is it only when people are married that a man can put his arm around a lady’s waist?”

“Yes . . . No . . . It depends. If they are very good friends and have known each other a long time, you understand . . . As I said before: it depends. Why do you want to know?”

“For no particular reason, Mother.”

Two stitches, ten misshapen chain stitches.

“Mother? Is Madame X married?”

“She has been. She is divorced.”

“I see. And Monsieur F., is he married?”

“Why, of course he is; you know that.”

“Oh! Yes . . . Then it’s all right if one of the two is married?”

“What is all right?”

“To depend.”

“One doesn’t say: ‘to depend.’”

“But you said just now that it depended.”

“But what has it got to do with you? Is it any concern of yours?”

“No, Mother.”

I let it drop. I feel inadequate, self-conscious, displeased with myself. I should have answered differently and I could not think what to say.

Bel-Gazou also drops the subject; she sews. But she pays little attention to her sewing, overlaying it with pictures, associations of names and people, all the results of patient observation. A little later will come other curiosities, other questions, and especially other silences. Would to God that Bel-Gazou were the bewildered and simple child who questions crudely, open-eyed! But she is too near the truth, and too natural not to know, as a birthright, that all nature hesitates before that most majestic and most disturbing of instincts, and that it is wise to tremble, to be silent, and to lie when one draws near to it.

[
Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod
]

Sunday
. This morning the children have an odd look on their faces. I’ve seen them look like this before, when they were organizing some theatrical production in the attic, with costumes, masks, shrouds, and dragging chains, that was their play,
Le Revenant de la commanderie
—a ghostly lucubration that cost them a week of fever, night frights, and furry tongues, so excited did they get with their own phantoms. But that is an old story. Bertrand is now eighteen and plans, as is suitable at his age, to reform the finances of Europe; Renaud, now over fourteen, has no other interest but to take apart and put together again motorcar engines; and Bel-Gazou, this year, asks me questions of desolating triteness: “When we go back to Paris, can I wear stockings? In Paris, can I have a hat? In Paris, will you curl my hair on Sundays?”