The Collected Stories of Colette (58 page)

The child who was going to die wanted to hoist himself a little higher against his big pillow but he could not manage it. His mother heard his mute appeal and helped him. Once again the child promised to death had his mother’s face very close to his own, the face he thought he would never look at again, with its light brown hair drawn back from the temples like an old-fashioned little girl’s, the long, rather thin cheeks with hardly a trace of powder, the very wide-open brown eyes, so sure of controlling their anxiety that they often forgot to keep guard over themselves.

“You’re rosy tonight, my little boy,” she said gaily.

But her brown eyes remained fixed in a steady, frightened look that the little boy knew well.

So as not to have to raise his feeble head, the little boy slid his pupils, with their big sea-green irises, into the corners of his lids and corrected her gravely: “I’m rosy because of the lampshade.”

Madame Mamma looked at her son sorrowfully, inwardly reproaching him for wiping out, with one word, that pink color she saw on his cheeks. He had shut his eyes again and the appearance of being asleep gave him back the face of a child of ten.

“She thinks I’m asleep.” His mother turned away from the white-faced little boy, very gently, as if afraid he might feel the thread of her gaze break off. “He thinks I think he’s asleep.” Sometimes they played at deceiving each other like this. “She thinks I’m not in pain,” Jean would think, though the pain would be making his lashes flicker on his cheekbones. Nevertheless, Madame Mamma would be thinking, “How well he can imitate a child who’s not in pain! Any other mother would be taken in. But not me . . .”

“Do you like this smell of lavender I’ve sprayed about? Your room smells nice.”

The child acquiesced without speaking; the habit and the necessity of preserving his strength had ended in his acquiring a repertoire of very tiny signs, a delicate and complicated mime like the language of animals. He excelled in making a magic and paradoxical use of his senses.

For him, the white muslin curtains gave out a pink sound when the sun struck them about ten in the morning and the scratched pale calf binding of an ancient
Journey on the Banks of the Amazon
smelled, to his mind, of hot pancakes. The desire to drink was expressed by three “claps” of the eyelids. To eat, oh, as to wanting to eat, he didn’t think about that. The other needs of the small, limp, defeated body had their silent and modest telegraph code. But everything that, in the existence of a child under sentence of death, could still be called the capacity for pleasure and amusement retained a passionate interest in human speech. This faculty searched out exact and varied words to be employed by a musical voice, ripened, as it were, by the long illness and hardly shriller than a woman’s. Jean had chosen the words employed in checkers, in “solitaire,” with its glitter of glass marbles, in “nine holes,” in a dozen other old-fashioned games that made use of ivory and lemonwood and were played on inlaid boards. Other words, mostly secret, applied to the Swiss patience pack, fifty-two little glazed cards, edged and picked out with gold like drawing-room paneling. The queens wore shepherdess hats, straw ones with a rose under the brim, and the shepherd-knaves carried crooks. On account of the bearded kings with rubicund faces and the small, hard eyes of mountain smallholders, Jean had invented a patience that excluded the four boorish monarchs.

“No,” he thought, “my room doesn’t really smell nice. It isn’t the same lavender. It seems to me that, in the old days, when I was able to walk about . . . But I may have forgotten.”

He mounted a cloud of fragrance that was passing within reach of his small, pinched, white nostrils and rode swiftly away. His life of being confined to bed provided him with all the pleasures of illness, including the spice of filial malice of which no child can bear to deprive himself, so he gave no hint of his secret delights.

Astride the scented cloud, he wandered through the air of the room; then he got bored and escaped through the frosted-glass fanlight and went along the passage, followed in his flight by a big silver clothes moth who sneezed in the trail of lavender behind him. To outdistance it, he pressed his knees into the sides of the cloud of fragrance, riding with an ease and vigor that his long, inert, half-paralyzed legs refused to display in the presence of human beings. When he escaped from his passive life, he knew how to ride, how to pass through walls; best of all, he knew how to fly. With his body inclined like a diver’s plunging down through the waves, his forehead passed with careless ease through an element whose currents and resistances he understood. With his arms outstretched, he had only to slant one or the other of his shoulders to change the direction of his flight, and by a jerk of his loins, he could avoid the shock of landing. In any case, he rarely did land. Once he had rashly let himself come down too near the ground, over a meadow where cows were feeding.

So close to the ground that he had seen, right opposite his own face, the beautiful, astonished face of a cream-colored cow with crescent-shaped horns and eyes that mirrored the flying child like two magnifying glasses, while the dandelion flowers came up out of the grass to meet him, growing bigger and bigger, like little suns. He had only just had time to catch tight hold of the tall horns with both hands and thrust himself backward up into the air again; he could still remember the warmth of the smooth horns and their blunted, as it were friendly, points. The barking of a dew-drenched sheep dog who ran up to protect his cow gradually faded away as the flying child soared up again into his familiar sky. Jean remembered very clearly that he had had to exert all the strength of his arm-wings that morning to make his way back through a periwinkle-colored dawn, glide over a sleeping town, and fall on his enameled iron bed, the contact of which had hurt him very much indeed. He had felt an agonizing pain burning his loins and tearing his thighs with red-hot pincers, a pain so bad that he had not been able to hide two pearly traces of tears from Madame Mamma’s sharp-eyed tenderness.

“Has my little boy been crying?”

“In a dream, Madame Mamma, only in a dream . . .”

The cloud of pleasant scent suddenly reached the end of the passage and butted its nose against the door leading to the kitchen.

“Whoa back! Whoa back! What a brute! Ah, these lavender half-breeds, with wild-thyme blood! They’d smash your face for you if you didn’t hold them. Is
that
how you go through a kitchen door?”

He gripped the repentant cloud hard between his knees and guided it into the upper region of the kitchen, into the warmed air that was drying the washing near the ceiling. As he lowered his head to pass between two pieces of linen, Jean deftly broke off an apron string and slipped it into the cloud’s mouth by way of a bit. A mouth is not always a mouth, but a bit is always a bit, and it matters little what it bridles.

“Where shall we go? We’ll have to get back in time for dinner and it’s late already. We must go faster, Lavender, faster . . .”

Having gone through the service door, he decided, for fun, to go down the staircase headfirst, then righted himself by a few slides on his back. The lavender cloud, frightened by what was being asked of it, jibbed a little. “Oh, you great goof of a mountain filly!” said the child, and this boy, who never laughed at all in his cloistered life, burst out laughing. As he rode wildly down, he grabbed hold, in passing, of the tangled hair of one of the house dogs, the one they told him was so clever he could go down the steps and out onto the pavement, “do his business all by himself,” then return to his parents’ house and scratch at the front door. Startled by Jean’s hand he yelped and flattened himself against the banisters.

“Coming with us, Riki? I’ll take you up behind me!”

With a small, powerful hand he caught up the dog and flung him onto the misty, ballooning rump of the lavender mare, who, spurred by two bare heels, galloped down the last two flights. But there the dog, panic-stricken, jumped down from the eiderdown pillion and fled upstairs to his basket, howling.

“You don’t know what you’re missing!” Jean shouted to him. “I was frightened too, at first, but now . . . Watch, Riki!”

Rider and mount hurled themselves against the heavy street door. To Jean’s amazement, they encountered, not the malleable obstacle of yielding oak and melting ironwork and big bolts that said “Yes, yes” as they slid softly back, but the inflexible barrier of a firmly chiseled voice that was whispering: “See, he’s fast asleep.”

Numbed by the shock, anguished from head to foot, Jean was aware of the cruel harshness of the two words “See he’s, Seehees, Seeheeze.” They were sharper than a knife blade. Beside them lay three severed syllables, “fa-sta-sleep.”

“Fa . . . sta . . . sleep,” repeated Jean. “That’s the end of the ride, here comes Fa . . . sta . . . sleep, curled up in a ball! Goodbye. Good-bye . . .”

He had no leisure to wonder to whom he was saying goodbye. Time was running out horribly fast. He dreaded the landing. The foundered cloud missed its footing with all the four legs it never had; before it dispersed in tiny cold drops, it threw its rider, with a heave of its non-existent hindquarters, into the valley of the japanned bedstead, and once again, Jean groaned at the brutal contact.

“You were sleeping so well,” said the voice of Madame Mamma.

A voice, thought her little boy, that was all a tangle of straight lines and curved lines—a curved one, a straight one—a dry line—a wet line. But never would he try to explain that to Madame Mamma.

“You woke up moaning, darling, were you in pain?”

He made a sign that he was not, waving his thin, white, well-groomed forefinger from right to left. Besides, the pain was calming down. Falling onto this rather harsh little bed, after all he was pretty used to it. And what could you expect of a big puffy cloud and its scented bumpkin’s manners?

“The next time,” thought Jean, “I’ll ride the Big Skating Rink.” In the hours when he lay with closed lids and they put a screen between the bright bulb and the lampshade, that was the name of the immmmmmense nickel-plated paper knife, so big that, instead of two
m
’s, it needed three or often six in its qualifying adjective.

“Madame Mamma, would you bring the Big Skat . . . I mean the big paper knife, a little farther forward under the lampshade? Thanks awfully.”

To prepare his next ride at leisure, Jean turned his head on the pillow. They had cut his fair hair very short at the back, to stop it from matting. The top of his head, his temples, and his ears were covered with curls of pale, faintly greenish gold, the gold of a winter moon, that harmonized well with his sea-green eyes and his face white as a petal.

“How exquisite he is!” murmured Madame Mamma’s female friends. “He looks quite astonishingly like L’Aiglon.” Whereupon Madame Mamma would smile with disdain, knowing well that the Due de Reichstadt, slightly thick-lipped like his mother, the Empress, would have envied the firm, cupid’s-bow mouth with its fine-drawn corners that was one of Jean’s beauties. She would say haughtily: “Possibly there is something . . . yes, in the forehead. But, heaven be praised,
Jean
isn’t tubercular!”

When, with a practiced hand, she had brought the lamp and big paper knife closer together, Jean saw what he was waiting to see on the long chromium blade, a pink reflection like snow at dawn, flecked here and there with blue, a glittering landscape that tasted of peppermint. Then he laid his left temple on the firm pillow, listened to the music of water drops and fountains played by the strands of white horsehair inside the cushion under the pressure of his head, and half closed his eyes.

“But, my little boy, it’s almost your dinnertime . . .” said Madame Mamma hesitantly.

The sick child smiled indulgently at his mother. You have to forgive well people everything. Besides, he was still faintly concussed from his fall. “I’ve got plenty of time,” he thought, and he accentuated his smile, at the risk of seeing Madame Mamma—as she did, faced with certain smiles, too perfect, too full of a serenity that, for her, could only have one meaning—lose countenance and rush out of the room, knocking herself against the doorpost.

“If you don’t mind, darling, I’ll have my dinner very quickly all by myself in the dining room, while you’re having yours on your tray.”

“Why, of course, of course,” answered the white, graciously condescending small forefinger, crooking itself twice.

“We know, we know,” also observed the two lash-bordered eyelids, blinking twice. “We know what an oversensitive lady Mamma is, and how a pair of tears suddenly comes into her eyes, like a pair of precious stones. There are lots of precious stones for ears . . . Eye rings, Madame Mamma has eye rings when she thinks about me. Won’t she ever get used to me, then? How illogical she is.”

As Madame Mamma was bending over him, he raised his unfettered arms and gave her a ritual hug. His mother’s neck raised itself proudly under the weight suspended on it, pulling up the child’s thin, overtall body; the slim torso followed by the long legs, inert now yet capable of gripping and controlling the flanks of a shadowy cloud.

For a moment, Madame Mamma contemplated her gracious invalid son, propped up against a hard pillow that sloped like a desk; then she exclaimed: “I’ll be back very soon! Your tray will be here in a minute. Besides, I must go and hurry up Mandora, she’s never on time!”

Once again, she went out of the room.

“She goes out, she comes in. Above all, she goes out. She doesn’t want to leave me but she keeps going out of my room all the time. She’s going off to dry her pair of tears. She’s got a hundred reasons for going out of my room; if by any chance she hadn’t got one, I could give a thousand. Mandora’s never late.”

Turning his head with precaution, he watched Mandora come in. Wasn’t it right and inevitable that this full-bodied, golden, potbellied maid, with her musical, resonant voice and her shining eyes that were like the precious wood of a lute, should answer to the name of Mandora? “If it weren’t for me,” thought Jean, “she’d still be calling herself Angelina.”