The Collected Stories of Colette (60 page)

The nice haircutter performed his mission very differently and told Jean all about his Sunday life. Every Sunday he went fishing around Paris. With a dazzling sweep of his scissors, he would demonstrate the gesture that flings the float and the bait far out, and Jean would shut his eyes under the chill of the water drops, splashing out in wheels when the fisherman triumphantly hauled up his loaded line . . .

“When you’re well again, Monsieur Jean, I’ll take you with me to the riverbank.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed Jean, his eyes closed.

“Why do they all want me to be well again? I
am
on the riverbank. What should I do with a chub-as-big-as-my-hand-here and a pickerel-as-long-as-your-paper-knife-there?”

“Nice barber, tell me some more . . .”

And he would listen to the story of the hawkmoths clinging under the arch of a little bridge, impromptu bait that had caught a “wagon-load” of trout with a hazel twig cut from the hedge and three bits of string knotted together.

To the cool, grating accompaniment of the twittering scissors, the story would begin.

“You go as far as a tiny little creek no-broader-than-my-thigh that widens out as it crosses a meadow. You see two-three willows together and a bit of brushwood: that’s the place.”

On the very first day Jean had transplanted other things around the two-three willows: the tall spikes of common agrimony extracted from the big botany album and pink-flowered hemp that attracts butterflies and tired children and sends them to sleep. The monstrous pollarded head of the oldest willow, crowned with white convolvulus, pulled faces only for Jean. The leap of a fish burst the glittering skin of the river, then another fish leaped . . . The nice hairdresser, busy with his bait, had heard them and turned around.

“Makin’ game o’ me, those two! But I’ll get ’em.”

“No, no,” Jean protested. “It was me. I threw two little pebbles into the water.”

The tree frog was singing, the imaginary afternoon was passing.

“Singing invisible on his water-lily raft,” mused Jean. “Why tree frog? Why not lily frog?”

The shearer of golden fleece, the river, and the meadow faded away like a dream, leaving behind on Jean’s forehead a sweet, commonplace scent and a wavy crest of fair hair. Jean, waking up, heard a whispering coming from the drawing room, a long low colloquy between Madame Mamma and the doctor from which one word escaped, crisp and lively, and made a beeline for Jean, the word “crisis.” Sometimes it entered ceremoniously, like a lady dressed up to give away prizes with an
h
behind its ear and a
y
tucked into its bodice: Chrysis, Chrysis Wilby-Sallatry. “Truly? Truly?” said the urgent voice of Madame Mamma. “I said: perhaps . . .” replied the doctor’s voice, an unsteady voice that halted on one foot. “A crisis, salutary but severe . . . Chrysis Salutari Sevea, a young Creole from tropical America, lissome in her flounced white cotton dress.”

The child’s subtle ear also gathered the name of another person which no doubt it was expedient to keep secret. A name he couldn’t quite catch, something like Polly O’Miley or Olly O’Miall, and he finally decided it must refer to some little girl, also stricken with painful immobility and possessed of two long, useless legs, whom they never mentioned in front of him in case he should be jealous.

Complying with the order it had received, the tip of the chestnut branch and its message of coming spring had foundered in the sea of night. Although Jean had a second time requested it to do so, the pear-shaped bell had not yet lit up. Its dim opal flame was not shining on the bedside table that bore the mineral water, the orange juice, the big nickel paper knife with the alpine dawn in its hidden depths, the myopic watch with its domed glass, and the thermometer . . . Not one book lay on the table, waiting for Jean to choose it. Printed texts, whatever their size and shape, slept inside and ready open in the same bed as the invalid child. At the foot of the bed, a great tile of binding sometimes weighed heavily on his almost lifeless legs without his making any complaint.

He groped about him with his still-active arms and fished up some paperbound books, tattered and warm. An ancient volume thrust out its friendly horn from under the pillow. The paperbacks, heaped in a cushion, took their place against one of the little boy’s thin lips, and the soft childish cheek pressed against the light calf binding that was a century old. Under his armpit, Jean verified the presence of a tough favorite comrade, a volume as hard and squat as a paving stone, a grumpy, robust fellow who found the bed too soft and usually went off to finish his night on the floor on the white goatskin rug.

Angular pasteboard shapes and the sockets and sinuses and cavities of a fragile anatomy interlocked in the friendliest way. The temporary bruising made the chronic pain easier to bear patiently. Certain wayward little tortures, inflicted between the ear and the shoulder by the horned light brown calf, displaced and relieved the torments endured by that region and by the wretched little back with its wings of prominent shoulder blades.

“Whatever have you got there?” Madame Mamma would say. “It looks as if you’d had a blow. Really, I simply can’t understand . . .” In perfect good faith, the bruised child would think for a moment, then inwardly reply to himself: “There . . . Why, yes, of course. It was that tree I couldn’t avoid. It was that little roof I leaned on to watch the sheep going back into the fold. It was that big rake that fell on the back of my neck when I was drinking at the fountain. Still, what luck Madame Mamma didn’t see the little nick at the corner of my eye, the mark of that swallow’s beak I knocked up against in the air. I hadn’t time to avoid it, it was as hard as a scythe. True, a sky is so small . . .”

The confused murmur of his nights began to rise, expected but not familiar. It varied according to his dreams, his degree of weakness, his temperature, and the fantasies of a day that Madame Mamma supposed depressingly like all the other days. This new night bore no resemblance whatever to yesterday’s night. The darkness was rich in innumerable blacks. “The black is all purple tonight. I’ve got such a pain in . . . in what? In my forehead. No, whatever am I saying? It’s always my back . . . But no, it’s a weight, two weights that are hung on my hips, two weights shaped like pine cones like the ones on the kitchen clock.
You
there, for the last time, will you light up?”

To intimate his order to the enamel bell, he leaned his temple hard against the pale leather binding and shuddered to find it so cold. “If it’s frozen, it means I’m burning.” No light flowed from the enamel pear. “What’s the matter with it? And what’s the matter with me? Only this afternoon, the front door wouldn’t let me go through it.” He stretched out his hand into the inhabited night air and found the shadowy pear without groping for it. Capriciously changing its usual source, the light appeared on the fat, shortsighted face of the spherical watch. “What are you sticking your nose in for?” muttered Jean. “Mind your own business and be satisfied with knowing how to tell the time.”

The mortified watch put out its light and Jean heaved a sigh of gratified power. But all he could get out of his rigid sides was a groan. All at once, a wind he recognized among all others, the wind that snaps the pine trees, dishevels the larches, and flattens and raises the sand dunes, began to roar. It filled his ears, and the images, forbidden to the more ordinary dream that does not pierce the curtain of closed eyelids, rose up and longed to run free, to take advantage of the limitless room. Some of them, queerly horizontal, checkered the vertical crowd who had reared straight up on end. “Scottish visions,” thought Jean.

His bed trembled slightly, shaken by the vibrating ascent of High Fever. He felt three or four years fall away from him, and fear, to which he was almost a stranger, clutched at him. He very nearly called out: “To the rescue, Madame Mamma! They’re carrying off your little boy!”

Neither in his rides, nor in the rich kingdom of the very strangest sounds—humpbacked sounds carrying reverberating ampoules on their heads, on their cockchafer backs, pointed sounds with muzzles like mongooses—nowhere had Jean ever seen such a swarm suddenly appear. His hearing tasted it like a mouth; his eye laboriously spelled it out, fascinated. “Help, Madame Mamma! Help me! You
know
I can’t walk! I can only fly, swim, roll from cloud to cloud . . .” At the same moment, something indescribable and forgotten stirred in his body, infinitely far away, right at the very end of his useless legs, a confused, scattered crowd of crazy ants. “To the rescue, Madame Mamma!”

But another person, whose decisions depended neither on impotence nor on motherly kindness, made a haughty sign that imposed silence. A magical constraint kept Madame Mamma on the other side of the wall, in the place where she waited, modest and anxious, to become as great as her little son.

So he did not scream. In any case, the unknown beings, the fabulous strangers, were already beginning to abduct him by force. Rising up on all sides, they poured burning heat and icy cold on him, racked him with melodious torture, swathed him in color like a bandage, swung him in a hammock of palpitations. With his face already turned to flee, motionless, to his mother, he suddenly changed his mind and launched himself in full flight, letting his own impetus carry him where it would, through meteors and mists and lightnings that softly opened to let him through, closed behind him, opened again . . . And just as he was on the very verge of being perfectly content, ungrateful and gay, exulting in his solitude as an only child, his privilege as an orphan and an invalid, he was aware that a sad little crystalline crash separated him from a bliss whose beautiful, soft, airy name he had yet to learn: death. A little, light, melancholy crash, coming perhaps from some planet deserted forever . . . The clear and sorrowful sound, clinging to the child who was going to die, held on so staunchly that the dazzling escape tried in vain to shake it off and outdistance it.

Perhaps his journey lasted a long time. But having lost all sense of duration, he could only judge of its variety. Often he thought he was following a guide, an indistinct guide who had lost his way too. Then he would groan at not being able to take on the pilot’s responsibility and he would hear his own groan of humbled pride, or such weariness that he abandoned his voyage, left the wake of a spindle-shaped squall, and took refuge, dead-beat, in a corner.

There he was pounced on by the anguish of living in a country where there were no corners, no square, solid shapes; where there was only a dark current of icy air; a night in whose depths he was no longer anything but a small boy, lost and in tears. Then he would rear himself upright on a great many, suddenly multiplied legs, promoted to the rank of stilts, that a searing pain was slicing off in rattling bundles, like faggots. Then everything would go dark and only the blind wind told him how fast he was traveling. Passing from a familiar continent to an unfamiliar sea he caught a few words in a language he was surprised to find he understood.

“The sound of the glass mug breaking woke me up.”

“Madame can see he’s smacking his lips, doesn’t Madame think he wants something to drink?”

He would have liked to know the name of that voice. “Madame . . . Madame . . . What Madame?” But already the speed at which he was going had swallowed up the words and the memory of them.

One pale night, thanks to a stop that jarred through his temples, he again gathered a few human syllables and would have liked to repeat them. The sudden stop had brought him painfully face to face with a harsh, solid object interposed between two noble and inhabited worlds. An object with no destination, finely striped, bristling with very tiny hairs and mysteriously associated—he discovered this afterward—with horrible “my-young-friends.” “It’s a . . . I know . . . a . . . sleeve . . .” Promptly he opened his wings and flung himself headfirst into reassuring chaos.

Another time, he saw a hand. Armed with slender fingers, with slightly chapped skin and white-spotted nails, it was pushing back a marvelous zebra-striped mass that was rushing up from the depths of the horizon. Jean began to laugh. “Poor little hand, the mass will make one mouthful of it, just imagine, a mass that’s all striped in black and yellow and has such an intelligent expression!” The feeble little hand struggled with all its outspread fingers, and the parallel stripes began to broaden and bend and diverge like soft bars. A great gap opened between them and swallowed up the frail hand and Jean found himself regretting it. This regret was delaying his journey, and with an effort, he launched himself off again. But he carried the regret with him, just as once, very, very long ago, he had carried the tenacious tinkle of a broken mug. After that, through whatever whirlpools and troughs he swirled and dipped, drowsy and rather pleasantly giddy, his journey was disturbed by echoes, by sounds of tears, by an anxious attempt at something that resembled a thought, by an importunate feeling of pity.

A harsh barking suddenly rent the great spaces, and Jean murmured: “Riki . . .” In the distance, he heard a kind of sob that kept repeating: “Riki! Madame, he said Riki!” Another stammering reiterated: “He said Riki! He said Riki.”

A little hard, quivering force, whose double grip he could feel under his armpits, seemed to want to hoist him up to the top of a peak. It was bruising him and he grumbled. If he had been able to transmit his instructions to the little force and its sharp corners, he would have taught it that this was no way to treat a famous traveler who only uses immaterial vehicles, unshod steeds, sledges that trace seven-colored tracks on the rainbow. That he only allowed himself to be molested by those . . . those elements whose power only the night can unleash and control. That, for example, the bird’s belly that had just laid itself against the whole length of his cheek had no right at all. And moreover, it was not a bird’s belly because it was not feathered but only edged with a strand of long hair. “That,” he thought, “would be a cheek, if there were any other cheek in the universe except mine. I want to speak, I want to send away this . . . this sham cheek. I forbid anyone to touch me, I forbid . . .”