The Collected Stories of Colette (61 page)

To acquire the strength to speak, he breathed the air in through his nostrils. With the air, there entered in the marvel, the magic of memory, the smell of certain hair, certain skin he had forgotten on the other side of the world and that started up a wild rush of recollections. He coughed, fighting against the rise of something that tightened his throat, staunched a thirst lurking in the parched corners of his lips, salted his overflowing eyelids, and mercifully veiled from him his return to the hard landing-bed. Over an endless stretch, a voice said, re-echoing to infinity: “He’s crying, dear God, he’s crying . . .” The voice foundered in a kind of storm from which there arose disjointed syllables, sobs, calls to someone present, but concealed. “Come quick, quick!”

“What a noise, what a noise,” thought the child reproachfully. But more and more, he kept pressing his cheek unconsciously against the soft, smooth surface bordered by someone’s hair, and drinking up a bitter dew on it that welled out, drop by drop. He turned away his head and, as he did so, encountered a narrow valley, a nest molded exactly to his measure. He had just time to name it to himself: “Madame Mamma’s shoulder,” before he lost consciousness or else fell asleep on it.

He came to himself to hear his own voice, light and faintly mocking, saying: “Wherever have you come from, Madame Mamma?”

There was no answer, but the deliciousness of a quarter orange, slipped between his lips, made him conscious of the return, of the presence of the person he was searching for. He knew that she was bending over him in that submissive attitude that flexed her waist and tired her back. Soon exhausted, he fell silent. But already a thousand questions were worrying him and he conquered his weakness to satisfy the most urgent one: “Did you change my pajamas while I was asleep, Madame Mamma? When I lay down last night, I had blue ones and these are pink.”

“Madame, it’s past believing! He remembers he had blue pajamas, the first night when . . .”

He did not listen to the rest of the sentence that a big, warm voice had just whispered and abandoned himself to the hands that were taking off his wet garments. Hands as deft as the waves between which he rocked, weightless and aimless . . .

“He’s soaked. Wrap him up in the big dressing gown, Mandora, without putting his arms through the sleeves.”

“The heat’s on full, Madame, don’t be afraid. And I’ve just put in a new hot-water bottle. Gracious me, he’s positively drenched.”

“If they knew where I’ve come from . . . Anyone would expect to be drenched,” thought Jean. “I wish to goodness I could scratch my legs or that someone would take those ants off.”

“Madame Mamma.”

He received the muteness, the vigilant stillness that were Madame Mamma’s answer when she was strained and on the alert.

“Would you please . . . scratch my calves a little because these ants . . .”

From the depths of silence, someone whispered, with a strange respectfulness: “He can feel ants . . . He said ants . . .”

Swathed in the dressing gown that was too big for him, he tried to shrug his shoulders. Why, yes, he had said ants. What was there astonishing about his having said Riki and ants? A reverie carried him away, relieved, to the margin between waking and sleeping; the rustle of some stuff brought him back again. Between his lashes, he recognized the hateful sleeve, the blue stripes, the little hairs of wool, and his resentment restored his strength. He refused to see any more of it, but a voice came and opened his closed lids, a voice that said: “Well, my-young-friend . . .”

“I abolish him, I abolish him!” shrieked Jean inside himself. “Him, his sleeve, his my-young-friend, his little eyes, I curse them, I abolish them!” Beside himself with irritation, he was panting.

“Well, well. What’s the matter? You’re very restless. There . . . there . . .”

A hand laid itself on Jean’s head. Powerless to revolt, he hoped to strike the aggressor down with one thunderbolt from his eye. But all he could see, sitting on the bedside chair reserved for Madame Mamma, was a worthy, rather fat, rather bald man, whose eyes, as they met his own, filled with tears.

“Little one, little one. Is it true you’ve got ants in your legs? Is it true? That’s splendid, my word, that’s really splendid. Could you manage to drink half a glass of lemonade? Wouldn’t you like to suck a spoonful of lemon ice? A mouthful of milk and water?”

Jean’s hand yielded itself up to some thick, very soft fingers and a warm palm. He murmured a vague acquiescence, not quite sure himself whether he was apologizing or whether he wanted the lemon ice, the drink, the “watered” milk. His eyes, paled to a tired gray between the great black rings and the dark eyebrows, gazed amicably into two small eyes of a cheerful blue that were moist and blinking and tender.

The rest of the new era was nothing but a series of muddled moments; a medley of different kinds of sleep, now short, now long, now hermetically sealed, interspersed with sudden sharp awakenings and vague tremors. The worthy doctor indulged in an orgy of great satisfied coughs, ahem, ahem, and exclamations of “Dear lady, this is capital! We’re safe now!” All this din was so cheerful that Jean, if he had not been sunk in apathy, would have asked himself what happy event had occurred in the house.

The hours passed inexplicably, signposted by fruits in jelly and milk flavored with vanilla. A boiled egg raised its little lid and revealed its buttercup yolk. The window, left ajar, let in a breath of spring, heady as wine.

The nice barber was not yet permitted to return. Jean’s hair hung down over his forehead and neck like a little girl’s and Madame Mamma risked tying it back with a pink ribbon, which Jean tore off with the gesture of an insulted boy.

Behind the pane, the chestnut branch’s rose-like buds were swelling day by day and all up and down Jean’s legs there ran ants armed with little nipping jaws. “This time, I’ve caught one, Madame Mamma!” But all he was pinching was his own transparent skin and the ant had fled inside a tree of veins the color of spring grass. On the eighth day of the new era, a great scarf of sunlight lying across his bed moved him more than he could bear and he decided that this very night the daily fever would bring him what he had been vainly awaiting for a whole week. Everything that profound weariness and sleep hewn out of a solid block of black repose had robbed him of would be restored: his faceless companions, his rides, the accessible skies, his security of an angel in full flight.

“Madame Mamma, I’d like my books, please.”

“My darling, the doctor said that . . .”

“It’s not to read them, Madame Mamma, it’s so that they’ll get used to me again.”

She said nothing and, with some apprehension, brought back the tattered volumes, the big badly bound paving stone, the light calf soft as a human skin, a
Pomology
with colored plates of chubby fruits, the Guérin mottled with flat-faced lions and duck-billed platypuses with beetles big as islands flying over them.

When night came, having eaten his fill—food was now something magical and interesting that he ate with the avidity of children who have come back to life—he pretended to be overcome with sleep and murmured his good nights, and a vague, mischievous song he had recently improvised. Having secretly watched the departure of Madame Mamma and Mandora, he took command of his raft of in-folio and atlas and set sail. A young moon, behind the chestnut branch, showed that the buds, thanks to the warmer weather, were about to open in leafy fingers.

He sat up without assistance in bed, towing his still-heavy legs that were overrun with ants. In the depths of the window, in the celestial waters of night swam the curved moon and the dim reflection of a long-haired child, to whom he beckoned. He raised one arm, and the other child obediently copied his summoning gesture. Slightly intoxicated with the power to work marvels, he called up his boon companions of the cruel but privileged hours: the visible sounds; the tangible images; the breathable seas; the nourishing, navigable air; the wings that mocked feet; the laughing suns.

In particular, he called up a certain spirited little boy who chuckled with inward laughter as he left the earth, who took advantage of Madame Mamma and, lord of her sorrows and joys, kept her prisoner of a hundred loving lies.

Then he waited, but nothing came. Nothing came that night or the following ones, nothing ever again. The landscape of pink snow had vanished from the nickel paper knife and never again would Jean fly, in a periwinkle dawn, between the sharp horns and the beautiful bulging eyes of cattle azure with dew. Never again would brown-and-yellow Mandora reverberate with all the strings—
tzrromm, tzrromm
—humming beneath her vast, generous skirt. Was it possible that the damask alp, piled high in the big cupboard, would henceforth refuse to allow a child who was nearly well to perform the feats a small cripple had achieved on the slopes of imaginary glaciers?

A time comes when one is forced to concentrate on living. A time comes when one has to renounce dying in full flight. With a wave of his hand, Jean said farewell to his angel-haired reflection. The other returned his greeting from the depths of an earthly night shorn of all marvels, the only night allowed to children whom death lets go and who fall asleep, assenting, cured, and disappointed.

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

“Oh, I can manage that,” the withered young girl told me. “Yes certainly, I can bring you each set of pages as I type them, as you’d rather not trust them to the post.”

“Can you? That would be kind of you. You needn’t trouble to come and collect my manuscript, I’ll bring it to you in batches as I go along. I go out for a walk every morning.”

“It’s so good for the health,” said Mademoiselle Barberet.

She gave a superficial smile and pulled one of the two little sausages of gold hair, threaded with white, that she wore tied on the nape with a black ribbon bow, forward again into its proper place, over her right shoulder, just below the ear. This odd way of doing her hair did not prevent Mademoiselle Barberet from being perfectly correct and pleasant to look at from her pale blue eyes to her slender feet, from her delicate, prematurely aged mouth to her frail hands, whose small bones were visible under the transparent skin. Her freshly ironed linen collar and her plain black dress called for the accessories of a pair of those glazed cotton oversleeves that were once the badge of writers. But typists, who do not write, do not wear their sleeves out below the elbows.

“You’re temporarily without your secretary, Madame?”

“No. The girl who used to type my manuscripts has just got married. But I don’t possess a secretary. I shouldn’t know what to do with a secretary, you see. I write everything by hand. And besides, my flat is small, I should hear the noise of the typewriter.”

“Oh, I do understand, I do understand,” said Mademoiselle Barberet. “There’s a gentleman I work for who only writes on the right-hand half of the pages. For a little while, I took over the typing for Monsieur Henri Duvernois, who would never have anything but pale yellow paper.”

She gave a knowing smile that lumped together and excused all the manias of scribblers and, producing a file—I noticed she matched the cardboard to the blue of my paper—she neatly put away the sixty or so pages I had brought.

“I used to live in this neighborhood once. But I can’t recognize anything anymore. It’s all straightened out and built up; even the street’s disappeared or changed its name. I’m not wrong, am I, Mademoiselle?”

Mademoiselle Barberet removed her spectacles, out of politeness. Her blue eyes were then unable to see me and her aimless gaze was lost in the void.

“Yes, I believe so,” she said, without conviction. “You must be right.”

“Have you lived here long?”

“Oh, yes,” she said emphatically.

She fluttered her lashes as if she were lying.

“I think that, in the old days, a row of houses opposite hid the rise.”

I got up to go over to the window and passed out of the circle of light that the green-shaded lamp threw over the table. But I did not see much of the view outside. The lights of the town made no breaches in the blue dusk of evening that falls early, in February. I pushed up the coarse muslin curtain with my forehead and rested my hand on the window catch. Immediately, I was conscious of the faint, rather pleasant giddiness that accompanies dreams of falling and flying. For I was clutching in my hand the peculiar hasp, the little cast-iron mermaid, whose shape my palm had not forgotten after all these years. I could not prevent myself from turning around in an abrupt, questioning way.

Without her glasses, Mademoiselle Barberet noticed nothing. My inquiring gaze went from her civil, shortsighted face to the walls of the room, almost entirely covered with gloomy steel engravings framed in black, colored reproductions of Chaplin—the fair-haired woman in the black velvet collar—and Henner, and even, a handicraft rare nowadays, thatchwork frames which young girls have lost the art of fashioning out of tubes of golden straw. Between an enlarged photograph and a sheaf of bearded rye, a few square inches of wallpaper remained bare; on it I could make out roses whose color had almost gone, purple convolvulus faded to gray, and tendrils of bluish foliage; in short, the ghost of a bunch of flowers, repeated a hundred times all over the walls, that it was impossible for me not to recognize. The twin doors, to right and left of the blind fireplace where a stove was fitted, promptly became intelligible, and beyond their closed panels, I revisualized all I had long ago left.