The Collected Stories of Colette (67 page)

“I’ll bring you back your typed pages tomorrow evening about half past six or seven. Make your escape,
she’ll
be asking me to get her lunch.”

I did not savor the pleasure I had anticipated, after leaving Rosita Barberet. Yet when I thought over the extravagance, the ambitiousness of this anecdote which aspired to be a sensational news item, I found that it lacked only one thing, guilelessness. A want of innocence spoiled its exciting color, all its suggestion of old women’s gossip and brewings of mysterious herbs and magic potions. For I do not care for the picturesque when it is based on feelings of black hatred. As I returned to my own neighborhood, I compared the Barberet story with “the story of the rue Truffaut” and found the latter infinitely pleasanter, with its circle of worthy women in the Batignolles district who, touching hands around a dinner table, conversed with the great beyond and received news of their dead children and their departed husbands. They never asked my name because I had been introduced by the local hairdresser and they slipped me a warning to mistrust a lady called X. It so happened that the advice was excellent. But the principal attraction of the meeting lay in the darkened room, in the tablecloth bordered with a bobble fringe that matched the one on the curtains, in the spirit of a young sailor, an invisible and mischievous ghost who haunted it on regular days, and shut himself up in the cupboard in order to make all the cups and saucers rattle. “Ah,
that
chap . . .” the stout mistress of the house would sigh indulgently.

“You let him get away with anything, Mamma,” her daughter (the medium) would say reproachfully. “All the same, it would be a pity if he broke the blue cup.”

At the end of the séance, these ladies passed around cups of pale, tepid tea. What peace, what charm there was in being entertained by these hostesses, whose social circle relied entirely on an extraterrestrial world! How agreeable I found her too, that female bonesetter, Mademoiselle Lévy, who undertook the care of bodies and souls and demanded so little money in exchange! She practiced massage and the laying on of hands in the darkest depths of pallid concierges’ lodges, in variety artistes’ digs in the rue Biot, and in dressing rooms in the music halls of La Fauvette. She sewed beautiful Hebrew characters into sachets and hung them around your neck: “You can be assured of its efficaciousness, it is prepared by the hands of innocence.” And she would display her beautiful hands, softened by creams and unguents, and add: “If things don’t get better tomorrow, when I go away, I can light a candle for you to Our Lady of Victories.
I’m
on good terms with everyone.”

Certainly, in the practices of innocent, popular magic, I was not such a novice as I had wished to appear in the eyes of Mademoiselle Barberet. But, in frequenting my ten- or twenty-franc sibyls, all I had done was to amuse myself, to listen to the rich but limited music of old, ritual words, to abandon my hands into hands so foreign to me, so worn smooth by contact with other human hands, that I benefited from them for a moment as I might have done from immersing myself in a crowd or listening to some voluble, pointless story. In short, they acted on me like a pain-killing drug, warranted harmless to children . . .

Whereas these mutual enemies, the Barberets . . . A blind alley, haunted by evil designs; was this what had become of the little flat where once I had suffered without bitterness, watched over by my rainy moon?

And so I reckoned up everything in the realm of the inexplicable that I owed to some extent to obtuse go-betweens, to vacant creatures whose emptiness reflects fragments of destinies, to modest liars and vehement visionaries. Not one of these women had done me any harm, not one of them had frightened me. But these two sisters, so utterly unlike . . .

I had had so little for lunch that I was glad to go and dine at a modest restaurant whose proprietress was simply known as “that fat woman who knows how to cook.” It was rare for me not to meet under its low ceilings one of those people one calls “friends” and who are sometimes, in fact, affectionate. I seem to remember that, with Count d’Adelsward de Fersen, I crowned my orgy—
bœuf à l’ancienne
and cider—by spending two hours at the cinema. Fersen, fair-haired and coated with brick-red suntan, wrote verses and did not like women. But he was so cut out to be attractive to all females that one of them exclaimed at the sight of him: “Ah, what waste of a good thing!” Intolerant and well-read, he had a quick temper and his exaggerated flamboyance hid a fundamental shyness. When we left the restaurant, Gustave Téry was just beginning his late dinner. But the founder of
L’Œuvre
gave me no other greeting than some buffalo-like glares, as was his habit whenever he was swollen with polemic fury and imagined he was being persecuted. Spherical, light on his feet, he entered like a bulky cloud driven by a gale. Either I am mistaken or else, that night, everyone I ran into, the moment I recognized them, showed an extraordinary tendency to move away and disappear. My last meeting was with a prostitute who was eyeing the pedestrians at the corner of the street, about a hundred steps from the house where I lived. I did not fail to say a word to her, as well as to the wandering cat who was keeping her company. A large, warm moon, a yellow June moon, lit up my homeward journey. The woman, standing on her short shadow, was talking to the cat Mimine. She was only interested in meteorology or, at least, so one would have imagined from her rare words. For six months I had seen her in a shapeless coat and a cloche hat with a little military plume that hid the top of her face.

“It’s a mild night,” she said, by way of greeting. “But you mustn’t imagine it’s going to last, the mist is all in one long sheet over the stream. When it’s in big separate puffs like bonfires, that means fine weather. So you’re back again, on foot, as usual?”

I offered her one of the cigarettes Fersen had given me. She remained faithful to the district longer than I did, with her shadow crouched like a dog at her feet, this shepherdess without a flock who talked about bonfires and thought of the Seine as a stream. I hope that she has long been sleeping, alone forever more, and dreaming of haylofts, of dawns crisp with frosted dew, of mists clinging to the running water that bears her along with it.

The little flat I occupied at that time was the envy of my rare visitors. But I soon knew that it would not hold me for long. Not that its three rooms—let’s say two and a half rooms—were inconvenient, but they thrust into prominence single objects that, in other surroundings, had been one of a pair. Now I possessed only one of the two beautiful red porcelain vases, fitted up as a lamp. The second Louis XV armchair held out its slender arms elsewhere for someone else to rest in. My square bookcase waited in vain for another square bookcase, and is still waiting for it. This series of amputations suffered by my furniture distressed no one but myself, and Rosita Barberet did not fail to exclaim: “Why, it’s a real nest!” as she clasped her gloved hands in admiration. A low shaft of sunlight—Honnorat had not yet finished serving his time as a page, and seven on the Charles X clock meant that it was a good seven hours since noon—reached my writing table, shone through a small carafe of wine, and touched, on its way, a little bunch of those June roses that are sold by the dozen, in Paris, in June.

I was pleased to see that she was once again the prim, neat Rosita, dressed in black with her touch of white lingerie at the neck. Fashion at that time favored little short capes held in place by tie ends that were crossed in front and fastened at the back of the waist. Mademoiselle Barberet knew how to wear a Paris hat, which means a very simple hat. But she seemed to have definitely repudiated the two little ringlets over one shoulder. The brim of her hat came down over the sad snail-shaped bun, symbol of all renouncements, on the thin, graying nape, and the face it shaded was wasted with care. As I poured out a glass of Lunel for Rosita, I wished I could also offer her lipstick and powder, some form of rejuvenating makeup.

She began by pushing away the burnt-topaz-colored wine and the biscuits.

“I’m not accustomed to it, Madame, I only drink water with a dash of wine in it or sometimes a little beer.”

“Just a mouthful. It’s a wine for children.”

She drank a mouthful, expostulated, drank another mouthful and yet another, making little affected grimaces because she had not learned to be simple, except in her heart. Betweentimes, she admired everything her shortsightedness made it impossible for her to see clearly. Soon she had one red cheek and one pale cheek and some little threads of blood in the whites of her eyes, around the brightened blue of the iris. All this would have made a middle-aged woman look younger, but Mademoiselle Barberet was only a girl, still young and withered before her time.

“It’s a magic potion,” she said, with her typical smile that seemed set in inverted commas.

Continuing, as if she were speaking a line in a play, she sighed: “Ah, if that poor Eugène . . .”

By this, I realized that her time was limited and I wanted to know how long she had.

“Has your sister gone out? She’s not waiting for you?”

“I told her I was bringing you your typescript and that I was also going to look in on Monsieur Vandérem and Monsieur Lucien Muhlfeld so as to make only one journey of it. If she’s in a hurry for her dinner, there’s some vegetable soup left over from yesterday, a boiled artichoke, and some stewed rhubarb.”

“In any case, the little restaurant on the right as you go down your street . . .”

Mademoiselle Barberet shook her head.

“No. She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t go out anymore.” She swallowed a drop of wine left in the bottom of her glass, then folded her arms in a decided way on my worktable, just opposite me. The setting sun clung for a moment to all the features of her half-flushed, half-pale face, to a turquoise brooch that fastened her collar. I wanted to come to her aid and spare her the preamble.

“I have to admit, Rosita, that I didn’t quite understand what you were saying to me yesterday.”

“I realized that,” she said, with a little whinny. “At first I thought you were making fun of me. A person as well-read as you are . . . To put it in two words instead of a hundred, Madame, my sister is in the process of making her husband die. On my mother’s memory, Madame, she is killing him. Six moons have already gone by, the seventh is coming, that’s the fatal moon; this unfortunate man knows that he’s doomed, besides he’s already had two accidents, from which he’s entirely recovered, but all the same it’s a handicap that puts him in a state of less resistance and makes the task easier for
her
.”

She would have exceeded the hundred words in her first breath had not her haste and, no doubt, the warmth of the wine slightly choked her.

I profited by her fit of coughing to ask: “Mademoiselle Rosita, just one question. Why should Délia want to make her husband die?”

She threw up her hands in a disclaiming gesture of impotence.

“Ah, as to that . . . you may well hunt for the real reason! All the usual reasons between a man and a woman! And you don’t love me anymore and I still love you, and you wish I were dead and come back I implore you, and I’d like to see you in hell.”

She gave a brutal “Hah!” and grimaced.

“My poor Rosita, if all couples who don’t get on resorted to murder . . .”

“But they do resort to it,” she protested. “They make no bones about resorting to it!”

“You see very few cases reported in the papers.”

“Because it’s all done in private, it’s a family affair. Nine times out of ten, no one gets arrested. It’s talked about a little in the neighborhood. But just you see if you can find any traces! Firearms, poisons, that’s all out-of-date stuff. My sister knows that, all right. What about the woman who keeps the sweet shop just below us, whatever’s
she
done with her husband? And the milkman at Number 57, rather queer isn’t it that he’s gone and lost his second wife, too?”

Her refined, high-class saleslady’s vocabulary had gone to pieces and she had thrust out her chin like a gargoyle. With a flip of her finger, she pushed back her hat, which was pinching her forehead. I was as shocked as if she had pulled up her skirt and fastened her suspenders without apologizing. She uncovered a high forehead, with sloping temples, which I had never seen so nakedly revealed, whence I imagined there was to be a burst of confidences and secrets that might or might not be dangerous. Behind Rosita, the window was turning pink with the last faint rose reflection of daylight. Yet I dared not switch on my lamp at once.

“Rosita,” I said seriously, “are you in the habit of saying . . . what you’ve just said to me . . . to just anybody?”

Her eyes looked frankly straight into mine.

“You must be joking, Madame. Should I have come so far if I’d had anyone near me who deserved to be trusted?”

I held out my hand, which she grasped. She knew how to shake hands, curtly and warmly, without prolonging the pressure.

“If you believe that Délia is doing harm to her husband, why don’t you try to counteract the harm? Because
you
, at least it seems so to me, wish nothing but good to Eugène Essendier.”

She gazed at me dejectedly.

“But I can’t, Madame! Love would have to have passed between Eugène and me. And it hasn’t passed between us! It’s never passed, never, never!”

She pulled a handkerchief out of her bag and wept, taking care not to wet her little starched collar. I thought I understood everything. “Now we have it, jealousy of course.” Promptly Rosita’s accusations and she herself became suspect, and I turned on the switch of my lamp.

“That doesn’t mean I must go, Madame?” she asked anxiously.

“Of course not, of course not,” I said weakly.

The truth was that I could hardly bear the sight, under the strong rays of my lamp, of her red-eyed face and her hat tipped backward like a drunken woman’s. But Rosita had hardly begun to talk.