The Collected Stories of Colette (68 page)

“Eugène has never even thought of wanting me,” she said humbly. “If he had wanted me, even just once, I’d be in a position to fight against her, you understand.”

“No. I don’t understand. I’ve everything to learn, as you see. Do you really attribute so much importance to the fact of having . . . having belonged to a man?”

“And you? Do you really attribute so little to it?”

I decided to laugh.

“No, no, Rosita, I’m not so frivolous, unfortunately. But all the same, I don’t think it constitutes a bond, that it sets a seal on you.”

“Well, you’re mistaken, that’s all. Possession gives you the power to summon, to convoke, as they say. Have you really never ‘called’ anyone?”

“Indeed I have,” I said, laughing. “I must have hit on someone deaf. I didn’t get an answer.”

“Because you didn’t call hard enough, for good or evil. My sister,
she
really does call. If you could see her. She’s unrecognizable. Also, she’s up to some pretty work, I can assure you.”

She fell silent, and for a moment, it was quite obvious she had stopped thinking of me.

“But Eugène himself, couldn’t you warn him?”

“I have warned him. But Eugène, he’s a skeptic. He told me he’d had enough of one crack-brained woman and that the second crack-brained woman would do him a great favor if she’d shut up. He’s got pockets under his eyes and he’s the color of butter. From time to time he coughs, but not from the chest, he coughs because of palpitations of the heart. He said to me: ‘All I can do for you is to lend you
Fantômas
. It’s just your cup of tea.’ That just shows,” added Mademoiselle Barberet, with a bitter smile. “That just shows how the most intelligent men can argue like imbeciles, seeing no difference between fantastic made-up stories and things as real as this . . . as such deadly machinations.”

“But what machinations, will you kindly tell me?” I exclaimed.

Mademoiselle Barberet unfolded her spectacles and put them on, wedging them firmly in the brown dints that marked either side of her transparent nose. Her gaze became focused, taking on new assurance and a searching expression.

“You know,” she murmured, “that it is never too late to
summon
? You have quite understood that one can
summon
for good and for evil?”

“I know it now that you have told me.”

She pushed my lamp a little to one side and leaned over closer to me. She was hot and nothing is so unbearable to me as the human smell except when—very rarely indeed—I find it intoxicating. Moreover, the wine to which she was not accustomed kept repeating and her breath smelled of it. I wanted to stand up but she was already talking.

There are things that are written down nowhere, except by clumsy hands in school exercise books, or on thin gray-squared paper, yellowed at the edges, folded and cut into pages and sewn together with red cotton; things that the witch bequeathed to the bonesetter, that the bonesetter sold to the love-obsessed woman, that the obsessed one passed on to another wretched creature. All that the credulity and the sullied memory of a pure girl can gather in the dens that an unfathomable city harbors between a brand-new cinema and an espresso bar, I heard from Rosita Barberet, who had learned it from the vaunts of widows who had willed the deaths of the husbands who had deserted them, from the frenzied fantasies of lonely women.

“You say a name, nothing but the name, the name of the particular person, a hundred times, a thousand times. No matter how far away they are, they will hear you in the end. Without eating or drinking, as long as you can possibly keep it up, you say the name, nothing else but the name. Don’t you remember one day when Délia nearly fainted? I suspected at once. In our neighborhood there are heaps of them who repeated the name . . .”

Whisperings, an obtuse faith, even a local custom, were these the forces and the magic philters that procured love, decided life and death, removed that lofty mountain, an indifferent heart?

“. . . One day when you rang the bell, and my sister was lying behind the door . . .”

“Yes, I remember . . . You asked me ‘Is that you, Eugène?’”

“She’d said to me: ‘Quick, quick, he’s coming. I can feel it, quick, he must tread on me as he comes in, it’s essential!’ But it was you.”

“It was only me.”

“She’d been lying there, believe me or not, for over two hours. Soon after that, she took to pointed things again. Knives, scissors, embroidery needles. That’s very well known, but it’s dangerous. If you haven’t enough strength, the points can turn against you. But do you imagine
that one
would ever lack strength? If I lived the life she does, I should have been dead by now.
I’ve
got nothing to sustain me.”

“Has she, then?”

“Of course she has. She hates. That nourishes her.”

That Délia, so young, with her rather arrogant beauty, her soft cheek that she laid against my hand. That was the same Délia who played with twenty little glittering thunderbolts that she intended to be deadly, and she used their sharp points to embroider beaded flowers.

“. . . But she’s given up embroidering bags now. She’s taken to working with needles whose points she’s contaminated.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she’s contaminated them by dipping them in a mixture.”

And Rosita Barberet launched out into the path, strewn with nameless filth, into which the practice of base magic drags its faithful adherents. She pursued that path without blenching, without omitting a word, for fastidiousness is not a feminine virtue. She would not allow me to remain ignorant of one thing to which her young sister stooped in the hope of doing injury, that same sister who loved fresh cherries . . . So young, with one of those rather short bodies a man’s arms clasp so easily and, beneath that black, curly hair, the pallor that a lover longs to crimson.

Luckily, the narrator branched off and took to talking only about death, and I breathed again. Death is not nauseating. She discoursed on the imminent death of this unfortunate Eugène, which so much resembled the death of the husband of the woman in the sweet shop. And then there was the chemist, who had died quite black.

“You must surely admit, Madame, that the fact of a chemist being fixed like that by his wife, that really is turning the world upside down!”

I certainly did admit it. I even derived a strange satisfaction from it. What did I care about the chemist and the unlucky husband of the woman who kept the sweet shop? All I was waiting for now from my detailed informant was one final picture: Délia arriving at the crossroads where, amid the vaporous clouds produced by each one’s illusion, the female slaves of the cloven-footed one meet for the Sabbath.

“Yes, indeed. And where does the devil come in, Rosita?”

“What devil, Madame?”

“Why, the devil pure and simple, I presume. Does your sister give him a special name?”

An honest amazement was depicted on Rosita’s face and her eyebrows flew up to the top of her high forehead.

“But, Madame, whatever trail are you off on now? The devil, that’s just for imbeciles. The devil, just imagine . . .”

She shrugged her shoulders and, behind her glasses, threw a withering glance at discredited Satan.

“The devil! Admitting he existed, he’d be just the one to mess it all up!”

“Rosita, you remind me at this moment of the young woman who said: ‘God, that’s all hooey! . . . But no jokes in front of me about the Blessed Virgin!’”

“Everyone’s got their own ideas, Madame. Good heavens! It’s ten to eight! It was very kind of you to let me come,” she sighed in a voice that did not disguise her disappointment.

For I had offered her neither help nor connivance. She pulled down her hat—at last—over her forehead. I remembered, just in time, that I had not paid her for her last lot of work.

“A drop of Lunel before you go, Mademoiselle Rosita?”

Involuntarily, by calling her “Mademoiselle” again, I was putting her at a distance. She swallowed the golden wine in one gulp and I complimented her.

“Oh, I’ve got a good head,” she said.

But as she had folded up her spectacles again, she searched around for me with a vague eye, and as she went out, she bumped against the doorpost, to which she made a little apologetic bow.

As soon as she had gone, I opened the window to its fullest extent to let in the evening air. Mistaking the feeling of exhaustion her visit had given me for genuine tiredness, I made the error of going to bed early. My dreams showed the effects of it, and through them, I realized I was not yet rid of the two enemy sisters or of another memory. I kept relapsing into a nightmare in which I was now my real self, now identified with Délia. Half reclining like her on
our
divan-bed, in the dark part of our room, I “convoked” with a powerful summons, with a thousand repetitions of his name, a man who was not called Eugène . . .

Dawn found me drenched with those abundant tears we rain in sleep and that go on flowing after we are awake and can no longer track them to their source. The thousand-times repeated name grew dim and lost his nocturnal power. In my own mind, I said farewell to it and thrust its echo back into the little flat where I had taken pleasure in suffering. And I abandoned that flat to those other women, to their stifled, audacious, incantation-ridden lives, where witchcraft could be fitted in between the daily task and the Saturday cinema, between the little washtub and the frying steak.

When the short night was ended, I promised myself that never again would I climb the Paris hill with the steep, gay streets. Between one day and the next, I turned Rosita’s furtive charm, her graceful way of putting down her slender feet when she walked, and the two little ringlets that fluttered on her shoulder into a memory. With that Délia who did not want to be called Adèle, I had a little more trouble. All the more so, as, after the lapse of a fortnight, I took to running into her by pure chance. Once, she was rummaging in a box of small remnants near the entrance of a big shop, and three days later she was buying spaghetti in an Italian grocer’s. She looked pale and diminished, like a convalescent who is out too soon, pearly under the eyes, and extremely pretty. A thick, curled fringe covered her forehead to the eyebrows. Something indescribable stirred in the depths of me and spoke in her favor. But I did not answer.

Another time, I recognized only her walk, seeing her from the back. We were walking along the same pavement and I had to slow down my step so as not to overtake her. For she was advancing by little, short steps, then making a pause, as if out of breath, and going on again. Finally, one Sunday when I was returning with Annie de Pène from the flea market and, loaded with treasure such as milk-glass lamps and Rubelles plates, we were having a rest and drinking lemonade, I caught sight of Délia Essendier. She was wearing a dress whose black showed purplish in the sunlight, as happens with redyed fabrics. She stopped not far from us in front of a fried-potato stall, bought a large bag of chips, and ate them with gusto. After that, she stayed standing for a moment, with an air of having nothing to do. The shape of the hat she was wearing recalled a Renaissance “Beguine’s,” and cupping Délia’s little Roman chin was the white crepe band of a widow.

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

Around fifteen, I was at the height of a mania for “desk furniture.” In this I was only imitating my father, whose mania for it lasted in full force all his life. At the age when every kind of vice gets its claws into adolescence, like the hundred little hooks of a burr sticking into one’s hair, a girl of fifteen runs plenty of risks. My glorious freedom exposed me to all of them and I believed it to be unbounded, unaware that Sido’s maternal instinct, which disdained any form of spying, worked by flashes of intuition and leaped telepathically to the danger point.

When I had just turned fifteen, Sido gave me a dazzling proof of her second sight. She guessed that a man above suspicion had designs on my little pointed face, the plaits that whipped against my calves, and my well-made body. Having entrusted me to this man’s family during the holidays, she received a warning as clear and shattering as the gift of sudden faith and she cursed herself for having sent me away to strangers. Promptly she put on her little bonnet that tied under the chin, got into the clanking, jolting train—they were beginning to send antique coaches along a brand-new line—and found me in a garden, playing with two other little girls, under the eyes of a taciturn man, leaning on his elbow like the meditative Demon on the ledge of Notre-Dame.

Such a spectacle of peaceful family life could not deceive Sido. She noticed, moreover, that I looked prettier than I did at home. That is how girls blossom in the warmth of a man’s desire, whether they are fifteen or thirty. There was no question of scolding me and Sido took me away with her without the irreproachably respectable man’s having dared to ask the reason for her arrival or for our departure. In the train, she fell asleep before my eyes, worn out like someone who had won a battle. I remember that lunchtime went by and I complained of being hungry. Instead of flushing, looking at her watch, promising me my favorite delicacies—whole-meal bread, cream cheese, and pink onions—all she did was to shrug her shoulders. Little did she care about my hunger pangs, she had saved the most precious thing of all.