The Collected Stories of Colette (71 page)

Love has never been a question of age. I shall never be so old as to forget what love is
.

“Thursday . . . Thursday is the cocktail party at the Schlumbergers’, a little six to nine affair . . . Friday we’re taking a picnic to Thoronet. I’m preparing one of those warm breads for them, stuffed with crushed anchovies in oil and sweet red peppers, with a pinch of thyme . . .”

Madame Vasco pressed her lips together in greedy anticipation, half closing her eyes.

“Sunday, of course, we’re giving the whole house the night off. Martine and Marinette want to go to the movies with the valet. Teobaldo will stay with the dogs . . . Oh, and about tonight . . . Shall we accept the invitation to the artists’ impromptu? You know, everyone dresses up in costumes made exclusively out of whatever’s lying around, old newspapers, kitchen aprons, wrapping paper, and towels . . . You already stood us up the day before yesterday, you bad boy. And last Wednesday it was the Simonis who brought me home. You don’t have to worry about being bored tonight . . . Henri Simoni is making his costume out of discarded postal parcels, all corrugated cardboard and string, it’ll be smashing!”

Paul Vasco did not answer right away. He lay stretched out on his back on the wide conjugal bed, his outspread arms bronze against the pink batiste and russet lace. A hand, whose firmness he knew well, ran like a stiff comb through the disorder of his damp, blond hair, and he decided it was time he opened his eyes.

“Ah, there you are, my two periwinkles!” said his wife in a softer voice.

Sitting up beside him, she held on her lap the small lemon-wood breakfast tray laden with pink china. The Paris morning papers were strewn across the pink bed, soiling it with their ink; a branch of pale blue plumbago, brought back by Paul from the path that led down to the sea, was being used by the white cat, which was deaf, as a toy. The sun had just entered the room and was making its way across the black rug. The bougainvillea hung slightly over the edge of the balcony. A pale sky, the sky of summer mornings on the Mediterranean, filled the window. Paul Vasco resigned himself, as he did every morning, to looking up at his wife, and every morning he was amazed.

Tall, careful of her weight, strong and healthy, she didn’t hesitate to tie her hair, thrown back and dyed a golden chestnut, with a little ribbon whose color changed with that of her dressing gown, and in the summer she tanned like a young woman. But her tan refused to penetrate certain creases, fine as incisions, forming at the corners of her eyes and around her neck, despite surgical intervention. Madeleine Vasco smiled down at her young husband, showing her teeth looked after and corrected by a master. Between her ear and her hairline, between the hair at her temples and the corner of her eye, Paul could make out the thin, scarred folds, looking mauve beneath the ochered powder. “She’s amazing,” he thought. “Even I would never imagine she was sixty-two years old. Besides, even if I did, she’d tell me it was all in my imagination.”

He closed his eyes again with the irresistible laziness that followed his morning swim and a run on the beach.

“You haven’t answered me about tonight. Sleepyhead, oh, my beautiful sleepyhead . . .”

For him it was not a question of answering but of stalling for time, of holding out, by lying motionless, until the moment when his wife, summoned by the need to oblige her stubborn beauty, would leave him for an hour and a half.

“Whatever you like,” he sighed at last.

With a snap of his fingers he called for a cigarette, which Madeleine put, already lit, between his lips.

“You could say,” he joked, “that the only thing I brought here was a mouth to smoke with . . .”

“And who’s asking you for anything else?” she countered.

With a penetrating and bold gaze, she caressed that mouth, whose smile and firm freshness had persuaded her into the foolishness of remarrying, ten months after the death of her first husband, thus snatching, from a minor office position, a poor, handsome, and by chance honest young man. For Paul Vasco she had given up her widow’s weeds and her semi-mourning, dyed her gray hair, and from her widow’s chrysalis had emerged a tall, strong woman in love, so set on happiness that she dazzled her young spouse, thirty years her junior. For two years now, from January to May, they had been coming “to the Riviera,” as Paul naively put it, he as yet not having grown tired of the luxury of an estate in the south, with its paths of pink sand, its wisteria, and its marble terraces. The smiles around them were discreet, for Madame Paul Vasco, shaded by large hats, wearing simple makeup, had a rather flashy way of refusing her husband’s arm when climbing the stairs of the casinos. He followed her, served her, and found her young. However, he could never overcome his apprehension when she was dancing with him. “I’ve got a strong heart, you know . . .” she would say. “I’ll give you a few pointers when they play the hesitation waltz.” In fact, she waltzed with long, gliding, somewhat masculine steps, and she never had to stop to catch her breath, holding her hand to her flat, jewel-clad breast. It was Paul who while dancing would experience a certain anguish, grow pale, and say softly, “Enough . . .” He could not hold up next to his wife’s stamina, her bony and mechanical lightness. He had a childish fear of a sudden creaking of hinges, a squeaking of springs. She never seemed less alive than when she was proving her agility, and as they danced he would press his temple against hers, trying not to notice that as she waltzed she stared wildly, straight ahead, and breathed through her painted, half-open mouth.

But once he was back at the estate, life again became sweet and easy. He felt at home there, and quickly developed a taste for laying out gardens and plotting the best colors for the flower beds with the head gardener.

“Shall we go somewhere?” Madeleine asked him after their siesta.

“Yes!” exclaimed Paul enthusiastically. “Let’s go to Fréjus. I need seven hundred geranium-ivy cuttings!”

“Teobaldo will pick them up in the station wagon, don’t bother.”

He pouted, and Madeleine looked at the pouting mouth.

“What a child! You really want to go? Have them bring the car around . . .”

For she gave in whenever she feared he might be getting bored. Somewhat distracted, and vain about his physical beauty, he was never bored when he was parading around half naked in the sun or tossing the medicine ball with the trainer who came down from Cannes.

One evening as Madeleine Vasco was calling her husband and fidgeting with impatience in a long black velvet dress trimmed with monkey fur, and shouting, “We’ll be late! The ballet starts at nine in Monte Carlo!” she was stupefied to see Paul emerge from the cellar, whitened ever so slightly by spider webs and saltpeter, with a venerable old bottle under each arm.

“Where have you been?”

“Can’t you tell?” he said. “We absolutely have to put the wine book back in order and the vintages in the racks have to be reclassified. It’s a shambles down there!”

Madeleine raised her plucked eyebrows and the wrinkles on her forehead all the way up to her hairline.

“What can that possibly have to do with us, my darling?”

“Why,” said Vasco, “it’s the man’s job to keep the cellar in order.”

“Does it amuse you?”

He smiled a competent smile. “Very much.”

“And that’s why you’re going to make us miss
Les Sylphides
?”

He seemed to wake up suddenly, looked at the dress, the woman, and the dazzling new jewel she was wearing on her bodice, next to skin which had lost its smoothness, its soft and supple mystery. He offered no protest and dashed off to get dressed.

“Give me five minutes!”

She remained alone, waiting for him on the lower terrace, walking in the wind which was ruffling the water and bringing the day to an end. She yawned and admitted to herself that she had no less of an appetite for delicate fish and champagne than for lights, music, new faces . . .

As soon as his wife had closed the door to her bathroom, Paul Vasco sat up on the rumpled bed and let out a gentle sigh. He was not a cynical man and he accepted kindness in a spirit of resignation. His wife’s frivolous energy did not frighten him unduly, for she did not bring to her way of leading the life of a young socialite the insane bitterness of aged bacchantes, but rather the determination of an ex-bourgeoise who remembered what it was like to have a dotty old homebody for a first husband. Paul learned how to escape, every fifth time, then every third time, from the dinners, the suppers, the automobile races, and the rallies. “Banner of Honor to the red-and-white sedan of Madame Paul Vasco . . .”

He slid down to the foot of the pink bed and swore to himself that he would not go to the artists’ costume party. “Those clowns of all ages can get themselves up in old newspapers, grocery bags, straw wigs, curtains, and straw mats without me.” There was sure to be a painful moment when he would say to Madeleine, “I’m not going.” There would be that look in his wife’s eyes, as if they were lying in ambush between the lashes of a starlet, and the silent disdain inflicted on a stay-at-home young man by an indomitable sixty-year-old scatterbrain . . . But what a reward it was, afterward, to savor an evening devoted to filing away bills and reading a manual dealing with the rejuvenation of trees by frequent injections into the root cap!

He managed his day as carefully as an adolescent wanting to spend the night at a friend’s, a soldier hoping to slip over the wall . . . While she was having a light dinner across from him, he asked his wife what sort of costume she was planning. Excitedly, she confided to him that, for herself, she was counting on using a crocheted bedspread lent her by Luc-Albert Moreau, and for Paul, a big lampshade tied around his waist, or else a woven straw seat cover.

“But we go in evening clothes, and put our costumes on there,” she added.

He made no objection, but as soon as he was alone, he put on a comfortable robe and his slippers, sat down in front of a blazing fire which made his cheeks glow, and, while waiting for the conjugal onslaught, read the evening edition of
L’Eclairceur de Nice et du Sud-Est
, over which he fell asleep.

Toward midnight, a sequined train slithered down the stairs with a delicate, snake-like sound. But the heavy tapping of heels, on each step, made it known that Madeleine’s knees were struggling against the onset of anchylosis. She came to the bottom of the stairs followed by her obedient, steel-gray, and glittering train. A scarlet cape, thrown over her shoulders, left only her bedecked, golden, proud head showing. Walking toward a mirror, she caught sight of her young sleeping husband and stopped. He was asleep with his head drooping to one side, with the light from the fire caressing his plump, dimpled chin, and two clearly drawn frown marks framing his childishly pouting mouth. An empty cup was proof that he had had some verbena tea, and the deaf cat slept at his feet on the open newspaper. Leaning over, Madeleine Vasco pressed her bracelets to her side to keep them from jingling. Where had she seen that robe and those slippers before, and the hermetic cat, the medicinal cup, and above all this sudden sleepiness which betrays a man’s weakness? . . . The image of the late Monsieur Perrin, her first husband, rose up between her and Paul Vasco, and she drew back. Facing her in the mirror, a tall woman, scarlet and gray, thin because she had to be, erect because she wanted to be, matched her glance for glance, and her mouth, smothered with lipstick, smiled. Madame Vasco took a last look at the sleeping man, muttered gruffly, “Just another old man!” and with two fingers picked up her train and left without looking back.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]

“Nice dress,” Clara thought. “But it seems to me Antoinette isn’t looking very well. Maybe it’s just because I don’t want her to look very well . . . We’ll see what he thinks. How can a man of taste be interested in a woman with such a high forehead?”