The Collected Stories of Colette (79 page)

“A shiver of insecurity sharpened my uneasiness; I raised my head, and just above me, just behind the crest of the dilapidated wall, I saw the mother and the daughter. Only the top half of their bodies was visible and they were watching me like hawks. It cost me a tremendous effort not to start off again at full speed. I was firm with myself and walked on slowly and nonchalantly, as if absorbed in moonlight meditation. Two heads, close side by side, followed my movement; they must be starting off again in pursuit of me. I was only too right; the two heads reappeared farther on, waiting for me. White hairs and gold hairs fluttered in the air like poplar seeds.

“Seeing them there, perfectly still, I stopped. It was one of the hardest things I have done in my life. Then I started to walk on again slowly, down the increasing slope of the path. I passed underneath the two women. It was then that a large-sized stone fell from the top of the wall, grazed my shoulder, and rolled ahead of me down the steep path, just in front of my feet. I stepped over it and continued on my way. A little farther on, a second stone just like it took the skin off my ear as it fell before hitting my foot and quite severely bruising my big toe. I was only wearing canvas shoes. I came to a breach that lowered the level of the wall. My tormentresses were standing in the breach and waiting for me. A good honest rage, the rage of an injured man, seized me at last and inspired me to assault the breach and the two hussies. In three bounds, I was up there. No doubt they too suddenly recovered their reason and remembered that they were females, and I was a male, for after hesitating, they fled and disappeared into the neglected garden behind some pyramid fruit trees and a feathery clump of asparagus.

“I didn’t care! I had regained control of myself. I shouted heaven knows what threats in the direction of my fugitives. I grabbed hold of a vine prop, which I brandished like a sword. It was ridiculous, but it did me no end of good. Afterward, I walked down to the path again and reached the undergrowth, spotted with moonlight like a Léopard skin. Rabbits were already scurrying about and I frightened some birds. But I was much more startled than these timid small folk. However, my nerves did not entirely let me down; I dried my bleeding ear and I began to limp because of my crushed foot.

“The next day, I went down with what is called a ‘first-class’ bout of fever, due, I think, to the warm dampness and to the folly of not having taken a sweater. To emotion as well, I’m not idiotic enough to deny it. No encounter has ever staggered me as much as the one with that moralist, the little lady with the frizzy white hair. For an outraged mother to demand some form of compensation, right, that’s logical enough. Even for her to insist on the supreme reparation—marriage—that’s all right too. That sort of demand always ends by the lady softening down. But
that
mother, with that fleecy head, those eyes, that way of charging the enemy. She’d have stoned me to death if she could. Yes, yes, she really would have. What risk did she take? A wall that was crumbling of its own accord. The little thing, I think she was just an honest, straightforward, adorable idiot.

“Well, my bout of fever was long and violent, and accompanied by shivering fits that made the bed rattle, by nightmares, even a little delirium—I’ve always been highly strung. I saw ferocious yellow cats, twin heads on a single neck. My host looked after me admirably, and luckily found in his cupboard various medicaments compounded in his professional days. He made a hole in one of my slippers to make room for my swollen injured toe. And his agreeable female relative sewed a number of medals, all of proven efficacy, into my pajamas.

“No, I never saw Louisette again. I made no attempt to see her. At one fell swoop I had lost the taste for the twilights of Franche-Comté and satiny birch trees and clumps of heather. But for all too definite reason, there was no question of forgetting her. When I thought about her, I turned hot and cold and disgust came rushing over me, distorting and eclipsing her charms. Infinitely worse, my dear, the most hideous fear of my life unfortunately revived again, insinuating its little icy serpent, its drop of burning wax, between my shirt and my skin, between Louisette and myself, between me and other Louisettes. Henceforth, it was to deprive your old friend—look, the mere thought of it is making me sweat—of all the Louisettes in this world. What’s that you say? A punishment for my sins? Just wait! I have been granted an unexpected kind of compensation. You know the theme, exploited hundreds of times in literature and funny stories: the enemies and the victims of Don Juan substitute the duenna or some overblown chambermaid in his bed for the beautiful quarry. And the next day, the gang of practical jokers assembles around the seducer and informs him, with loud laughter, what they have done . . . Inform him? Did he really know nothing about it? Wasn’t the evidence of his own senses enough? Does that mean that, but for his tormentors, he might have been quite satisfied in the morning, when he emerged from the warm darkness of the bed? It’s perfectly possible. So let’s say, my dear, that instead of the Louisettes, I could still console myself with the chambermaid. And as I had no friends to shout it from the housetops, I did not complain too much of my lot.”

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

The beak of a pruning shears goes clicking all down the rose-bordered paths. Another clicks in answer from the orchard. Presently the soil in the rose garden will be strewn with tender shoots, dawn-red at the tips but green and juicy at the base. In the orchard the stiff, severed twigs of the apricot trees will keep their little flames of flower alight for another hour before they die, and the bees will see to it that none of them is wasted.

The hillside is dotted with white plum trees like puffs of smoke, each of them filmy and dappled as a round cloud. At half past five in the morning, under the dew and the slanting rays of sunrise, the young wheat is incontestably blue, the earth rust-red, and the white plum trees coppery pink. It is only for a moment, a magic delusion of light that fades with the first hour of day. Everything grows with miraculous speed. Even the tiniest plant thrusts upward with all its strength. The peony, in the flush of its first month’s growth, shoots up at such a pace that its scapes and scarcely unfolded leaves, pushing through the earth, carry with them the upper covering of it so that it hangs suspended like a roof burst asunder.

The peasants shake their heads. “April will bring us plenty of surprises.” They bend wise brows over this folly, this annual imprudence of leaf and flower. They grow old, borne helplessly along in the wake of a terrible pupil who learns nothing from their experience. In the tilled valley, still crisscrossed with parallel rivulets, lines of green emerge above the inundation. Nothing can now delay the mole-like ascent of the asparagus, or extinguish the torch of the purple iris. The furious breaking of bonds infects birds, lizards, and insects. Greenfinch, gold-finch, sparrow, and chaffinch behave in the morning like farmyard fowl gorged with brandy-soaked grain. Ritual dances and mock battles, to the accompaniment of exaggerated cries, are renewed perpetually under our eyes, almost under our very hands. Flocks of birds and mating gray lizards share the same sun-warmed flagstones, and when the children, wild with excitement, run aimlessly hither and thither, clouds of mayfly rise and hover around their heads.

Everything rushes onward, and I stay where I am. Do I not already feel more pleasure in comparing this spring with others that are past than in welcoming it? The torpor is blissful enough, but too aware of its own weight. And though my ecstasy is genuine and spontaneous, it no longer finds expression. “Oh, look at those yellow cowslips! And the soapwort! And the unicorn tips of the lords and ladies are showing! . . .” But the cowslip, that wild primula, is a humble flower, and how can the uncertain mauve of the watery soapwort compare with a glowing peach tree? Its value for me lies in the stream that watered it between my tenth and fifteenth years. The slender cowslip, all stalk and rudimentary in blossom, still clings by a frail root to the meadow where I used to gather hundreds to straddle them along a string and then tie them into round balls, cool projectiles that struck the cheek like a rough, wet kiss.

I take good care nowadays not to pick cowslips and crush them into a greenish ball. I know the risk I should run if I did. Poor rustic enchantment, almost evaporated now, I cannot even bequeath you to another me: “Look, Bel-Gazou, like this and then like that; first you straddle them on the string and then you draw it tight.” “Yes, I see,” says BelGazou. “But it doesn’t bounce; I’d rather have my India-rubber ball.”

The shears click their beaks in the gardens. Shut me into a dark room and that sound will still bring in to me April sunshine, stinging the skin and treacherous as wine without a bouquet. With it comes the bee scent of the pruned apricot trees, and a certain anguish, the uneasiness of one of those slight preadolescent indispositions that develop, hang about for a time, improve, are cured one morning, and reappear at night. I was ten or eleven years old but, in the company of my foster-mother, who had become our cook, I still indulged in nursling whims. A grown girl in the dining room, I would run to the kitchen to lick the vinegar off the salad leaves on the plate of Mélie, my faithful watchdog, my fair-haired, fair-skinned slave. One April morning I called out to her, “Come along, Mélie, let’s go and pick up the clippings from the apricot trees, Milien’s at the espaliers.”

She followed me, and the young housemaid, well named Marie-la-Rose, came too, though I had not invited her. Milien, the day laborer, a handsome, crafty youth, was finishing his job, silently and without haste.

“Mélie, hold out your apron and let me put the clippings in it.”

I was on my knees collecting the shoots starred with blossom. As though in play, Mélie went “Hou!” at me and, flinging her apron over my head, folded me up in it and rolled me gently over. I laughed, thoroughly enjoying making myself small and silly. But I began to stifle and came out from under it so suddenly that Milien and Marie-la-Rose, in the act of kissing, had not time to spring apart, nor Mélie to hide her guilty face.

Click of the shears, harsh chatter of hard-billed birds! They tell of blossoming, of early sunshine, of sunburn on the forehead, of chilly shade, of uncomprehended repulsion, of childish trust betrayed, of suspicion, and of brooding sadness.

[
Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod
]

On the wooden balcony this morning, all among the battered wisteria and the flattened flowers of a red salvia blown in there by last night’s gale, there lay two pink and green butterflies, looking like the shed petals of a poppy. They were still just alive when I touched them, and a little spasm jerked their fragile feet up against the delicate fur of their thoraxes. One of them died very quickly; but the other continued for some minutes to quiver like an electrified flower, his antennae vibrating.

I leave them there on the wooden floor of the balcony. As soon as I turn my back, the sparrows will come and all I shall find will be eight wings deftly cut off. They must have been overcome by the sudden autumn, these sensitive silkworm moths with pink crescents on their wings; how many times have I seen them clinging to the warm chimney that runs the length of my house, trying to shelter from the baleful October dawn!

Every day from the balcony I watch all the gardens shrinking in this peaceful, threatened corner of Passy. Mine is losing its roof of leaves; and what remains now of the threefold arch of roses? Only the rusty iron, with a few bare branches tied to it. And what I call the “neighbor’s park,” where I used to hear invisible children laughing and running, was it nothing but that square enclosure, that clump of trees hemmed in by high, sad walls?

The pleasant provincial existence, which flourishes here in summer, deserts the gardens now and huddles as though abashed behind closed windows. Even on days when the sun returns, those young girls, whose pale frocks and shining hair I would glimpse between the branches, will no longer be there, lying back in their basket chairs.