The Collected Stories of Colette (92 page)

“What can I do about it? I’m putting on weight.”

“It’s only temporary,” I said. “Do you eat a lot?”

She shrugged her thickened shoulders.

“I don’t know. Yes. I
am
more greedy, that’s a fact, than . . . than before. But I’ve often seen you eat enormously and
you
don’t put on weight!”

To exonerate myself, I made a gesture to signify that I couldn’t help this. Marco stood up, planted herself in front of the mirror, clutched her waist tightly with both hands, and kneaded it.

“Last year, when I did that, I could feel myself positively melting away between my two hands.”

“Last year you weren’t happy, Marco.”

“Oh, so that’s it!” she said bitterly.

She was studying her reflection at close quarters as if she were alone. The addition of some few pounds had turned her into another woman, or rather another type of woman. The flesh was awkwardly distributed on her lightly built frame. “She’s got a behind like a cobbler’s,” I thought. In my part of the country, they say that the cobbler’s behind gets flat from sitting so much but develops a square shape. “And, in addition, breasts like jellyfish, very broad and decidedly flabby.” For even if she is fond of her, a woman always judges another woman harshly.

Marco turned around abruptly.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I didn’t say anything, Marco.”

“Sorry. I thought you did.”

“If you really want to fight against a tendency to put on flesh . . .”

“
Tendency
,” Marco echoed, between her teeth. “Tendency is putting it mildly.”

“. . . why don’t you try Swedish gymnastics? People are talking a lot about them.”

She interrupted me with a gesture of intolerant refusal.

“Or else cut out breakfast? In the morning don’t have anything but unsweetened lemon juice in a glass of water.”

“But I’m hungry in the morning!” cried Marco. “Everything’s different, do realize that! I’m hungry, I wake up thinking of fresh butter—and thick cream—and coffee, and ham. I think that, after breakfast, there’ll be luncheon to follow and I think of . . . of what will come after luncheon, the thing that kindles this hunger again—and all these cravings I have now that are so terribly fierce.”

Dropping her hands that had been harshly pummeling her waist and bosom, she challenged me in the same querulous tone: “Candidly, could
I
ever have foreseen . . .”

Her voice changed. “He actually says that I make him so happy.”

I could not resist putting my arms around her neck.

“Marco, don’t worry about so many things! What you’ve just said explains everything, justifies everything. Be happy, Marco, make him happy and let everything else go hang!”

We kissed each other. She went away reassured, swaying on those unfamiliar broadened hips. Soon afterward, Monsieur Willy and I went off to Bayreuth and I did not fail to send Marco a great many picture postcards, covered with Wagnerian emblems entwined with leitmotifs. As soon as I returned, I asked Marco to meet me at our tearoom. She had not grown any thinner nor did she look any younger. Where others develop curves and rotundity, Marco’s fleshiness tended to be square.

“And you haven’t been away from Paris at all, Marco? Nothing’s changed?”

“Nothing, thank God.”

She touched the wood of the little table with the tip of her finger to avert ill luck. I needed nothing but that gesture to tell me that Marco still belonged, body and soul, to Lieutenant Trallard. Another, no less eloquent sign was that Marco only asked me questions of pure politeness about my stay in Bayreuth—moreover, I guessed she did not even listen to my answers.

She blushed when I asked her, in my turn: “What about work, Marco? Any novelettes on the stocks for next season?”

“Oh, nothing much,” she said in a bored voice. “A publisher wants a novel for children of eight to fourteen. As if that was up my street! Anyway . . .”

A gentle, cowlike expression passed over her face like a cloud and she closed her eyes.

“Anyway, I feel so lazy . . . oh,
so
lazy!”

When Masson, informed of our return, announced himself with his usual three rings, he hastened to tell me he knew “all” from Marco’s own lips. To my surprise, he spoke favorably of Lieutenant Trallard. He did not take the line that he was a tenth-rate gigolo or a drunkard destined to premature baldness or a garrison-town Casanova. On the other hand, I thought he was decidedly harsh about Marco and even more cold than harsh.

“But, come now, Paul, what are you blaming Marco for in this affair?”

“Pooh! nothing,” said Paul Masson.

“And they’re madly happy together, you know!”

“Madly strikes me as no exaggeration.”

He gave a quiet little laugh that was echoed by Monsieur Willy. Detestable laughs that made fun of Marco and myself, and were accompanied by blunt opinions and pessimistic forecasts, formulated with complete assurance and indifference, as if the romance that lit up Marco’s Indian summer were no more than some stale bit of gossip.

“Physically,” Paul Masson said, “Marco
had
reached the phase known as the brewer’s dray horse. When a gazelle turns into a brood mare, it’s a bad lookout for her. Lieutenant Trallard was perfectly right. It was Marco who compromised Lieutenant Trallard.”

“Compromised? You’re crazy, Masson! Honestly, the things you say.”

“My dear girl, a child of three would tell you, as I do, that Marco’s first, most urgent duty was to remain slender, charming, elusive, a twilight creature beaded with raindrops, not to be bursting with health and frightening people in the streets by shouting: ‘I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I’ve . . .’”

“Masson!”

My blood was boiling; I flogged Masson with my rope of hair. I understood nothing of that curious kind of severity only men display toward an innocence peculiar to women. I listened to the judgments of these two on the “Marco case,” judgments that admitted not one extenuating circumstance, as if they were lecturing on higher mathematics.

“She
wasn’t
up to it,” decreed one of them. “She fondly supposed that being the forty-six-year-old mistress of a young man of twenty-five was a delightful adventure.”

“Whereas it’s a profession,” said the other.

“Or rather, a highly skilled sport.”

“No. Sport is an unpaid job. But she wouldn’t even understand that her one and only hope is to break it off.”

I had not yet become inured to the mixture of affected cynicism and literary paradox by which, around 1900, intelligent, bitter, frustrated men maintained their self-esteem.

September lay over Paris, a September of fine, dry days and crimson sunsets. I sulked over being in town and over my husband’s decision to cut short my summer holiday. One day, I received an express letter that I stared at in surprise, for I did not know Marco’s writing well. The handwriting was regular but the spaces between the letters betrayed emotional agitation. She wanted to talk to me. I was in, waiting for her, at the hour when the red light from the setting sun tinged the yellow-curtained windowpane with a vinous flush. I was pleased to see there was no outward trace of disturbance about her. As if there were no other possible subject of conversation, Marco announced at once: “Just imagine, Alex is going off on a mission.”

“On a mission? Where to?”

“Morocco.”

“When?”

“Almost at once. Perhaps in a week’s time. Orders from the War Office.”

“And there’s no way out of it?”

“His father, General Trallard . . . yes, if his father intervened personally, he might be able . . . But he thinks this mission—incidentally, it’s quite a dangerous one—is a great honor. So . . .”

She made a little, abortive gesture and fell silent, staring into vacancy. Her heavy body, her full, pale cheeks and stricken eyes made her look like a tragedy queen.

“Does a mission take a long time, Marco?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t the faintest idea. He talks of three or four months, possibly five.”

“Now, now, Marco,” I said gaily. “What’s three or four months? You’ll wait for him, that’s all.”

She did not seem to hear me. She seemed to be attentively studying a purple-ink cleaner’s mark on the inside of her glove.

“Marco,” I risked, “couldn’t you go over there with him and live in the same district?”

The moment I spoke, I regretted it. Marco, with trunks full of dresses, Marco as the European favorite, or else Marco as the native wife going in for silver bangles, couscous, and fringed scarves. The pictures my imagination conjured up made me afraid—afraid for Marco.

“Of course,” I hastily added, “that wouldn’t be practical.”

Night was falling and I got up to give us some light, but Marco restrained me.

“Wait,” she said. “There’s something else. I’d rather not talk to you about it here. Will you come to my place tomorrow? I’ve got some good China tea and some little salted cakes from the boulevard Malesherbes.”

“Of course I’d love to, Marco! But . . .”

“I’m not expecting anyone tomorrow. Do come, you might be able to do me a great service. Don’t put on the light, the light in the hall is all I need.”

Marco’s little “furnished suite” had changed too. An arrangement of curtains on a wooden frame behind the entrance door provided it with a substitute for a hall. The brass bedstead had become a divan-bed and various new pieces of furniture struck me quite favorably, as also did some Oriental rugs. A garlanded Venetian glass over the mantelpiece reflected some red and white dahlias. In the scent that pervaded it, I recognized Marco’s married, if I can use the expression, to another, full-bodied fragrance.

The second, smaller room served as a bathroom; I caught sight of a zinc bathtub and a kind of shower arrangement fixed to the ceiling. I made, as I came in, some obvious remark such as: “How nice you’ve made it here, Marco!”

The stormy, precociously cold September day did not penetrate into this confined dwelling, whose thick walls and closed windows kept the air perfectly still. Marco was already busy getting tea, setting out our two cups and our two plates. “She’s not expecting anyone,” I thought. She offered me a saucer full of greengages while she warmed the teapot.

“What beautiful little hands you have, Marco!”

She suddenly knocked over a cup, as if the least unexpected sound upset the conscious control of her movements. We went through that pretense of a meal that covers and puts off the embarrassment of explanations, rifts, and silences; nevertheless, we reached the moment when Marco had to say what she wanted to say. It was indeed high time; I could see she was almost at the end of her tether. We instinctively find it odd, even comic, when a plump person shows signs of nervous exhaustion and I was surprised that Marco could be at once so buxom and in such a state of collapse. She pulled herself together; I saw her face, once again, look like a noble warrior’s. The cigarette she avidly lit after tea completed her recovery. The glint of henna on her short hair suited her.

“Well,” she began in a clear voice, “I think it’s over.”

No doubt she had not planned to open with those words, for she stopped, as if aghast.

“Over? Why, what’s over?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she said. “If you’re at all fond of me, as I think you are, you’ll try and help me, but . . . All the same, I’m going to tell you.”

Those were almost her last coherent words. In putting down the story that I heard, I am obliged to cut out all that made it, in Marco’s version, so confused and so terribly clear.

She told it as many women do, going far back, and irrelevantly, into the past of what had been her single, dazzling love affair. She kept on repeating herself and correcting dates: “So it must have been Thursday, December 26. What
am
I saying? It was a Friday, because we’d been to Prunier’s to have a fish dinner. He’s a practicing Catholic and abstains on Fridays.”

Then the detailed minuteness of the story went to pieces. Marco lost the thread and kept breaking off to say, “Oh well, we can skip that!” or “Goodness, I can’t remember where I’d got to!” and interlarding every other sentence with “You know.” Grief drove her to violent gesticulation: she kept smiting her knees with the palm of her hand and flinging her head back against the chair cushions.

All the time she was running on with the prolixity and banality that give all lovers’ laments a family likeness, accompanying certain indecent innuendoes with a pantomime of lowering her long eyelids. I felt completely unmoved. I was conscious only of a longing to get away and even had to keep clenching my jaws to repress nervous yawns. I found Marco all too tiresomely like every other woman in love; she was also taking an unconscionably long time to tell me how all this raving about a handsome young soldier came to end in disaster—a disaster, of course, totally unlike anyone else’s; they always are.

“Well, one day . . .” said Marco, at long last.

She put her elbows on the arms of her chair. I imitated her and we both leaned forward. Marco broke off her confused jeremiad and I saw a gleam of awareness come into her soft, sad eyes, a look capable of seeing the truth. The tone of her voice changed too, and I will try to summarize the dramatic part of her story.

In the verbosity of the early stage, she had not omitted to mention the “madness of passion,” the fiery ardor of the young man who would impetuously rush through the half-open door, pull aside the curtain, and, from there, make one bound onto the divan where Marco lay awaiting him. He could not endure wasting time in preliminaries or speeches. Impetuosity has its own particular ritual. Marco gave me to understand that, more often than not, the lieutenant, his gloves, and his peaked cap were all flung down haphazardly on the divan. Poetry and sweet nothings only came afterward. At this point in her story, Marco made a prideful pause and turned her gaze toward a beveled, nickel-plated photograph frame. Her silence and her gaze invited me to various conjectures, and perhaps to a touch of envy.