The Collected Stories of Colette

  “It isn’t a talent, it’s a profession,” said Délia in a tone of disgust.

  But she was not displeased, I think, to devote herself, under my eyes to work that was as graceful as a charming pastime. The needles, fine as steel hairs, the tiny multicolored beads, the canvas net, she manipulated them all with the deftness of a blind person, still half recumbent on a corner of the divan-bed. From the neighboring room came the choppy chatter of the typewriter, the jib of its little carriage at every line, and its crystalline bell. What was I doing in that desert? It was not a desert. I forsook my own three small, snug rooms, my books, the scent I sprayed about, my lamp. But one cannot live on a lamp, on perfume, on pages one has read and reread. I had moreover friends and good companions; I had Annie de Pène, who was better than the best of them. But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.

  With Rosita, with Délia, I was insured against the risk of making confidences. My hidden past climbed the familiar stairs with me, sat secretly beside Délia, rearranged furniture on its old plan, revived the colors of the “rainy moon,” and sharpened a weapon once used against myself.

  “Is it a profession you chose yourself, Délia?”

  “Not exactly. In January, this year, I took it up again because it means I can work at home.”

  She opened the beak of her fine scissors.

  “It’s good for me to handle pointed things.”

  There was a gravity about her, like the gravity of a young madwoman, that oddly suited Délia. I thought it unwise to encourage her further than by a questioning glance.

  “Pointed things,” she reiterated. “Scissors, needles, pins . . . It’s good.”

  “Would you like me to introduce you to a sword swallower, a knife thrower, and a porcupine?”

  She deigned to laugh and that chromatic laugh made me sorry she was not happy more often. A powerful feminine voice in the street called out the greengrocer’s cry.

  “Oh, it’s the cherry cart,” murmured Délia.

  Without taking time to put on my felt hat, I went down bareheaded and brought a kilo of white-heart cherries. Running to avoid a motorcar, I bumped into a man who had stopped outside my door.

  “Another moment, Madame, and your cherries . . .”

  I smiled at this passer-by, who was a typical Parisian, with a lively face, a few white threads in his black hair, and fine, tired eyes that suggested an engraver or a printer. He was lighting a cigarette, without taking his eyes off the first-floor window. The lighted match burned his fingers; he let it drop and turned away.

  A cry of pleasure—the first I had ever heard from Délia’s lips—greeted my entrance, and the young woman pressed the back of my hand against her cheek. Feeling oddly rewarded, I watched her eating the cherries and putting the stalks and stones into the lid of a box of pins. Her expression of greed and selfishness did not deprive her of the charm that makes us feel tender toward violent children, withdrawn into their own passions and refusing to condescend to be pleasant.

  “Just imagine, Délia, down there on the pavement . . .”

  She stopped eating, with a big cherry bulging inside her cheek.

  “What, down there on the pavement?”

  “There’s a man looking up at your windows. A very charming man, too.”

  She swallowed her cherry and hastily spat out the stone.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Dark, a face . . . well, pleasant . . . white hairs in his black hair. He’s got red-brown stains on his fingertips, they’re the fingers of a man who smokes too much.”

  As she tucked her slipperless feet under her again with a sudden movement, Délia scattered all her fragile needlework tools on the floor.

  “What day is it today? Friday, isn’t it? Yes, Friday.”

  “Is he your Friday lover? Have you got one for all the days of the week?”

  She stared full in my face with the insulting glare adolescents reserve for anyone who treats them as “big babies.”

  “You know everything, don’t you?”

  She rose to pick up her embroidery equipment. As she flourished a delicate little antique purse she was copying against the light, I noticed her hands were trembling. She turned toward me with a forced playfulness.

  “He’s nice, isn’t he, my Friday lover? D’you think he’s attractive?”

  “I think he’s attractive, but I don’t think he looks well. You ought to look after him.”

  “Oh, I look after him all right, you needn’t worry about him.”

  She began to laugh crazily, so much so that she brought on a fit of coughing. When she had stopped laughing and coughing, she leaned against a piece of furniture as if overcome with giddiness, staggered, and sat down.

  “It’s exhaustion,” she muttered.

  Her black hair, which had come down, fell no lower than her shoulders. Combed up on her temples and revealing her ears, it looked like an untidy little girl’s and accentuated the regularity of her profile and its childish, inexorable cast.

  “It’s exhaustion.” But what exhaustion? Due to an unhealthy life? No unhealthier than my own, as healthy as that of all women and girls who live in Paris. A few days earlier Délia had touched her forehead and clutched her temples. “It’s there I wear myself out . . . And there . . .” Yes, the fixed idea; the absent man, the faithless Essendier. No matter how much I studied that perfect beauty—if you scanned it carefully, there was not a flaw in Délia’s face—I searched it in vain for any expression of suffering, in other words, of love.

  She remained seated, a little out of breath, with her slender pointed scissors dangling over her black dress from a metal chain. My scrutiny did not embarrass her, but after a few moments, she stood up like someone getting her way again and reproaching herself for having lingered too long. The change in the light and in the street noises told me the afternoon was over and I got myself ready to leave. Behind me, irreproachably slim, with her muted fairness, stood Mademoiselle Rosita. For some time, I had lost the habit of looking at her; she struck me as having aged. It struck me too that, through the wide-open door, she had probably heard us joking about the Friday lover. At the same instant, I realized that, in frequenting the Barberet sisters for no reason, I left the older sister out in the cold. My intercourse with her was limited to our brief professional conversations and to polite nothings, observations about the weather, the high cost of living, and the cinema. For Mademoiselle Rosita would never have allowed herself to ask any question that touched on my personal life, on my obvious freedom of a woman who lived alone. But how many days was it since I had displayed the faintest interest in Rosita? I felt embarrassed by this, and as Délia was making her way to the bathroom, I considered being “nice” to Rosita. An exemplary worker, endowed with sterling virtues and even with natural distinction, who typed Vandérem’s manuscripts and Arthur Bernède’s novelettes and my own crossed-out and interlined pages deserved a little consideration.

  With her hands clasped palm to palm, her two little ringlets on her right shoulder, she was waiting patiently for me to go. As I went up to her, I saw she was paying not the slightest heed to me. What she was staring at was Délia’s back as she left the room. Her eyes, of a middling blue, were hardened; they never left the short, slightly Spanish figure of her sister and the black hair that she was putting up with a careless hand. And as we take our interior shocks and shudders for divination, I thought, as I walked down the hill, whose houses were already rosy at the top: “But it’s in the depths of this prim, colorless Rosita that I must find the answer to this little enigma brooding between the divan and the solitary window of a bedroom where a young woman is pretending, out of sheer obstinacy and jealousy, to relive a moment of my own life. The stubborn young woman very likely has few clues to the little enigma. If she knew more about it, she would never tell me. Her mystery, or her appearance of mystery, is a gratuitous gift; s
he might just as well have a golden strand in her black hair or a mole on her cheek.”

  Nevertheless, I continued walking along the pavements where, now that it was June, the concierges sitting out on their chairs, the children’s games, and the flight of balls obliged one to perform a kind of country dance, two steps forward, two steps back, swing to the right and turn . . . The smell of stopped-up sinks, in June, dominates the exquisite pink twilights. By contrast I quite loved my western district that echoed like an empty corridor. A surprise awaited me in the form of a telegram: Sido, my mother, was arriving on the morrow and was staying in Paris three days. After this particular one, she only made a single last journey away from her own surroundings.

  While she was there, there was no question of the Barberet young ladies. I am not concerned here to describe her stay. But her exacting presence recalled my life to dignity and solicitude. In her company, I had to pretend to be almost as young as she was, to follow her impulsive flights. I was terrified to see her so very small and thin, feverish in her enchanting gaiety and as if hunted. But I was still far from admitting the idea that she might die. Did she not insist, the very day she arrived, on buying pansy seeds, hearing a comic opera, and seeing a collection bequeathed to the Louvre? Did she not arrive bearing three pots of raspberry-and-currant jam and the first roses in bud wrapped up in a damp handkerchief; had she not made me a barometer by sewing weather-predicting wild oats onto a square of cardboard?

  She abstained, as always, from questioning me about my most intimate troubles. The sexual side of my life inspired her, I think, with great and motherly repugnance. But I had to keep guard over my words and my face and to beware of her look, which read right through the flesh she had created. She liked to hear the news of my men and women friends, and of any newly formed acquaintances. I omitted however to tell her the Barberet story.

  Sitting opposite me at the table, pushing away the plate she had not emptied, she questioned me less about what I was writing than about what I wanted to write. I have never been subjected to any criticism that resembled Sido’s, for while believing in my vocation as a writer, she was dubious about my career. “Don’t forget that you have only one gift,” she used to say. “But what is one gift? One gift has never been enough for anyone.”

  The air of Paris intoxicated her as if she had been a young girl from the provinces. When she left, I put her on her slow train, anxious about letting her travel alone, yet happy to know that, a few hours later, she would be in the haven of her little home, where there were no comforts but also no dangers.

  After her departure, everything seemed to me unworthy of pursuit. The wholesome sadness, the pride, the other good qualities she had instilled in me could not be more than ephemeral, I had already lived away from her too long. Yet when she had gone, I took up my place again in the deep embrasure of my window and once more switched on my green-shaded daylight lamp. But I was impelled by necessity, rather than love, of doing a good piece of work. And I wrote until it was time to travel by métro up the hill whose slope I liked to descend on foot.

  Mademoiselle Rosita opened the door to me. By chance, she exclaimed “Ah!” at the sight of me, which checked a similar exclamation of surprise on my own lips. In less than a fortnight, my withered young girl had become a withered old maid. A little charwoman’s bun replaced the bow and the two ringlets; she was wearing a bibbed apron tied around her waist. She mechanically fingered her right shoulder and stammered, “You’ve caught me not properly dressed. I’ve been dreadfully rushed these last days.”

  I shook her dry, delicate hand, which melted away in mine. A rather common scent, mingled with the smell of a frying pan in which cooking oil is being heated, revived my old memory of the little flat and of the younger sister.

  “Are you keeping well? And your sister too?”

  She jerked her shoulders in a way that signified nothing definite.

  I added, with involuntary pride: “You understand, I’ve had my mother with me for a few days. And how’s Délia getting on? Still working hard? Can I go and say how d’you do to her?”

  Mademoiselle Rosita lowered her head as sheep do when they are mustering up their courage to fight.

  “No, you can’t. That is to say, you can, but I don’t see why you should go and say how d’you do to a murderess.”

  “What did you say?”

  “To a murderess. I have to stay here. But you, what have you got to do with a murderess?”

  Even her manner had changed. Mademoiselle Rosita remained polite but she used a tone of profound indifference to utter words that could have been considered monstrous. I could not even see her familiar little white collar; it was replaced by a piece of coarse, sky-blue machine embroidery.

  “But, Mademoiselle, I couldn’t possibly have guessed. I was bringing you . . .”

  “Very good,” she said promptly. “Will you come in here?”

  I went into the big room, just as in the days when Mademoiselle Rosita used adroitly to bar one from entering Délia’s bedroom. I unpacked my manuscript in the intolerable glare of the unshaded windows and gave instructions as if to a stranger. Like a stranger, Rosita listened, and said: “Very good . . . Exactly . . . One black and one purple . . . It’ll be finished Wednesday.” The frequent, unnecessary interjections—“Madame . . . Yes, Madame . . . Oh, Madame . . .” had vanished from her replies. In her conversation, too, she had cut out the ringlets.

  As in the days of my first curiosity, I kept my patience at first, then suddenly lost it. I hardly lowered my voice, as I asked Mademoiselle Barberet point-blank: “Whom has she killed?”

  The poor girl, taken by surprise, made a small despairing gesture and leaned against the table with both hands.

  “Ah, Madame, it’s not done yet, but he’s going to die.”

  “Who?”

  “Why, her husband, Eugène.”

  “Her husband? The man she was waiting for day and night? I thought he had left her?”

  “Left her, that’s easier said than done. They didn’t get on but you mustn’t think the fault was on his side, very far from it. He’s a very nice boy indeed, Eugène is, Madame. And he’s never stopped sending my sister something out of what he earns, you know. But she—she’s taken it into her head to revenge herself.”

  In the increasing confusion that was overtaking Rosita Barberet, I thought I could detect the disorder of a mind in which the poison of an old love was at work. The commonplace, dangerous rivalry between the pretty sister and the faded sister. A strand of hair, escaped from Rosita’s perfunctorily scraped-up bun, became, in my eyes, the symbol of a madwoman’s vehemence. The “rainy moon” gleamed in its seven colors on the wall of my former refuge, now given over to enemies in the process of accusing each other, fighting each other.

  “Mademoiselle Rosita, I do beg you. Aren’t you exaggerating a little? This is a very serious accusation, you realize.”

  I did not speak roughly, for I am frightened of harmless lunatics, of people who deliver long monologues in the street without seeing us, of purple-faced drunks who shake their fists at empty space and walk zigzag. I wanted to take back my manuscript, but the roll of papers had been grabbed by Rosita and served to punctuate her sentences. She spoke violently, without raising her voice.

  “I definitely mean revenge herself, Madame. When she realized he did not love her anymore, she said to herself: ‘I’ll get you.’ So she cast a spell on him.”

  The word was so unexpected that it made me smile, and Rosita noticed it.

  “Don’t laugh, Madame. Anyone would think you really didn’t know what you were laughing about.”

  A metallic object fell, on the other side of the door, and Rosita gave a start.

  “Well, right, so it’s the scissors now,” she said, speaking to herself.

  She must have read on my face something like a desire to be elsewhere, and tried to reassure me.

  “Don’t be afraid. She knows quite well that you’re here, but if you don’
t go into her room, she won’t come into this one.”

  “I’m not afraid,” I said sharply. “What has she given him? A drug?”

  “She’s convoked him. Convoking, do you know what that is?”

  “No . . . that’s to say, I’ve got some vague idea, but I don’t know all the . . . the details.”

  “Convoking is summoning a person by force. That poor Eugène . . .”

  “Wait!” I exclaimed in a low voice. “What’s he like, your brother-in-law? He’s not a dark young man who’s got white hairs among his black ones? He looks rather ill, he’s got the complexion of people who have a cardiac lesion? Yes? Then it was him I saw about . . . say two weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Down there, in the street. He was looking up at the window of my . . . the window of Délia’s bedroom. He looked as if he were waiting. I even warned Délia she had a lover under her window . . .”

  Rosita clasped her hands.

  “Oh, Madame! And you didn’t tell me! A whole fortnight!”

  She let her arms fall and hang limp over her apron. Her light eyes held a reproach, which, to me, seemed quite meaningless. She looked at me without seeing me, her spectacles in her hand, with an intense, unfocused gaze.

  “Mademoiselle Rosita, you don’t really mean to say you’re accusing Délia of witchcraft and black magic?”

  “But indeed I am, Madame! What she is doing is what they call convoking, but it’s the same thing.”

  “Listen, Rosita, we’re not living in the Middle Ages now . . . Think calmly for a moment . . .”

  “But I am thinking calmly, Madame. I’ve never done anything else! This thing she’s doing, she’s not the only one who’s doing it. It’s quite common. Mark you, I don’t say it succeeds every time. Didn’t you know anything about it?”

  I shook my head and the other faintly shrugged her shoulders, as if to indicate that my education had been seriously lacking. A clock somewhere struck midday and I rose to go. Absorbed in her own thoughts, Rosita followed me to the door out of mechanical politeness. In the dark hall, the plate-shaped ceiling light chiseled her features into those of a haggard old lady.