The Collected Stories of Colette

  “So that’s what they meant when they warned us that they hadn’t finished building it yet,” said Odette. “I certainly wouldn’t say no to a drink myself. Shall we go and have one at the Petit Socco?”

  “Certainly,” said Bernard in a gloomy voice.

  “Oh, you’re the limit as soon as one tries to get you off your orangeades and your malted milks.”

  She bit into her orange as savagely as if she were biting Bernard himself. Her fierceness was possibly something of a pose. A brunette of the hard type, she exaggerated her cannibal laugh and made great display of crushing nuts and even plum stones between the two rows of teeth of which she was so vain.

  A lizard or a tiny snake glided through the fresh grass and Odette lost all her haughtiness.

  “Bernard! A viper! Oh, this awful country!”

  “Why do you insist that it’s a viper? There aren’t any vipers here. Ask Ahmed.”

  “What’s the good of asking him anything? He doesn’t speak French!”

  “I’m not so convinced as you that he doesn’t . . .”

  An infinite meekness, a gravity tempered by a vague, courteous smile, protected their guide from all suspicion. He was one of the servants of the absent pasha who allowed a few tourists to use his gardens.

  “Who is Ahmed, anyway?”

  “The oldest son of the bailiff who looks after the property and keeps it up,” said Bernard.

  “The concierge’s kid, in fact,” Odette translated.

  “I prefer my description to yours,” said Bernard. “It’s more . . .”

  “More polite, you mean?”

  “Also more accurate. Ahmed’s not in the least like a concierge.”

  Ahmed, who, whether from discretion or disdain, appeared to hear nothing, picked an orange from the tree and offered it on his brown palm to Odette.

  “Thank you, blue-eyed boy. Allah have you in his holy keeping!”

  She dropped Ahmed a comic curtsy, made some little clucking noises, and laid her hand on her heart, then on her forehead. Bernard blushed with shame for her. “After what she’s just done, I’d leave them there flat. If it weren’t for Rose, they wouldn’t set eyes on me again. But there’s Rose . . .”

  There was indeed Rose, the pink-cheeked widow of the younger Bessier, who had been an architect. There was also her brother-in-law Cyril, Odette’s husband, whom people still called Bessier Senior. Besides Cyril, there was the deed of partnership, not yet signed, which would substitute Bernard Bonnemains for the younger Bessier. “Bernard had better not count his chickens before they are hatched,” Odette was in the habit of saying, whenever she thought it expedient to recall the fact that Bonnemains was exactly thirty, had no rich clients and not much money.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” declared Odette. “Let’s do something else or I’m going in. Anyway, I’m tired.”

  “But . . . we haven’t done anything tiring,” Rose objected.

  “Speak for yourself,” snapped her sister-in-law.

  She stretched, yawned uninhibitedly, then sighed: “Oh, that Cyril! I don’t know what’s the matter with him here . . .”

  “That’s her way of flaunting things under our noses,” thought Bernard. “If I didn’t control myself, I’d remind her there was such a thing as decency.”

  But he did control himself, wincing like a starving man reminded of food. “Eight days, eight nights since I’ve had nothing of Rose but little stolen kisses and allusions to our love in cryptic language . . .”

  Rose’s blue eyes asked him the reason for his sullen silence, and blinked moistly under the sun. Her eyes were a warm, generous blue, her cheeks almost too vividly pink, her naturally curly hair frankly and cheerfully golden. Looking at Rose’s strong, bright coloring, at the red mouth engaged in sucking the dripping, almost scarlet orange, Bernard was furious that she had not yet given him all this glory of color. They had only been lovers a very short time and he had had to make love to her on hotel beds, in the dark, or under a pallid moon. “One of these days, I’ll throw my scruples to the winds—and Rose’s too. I’ll say to Cyril: ‘Look here, old man, Rose and I . . . well, that’s the way things are. And I’m going to marry her.’” But he imagined Bessier Senior’s faint, distant smile and Odette’s spiteful laugh and ugly thoughts. “And, in any case, I don’t call Bessier ‘old man.’” He threw a bitterly resentful look at the “cannibal.” Once again he recognized in Odette an ultra-feminine female, difficult to manage and always ready to pick a quarrel. Once again, his resentment weakened to respect.

  A cloud darkened the green of the sea and the leaves: Bernard’s desire and his good humor vanished at the same moment.

  “Don’t you think we might as well stay where we are? I can’t help feeling that this pasha’s been very amiable and that we’re behaving like . . .”

  “Like tourists,” cut in Odette. “Look at the delightful little ‘Bois de Boulogne’ we’re arranging for him, your pasha. Gold-tipped cigarette ends, cellophane wrappings, bean pods and orange peel. A few greasy newspapers and some métro tickets and the work of civilization will be complete.”

  Bernard slid a furtive glance of apology in Ahmed’s direction. But Ahmed, facing toward the sea, was a perfect statue of youthful Arab indifference.

  “Hi, Ahmed!” shrieked Odette. “We’re going! Finish! Macache! Walk! Get a move on!”

  “Don’t muddle him,” Rose implored. “What on earth do you expect him to make of all that?”

  Odette went up to the youth of sixteen or so, stuck one of her Turkish cigarettes between his lips, and held out her lighter. Ahmed took two puffs, thanked her with a gesture, and continued to await the Europeans’ good pleasure. He smoked nobly, holding the cigarette between two slender fingers and blowing the smoke out through his nostrils in a double jet, like a horse’s warm breath.

  “He’s handsome,” said Bernard in an undertone.

  “She’s quite aware of that,” answered Rose in the same low voice.

  He was shocked that Rose should have noticed the beauty of their young guide, even if only through the eyes of Odette.

  “Well, Ahmed, shall we get going?” said Odette. “Which way?”

  With his raised hand, Ahmed indicated the heights of the unknown park. The slopes above them were crowned with pines, gum cistus with limp petals, and trees imported at the whim of an American who had laid out the park and built his house there half a century earlier. The three French tourists left the orchard and vegetable garden and climbed up toward blue cascades of wisteria, roses festooned on thujas, broom over which danced butterflies of a similar yellow, and white transparent clematis grown weak through long neglect. Ahmed walked in front of them with a carefree stride.

  “So he understood your question?” Bernard asked Odette.

  “Telepathy,” said Odette fatuously.

  They emerged from the orange grove and took deep breaths, glad to be free of the overpowering scent of its fruit and flowers.

  “I shan’t go any farther this morning,” declared Odette. “That blood-orange cocktail has gone to my legs. What’ll we see up there, anyway? Only the same as here. Wisteria on trellises, clematis by the yard, and what else? On our right, a bottomless abyss. On our left, unexplored wilderness. It’s almost midday. Shall we go back?”

  “Quite a good idea,” said Bernard blandly.

  Ahmed came to a halt and they meekly followed suit. He had stopped in front of a little circle of level ground, an old pond half smothered in young grass and potentilla in flower. Its crumbling stone rim could no longer keep back the invasion of marsh marigolds and poppies. A trickle of water, deserting its dried-up spout in the mouth of a stone lion’s head, ran free between the broken flags.

  “Oh,” cried Rose in delight.

  “Rather snappy,” declared Odette. “Bernard, what about something like that for a garden terrace at Auteuil?”

  Bernard did not answer. He was measuring with his eye the flat space now overrun with wild grasses. He
smiled to see that in the middle the slightly crushed grass seemed to indicate that someone had lain there. “One person, or two? Two bodies closely interlocked leave no more trace than one.” Without raising his head he darted a covert glance at Rose. It was the look of a lascivious schoolboy which began at her knees and slid upward to her thighs and thence to her breasts. “There, it’s firm, almost harsh to the touch, like a very downy peach and, I’m sure, slightly brindled. Real blondes are never all one color . . . There, it’s probably bluish white, like milk, and there, oh, there it’s as frankly rosy as her name. It was bad enough only being able to see with my eyes and my lips in the dark. But to see nothing at all, touch nothing at all for all these days and nights, no, no, it’s unbearable . . . From that appalling hotel to this soft cushiony grass—let me see—it can’t be more than five hundred yards.”

  He stared at Rose with such a harsh, explicit look that she blushed almost to tears, her face flooded with the burning color of the blonde at bay. “If I had her in my arms . . .” he thought. The power they had over each other was so new that they were defenseless against such shocks. Frightened, afraid to move, they were assaulted by identical pangs. And because they were both suffering the same thing, they felt themselves to be one.

  “It’s not only frightfully amusing,” insisted Odette, “it’s positively sexy.”

  Leaving Rose to her troubled feelings, Bernard turned away from her with a cowardice which he told himself was discretion.

  “That bitch Odette, she’s guessed everything! I’m sure she saw me blush.” He mopped his forehead and the back of his strong neck. Rose, who was calming down, smiled as she recognized the blue handkerchief she had given him. “The darling, she’s so silly when she loves me!”

  Vaguely offended, obscurely jealous of a desire which was not fixed on herself, Odette went and sat down some distance away and put on her “Fiji Island face.” The black fringe of her hair was etched sharply against her forehead under the white piqué hat and her hard eyes reviled the resplendent weather. When she sulked, she kept her prominent mouth shut. Usually it was open, showing the importunate whiteness of her teeth.

  “She’s ugly,” Bernard decided on consideration. For he knew what a menace ugly women of that type can be when they decide to attract and infuriate. Bessier Senior, who was aging, must also know something on that subject!

  With a savage heel, the woman he found ugly crushed a scarab beetle as it laboriously made its way across the clearing, and Bernard rushed up to her as if to ward off some danger. “Madame Odette . . .”

  “Can’t you call me Odette like everyone else? No, of course not!”

  “But I should be only too delighted,” he said promptly.

  “Things are going badly,” he thought. “Next week she’s capable of insisting on even more intimate terms. But I haven’t the least desire to go all out to make things easier.” All the same, face to face with the enemy, he accentuated his smile, the smile which had conquered Rose.

  “I wanted to make a suggestion, Odette—do you hear, Odette? Hodette?”

  She leaned back and laughed, showing the interior of her mouth, the moist palate the color of a ripe fig, and all her even, flawless teeth.

  “That’s better. I’m not pretending that it’s a very inspired suggestion. Still, why shouldn’t we have some mint tea brought up here at teatime—Ahmed knows how to make it—or some sort of orange drink. And cadi’s horns and gazelle’s ears . . .”

  “It’s the other way around,” said Rose with no malice.

  “Well, those little cakes made of almonds and pistachio nuts, whatever they’re called.”

  “One word more and I shall be sick,” said Odette. “It only needs the vice-principal and the headmaster. And what’s the grand climax?”

  “I’ve thought of that,” said Bernard in a malicious voice which made him loathe himself. “The grand climax is that we don’t have any dinner and go to bed at ten. We go to bed and, thank God, we go to bed without the local cinema, without a forced march through that beastly steep town. We even go to bed at half past nine! It’s all my own invention and I’m decidedly proud of it.”

  They did not answer immediately. Odette yawned. Rose waited for Odette to give her opinion. And Odette was never in a hurry to approve anyone else’s suggestion.

  “The fact is . . .” she began.

  “Oh,” put in Rose, “I’m the last person to stop anyone going to bed.”

  All three of them were thinking of their long evening of the day before, which had begun in a café-chantant under the canvas awning of a little courtyard that smelled of acetylene. They had been taken there by a young and voluble guide—who wore a dinner jacket but no hat on his sleek head—to mix with the local gentry as they sat sipping their anis and nibbling their nougat. On the platform there had been a Spanish woman in yellow stockings, who looked like a staved-in cask, and two Tunisian commères, pale as butter, who sang from time to time. Next they had stopped at a cleaner place with an arched roof, where they had watched another dancer, a slim, naked, competent little creature with well-set breasts, who stamped on the tiles with a lively business-like step. She displayed everything but her hair, which was tightly tied up in a silk handkerchief, and her eyes, which she kept downcast throughout. When her dance was over, she went and sat cross-legged on a leather cushion. She had no art other than that of moving modestly and keeping her sexual organs ingeniously concealed.

  “It was pathetic, that little thing who danced naked,” said Rose.

  Bernard was grateful to her for having thought, at the same moment, just what he himself was thinking. Odette shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s not pathetic. It’s inevitable. In Madrid one goes to see the Goyas. Here, you mustn’t miss native girls in the nude. But I admit the sight isn’t worth the effort of staying up till half past three.”

  “But it is,” thought Bernard. “Only not with her or Rose. You can’t expect women to lay aside their own particular brand of indecency and their instinct for spontaneous comparison. Any pleasure in the world would be spoiled for me if Odette were looking on. I knew everything she was thinking: ‘That Zorah . . . her breasts won’t last three years. My back’s longer than hers. My breasts are more like apples, not so much like lemons as hers. I’m made quite differently there . . .”’

  He was embarrassed to find himself imagining the details of a woman’s body over which he had no rights and he blushed as he met Odette’s look. “That female guesses everything. I’ll never manage to do what I want to do tonight. Rose will never have the courage.”

  Ahmed seemed to be listening to the distant voice of the invisible Tangiers and pulled up his white sleeve to consult his wristwatch. He bent over the little circle of lush, trampled grass and picked a blue flower, which he slipped between his ear and his fez. Then he fell back into his immobility, his lids and lashes hiding his great dark eyes.

  “Ahmed!”

  Bernard had called him almost in an undertone. Ahmed started.

  “We’re going down again, Ahmed.”

  Ahmed turned toward Rose and Odette, questioning them with his smile. They both smiled back so promptly and with such obvious pleasure that Bernard was annoyed. Ahmed’s slippers and lean, agile ankles led the way: Bernard took note of all the turnings and landmarks. “It’s as easy as anything. The first turning that forks upward from the big avenue. Anyway, one can hear the trickling of the water almost at once.” But he remained dissatisfied. He was languid under the assault of noon; the growing light and heat sapped his vitality. Nevertheless, he would like to have owned that vast domain, which struck him as peculiarly Oriental.

  “I’ll say goodbye to Odette and Bessier. I’ll shut myself up with Rose. I’ll keep Ahmed and that wild little Arab girl we saw down there.”

  On their way back down the slope they saw once again the pines and the blue cedars and, lower down, the white arums which Ahmed contemptuously beheaded as he passed.

  Lower down s
till, a little girl, whose skin was almost black, crossed their path, followed by her white hens. Her hair was plaited into a horn, one shoulder was half bare, and her breasts, under the native muslin, were conical.

  “Ah, that’s the nice little thing we saw over by the kitchens,” exclaimed Odette.

  The nice little thing shot her an insulting look and disappeared.

  “Success! Ahmed, what’s she called? Yes, the little thing over there. Don’t act the idiot! It doesn’t take me in for a moment. What’s her name?”

  Ahmed hesitated and fluttered his lashes.

  “Fatima,” he said, at last.

  “Fatima,” echoed Rose, “Isn’t that pretty! She had a smile for Ahmed. What a look she gave us!”

  “She’s got a marvelous mouth,” said Bernard. “And those thick teeth that I adore.”

  “That I adore!” mocked Rose. “Merely that! Do you hear that, Odette?”

  “I hear all right,” said Odette. “But I don’t care a damn what he says. My feet are hurting.”

  They reached the crumbling wall of the park. As he stopped a moment to thank the ever-speechless Ahmed with a handshake, Bernard noticed that a gate was missing and a rusty padlock hung at the end of a useless chain.

  The three companions turned into the narrow, almost shadeless path, barbed with prickly pears. Odette walked ahead, her eyes almost closed between the black fringe of her hair and the white bar of her teeth. Rose twisted her ankle and groaned. Bernard, who was following her, took her by the elbow and mischievously squeezed her arm as he helped her along.

  “So you’ve got the wrong sort of shoes on, too? Couldn’t either of you come to Africa with any other sort of shoes except those absurd white buckskin things?”

  “No, stop, that’s the limit,” Rose wailed. “As if I hadn’t enough to put up with as it is, without your having to . . .”

  “Oh, give over,” broke in Odette, without turning around. “He’s just another of those chaps who say, ‘For goodness’ sake, wear espadrilles!’ and then they’re furious with you because, with no heels, all your skirts droop at the back.”