We talked, and we also read. I had been an insatiable reader in my childhood. Marco had educated herself. At first, I thought I could delve into Marco’s well-stored mind and memory. But I noticed that she replied with a certain lassitude, and as if mistrustful of her own words.
“Marco, why are you called Marco?”
“Because my name is Léonie,” she answered. “Léonie wasn’t the right sort of name for V’s wife. When I was twenty, V. made me pose in a tasseled Greek cap perched over one ear and Turkish slippers with long turned-up points. While he was painting, he used to sing this old sentimental ballad:
Fair Marco, do you love to dance
In brilliant ballrooms, gay with flowers?
Do you love, in night’s dark hours,
Ta ra ra, ta ra ra ra . . .
I have forgotten the rest.”
I had never heard Marco sing before. Her voice was true and thin, clear as the voice of some old men.
“They were still singing that in my youth,” she said. “Painters’ studios did a great deal for the propagation of bad music.”
She seemed to want to preserve nothing of her past but a superficial irony. I was too young to realize what this calmness of hers implied. I had not yet learned to recognize the modesty of renunciation.
Toward the end of our summer holiday in Franche-Comté, something astonishing did, however, happen to Marco. Her husband, who was painting in the United States, sent her, through his solicitor, a check for fifteen thousand francs. The only comment she made was to say, with a laugh: “So he’s actually got a solicitor now? Wonders will never cease!”
Then she returned the check and the solicitor’s letter to their envelope and paid no more attention to them. But at dinner, she gave signs of being a trifle excited, and asked the waitress in a whisper if it was possible to have champagne. We had some. It was sweet and tepid and slightly corked and we only drank half the bottle between us.
Before we shut the communicating door between our rooms, as we did every night, Marco asked me a few questions. She wore an absentminded expression as she inquired: “Do you think people will be still wearing those wide-sleeved velvet coats next winter, you know the kind I mean? And where did you get that charming hat you had in the spring—with the brim sloping like a roof? I liked it immensely—on you, of course.”
She spoke lightly, hardly seeming to listen to my replies, and I pretended not to guess how deeply she had hidden her famished craving for decent clothes and fresh underlinen.
The next morning, she had regained control of herself.
“When all’s said and done,” she said, “I don’t see why I should accept this sum from that . . . in other words, from my husband. If it pleases him at the moment to offer me charity, like giving alms to a beggar, that’s no reason for me to accept it.”
As she spoke, she kept pulling out some threads the laundress had torn in the cheap lace that edged her dressing gown. Where it fell open, it revealed a chemise that was more than humble. I lost my temper and I scolded Marco as an older woman might have chided a small girl. So much so that I felt a little ashamed, but she only laughed.
“There, there, don’t get cross! Since you want me to, I’ll allow myself to be kept by his lordship V. It’s certainly my turn.”
I put my cheek against Marco’s cheek. We stayed watching the harsh, reddish sun reaching the zenith and drinking up all the shadows that divided the mountains. The bend of the river quivered in the distance. Marco sighed.
“Would it be very expensive, a pretty little corset belt all made of ribbon, with rococo roses on the ends of the suspenders?”
The return to Paris drove Marco back to her novelette. Once again I saw her hat with the three blue thistles, her coat and skirt whose black was faded and pallid, her dark gray gloves, and her schoolgirl satchel of cardboard masquerading as leather. Before thinking of her personal elegance, she wanted to move to another place. She took a year’s lease of a furnished flat; two rooms and a place where she could wash, plus a sort of cupboard-kitchen, on the ground floor. It was dark there in broad daylight but the red and white cretonne curtains and bedspread were not too hopelessly shabby. Marco nourished herself at midday in a little restaurant near the library and had tea and bread-and-butter at home at night except when I managed to keep her at my flat for a meal at which stuffed olives and rollmops replaced soup and roast meat. Sometimes Paul Masson brought along an excellent chocolate “Quillet” from Quillet’s, the cake shop in the rue de Buci.
Completely resigned to her task, Marco had so far acquired nothing except, as October turned out rainy, a kind of rubberized hooded cloak that smelled of asphalt. One day she arrived, her eyes looking anxious and guilty.
“There,” she said bravely, “I’ve come to be scolded. I think I bought this coat in too much of a hurry. I’ve got the feeling that . . . that it’s not quite right.”
I was amused by her being as shy as if she were my junior, but I stopped laughing when I had a good look at the coat. An unerring instinct led Marco, so discriminating in other ways, to choose bad material, deplorable cut, fussy braid.
The very next day, I took time off to go out with her and choose a wardrobe for her. Neither she nor I could aspire to the great dress houses, but I had the pleasure of seeing Marco looking slim and years younger in a dark tailor-made and in a navy serge dress with a white front. With the straight little caracul topcoat, two hats, and some underclothes, the bill, if you please, came to fifteen hundred francs: you can see that I was ruthless with the funds sent by the painter V.
I might well have had something to say against Marco’s hairstyle. But just that very season, there was a changeover to shorter hair and a different way of doing it, so that Marco was able to look as if she was ahead of fashion. In this I sincerely envied her, for whether I twisted it around my head “à la Ceres” or let it hang to my skirt hem—“like a well cord” as Jules Renard said—my long hair blighted my existence.
At this point, the memory of a certain evening obtrudes itself. Monsieur Willy had gone out on business somewhere, leaving Marco, Paul Masson, and myself alone together after dinner. When the three of us were on our own, we automatically became clandestinely merry, slightly childish, and, as it were, reassured. Masson would sometimes read aloud the serial in a daily paper, a novelette inexhaustibly rich in haughty titled ladies, fancy-dress balls in winter gardens, chaises dashing along “at a triple gallop” drawn by pure-bred steeds, maidens pale but resolute, exposed to a thousand perils. And we used to laugh wholeheartedly.
“Ah!” Marco would sigh, “I shall never be able to do as well as that. In the novelette world, I shall never be more than a little amateur.”
“Little amateur,” said Masson one night, “here’s just what you want. I’ve culled it from the Agony Column: ‘Man of letters bearing well-known name would be willing to assist young writers both sexes in early stages career.’”
“Both sexes!” said Marco. “Go on, Masson! I’ve only got one sex and, even then, I think I’m exaggerating by half.”
“Very well, I will go on,” said Masson. “I will go on to lieutenant (regular army), garrisoned near Paris, warmhearted, cultured, wishes to maintain correspondence with intelligent, affectionate woman. Very good, but apparently, this soldier does not wish to maintain anything but correspondence. Nevertheless, do we write to him? Let us write. The best letter wins a box of Gianduja Kohler—the nutty kind.”
“If it’s a big box,” I said, “I’m quite willing to compete. What about you, Marco?”
With her cleft nose bent over a scribbling block, Marco was writing already. Masson gave birth to twenty lines in which sly obscenity vied with humor. I stopped after the first page, out of laziness. But how charming Marco’s letter was!
“First prize!” I exclaimed.
“Pearls before . . .” muttered Masson. “Do we send it? Poste Restante, Alex 2, Box 59. Give it to me. I’ll see that it goes.”
“After all, I
’m not risking anything,” said Marco.
When our diversions were over, she slipped on her mackintosh again and put on her narrow hat in front of the mirror. It was a hat I had chosen, which made her head look very small and her eyes very large under its turned-down brim.
“Look at her!” she exclaimed. “Look at her, the middle-aged lady who debauches warmhearted and cultured lieutenants!”
With the little oil lamp in her hand, she preceded Paul Masson.
“I shan’t see you at all this week,” she told me. “I’ve got two pieces of homework to do: the chariot race and the Christians in the lions’ pit.”
“Haven’t I already read something of the kind somewhere?” put in Masson.
“I sincerely hope you have,” retorted Marco. “If it hadn’t been done over and over again, where should I get my documentation?”
The following week, Masson bought a copy of the paper and with his hard, corrugated nail pointed out three lines in the Agony Column: “Alex 2 implores author delicious letter beginning ‘What presumption’ to give address. Secrecy scrupulously honored.”
“Marco,” he said, “you’ve won not only the box of Gianduja but also a booby prize in the shape of a first-class mug.”
Marco shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s cruel, what you’ve made me do. He’s sure to think he’s been made fun of, poor boy.”
Masson screwed up his eyes to their smallest and most inquisitorial.
“Sorry for him already, dear?”
These memories are distant, but precise. They rise out of the fog that inevitably drowns the long days of that particular time, the monotonous amusements of dress rehearsals and suppers at Pousset’s, my alternations between animal gaiety and confused unhappiness, the split in my nature between a wild, frightened creature and one with a vast capacity for illusion. But it is a fog that leaves the faces of my friends intact and shining clear.
It was also on a rainy night, in late October or early November, that Marco came to keep me company one night; I remember the anthracite smell of the waterproof cape. She kissed me. Her soft nose was wet, she sighed with pleasure at the sight of the glowing stove. She opened her satchel.
“Here, read this,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s got a charming turn of phrase, this . . . this ruffianly soldier?”
If, after reading it, I had allowed myself a criticism, I should have said: too charming. A letter worked over and recopied; one draft, two drafts thrown into the wastepaper basket. The letter of a shy man, with a touch of the poet, like everyone else.
“Marco, you mean you actually wrote to him?”
The virtuous Marco laughed in my face.
“One can’t hide anything from you, charming daughter of Monsieur de La Palisse! Written? Written more than once, even! Crime gives me an appetite. You haven’t got a cake? Or an apple?”
While she nibbled delicately, I showed off my ideas on the subject of graphology.
“Look, Marco, how carefully your ‘ruffianly soldier’ has covered up a word he’s begun so as to make it illegible. Sign of gumption, also of touchiness. The writer, as Crépieux-Jamin says, doesn’t like people to laugh at him.”
Marco agreed, absentmindedly. I noticed she was looking pretty and animated. She studied herself in the glass, clenching her teeth and parting her lips, a grimace few women can resist making in front of a mirror when they have white teeth.
“Whatever’s the name of that toothpaste that reddens the gums, Colette?”
“Cherry something or other.”
“Thanks, I’ve got it now. Cherry Dentifrice. Will you do me a favor? Don’t tell Paul Masson about my epistolary escapades. He’d never stop teasing me. I shan’t keep up my relations with the regular army long enough to make myself ridiculous. Oh, I forgot to tell you. My husband has sent me another fifteen thousand francs.”
“Mercy me, be I a-hearing right? as they say where I come from. And you just simply forgot that bit of news?”
“Yes, really,” said Marco. “I just forgot.”
She raised her eyebrows with an air of surprise to remind me delicately that money is always a subject of minor importance.
From that moment, it seemed to me that everything moved very fast for Marco. Perhaps that was due to distance. One of my moves—the first—took me from the rue Jacob to the top of the rue de Courcelles, from a dark little cubbyhole to a studio whose great window let in cold, heat, and an excess of light. I wanted to show my sophistication, to satisfy my newly born—and modest—cravings for luxury: I bought white goatskins, and a folding shower bath from Chaboche’s.
Marco, who felt at home in dim rooms and in the atmosphere of the Left Bank and of libraries, blinked her lovely eyes under the studio skylight, stared at the white divans that suggested polar bears, and did not like the new way I did my hair. I wore it piled up above my forehead and twisted into a high chignon; this new “helmet” fashion had swept the hair up from the most modest and retiring napes.
Such a minor domestic upheaval would not have been worth mentioning, did it not make it understandable that, for some time, I only had rapid glimpses of Marco. My pictures of her succeeded each other jerkily like the pictures in those children’s books that, as you turn the pages fast, give the illusion of continuous movement. When she brought me the second letter from the romantic lieutenant, I had crossed the intervening gulf. As Marco walked into my new, light flat, I saw that she was definitely prettier than she had been the year before. The slender foot she thrust out below the hem of her skirt rejoiced in the kind of shoe it deserved. Through the veil stretched taut over the little cleft at the tip of her nose she stared, now at her gloved hand, now at each unknown room, but she seemed to see neither the one nor the other clearly. With bright patience she endured my arranging and rearranging the curtains: she admired the folding shower bath, which, when erected, vaguely suggested a vertical coffin.
She was so patient and so absentminded that in the end I noticed it and asked her crudely: “By the way, Marco, how’s the ruffianly soldier?”
Her eyes, softened by makeup and shortsightedness, looked into mine.
“As it happens, he’s very well. His letters are charming—decidedly so.”
“Decidedly so? How many have you had?”
“Three in all. I’m beginning to think it’s enough. Don’t you agree?”
“No, since they’re charming—and they amuse you.”
“I don’t care for the atmosphere of the poste restante . . . It’s a horrid hole. Everyone there has a guilty look. Here, if you’re interested . . .”
She threw a letter into my lap; it had been there ready all the time, folded up in her gloved hand. I read it rather slowly, I was so preoccupied with its serious tone, devoid of the faintest trace of humor.
“What a remarkable lieutenant you’ve come across, Marco! I’m sure that if he weren’t restrained by his shyness . . .”
“His shyness?” protested Marco. “He’s already got to the point of hoping that we shall exchange less impersonal letters! What cheek! For a shy man . . .”
She broke off to raise her veil which was overheating her coarse-grained skin and flushing up those uneven red patches on her cheeks. But nowadays she knew how to apply her powder cleverly, how to brighten the color of her mouth. Instead of a discouraged woman of forty-five, I saw before me a smart woman of forty, her chin held high above the boned collar that hid the secrets of the neck. Once again, because of her very beautiful eyes, I forgot the deterioration of all the rest of her face and sighed inwardly: “What a pity . . .”
Our respective moves took us away from our old surroundings and I did not see Marco quite so often. But she was very much in my mind. The polarity of affection between two women friends that gives one authority and the other pleasure in being advised turned me into a peremptory young guide. I decided that Marco ought to wear shorter skirts and more nipped-in waistlines. I sternly rejected braid, which made her look old, colors that dated
her, and, most of all, certain hats that, when Marco put them on, mysteriously sentenced her beyond hope of appeal. She allowed herself to be persuaded, though she would hesitate for a moment: “You think so? You’re quite sure?” and glance at me out of the corner of her beautiful eye.
We liked meeting each other in a little tearoom at the corner of the rue de l’Echelle and the rue d’Argenteuil, a warm, poky “British,” saturated with the bitter smell of Ceylon tea. We “partook of tea,” like other sweet-toothed ladies of those far-off days, and hot buttered toast followed by quantities of cakes. I liked my tea very black, with a thick white layer of cream and plenty of sugar. I believed I was learning English when I asked the waitress: “Edith, please, a little more milk, and butter.”
It was at the little “British” that I perceived such a change in Marco that I could not have been more startled if, since our last meeting, she had dyed her hair peroxide or taken to drugs. I feared some danger, I imagined that the wretch of a husband had frightened her into his clutches again. But if she was frightened, she would not have had that blank flickering gaze that wandered from the table to the walls and was profoundly indifferent to everything it glanced at.
“Marco? Marco?”
“Darling?”
“Marco, what on earth’s happened? Have other treasure galLéons arrived? Or what?”
She smiled at me as if I were a stranger.
“GalLéons? Oh, no.”
She emptied her cup in one gulp and said almost in a whisper: “Oh, how stupid of me, I’ve burned myself.”
Consciousness and affection slowly returned to her gaze. She saw that mine was astonished and she blushed, clumsily and unevenly, as she always did.
“Forgive me,” she said, laying her little hand on mine.
She sighed and relaxed.
“Oh!” she said. “What luck there isn’t anyone here. I’m a little . . . how can I put it? . . . queasy.”
“More tea? Drink it very hot.”
“No, no. I think it’s that glass of port I had before I came here. No, nothing, thanks.”