The Collected Stories of Colette Read Free Page A

vigilant, merciless, with a tough youthfulness nothing can penetrate. She is not a monster, she is one of those terrible young girls of today, hard and narrow-minded. He has seen her cry, but with rage, during her lessons. He has seen her laugh, to make fun of him or a friend. She is thought of as sensual, but he knows very well that she displays her beautiful skin, white and blue like milk in shadow, coldly, and that this too is part of her “job.”
    Clouk can hear, striking against the lace-covered windows, the hissing of a winter downpour which has almost turned to sleet. He is thinking about getting home, about Lulu’s conjugal silence, the voice teacher coming at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, the masseuse who comes after him . . . As she does every day, Lulu will have that set, stern look on her face, darkened by important matters. As he does every day, he will wait until it is time for her to make her entrance, when her charming mouth flowers into fresh, aggressive laughter. He feels cold, a little ill. What he needs is . . .
    Clouk stares at the other table, the table with the old ladies. They laugh constantly, and perhaps for no reason, with that lightheartedness which comes to a woman when the peril of men has at last left her. Léa de Lonval, a colorful woman beneath her white hair, looks like Louis XV, and the older of the operetta singers has the sauciness of a racy grandmother. If Clouk dared, he would slip over to their table, all frail and small, squeeze in between those fat gossips’ arms, amid the rustling skirts and the doughy knees, and lean up against the ample shoulders, lost, drowned in that melting warmth of slightly senile nannies; he would warm himself, console himself for being the envied lover of Lulu, sparkling there in front of him like a frosty little tree . . .
    THE SCREEN
    When Lulu left him, Clouk did not give in right away to the stunned despair which dismays the very young. He went on with his life, going out to restaurants and bars, driving around in his car. His everyday little face seemed unchanged, clean and comical, his left eyebrow clamped down to hold his monocle in place, his fishlike mouth open slightly. As he was ordinarily quiet, no one noticed that he wasn’t speaking at all and that he was sniffling more often. He was conducting himself quite well. But the “close” circle of friends who were looking after him finished him off with enough sympathy to kill an ox. One would clap him on the back with the crude cordiality of a sergeant. One melancholy and sisterly friend discreetly informed him as to Lulu’s whereabouts and carryings-on, under the guise of “keeping things out in the open.” Without saying a word, the least cruel would hand Clouk a full glass . . .
    And so when his friends, gasping from self-sacrifice, wanted to return to their usual occupations, it was noticed that Clouk, drinking more, was not eating at all, and that his collars looked like hoops around the neck of a plucked bird.
    Clouk was suffering, still stunned. He did not dare say it, and he began confronting his interrogators with the smile of one whose feet have been stepped on while waltzing. His headstrong, youthful sadness knew nothing of the confidences in which the lyricism of old incorrigible lovers takes comfort. He believed he was hardly thinking at all, did not delude himself, and did not repeatedly whisper her name: “Lulu . . . Lulu . . .” But without knowing it, he endured a twofold pain. At times he would reel, light-headed, floating, as if blank forever; at times he would run away, hoping to leave far behind him, in the place he was fleeing, the intolerable memory.
    He ran into Lulu one night in the restaurant, accompanied by her new “friend,” and was quite proud of himself for feeling neither shocked nor heartbroken. But the next day, sitting in a music hall, he broke down in tears watching a clown who couldn’t free himself from a piece of flypaper; and