Colette
Part One
TEN THIRTY . . . Once again I’m ready too early.
My partner Brague, who helped me out when I was starting in pantomime, frequently reproaches me for this in picturesque terms:
“In a big hurry, aren’t you, you damned amateur! There’s always a fire burning under your ass.
If it was up to you, we’d smear on our foundation at seven thirty while munching our appetizers!”
Three years of vaudeville and plays haven’t changed me; I’m always ready too early.
Ten thirty-five . . . If I don’t open that book, which I’ve read over and over—the book lying around on my makeup shelf—or the racing form that my dresser was ticking off names in with the tip of my eyebrow pencil, I’m going to end up alone with myself, face to face with that rouged and powdered adviser looking at me from out of the mirror with deepset eyes, their lids rubbed with a greasy purplish paste.
She has bright cheekbones, the same color as garden phlox, and very dark-red lips, shiny as if varnished . . . She fixes a long gaze on me, and I know she’s about to speak . . . She’s going to say:
“Is that really you there?
There, all alone, in this cage with white walls on which idle, impatient, captive hands have scratched monograms and which they’ve embellished with naively dirty pictures?
On these plastered walls, painted fingernails like yours have written a marooned woman’s unconscious cry for help . . . In back of you a woman’s hand has engraved ‘Marie . . . ,’ the end of the name breaking out into an ardent flourish that rises like a scream . . . Is that really you there, all alone, beneath the ceiling that’s buzzing as it’s shaken by the dancers’ feet like the floor of a mill in operation?
Why are you there all alone?
Why not elsewhere? . . . ”
Yes, it’s that dangerous hour of lucidity . . . Who will knock at the door of my dressing room?
What face will come between me and that adviser in her makeup spying on me from out of the mirror? . . .
Chance, who is my friend and my master, will surely deign once more to send me the genii from his ill-regulated kingdom.
My sole remaining faith is in him, and in myself.
In him, especially; he fishes me out when I’m sinking, grabs me and shakes me, like a life-saving dog whose teeth pierce my skin a little each time . . . So that, whenever I’m in despair, I no longer expect my death, but some adventure, some little commonplace miracle that, like a gleaming clasp, will reassemble and hold together the necklace of my life.
It’s faith, it’s truly faith, with its sometimes feigned blindness, with the jesuitry of its renunciations and its obstinate hope at the very moment when I cry, “I’m completely deserted! . . . ” Truly, the day that my master, Chance, bore another name in my heart, I could become a very good Catholic . . .
How the floor is shaking tonight!
You can tell it’s cold: the Russian dancers are trying to keep warm.
When they all shout “Ho!” together with the shrill, hoarse voice of young pigs, it will be eleven ten.
My clock is infallible; it doesn’t lose or gain five minutes in a month.
At ten I get here; Madame Cavallier is singing her three songs,
“The Little Vagrants,”
“The Farewell Kiss,” and
“A Little ‘Somebody.’” At ten ten, Antoniev and his dogs. At ten twenty-two, rifle shots, barks, the end of the dog act.
The iron staircase creaks and someone coughs: it’s Jadin coming down.
She swears while coughing because she steps on the hem of her dress every time—it’s a ritual . . .
Ten thirty-five, the comic singer Bouty.
Ten forty-seven, the Russian dancers.
And finally eleven ten: me!
Me . . . When that word arose in my thoughts, I looked at the mirror involuntarily.
It’s really me there all the same, with a red-purple mask, my eyes ringed with a greasy blue halo that’s beginning to melt . . .
Will I wait for the rest of my face to wash away, too? What if all that will be left of my reflection is a colored trickle, stuck to the glass like a long, muddy tear? . . .
But it’s really freezing here!
I rub together my hands, gray with cold beneath the liquid white pigment, which is crackling.
Of course! The radiator pipe is ice-cold: it’s Saturday, and on Saturdays this management relies on the plebeian audience, that merry, rowdy, and slightly tipsy audience, to warm up the auditorium.
They never think about the performers’ dressing rooms.
A knock with a strong fist shakes my door, and my very ears are startled.
I open the door, and there is my partner Brague, got up as a Romanian bandit, swarthy and conscientious.
“We’re on, you know?”
“I know.
And not a minute too soon.
You can catch your death here!”
At the top of the iron staircase that ascends to the stage, the welcome dry and dusty heat wraps around me like a comfortable, dirty coat.
While the ever-meticulous Brague supervises the erection of the set and the installation of the rear rack of lights—the one that supplies the sunset—I automatically glue my eye to the bright round hole in the curtain.
It’s a fine Saturday crowd in this popular neighborhood vaudeville house.
A dark auditorium, which the spotlights are unable to illuminate completely, and in which you couldn’t possibly find a man in a shirt collar from the tenth row in the orchestra all the way to the second balcony!