I find flowers in my dressing room, Fossette receives a little nickel-plated bowl for her dogfood; three tiny good-luck animals have taken up residence, cheek by jowl, on my writing desk: an amethyst cat, a chalcedony elephant, and a turquoise toad . . .
A little jade hoop, green as a tree frog, encircled the stems of the greenish lilies delivered to me on New Year’s Day . . . In the street I too frequently run across the same Dufferein-Chautel, who greets me with a surprise he acts so badly . . .
He forces me to remember, all too often, that desire exists, an imperious demigod, an unleashed faun who frisks all around Love but doesn’t obey Love; that I’m alone, healthy, still young, and rejuvenated by my long mental convalescence . . .
Senses?
Yes, I have them . . . Or I had when Adolphe Taillandy deigned to concern himself with them.
Timid senses, which followed a routine and were grateful for the habitual caress that satisfied them, which feared any rakish refinement or complication . . . which were slow to flare up, but also slow to die down: in short, healthy senses . . .
His unfaithfulness and my protracted grief dulled them—for how long?
On cheerful days of physical ebullience, I exclaim,
“Forever!” and I feel ingenuous, freed from that which made me a woman like all the rest . . .
But there are also lucid days when I reason severely with myself:
“Watch out!
Be alert at all times!
Everyone who approaches you is a suspect, but you are your own worst enemy!
Don’t proudly proclaim that you’re dead, empty, weightless: the animal you’re forgetting about is in hibernation and is gaining strength from its long slumber . . . ”
Then I once more lose the memory of what I used to be, in my fear of coming back to life; I long for nothing, I miss nothing from the past, until the next time my confidence is shattered, until the inevitable fit in which I watch in terror the approach of sadness, with its gentle but powerful hands, that guide and companion of all sensual pleasures . . .
*** For the last few days we’ve been rehearsing a new pantomime, Brague and I.
There will be a forest, a cave, an old caveman, a young hamadryad, and a faun in the prime of life.
Brague will play the faun, I will play the wood nymph; as for the old caveman, it’s too soon to decide.
His role is episodic, and, to play him, Brague says: “I’ve got a little eighteen-year-old rascal, one of my pupils, who’ll be perfectly prehistoric!”
They’re willing to lend us the stage of the Folies-Bergere, mornings from ten to eleven, to rehearse.
Devoid of its backdrops, the deep stage shows us its entire bare floor.
How gloomy and gray it is there when I arrive, uncorseted, in a sweater instead of a blouse, and with black satin panties beneath my short skirt! . . .
I envy Brague’s ability to be completely himself at all hours, wide awake, swarthy, bossy . . .
I struggle feebly with the chill, with stiffness, and with the nastiness of that atmosphere, imperfectly cleansed of its nocturnal odors and still stinking of humanity and sour punch . . .
The dinky rehearsal piano spells out the new music, my hands clutch each other and refuse to separate; my gestures are clipped and too near the body; my shoulders rise in a shiver; I feel mediocre, awkward, lost . . .
Brague, who’s used to my morning inertia, has also discovered the secret of curing it.
He nags at me ceaselessly, running around me like a dog chasing rats, lavishing brief words of encouragement or exclamations that lash me like a cracking whip . . .
A cloud of dust rises from the auditorium; it’s the hour when the cleaning men sweep out, along with the mud that has dried on the carpets, the small crud of the night before: bits of paper, cherry pits, cigarette stubs, dirt from shoes . . .
In the far background—because we’re allotted only a slice of the stage, a pathway about two yards wide—a troupe of acrobats is working on their thick rug: good-looking pink Germans with blonde hair, silent and dedicated to their task.
They’re wearing filthy work tights, and during the pauses in their act, their repose and their pastimes are still more exercises; two of them, with sleepy laughter, are trying to achieve an impossible miracle of equilibrium . . . maybe they’ll succeed next month.
At the end of the session, they very seriously attend to the perilous education of the youngest boy in the troupe, a kid with the face of a little girl and with long bonde curls; they throw him into the air, and he lands on the foot or hand of one of them, a little airy creature who seems to be flying, his curls flung out horizontally behind him or standing straight up over his head like a flame while he falls back again, his feet together in a point, his arms glued to his sides . . .
“Keep to the beat!” Brague shouts. “You were too late with that gesture again!
This is what I call a half-assed rehearsal!
Can’t you pay attention to what you’re doing?”
It’s hard, I admit.
Now there are gymnasts soaring above us on three trapezes, exchanging shrill calls, cries like swallows . . . The nickel-plated flashing of the metal trapezes, the squeaking of the rosined hands on the polished bars, all that outlay of elegant, supple strength all around me, that methodical contempt for danger excite me, and finally spur me into a contagious emulation . . .
And it’s then that they throw us out, just when I was beginning to feel in myself, like a set of jewelry suddenly put on again, the beauty of my finished gestures, the rightness of an expression of terror or desire . . . Galvanized too late, I use up the rest of my fervor by walking home with Fossette, in whom rehearsals store up a silent rage which she then takes out on dogs bigger than she is, when she’s back outdoors.
She terrorizes them, like the clever actress she is, with a single convulsion of her Japanese-dragon face, with a hideous grimace that makes her eyes bulge out of her head and curls her floppy lips back, displaying, in their blood-red lining, several white teeth planted at an angle like the pickets of a wind-shaken fence.
Having grown up in the profession, Fossette knows the vaudeville house better than I do; she trots into dark cellars and bowls down the corridors, guided by the familiar smell of soapy water, rice powder, and ammonia . . . Her brindled body is used to being hugged by arms coated with pearl white; she condescends to eat the sugar that the supers save from the saucers in the cafe downstairs.
Capriciously she sometimes demands that I take her along at night, while on other days she watches me leave, while rolled up like a turban in her basket, with the scorn of a lady of independent means who has all the time in the world to digest her meal.
“It’s Saturday, Fossette! Let’s run! Hamond will be there before we are!”
We’ve run like two lunatics instead of taking a cab: it’s because the air this morning has such a surprising and soft sweetness of early springtime in it . . . And we meet Hamond just as he reaches my white “hut,” which is the color of a butter sculpture.
But Hamond isn’t alone: he’s chatting on the sidewalk with . . . with Dufferein-Chautel the younger, whose first name is Maxime and who’s known as the Big Ninny . . .
“What?
You again?”
Without giving him time to protest, I question Hammond severely:
“You know Monsieur Dufferein-Chautel?”
“Of course,” says Hamond calmly. “So do you, I see.
As for me, I’ve known him since he was a little boy.
I still have in some drawer the photo of a kid with a white armband: