She’s eighteen.
Luck (good luck?) has seized her recklessly, and her defensive elbows, her whole stubborn body thrust forward like a gargoyle, seem to be warding off the blows of a brutal fate fond of practical jokes.
She bawls her numbers like a dressmaker’s assistant or a raucous street singer, with no notion that there are other ways of singing.
She naively forces her rasping but appealing contralto, which is so suited to her young face, that of a pink, sulky apache.
Just as she is, with a dress that’s too long and was bought anywhere, with her chestnut hair that isn’t even waved, with her sloping shoulder that still seems to be dragging a laundry hamper, with the down over her lips all white with cheap powder, the audience is wild about her.
The woman who manages the theater has promised her, for next season, her name in lights and second billing; as for a raise, she’ll think about it.
Onstage Jadin is radiant and jubilant.
Every night she recognizes in the second-balcony audience some fellow who gallivanted around with her when they were kids, and to greet him she can’t resist interrupting her sentimental ditty with a happy shout, a shrill schoolgirl’s laugh, or even a vulgar mocking hand gesture made high up on her thigh . . . She’s the one awol from the show today.
In a half hour, there will be a storm in the auditorium, shouts of
“Jadin!
Jadin!”, a stamping of clogs, and a tinkling of spoons on iced-coffee glasses . . .
It was bound to happen.
It’s said that Jadin isn’t ill, and our stage manager is grumbling:
“Like hell, she’s got the flu!
What she did is tumble across a bed!
Somebody’s applying a banknote as a compress!
Otherwise, she’d have let us know . . . ”
Jadin has found an admirer who’s not from this neighborhood.
A girl must live . . . And yet she had been living with this man, with that man, with everybody . . . Will I see any more her little gargoyle figure, with one of the “stylish” bonnets she made herself pulled down to her eyebrows?
Just last night, she stuck her badly powdered snoot into my dressing room to show me her latest creation: a toque of rabbit fur, “resembling white fox,” that was too tight and bent Jadin’s small, very pink ears back against both sides of her head.
“The spitting image of Attila the Hun,” Brague said to her, in a very serious tone. Jadin is gone . . .
The long corridor, perforated by small square dressing rooms, is buzzing and sneering; everyone seems to have expected this escapade but me . . .
Bouty, the little comedian who sings the songs in Dranem’s style, is walking back and forth in front of my dressing room, made up as an ape, a glass of milk in his hand, and I hear him prophesying:
“It was a sure thing!
As for me, I was giving Jadin another five or six days, maybe a month!
The boss lady must be making a long face . . . But it will take more than that to convince her to raise the salary of the performers who bring in the money . . .
Remember what I’m saying! Jadin will be back: this is just an outing.
She’s a girl with her own life style, she’ll never be able to hold onto a sugar daddy . . . ”
I open my door to speak to Bouty, while applying liquid white to my hands:
“She didn’t say anything to you about leaving, Bouty?”
He shrugs his shoulders, turning toward me his face made up as a red gorilla with white-ringed eyes:
“Not very likely!
I’m not her mother . . . ”
Saying which, he gulps down his glass of milk a little at a time—milk as bluish as starch.
Poor little Bouty, with his chronic enteritis and the factory-sealed bottle of milk that he parades around everywhere!
When his red-and-white makeup is cleaned off, he has a weak, gentle face, delicate and intelligent, beautiful, tender eyes, and a heart like that of a dog without an owner, prepared to love anyone who’ll adopt him.
His ailment and his tough profession are killing him; he lives on milk and boiled macaroni, yet finds the strength to sing and do ragtime dances for twenty minutes at a time.
When his act is over, he falls onto the floor backstage, completely exhausted and unable to go right down to his dressing room . . . His slender body, stretched out there like a corpse, sometimes blocks my path, and I stiffen, resisting the urge to stoop down, lift him up, and call for help.
Our colleagues and the chief stagehand merely shake their heads knowingly as they stand beside him, and say:
“Bouty is a performer whose work really knocks him out.” ”Snappy, snappy! Full steam ahead!
The audience didn’t yell for Jadin all that badly.
We were in luck!”
Brague pushes me onto the iron staircase; the dusty heat, together with the light from the lamp racks, makes me dizzy; this matinee has gone by like a busy dream; half of my day’s work has melted away somehow, and I retain from it merely that nervous chill and tightening of the stomach which you get when you wake up and rise out of bed quickly in the middle of the night.
In an hour it will be dinnertime, then you take a taxi and start all over again . . . And I still have a month of living like this!
The current show has enough drawing power; besides, we’ve got to hold out till the end-of-the-year revue comes on:
“We’re good like this,” Brague says, “forty days with nothing to think about.”
And he rubs his hands together.
With nothing to think about . . . I wish I could be like him!
As for me, I’ve got forty days for thinking, the whole year, my whole life . . . How long will I trot out, from vaudeville to the legit, from the legit to the casino, “talents” that people politely consent to find interesting?
In addition, they grant me a “precise skill in miming,” “clear diction,” and “a faultless figure.”