Just now he’s working in my “dump,” the Empyree-Clichy.
This blond Gaul, whom tuberculosis gnaws away at a little more each year, sees his biceps melting away, and his pink thighs with their iridescent golden down, and the fine pectorals he was justly proud of. He’s already had to give up boxing for dancing and roller skating . . .
Here he skates on an inclined plane; meanwhile, he’s set himself up as a dancing teacher and also raises bulldogs for apartment owners.
This winter he’s been coughing a lot.
He frequently comes into my dressing room in the evening, coughs, sits down, and offers to sell me “a brindled gray bulldog bitch, a real beauty, who only failed to win the first prize this year because of jealousy . . . ”
As things will happen, today I get to the underground corridor, perforated with square cubicles, that leads to my dressing room just when Dancing Stephane is coming off stage.
Thin around the waist, broad in the shoulders, in his tight myrtle-green Polish dolman edged with fake chinchilla, his fur cap pulled down over one ear, that boy is still a magnet for women, with his blue eyes and his cheeks scumbled with pink . . .
But he’s losing weight, losing weight slowly, and his scores with women are speeding up his deterioration . . .
“Hi!”
“Hi, Stephane!
Big crowd?”
“I should say!
I wonder what those assholes are doing here when the weather’s so good in the country. . . .
Say, could you use a schipperke bitch that weights twenty-odd ounces? . . . I could get her at a bargain from someone I know . . . ”
“Twenty-odd ounces! . . .
No, thanks, my apartment’s too small!”
He laughs obligingly and doesn’t persist.
I know the twenty-ounce schipperke bitches that Stephane sells!
They weigh about six pounds.
It’s not that he’s dishonest; it’s a matter of business.
What will Dancing Stephane do when he’s down to his last shred of lung, when he can no longer dance, when he can no longer sleep with little broads who pay for his cigars, ties, and drinks? . . .
What hospital or “home” will take in his beautiful hollowed-out carcass? . . .
Oh, how sad it all is, and how unbearable the wretchedness of so many people is, after all! . . .
”Hi, Bouty!
Hi, Brague! . . . Any news of Jadin?”
Brague shrugs his shoulders without answering, as he concentrates on touching up his eyebrows, which he pencils a dark purple because “it looks fiercer.”
He has a certain blue to depict wrinkles, a certain orange-red for the inside of his lips, a certain ocher for foundation, a certain syrupy carmine for flowing blood, and especially a certain white for making up as Pierrot, “the formula for which,” he assures me, “I wouldn’t give to my own brother!”
Anyway, he makes a skillful use of his little obsession with polychromy, and I don’t know anything else laughable about this intelligent and almost too conscientious mime.
Bouty, very thin in his loose plaid suit, signals to me mysteriously.
“I’ve seen little Jadin.
I saw her on the boulevard with some well-to-do guy.
She was wearing enormous feathers and a huge muff, and looked as if she were bored stiff ‘at a hundred francs an hour!’”
“If she’s actually getting a hundred francs an hour, she has nothing to complain about!” Brague interrupted, logically.
“I’m with you there, buddy. But she won’t stay on the boulevard; she’s a girl who can’t understand money. I’ve been following Jadin’s doings for a long time; she and her mother used to live in my courtyard . . . ”
Through the open door of my dressing room, which is opposite Brague’s, I see little Bouty, who has suddenly fallen silent without finishing his sentence.
He has placed his pint of bottled milk, to warm it up, on the radiator pipe that runs through the dressing rooms at floor level.
His face, made up in brick red and chalk white, keeps you from guessing its real expression to any extent, but I feel that, since Jadin left, Bouty has been more depressed . . .
In order to whiten and powder my shoulders and knees, which are full of bruises—Brague uses his full strength when he throws me to the ground!—I shut my door; anyway, I’m sure Bouty will say no more.
Like the rest, like me, he hardly ever mentions his private life.
It’s that silence, that stubborn decency, which deceived me about my colleagues when I began in vaudeville.
The most outgoing and vain ones talk about their success and their artistic ambitions with all the requisite bombast and gravity; the nastier ones go as far as bad-mouthing the “dump” and their comrades; the most talkative ones hash over jokes about stage and studio; one out of ten feels the need to say:
“I have a wife, I have two kids, my mother is sick, I’m worried to death over my girlfriend . . . ”
The silence they maintain as to their personal life is like a polite way of telling you:
“The rest is none of your business.”
Once they’re removed the white greasepaint and have put their scarf and hat back on, they part company and vanish with a speed that I believe reveals as much pride as discretion.
They’re almost all proud, and poor: in vaudeville, a cadging colleague is an exception.
My unspoken affection, which has become enlightened and informed during these three years, is for all of them, not singling out anybody.
Vaudeville performers . . . how little known, put down, and misunderstood they are!
Dreamers, proud folk full of an absurd and outmoded faith in Art, they alone are the last people who dare to state, with holy fervor:
“An ‘artist’ shouldn’t do that . . . an ‘artist’ can’t accept that . . . an ‘artist’ wouldn’t agree to that . . . ”