“I’ll go and ask Lucie,” said Madame Ruby, promptly getting to her feet.
“No,” shouted Madame Suzanne. “I must go and see to the dinner. You don’t suppose the leg of mutton’s anxiously waiting for
you
, do you?”
She was trembling with sudden rage. Her lips were quivering with desire to burst out into a furious tirade. To stop herself, she made a rush to the door. As she did so, there was the sound of a motor engine and the headlights of a car swept the courtyard.
“Daddy Daste,” announced Madame Suzanne.
“Why isn’t that man switched off his headlights to come in? He might at least do that.”
Pati, suddenly woken up, flung herself at the french window, from etiquette rather than from hostility. The dry breath of the mistral entered along with Monsieur Daste. He was rubbing his hands, and his impersonal face at last bore an individual accent. This was a small newly-made wound, triangular in shape, under his right eye.
“Hello, Monsieur Daste! You is wounded? Pebble? A branch? An attack? Is the car damaged?”
“Good evening, ladies,” said Monsieur Daste politely. “No, no, nothing wrong with the car. She’s going splendidly. This,” he put his hand to his cheek, “isn’t worth bothering about.”
“All the same, I’m going to give you some peroxide,” said Madame Suzanne, who had come up to him and was examining the deeply incised little wound at close range. “Don’t cover it up, then it’ll dry quicker. A nail? A bit of flying flint?”
“No,” said Monsieur Daste. “Just a . . . bird.”
“What,
another
one?” said Madame Ruby.
Madame Suzanne turned to her friend with a reproving look.
“What do you mean, another one? There’s nothing so very astonishing about it.”
“Quite so. Nothing so very astonishing,” agreed Monsieur Daste.
“It’s full of night birds around here.”
“Full,” said Monsieur Daste.
“The headlights dazzle them and they dash themselves against the windshield.”
“Exactly,” concluded Monsieur Daste. “I’m delighted to be back at Bella-Vista again. That Corniche road at night! To think that there are people who actually drive on it for pleasure! I shall do justice to the dinner, Madame Suzanne!”
Nevertheless we noticed at dinner that Monsieur Daste ate nothing but the sweet. I noticed this mainly because Madame Ruby kept up a stream of encouragement from her table.
“Hello, Monsieur Daste! Is good for you to keep your strength up!”
“But I assure you I don’t feel in the least weak,” Monsieur Daste kept politely assuring her.
In fact, his abstinence had endowed him with the bright flush of satiety. He was drinking water with a slightly inebriated expression.
Madame Ruby raised her large hand sententiously.
“Leg of mutton
Bretonne
is very good against birds, Monsieur Daste!”
I remember it was that evening that we played our first game of poker. My three partners loved cards. In order to play better, they retired into the depths of themselves, leaving their faces unconsciously exposed. Studying them amused me more than the game. In any case, I play poker extremely badly and was scolded more than once. I was amused to note that Monsieur Daste only “opened” when forced to and then only with obvious reluctance, but good cards gave him spasms of nervous yawns which he managed to suppress by expanding his nostrils. His little wound had been washed and around it a bruised area was already turning purple, showing how violent the impact had been.
Madame Ruby played a tough game, compressing her full lips, and asking for cards and raising the bid by signs. I was astonished to see her handling the cards with agile but brutal fingers, using a thumb which was much thicker than I had realized. As to Madame Suzanne, she seemed set in her tracks like a bloodhound. She showed not the slightest emotion, pulled each card out slowly before declaring with an air of detachment: “Good for me!”
The smoke accumulated in horizontal layers and between two rounds I reproached myself for the inertia which kept me sitting there. “Perhaps I’m still not quite well,” I told myself with a kind of hopefulness.
Suddenly the mistral stopped blowing and the silence fell on us so brutally that it awakened the sleeping griffon. She emerged from her knitted hood and asked clearly, with her eyes and her pricked ears, what time it was.
“Huisipisi, huisipisi!” said Monsieur Daste maliciously.
She stared at him, sniffed the air about his person, and put her two front paws on the table. From there, by stretching her thick little neck, she could just reach Monsieur Daste’s hands.
“How she loves me!” said Monsieur Daste. “Huisipisi . . .”
The dog seemed to be searching for a particular spot and to find it just under the edge of Monsieur Daste’s cuff. She smelled it with her knowing black nostrils, then she tasted it with her tongue.
“She’s tickling me! Madame Suzanne, you pray too long to the goddess of luck while you’re shuffling the cards. On with the game!”
“Monsieur Daste, why do you always say ‘huisipisi’ to my dog? Is it a magic password?”
He fluttered his little hands about his face.
“The breeze,” he said. “The wind in the fir trees. Wings . . . Huisipisi . . . Things that fly . . . Even things that skim over the ground in a very . . . very
silky
way. Rats.”
“Boo!” cried Madame Suzanne. “I’ve a horror of mice. So, imagine, a
rat
! On with the game yourself, Monsieur Daste. Madame Colette, don’t forget the kitty. I believe you’re thinking more about your next novel than our little poker game.”
In this she was wrong. Alone in this equivocal guest house, during the pause before the harvest of its summer debauch, I was aware of a complex and familiar mental state. In that state a peculiar pleasure blunts the sharp edge of my longing for my friends, my home, and my real life. Yet is there anyone who is not deluded about the setting of their “real” life? Was I not breathing here and now, among these three strangers, what I call the very oxygen of travel? My thoughts could wander as lazily as they pleased; I was free of any burden of love; I was immersed in that holiday emptiness in which morning brings a lighthearted intoxication and evening a compulsion to waste one’s time and to suffer. Everything you love strips you of part of yourself: the Madame Suzannes rob you of nothing. Answering the few careless questions they ask takes nothing out of you. “How many pages do you do a day? All those letters you get every day and all those ones you write, don’t you have to cudgel your brains over them? You don’t happen to know an authoress who lives all the year round at Nice—a tall woman with pince-nez?” The Madame Suzannes don’t catechize you; they tell you about themselves. Sometimes, of course, they keep aggressively silent about some great secret which is always rising to their lips and being stifled. But a secret is exacting and deafens us with its clamor.
In many ways, I found Bella-Vista satisfying. It revived old habits from my solitary days: the itch for the arrival of the postman, my curiosity about passers-by who leave no permanent trace. I felt sympathetic toward the discredited pair of friends. At Bella-Vista I ate admirably and worked atrociously. Moreover, I was putting on weight there.
“Four last rounds,” announced Madame Suzanne. “Monsieur Daste, you open for the last time. Afterward, I’ll stand you a bottle of champagne. I think that ought to wake Madame Ruby up. There hasn’t been a sound from her all the evening.”
Her blue eyes shot a glance of fierce reproach at her impassive friend.
“You is usually hear me play poker at the top of my voice?”
Madame Suzanne did not answer and, as soon as the last round was over, went off to get the champagne. While she was going down to the cellar, Madame Ruby stood up, stretched her arms and her firm shoulders till the joints cracked. Then she opened the door between the dining room and the boudoir, listened in the direction of the kitchen, and came back again. She seemed absentminded, preoccupied by some care which made her full mouth look ugly and dulled the large gray eyes under the eyebrows which were paler than her forehead. That evening, the ambiguity of all her features, always disturbing, seemed almost repellent. She was biting the inside of her cheek but forced herself to stop gnawing it when her friend returned, out of breath, with a bottle of
brut
under each arm.
“This is really old,” announced Madame Suzanne. “Some remains of the ‘06. You don’t think I pour
that
down the gullets of the summer visitors. It’s not iced but the cellar’s cool. I don’t know if you agree with me that it’s nice to have a wine now and then that doesn’t make a block of ice in your stomach. Madame Ruby, where are there some pliers? These bottles are wired in the old-fashioned way.”
“I’ll call Lucie,” suggested the American.
Madame Suzanne looked at her almost furiously.
“For God’s sake, can’t you give Lucie a little peace? For one thing, she’s gone to bed. For another, you’ll certainly find some sort of pliers in the office.”
We drank each other’s health. Madame Ruby magically gulped down a large glass in one swallow, throwing her head back in a way which proved how much drinking was a habit with her. Madame Suzanne mimicked the toasts with which drinkers in the Midi raise their glasses: “To your very good!” “Much appreciated! Likewise!” Monsieur Daste closed his eyes like a cat afraid of splashing itself when it laps. Sitting opposite me in the depths of one of the English armchairs, he drank the perfect old champagne, whose bubbles gave out a faint scent of roses as they burst, in tiny sips. The bruise which was now clearly visible around the little triangular wound on his cheek made him seem, for some reason, likable, less definitely human. I like a fox terrier to have a round spot by its eye and a tortoiseshell cat to show an orange crescent or a black patch on its temple. A large mole or freckle on our cheek, a neat well-placed scar, one eye that is slightly larger than the other: all such things mark us out from the general human anonymity.
Madame Suzanne inclined the neck of the second bottle over our goblets and drew our attention to the mushroom-shaped cork, which had acquired the texture of hard wood with age.
“Two bottles among four of us. Quite an orgy! But we’ll see better than that in this house this summer.”
“We can see it here and now, if you like,” said Madame Ruby promptly, pushing her empty glass toward the bottle.
Madame Suzanne gave her friend a warning look.
“Moderation in all things, Madame Ruby. Would you be an angel and go and find that fool of a Slough? And shut the rabbit up, if you can! Have you covered up the parakeets?”
Through the light buzzing of the wine in my ears, I listened to those ritual phrases, not unlike “counting-out rhymes.” I know by experience how their sound, their fatal recurrence can be like longed-for dew or a faint, neutral blessing. I know, too, that they can also fall like a branding iron on a place already seared.
But that night I was all benevolence. Pati, who was also getting fatter at Bella-Vista, waddled peacefully into the courtyard and I listened gratefully to Madame Ruby’s voice outside announcing that it was going to be fine.
As I stood up, my spectacles and my room key slipped off my knees. As they fell, Monsieur Daste’s hand reached out and caught them with such a swift, perfectly timed movement that I hardly had time to see his gesture. “Ah,” I thought. “So he’s not quite human, this climber.”
We all separated without further words like people who have the sense not to prolong the pleasures of a superficial gaiety and cordiality to the point of imprudence. Still under the spell of my optimism, I complimented Monsieur Daste on the appearance of his little wound. I did not tell him that it brought out the character, at once intelligent and uninteresting, of his face. He seemed enchanted. He bridled and passed one hand coquettishly over his ear to smooth his hair.
Lucie did not have to wake me the next morning. When she came in with the tray and the rose, I was already dressed and standing at my open french window, contemplating the fine weather.
Thirteen years ago, I did not know what spring or summer in the Midi could be. I knew nothing of that irruption, that victorious invasion of a season of serenity, of that enduring pact between warmth, color, and scent. That morning I took to longing for the sea salt on my hands and lips and to thinking of my patch of land where my picnicking workmen were drinking
vin rosé
and eating salami.
“Lucie, what beautiful weather!”
“The proper weather for the season. About time too. It’s kept us waiting long enough.”
As she arranged my breakfast and the daily rose on the table, the dark-haired maid answered me absently. I looked at her and saw that she was pale. Her pallor and a certain troubled look made her more attractive. She had put a little rouge on her beautiful mouth.
“Hello, Madame Colette!”
I answered Madame Ruby, who, dressed all in blue, with a narrow tight-fitting shirt and a beret pulled over one ear, was loading up her hampers.
My dog rushed at her, gave her her military salute, and danced around her.
“You is not want to come with me?”
“I’d love to.”
“While I do my shopping, you gives good advice to your pioneers.”
“Excellent idea!”
“You say the mason: ‘Dear friend.’ You say the man who does the roof: ‘My boy.’ You say the little painter: ‘Where is you get made the smart white blouse what suits you so well?’ You turn on the charm! Perhaps that works.”
“Ah, you know how to talk to men, Madame Ruby! Hold Pati. Just let me get a pullover and I’ll be with you.”
I went into the bathroom for a moment. When I returned, Lucie and Madame Ruby, one standing perfectly still in my room and the other stationed in the courtyard, were looking at each other across the intervening space. The maid did not turn away quickly enough to conceal from me that her eyes were full of fear, gentleness, and tears.