Colette: Chéri

Colette

Chéri

[Translated by Matthew Ward]

1. 
   

Chéri

“Léa! Give it to me, give me your necklace! Do you hear me, Léa? Give me your pearls!”

He moves, black and thin, back and forth across the sun-filled window. Because of the bright-pink curtains, slightly parted, he looks like a graceful demon dancing in front of a blazing fire. As he moves back into the center of the room, he turns white, dressed in silk pajamas and white babouches.

“Why won’t you give me your necklace, Léa? It looks as good on me as it does on you... at least!” He raises his hands, and around his neck he fastens a strand of pearls which iridesce and light up, radiant, next to the white silk...

At the faint snap of the clasp, the lace linens of a big bed ripple and two bare, strong arms, thin-wristed, raise two lovely, lazy hands. “Leave it alone, Chéri, you’ve played enough with that necklace.”

“Why? It amuses me... Are you afraid I’ll steal it from you?”

He had moved toward the bed, silent as a cat in his white slippers. He is a very handsome and very young man whose smooth black hair is worn like the tight cap of Pierrot. He leans his naughty chin over Léa, and the same pink spark, from the window, dances in his dark eyes, on his teeth, and on the pearls of the necklace...

The nonchalant hands draw a vague response in the air and Chéri insists, “Say it, go on! Are you afraid I’ll take it?”

“No. But if I were to offer it to you, you’re quite capable of accepting it.”

He laughs softly, to himself, turns toward the warm light, and rolls the round pearls between his fingers.

“And why not? It’s fine for a man to receive a set of studs and a tie pin, two or three pearls. But any more than that and the gift becomes a scandal. Really now... do I look ugly in a pearl necklace? Tell me.”

He pirouettes nimbly and admires himself in the mirror, opening his pajama top with both hands and revealing a smooth, muscular neck and a tight, hard chest, curved like a shield.

“Go on, say it, say I’m ugly!”

Léa, leaning on her elbow, looks at him. In the merciful half-light, she shows what a pretty fifty-year-old woman, well cared for and in good health, can show: the bright complexion, somewhat ruddy and a bit weathered, of a natural blonde, shapely, solid shoulders, and celebrated blue eyes which have kept their thick chestnut lashes. But she is now a redhead, because of her hair, which is turning gray.

She loves to chat in bed, almost invisible, while her magnificent arms and expressive hands comment on her wise words. Nearing the end of a successful career as a sedate courtesan, she is neither sad nor spiteful. She keeps the date of her birth a secret, but willingly admits, as she settles her calm gaze on Chéri, that she is approaching the age when one is permitted little comforts...

“I’m not going to say you’re ugly. In the first place, you wouldn’t believe it. But can’t you laugh without wrinkling up your nose like that? You won’t be happy until you’ve got three wrinkles at the corners of your nose, will you?”

Chéri’s handsome face suddenly freezes and he turns around to examine, with fierce closeness, the little lines marking Léa’s cheeks from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she says without getting angry. “But I’m not twenty-four years old. Take off that necklace.”

He obeys reluctantly and sulks. “I obviously wouldn’t traipse around with this trinket on my neck, but if you were to give it to me, it would make an absolutely stunning wedding present!”

“Wedding present? For whom?”

“Why, for my fiancée!”

“Your fiancée?”

Léa sits up, showing above the covers. “Your fiancée! Are you serious?”

Chéri nods his head, malicious and self-important. “I’m afraid so. The poor child’s crazy about me.”

“Is it that same little girl?...”

“Yes, the same.”

“And what about you, what do you have to say about it?”

Chéri raises his velvety eyes to the sky and opens his arms like a victim. “Take me...” Conscious of his beauty, he strikes a pose, because Léa is staring at him intently.

“You’re getting married... just like that?... You’re getting married .. Why?”

Chéri puts his finger to his lips, goes “Shhh!” mysteriously, and shrugs his shoulders. His charming liar’s face grows sad, then smiles, then goes blank—he plays with all his features like an expert mime.

“Well, there you have it… Lofty motives, my dear. The kid’s loaded. And pretty, too. And besides, the old girl—I mean my sainted mother—has spoken, and when my mother speaks... Besides... besides, what do I know?”

He leaps up, comes back down after a perfect entrechat-six, butts his way through the Persian door curtains, and disappears, shouting: “My bath—now! And send the masseuse to my dressing room, quick! I’m lunching at the old girl’s!”

“Chéri!... Listen, Chéri!”

He does not hear or else does not want to come back. Seated on the edge of the big bed, Léa thinks to herself: “What? He’s getting married? It’s impossible! The whole family’s crazy! What can his mother be thinking? Marry Chéri!”

She looks at the Persian door curtains and raises her shoulders. “Marry that?”

Léa is neither pained nor jealous. She is shocked and is slowly becoming indignant.

“I swear, people are crazy! Here’s a boy who’s... well, who’s Chéri! As far as reason goes, he’s eight years old, except that he knows pearls like an old Jewess and speaks sharply to the help—at least to mine. What need is there for him to marry, I ask you. Doesn’t he have everything he needs here, everything? A young girl... crazy about him... She’s going to give this spoiled little brat her love, as if he needs it! He’s too mean, he’s too young. It doesn’t matter to me. He can sharpen his nails on me, it doesn’t leave any marks. But a young girl... who loves him!... This one doesn’t love anything. He doesn’t know how. They don’t know how, all the other Chéris just like him... People envy me because he’s so young and so handsome, they envy me for being the nanny of one of these brainless boys, Chéri or some other one, brought up by lackeys, manicurists, and boxing instructors... Poor Chéri, people take him for a man because he has biceps. They’re going to give him a wife—a young girl... a child... Oh, they can’t do that! . . .”

Léa gives a start because Chéri has just come back, shivering and grumbling, in his bathrobe.

“You’re not getting up today? But, Léa, you’ll get so fat!”

She sizes him up and does not deign to respond.

“A young girl... a pretty, tender girl, a little dopey...”

“Is it my wedding that’s bothering you, Léa?”

She hesitates, then decides to say it: “Yes... Listen, my dear, you shouldn’t... I really wish...”

How can she say what she’s thinking? Chéri files his nails; but beneath his distracted exterior he is waiting, he is listening for...

“They’re going to make him the guardian, the support, the master,” she thinks to herself, “of a child so young and so weak. It’s terrible. She’ll think she’s marrying Prince Charming and the next day she’ll find herself face to face with an old coquette. Because really, it’s extraordinary, but of the two of us, he’s the old coquette. He’s the one who’s always scrubbing himself, plucking hairs, and sleeping with cucumber cream on his face, and not one night of lovemaking goes by for him without a good facial massage afterward! An old coquette doubling as a rich and greedy petty bourgeois, who quibbles over tips, who yells if the bathwater is too hot, and counts the number of bottles of champagne in the cellar; a fussy, idle, petty bourgeois... With me, it didn’t matter, because I’ve had so many of these naughty nurselings. I was the tree they blunted their nails on; I was the warm rug they curled up on to sleep. My God, the poor little girl! If only someone could stop it!”

Léa looks at Chéri almost with anguish—she forgets to raise the corners of her lovely, tired mouth. She makes one more effort: “Listen, child . . . I assure you, don’t get married. You mustn’t get married...”

It is exactly what Chéri was waiting for. He bursts out laughing and shakes Léa by the shoulders, with insulting hilarity.

“Aha! You jealous...” he shouts at her.

2.

The Return

Half past midnight. Léa closes her book and thinks that it is time to sleep. She marks her place with a postcard from Chéri, which arrived the day before, in which he concisely expresses the boredom of being married. “I’ve had it! I’ve had it!”

Tomorrow she will file the card away with Chéri’s other letters: a dozen telegrams, a few pneumatiques, two or three notes scribbled on hotel stationery... The telegrams composed pidgin-style, without needless tenderness or niceties: Chéri, like nearly all children of the rich, knows perfectly well that they cost by the word. His letters have a singular tone to them, sometimes that of one schoolboy to another, sometimes that of a child to an old and very dear nanny: “My darling Nounoune...” Léa smiles, thinking about it.

“Poor thing... He was so used to me... What an orphanage that must be, him and his child bride!” She relaxes and reminisces, alone in her big bedroom of which, though it is somewhat démodé, she is quite fond. An elegant and tractable young woman up on the style of the day would like it to be more airy, with fewer cushions and fewer crimson curtains, but Léa holds on to her knickknacks and her big, heavy bed, made entirely of chased brass, which shines in the dark like a suit of armor.

The lace bed linen and the sheets heavy with embroidery also give away Léa’s age, her fifty wise years, her bourgeois taste for fine, long-lasting linen. This sturdy luxury sits well on Léa, enthroned in its midst, plump and healthy, adorned only with cool, clean lawn, not the least tempted by the frills of soubrettes and the little bonnets described as “young-looking.”

She looks approvingly at the order which reigns in the room: “It’s easy to see that Chéri doesn’t come around anymore,” she thinks.

A serious ring of the bell in the courtyard gives her a start. She has just enough time to make out the sound of muffled footsteps and whispers; the door is pushed open roughly.

“It’s me,” says an angry voice. There is Chéri standing under the chandelier. The overhead light chisels his high cheekbones and grazes his feminine chin. He knits his eyebrows over his eyes, which are too dark to be seen.

Léa does not cry out. She sits on the edge of the bed and, with instinctive modesty, merely arranges the short braids she has fixed her hair for the night.

“I was afraid it was you,” she says at last.

He looks thinner to her, he seems even more surly. He is wearing a suit beneath his open overcoat; his hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers, and with his tousled hair and rumpled shirt he resembles a drunken best man.

“What do you want, my dear? Where did you come from? This is no way to make an entrance,” she observes calmly.

He takes two or three sharp breaths and lets his stiff, raised shoulders fall, as if beginning to melt in the warmth of the room; he smiles vaguely, letting his extreme youthfulness show on his face, and sighs softly.

“Hello...”

“Hello...” says Léa in the same tone. “So, what brings you here? Has something happened? Where are you coming from?”

“From my wife’s, of course.”

He says “my wife’s” awkwardly, with excessive vanity in his voice.

“It’s late to be going out,” remarks Léa discreetly.

“And it’s too late to go back there!” shouts Chéri. “That’s one place you’ll never see me again!”

He throws off his overcoat as if ready to fight and falls dumbstruck into an armchair near the bed. “You know, Léa, I... don’t you...” He says nothing more and shakes his head, sulking.

“Of course I know,” says Léa indulgently.

She leans over and runs her hand over his tousled head, enhancing its disorder and his anger. She knows very well that Chéri does not speak easily and that he does not take great pains in choosing his words. She also knows that what he has to tell her could be summed up in three phrases: it is the story of his four months of marriage and travel in close quarters with a little girl, young like himself, rich like himself, and who perhaps resembles Chéri like one half-tame colt resembles another...

Under the familiar caress, Chéri leans his head back, closes his eyes, and his nostrils flare as if he was on the verge of crying.

“Nounoune...” he whispers despite himself.

He fights back his tears with the spiteful pride of a child, and Léa helps calm him. “There, there, Chéri.”

Until his magnificent, moist eyes open again with a burst of laughter. “Can you imagine the look on their faces?”

“Whose?”

“Why, Mama’s! This’ll give the old girl a shock! And everybody else, too!”

“And... your wife?”

“Oh, this’ll be the last straw for her!”

Léa shakes her head angrily. “But will she be upset?”

Chéri jumps furiously to his feet. “Upset? Of course she’ll be upset! That’s all she ever is—upset! For the last four months...”

He tears off his jacket and tie, which he throws on the dressing table. “You don’t know what kind of life I’ve been living for the last four months! A child like that who isn’t even twenty-one years old! Who doesn’t know anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t understand anything! She’s bored, she’s afraid to be alone, she cries if I say anything, she hides under the table if I yell... I’m not a nursemaid!”

“Neither is she, unfortunately,” thinks Léa.

“So, you see, it’s not working out for me. And then always hanging on me, despite all that, saying I’m handsome and that she loves me! Do I even know her? I’m telling you, I’ve had it! Up to here!”

He kneels down beside the bed and rolls his head in the cool sheets. Seeing him, one would think it was the return of a smitten lover. But Léa does not fool herself. She understands the mysterious power of habit; she understands even better Chéri’s closed heart, hard and belated like the buds of the oak . . . He had smiled at the fragrant bedroom; he had fallen, relieved, into the familiar armchair. A caress that was not in the least passionate had nearly opened the floodgates of his egotistical tears; what he longs for now is the bed in which he slept the long sleeps of his adolescence. But he had not yet kissed either Léa’s hand or her face... He does not give a thought to the suffering of an abandoned child.

Pensively Léa brushes Chéri’s clear cheek and his handsome, thankless forehead with the tips of her fingers. “Chéri...”

He groans lazily. “What?”

“You can’t stay here, you know. You have to go back...”

He opens terrible, dark eyes. “Go back? You must be kidding! I’d rather die! I’m through with being married! Get me out of it, if you can!”

He has wrapped his strong arms around her... Léa shrugs her shoulders, powerless...

“Send Chéri back? Where he go? He doesn’t understand yet that the one waiting there for him is a woman...” He is too young, this child hanging on to his old friend, trying to heal a sickly love bruised by its own emergence... “Well, too bad, I’m keeping him!” Léa decides with calm fatalism. “Worse things could happen... Let him stay—in the meantime.”

And loosening Chéri’s grip, she makes a place for him in the hollow of her comforting side like a mother animal.

3.

The Pearls

“We’ll have the coffee in the lounge, won’t we, Chéri?”

“Of course.”

“And Turkish coffee, like yesterday?”

“Of course.”

“You’re so sweet here. You have a delightful disposition when you travel.”

“Yes, but I don’t want anyone telling me I do. It immediately makes me want to start acting up.”

He laughs and his laughter arouses in his handsome face the ferocity of a wolf cub. His perfect mouth is nearly innocent of smiling; after brief outbursts of a stinging joke, it closes back up like a sullen flower. But today Chéri, languid and subdued, laughs lazily, turned toward the garden, which is blue with shadows and greenery.

Léa gazes at her young friend and admires him without servility or bitterness.

“You’ve never looked better than you have since we arrived in Tunis. What a face! And your eyes! Exactly like the eyes of the women here! You wouldn’t happen to be part Tunisian by any chance?”

Blasé, Chéri does not deign to look at her with his dark eyes; but with a finger moist with saliva he shines his thrilling lashes and his gleaming eyebrows like plumage. They both fall silent, like satisfied lovers with nothing left to say to each other, like old friends resting together. A simple white dress and a white hat brighten Léa’s healthy complexion and are not intended to make it look younger. With her beautiful, solid shoulders, her tranquil blue eyes, and without the dye in her hair, she might be taken for a very agreeable mother accompanying her son…

No one looks at them all that much at the Arabian Palace. In Paris they have been forgotten, and in any case, their running off together did not cause a big to-do. Chéri’s attempt at marriage was so brief—four months!—he had barely had time to leave his more mature friend for his young wife. And he has come back to her with the rage of a deceived child, impatient to rediscover in her, by turns obliging, calm, indifferent, and good, what for him takes the place of love. She took him back, peevish and wheedling, she looked after the ill-tempered, detestable little king, and they began living together again.

As before, he insults her, he strokes her naggingly; as before, she lets him play and destroy all around her with an indulgent disdain which dwarfs him. He wields a powerless spite against her. When he feels like shouting at her, “The least you could do is cry! That other one cries, that little girl I abandoned cries!” Léa smiles, strokes Chéri’s forehead, and says only, “Poor baby.”

Humiliated, bristling, he sometimes bites the appeasing hand, then little by little loosens his bite and stays there, eyes shut, lips closed around the skin he has bitten, as if slaking his thirst for her…

They came to Tunis as innocents, expecting to find on the other side of the sea a land without winter, a city with the whiteness of sugar, crisscrossed with blue shadows. With the first disappointment behind them, they gave in to their idleness, the one as unadventurous as the other, both incapable of any lasting curiosity but amused by a passing burnous or a veil worked with gold, and imagining that the entire Orient fits into a Jew’s stall cluttered with rolled carpets and big silver jewelry.

Within a week this rather singular couple of lovers reverts to a Parisian use of time, mundane and inflexible. Before lunch, a stroll through the souks where Chéri fingers the gandurahs, the Bokharan embroidery. Léa takes her time picking out antique rugs, with a short pile, those whose red threads, worn with light, pale to a silvery pink. They make their way slowly toward the hotel and Chéri turns to look at the passing veiled women, sees his dark eyes in theirs, dark and magnificent like his.

After lunch, after the quiet hour of Turkish coffee and cigarettes, the car takes Léa and Chéri outside the city; they are going to Carthage for tea, or to some other Turkish café in Sidi-bou-Said, it being too far to the Pre-Catelan or the pavilion at Bellevue.

They can look at the mountains without their souls rushing toward the white sand, toward the desert they conceal; they can walk along the green and white sea without their hearts filling like a sail. Léa, growing older and wiser, has lost forever the thrill of travel, and Chéri, young, ardent, robust, carries with him, in him, something convalescent, belated, languid...

“It will be hard for you to go back to being married,” says Léa, shaking her head.

They are alone in the hall, and Chéri can stretch out on the rattan chaise lounge. He inhales deeply the delicious aroma of the Turkish coffee prepared for him in a corner of the hall on the glowing coals of a tiny brazier. Léa leafs through the illustrated magazines and affectionately oversees the dozing Chéri, whose beautiful eyelashes flutter, heavy with sleep... Suddenly he opens his eyes with a start.

“Nounoune!”

Léa gets up, accustomed to the trepidation of a child wakened by a bad dream. “There, there... Sleep, I’m right here next to you.”

He rests his neck back down on the cushions, but his hand hangs on to the long strand of pearls that encircles Léa’s neck three times before descending to her knees. Half asleep he plays with the luminous beads, whose slightest imperfections are detected by his sensitive fingers. He likes their roundness, their vibrant warmth, their soapy softness...

His heavy, thoughtless gaze moves from his friend to the bright bay window opening onto a garden of palm and orange trees. A dry hand, the color of toasted bread, has just set down on the low table two steaming cups, white and transparent like two halves of an eggshell. Onto the cushions next to Chéri, another hand, this one a black purple color, slips a bouquet of moist white carnations, which gives off the active fragrance of pepper and vanilla...

Chéri smiles with contentment and fingers the pearls as if saying the rosary. Each one harbors beneath its silky skin the glinting, veiled colors of an elusive rainbow. This one is the most beautiful... But this one is even more beautiful. And higher up those lying on the full, somewhat heavy breast... Oh, those... But the biggest, the purest, are wound into a triple strand around Léa’s neck. It is on this neck that Chéri’s eyes settle, fixed, as if he were seeing it for the first time. His friend is reading, seated, her head tilted forward. Under her chin she has two folds of slightly yellow skin and her neck is covered with loose skin, also yellow, more yellow because of the pearls, and grainy below the ear... “The skin of an old hen,” thinks Chéri fiercely. He cannot take his eyes off the neck or the pearls. He can sense an image, a memory taking shape, coming to him, still hazy, from the depths of his indolent memory. He suffers vaguely; something grows within him painfully. He would like to turn his eyes away or close them. This withered skin, these pearls... “What is it?” he asks himself impatiently.

His eyelids close suddenly and his entire body relaxes, as if allowed to rest. The dread image is coming to life, and in place of Léa’s neck, in place of the triple, iridescent chain, Chéri can see a young, amber-colored neck, smooth, bent in sadness, adorned with a thin strand of pearls. And the nape of the neck, the necklace, the soft cascading hair, undone, all shudder to the rhythms of impassioned sobs...

The image, the whispering of the sobs accompany Chéri, descend with him to sleep, where a dream timid with tenderness and remorse sketches itself out, a dream in which his hand, protective for the first time, touches the necklace it has fastened there, on the silky young neck, the thin necklace of tiny little pearls...