The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette Read Free Book Online

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