DOROTHEA STR.AUS
37
aromatic as any perfume.
In
her painful immobility she could be con–
soled, also, by the velvety padded touch of a cat, or the soft, voluptuous
folds of an afghan. An aged great lady, a hedonist, she continued to
sport a tousled head of curls and a coquettish, frizzy
belle epoql/e
bang,
beneath which her feline glance retained all of its cunning acuteness. But
she died before
I
could behold her in actuality.
I
had her books. Most of her novels are set in Paris, the scene of her
adult life: on the stages of music halls and theaters, in the feminine world
of the demimonde. She moved among the famous writers and performers
of her day. Lover of her own sex, Colette was able
to
enjoy men as
well; in late middle age, she would claim that the flesh of her young
lover was as seductive as the downy skin of a peach.
The work that
I
chose to read and reread is a memoir of her child–
hood in the village of Saint Sauver in Provence, light-years removed
from the bohemian sophistications of Paris. The central figure is a
woman, Colette's mother, an icon garlanded with the produce of the
earth and by small country creatures: field mice, rabbits, lizards, birds, and
butterflies, the composition painted in vibrant words, bathed in the
mellow yellow light of loving recollection.
But deception is buried somewhere. Just like those puzzle picture
games from my childhood, in which a face was concealed in the foliage
of a tree, these buoyant memories mask a vein of longing and depriva–
tion. The title -
My Mother's HOl/se
-
is telltale . The home belongs to
Her: Sido (Sidonie), and the boisterous children surrounding her resem–
ble the small animals decorating the rustic goddess of the icon. As for the
father, with his wooden leg (a trophy from World War
I),
he is scarcely
more interesting
to
his daughter than an old carriage horse sequestered in
his stable library.
"I
follow her vaguely disturbed that she ISido I should be worrying
about my father .... He scarcely ever goes out, she knows perfectly
well where he is. There would have been more sense, for instance, had
she said to me 'Minet-Cherie, you're looking pale . Minet-Cherie, what's
the matter?'"
Although Sido remained an oddly elusive parent, all things existed to
worship her - the mother - the supreme invention of her daughter, the
writer Colette. Sido was more attuned to nature than to any person.
" ... Already out of sight, her voice still reached us, a brisk soprano
voice full of inflexions that trembled at the slightest emotion and pro–
claimed to all and sundry news of delicate plants, of graftings, of rain and
blossomings, like the voice of a hidden bird that foretells the weather."
Surely, the child might have wished for something more, and oca–
sionally, her need broke through the artist's pigment of idolatry, but it
