The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette

Author:Colette [Colette]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Things have returned to normal.

[Translated by Herma Briffault]

The Hollow Nut

Three shells like flower petals, white, nacreous, and transparent as the rosy snow that flutters down from the apple trees; two limpets, like Tonkinese hats with converging black rays on a yellow ground; something that looks like a lumpy, cartilaginous potato, inanimate but concealing a mysterious force that squirts, when it is squeezed, a crystal jet of salt water; a broken knife, a stump of pencil, a ring of blue beads, and a book of transfers soaked by the sea; a small pink handkerchief, very dirty . . . That is all. Bel-Gazou has completed the inventory of her left-hand pocket. She admires the mother-of-pearl petals, then drops them and crushes them under her espadrille. The hydraulic potato, the limpets, and the transfers earn no better fate. Bel-Gazou retains only the knife, the pencil, and the string of beads, all of which, like the handkerchief, are in constant use.

Her right-hand pocket contains fragments of that pinkish limestone that her parents, heaven knows why, name lithothamnion, when it is so simple to call it coral. “But it isn’t coral, Bel-Gazou.” Not coral? What do they know about it, poor wretches? Fragments, then, of lithothamnion, and a hollow nut, with a hole bored in it by the emerging maggot. There isn’t a single nut tree within three miles along the coast. The hollow nut, found on the beach, came there on the crest of a wave, from where? “From the other side of the world,” affirms Bel-Gazou. “And it’s very ancient, you know. You can see that by its rare wood. It’s a rosewood nut, like Mother’s little desk.”

With the nut glued to her ear, she listens. “It sings. It says: ‘Hu-u-u . . .’”

She listens, her mouth slightly open, her lifted eyebrows touching her fringe of straight hair. Standing thus motionless, and as though alienated by her preoccupation, she seems almost ageless. She stares at the familiar horizon of her holidays without seeing it. From the ruins of a thatched hut, deserted by the customs officer, Bel-Gazou’s view embraces, on her right hand the Pointe-du-Nez, yellow with lichens, streaked with the bluish purple of a belt of mussels which the low tide leaves exposed; in the center a wedge of sea, blue as new steel, thrust like an ax head into the coast. On the left, an untidy privet hedge in full bloom, whose oversweet almond scent fills the air, while the frenzied little feet of the bees destroy its flowers. The dry sea meadow runs up as far as the hut and its slope hides the shore where her parents and friends lie limply baking on the sand. Presently, the entire family will inquire of Bel-Gazou: “But where were you? Why didn’t you come down to the shore?” Bel-Gazou cannot understand this bay mania. Why the shore, always the shore, and nothing but the shore? The hut is just as interesting as that insipid sand, and there is the damp spinney, and the soapy water of the washhouse, and the field of lucerne as well as the shade of the fig tree.

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