Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  Now what sort of a conundrum is that supposed to be? She was produced by what was that long term, parthenogenesis, she just growed, like Topsy? You know that’s not true.

  He arranged for her seat as his guest for the rest of the repertoire in which he was playing the lead. It was taken for granted she’d come backstage afterwards. Sometimes he included her in other cast gatherings ‘among people your own age’ obliquely acknowledging his own, old enough to be her father. Cool. He apparently had no children, adult or otherwise, didn’t mention any. Was he gay? Now? Does a man change sexual preference, or literally embrace both. As he played so startlingly, electric with the voltage of life the beings created only in words by Shakespeare, Strindberg, Brecht, Beckett—oh you name them from the volumes holding down the letter telling of that Saturday. ‘You seem to understand what I—we—actors absolutely risk, kill themselves, trying to reach the ultimate identity in what’s known as a character, beating ourselves down to let the creation take over. Haven’t you ever wanted to have a go, yourself? Thought about acting?’ She told: ‘I know an actuary is the absolute antithesis of all that. I don’t have the talent.’ He didn’t make some comforting effort. Didn’t encourage magnanimously, why not have a go. ‘Maybe you’re right. Nothing like the failure of an actor. It isn’t like many other kinds of failure, it doesn’t just happen inside you, it happens before an audience. Better be yourself. You’re a very interesting young woman, depths there, I don’t know if you know it—but I think you do.’

  Like every sexually attractive young woman she was experienced in the mostly pathetic drive ageing men have towards them. Some of the men are themselves attractive either because they have somehow kept the promise of vigour, mouths with their own teeth, tight muscular buttocks in their jeans, no jowls, fine eyes that have seen much to impart, or because they’re well-known, distinguished, well yes, even rich. This actor whose enduring male beauty is an attribute of his talent, he is probably more desirable than when he was a novice Marat in Peter Weiss’s play; all the roles he has taken, he’s emerged from the risk with a strongly endowed identity. Although there is no apparent reason why he should not be making the usual play towards this young woman, there’s no sign that he is doing so. She knows the moves; they are not being made.

  The attention is something else. Between them. Is this a question or a fact? They wouldn’t know, would they. The other, simple thing is he welcomes her like a breeze come in with this season abroad, in his old home town; seems to refresh him. Famous people have protégés; even if it’s that he takes, as the customary part of his multiply responsive public reception. He’s remarked, sure to be indulged, he wants to go back to an adventure, a part of the country he’d been thrilled by as a child, wants to climb there where there were great spiky plants with red candelabras—it was the wrong season, these wouldn’t be in bloom in this, his kind of season, but she’d drive him there; he took up the shy offer at once and left the cast without him for two days when the plays were not those in which he had his lead. They slipped and scrambled up the peaks he remembered and at the lodge in the evening he was recognised, took this inevitably, autographed bits of paper and quipped privately with her that he was mistaken by some for a pop star he hadn’t heard of but ought to have. His unconscious vitality invigorated people around him wherever he was. No wonder he was such an innovative director; the critics wrote that classic plays, even the standbys of Greek drama, were re-imagined as if this was the way they were meant to be and never had been before. It wasn’t in his shadow, she was: in his light. As if she were re-imagined by herself. He was wittily critical at other people’s expense and so with him she was freed to think—say—what she realised she found ponderous in those she worked with, the predictability among her set of friends she usually tolerated without stirring them up. Not that she saw much of friends at present. She was part of the cast of the backstage scene. A recruit to the family of actors in the coffee shop at lunch, privy to their gossip, their bantering with the actor-director who drew so much from them, roused their eager talent. The regular Charlie dinners with her father, often postponed, were subdued, he caught this from her; there wasn’t much for them to talk about. Unless she were to want to show off her new associations.

  The old impulse came, unwelcome, to go with him to the theatre. Suppressed. But returned. Sit with him and see the one commanding on the stage. What for? Would this resolve, she is Charlotte not Charlie.

  Buried under the weight of books, there came out—Charlie said, ‘Let’s see the play that’s had such rave reviews, I’ll get tickets.’ He didn’t demur, forgotten who Randell Harris was; might be.

  He led to the bar afterwards talking of the play with considering interest—he’d not seen Beckett for ages, it wore well, not outdated. She didn’t want to be there, she urged it was late, no, no, she didn’t want a drink, the bar was too crowded, but he persuaded gently, we won’t stay, I’m thirsty, need a beer. The leading actor was in a spatter of applause over the drinks as he moved about the salute of admiration. He talked through clusters of others and arrived.

  ‘Rendall, my father.’

  ‘Congratulations. Wonderful performance, the critics don’t exaggerate.’

  The actor—he dismissed the laudation as if he had enough of that from people who don’t understand what such an interpretation of Vladimir or Estragon involves, the (what was that word he always used) risk. ‘I didn’t feel right tonight. I was missing a beat. Charlotte, you’ve seen me do better, hey, m’darling.’ Her father picked up his glass but didn’t drink. ‘Last time I saw you was in the play set in an asylum, Laila de Morne was Charlotte Corday.’

  Her father Told.

  ‘Of course you always get chalked up in the critics’ hierarchy by how you play the classics, but I’m more fascinated by the new stuff, movement-theatre, parts I can take from zero. I’ve sat in that bathtub too many times, knifed by Charlotte Cordays . . .’ The projection of the disarmingly self-deprecating laugh.

  She spoke what she had not Told, not yet found the right time and situation to say to him. ‘Laila de Morne is my mother.’ No more to be discarded in the past tense than the performance of the de Sade asylum where she was Charlotte Corday to his Marat. ‘That’s how I was named.’ ‘Well, you’re sure not a Charlotte to carry a knife, spoil your beautiful aura with that, frighten off the men around you.’ Peaked eyebrows as if, ruefully, one of them, a trick from the actors’ repertoire contradicted by a momentary—hardly to be received—entrance of those eyes to her own, diamonds black with the intensity it was his talent to summon, a stage-prop claim made, to be at once released, at will.

  Laila was Laila.

  WHEN they were silent in the pause at a traffic light he touched the open shield of his palm to the back of her head, the unobtrusive caress used the times he was driving her to boarding school. If she was for her own reasons now differently disturbed that was not to be pried at. She was to drop him at his apartment, but when she drew up at the entrance she opened the car door at her side as he did his, and came to him in the street. He turned—what’s the matter. She moved her head: nothing. She went to him and he saw without understanding he must take her in his arms. She held him, he kissed her cheek and she pressed it against his. Nothing to do with DNA.

  alternative endings

  ASKED about how fiction writers bring their imagined characters to life, Graham Greene said writers create alternative lives for people they might have encountered, sat beside on a bus, overheard in loving or quarrelsome exchange on a beach, in a bar, grinning instead of weeping at a funeral, shouting at a political meeting (my examples).

  A writer also picks up an imagined life at some stage in the human cycle and leaves it at another. Not even a story from birth to death is decisive; what mating, by whom, brought about the entry, what consequences follow the exit—these are part of the story that hasn’t been chosen to be told. The continuity of existence has to be selectively interrupted by the sense of form which
is art. In particular, when we come to close a story, it ends This Way, that’s the writer’s choice according to what’s been revealed to the writer of the personality, the known reactions, emotions, sense of self in the individuals created. But couldn’t it have ended That Way? Might not the moment, the event, the realisation have been received differently, meant something other to the individual, that the writer didn’t think, receive intuition of. No matter how cumulative, determinative, obvious even, the situation could be, might it not find its resolution differently? This way, not that. There is choice in the unpredictability of humans; the forms of storytelling are arbitrary. There are alternative endings. I’ve tried them out, here, for myself.

  the first sense

  The senses ‘usually reckoned as five—sight, hearing,

  smell, taste, touch.’

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  HE has to make a living any way he can.

  He was a young D.Phil from Budapest—then, when they emigrated for reasons nobody here is interested in; there have been so many waves of Europeans, whites moving in on the blacks’ country. Whether this time the instance was escape from communist rule or the one that succeeded it, in Hungary, is too remote. Soon the country of adoption went through an overturn of regime of its own; victory and the different problems unvisioned that presents, preoccupied the population long programmed to see themselves only as black and white. As for professional opportunities an immigrant hopes for in a new land—what university could have been expected to appoint a professor who was fluent at academic level only in a remote language, with the ability to speak one other—German—well enough maybe to lecture where this was on the curricula of European tongues in a country that itself had a Tower of Babel: eleven official languages, after the change of regime.

  In the obligation of natal solidarity, someone of an older generation of immigrants, whose children were conceived and born in South Africa, arranged for the member of new immigration to be employed in the prosperous sons’ supermarket. Stores Department. Ferenc became Fred.

  It’s not a bad living. The pay modest; what one would expect for the working-class. He was a storeman; Stores Manager now, with a team of young black assistants careening hugely loaded trolleys about with the power of splendid muscles raised on the soccer fields. Strangely—a well-educated man would be expected to have the advantage of facility in learning a new language he hears spoken about him every day—his English has never advanced beyond the simple colloquial vocabulary of supermarket exchanges. So moving up to some level of activity, even commercial if not intellectual, commensurate with any career he would have had back where he came from, faded as a promise, a possibility. She—Zsuzsana—who had no more than schooling in a small Hungarian town, picked up the language easily; perhaps perforce, because having been taught how to sew in accordance with the strict requirements of a female role imposed by her grandmother, had turned resourcefully to dressmaking as the way to contribute to getting ends meet. She had become fluent in order to speak her clients’ language in flattery of their appearance. The child born to the couple in immigration (both felt, what better way to make claim to a new country) went to school where the language of instruction and of his playmates was English. Peter. A name chosen common to many countries, distinguishable only by differing pronunciation. The boy and his mother chattered away in English together, at home. Magyar, like Latin in churches, belonged in a special context, undertones spoken on the occasions of love-making.

  For the first years Ferenc had friends, still back there, send him newspapers. But reading, here, what was happening in Hungary, what crowds were demanding of whatever new government, what was being discussed in the endless forum of Budapest cafés became detached from the venue, abstract, without accompanying vision, awareness of familiar place. This was the reverse of looking at old photographs, recognising the place in which they were taken and having no memory of who the people were. It was Fred, driving in his Korean car across the vast suspension bridge—named for this country’s great hero, Mandela—who was suddenly crossing from Buda to Pest over the gleaming breast of the Danube, and not over the confusion of railroad tracks the hero’s bridge actually spans. Budapest. The light of the water was in his eyes, the features of faces met him. He was there for the moments of the traverse, being recognised, claimed by the façades, the detailed prospects of streets rising from the river-of-rivers. He saw. As he did not see any other place.

  His enterprising, hard-working wife had more women coming to be clothed by her than she could ‘take on’ as she said in quick-witted acquisition of their turns of phrase, their vision of themselves, their scattering of the word ‘darling’ as punctuation of what neckline, what brief scrap of skirt, there in the mirror, would ‘make the best of what I’ve got to show, darling’. They stayed for her coffee after a fitting. Unlike a man, a woman in her difference, her foreign image, is attractive to locals, doesn’t have to conform to some other norm. Her name was not translated into something less exotic. The abbreviation of Zsuzsana, ‘Zsuzsi’, by which she’d been known since childhood, sounded like the familiar ‘Susie’, common in English. An evening dress, a pants suit made by Zsuzsi caught a certain touch of European fashion flair that couldn’t be bought off the peg. She had a little assistant to iron the seams and tack the hems, a young black girl, as he had his black team of muscle to man the trolleys.

  IT was through her friendly relations with her clients that it came about.

  AS the women for whose image she sewed were inclined to take someone outside their social circle into confidences over their lives she was herself beguiled in turn to confess, with alert precaution of assuring she enjoyed the privilege of making beautiful clothes for the confidante present, that she was tired of working at home. It wasn’t what she was made for; she let it be imagined what that might be. Circumstances kept her shut away from the world. She had ‘had enough’—just as the women phrased it, for her unlikely ear alone, of their drug-addict daughter or the second husband who was more difficult than the first. The mother of that daughter was one who had no complaints about a husband, indeed proud of getting a man she believed her own qualities deserved. One of these was her willingness to help others, which her capable husband in the building industry indulged. Perhaps they were good Christians, or good Jews. His firm specialised in restoring grand neglected houses for new-rich people who aspired to the power and prestige of Old Money the image of such mansions recalled. It was easy enough for her; she had the kind idea that the personality, the appearance of Zsuzsi could go into the business of selling such houses—there was the obvious cachet of a European background, the palimpsest images of familiarity with cultured settings far above local standards. The husband introduced the charming Zsuzsi to an estate-agent friend who agreed to give her a trial once reassured that her English was fluent, even advantageously distinguished from the usual spiel of estate agents by the occasional Continental flourish—as the accent wasn’t German perhaps it was French. She looked good. Well, keep your hands to yourself. She was assigned to a section of the Agency’s upmarket territory, those old suburbs from the days of early gold-mining magnates the latest generation of wealthy whites hunted for tradition that wasn’t political, just aesthetic, not to be misinterpreted, in assertive frontage and form, as nostalgia for lost white racist supremacy. The Agency’s other upmarket activity was where the emergent black jet-set looked to take possession of fake Bauhaus and California haciendas that had been the taste of the final generation of whites in power, the deposed, many of whom had taken their money and gone to Australia or Canada where the Aborigines and the Red Indians had been effectively dealt with.

  She worked hard indeed, it seemed to him, who left for the Stores warehouse at the same time every weekday morning and returned at the same time every evening. Even longer hours than she had sat at the sewing machine, its whirrs, snipped-off stops and starts that had accompanied Sundays while he sat reading this country’s newspapers with its
particular political obsessions resultant from its history he didn’t share, scenes he couldn’t visualise, and the boy entrancedly mimed American shrieks and howls of heroes and villains he was watching on TV. There are no regular hours in the business of selling houses. Prospective buyers and sellers expect the agent to be at their disposal in the evenings and over weekends, whenever it suits the one who is in the market, so to speak. She could hardly oppose with personal inconvenience: ‘My husband is waiting for me to cook dinner’ he proposed, laughing at presumption of an agent’s life being measured against the client’s. You don’t have to be a philosopher to know immigration means accepting the conditions declared if you want to survive. He and Peter, helpful little lad, put together the meal, frying eggs or heating up the goulash she’d frozen after preparing early some morning—not often the chance for such tasks, some clients want to view houses before going to their offices, legal chambers or doctors’ consulting rooms. And it’s true that it’s a good time to take them viewing, have them come upon a fine house in the fresh light, as a face that may be destined to become familiar, owned. Late-afternoon client viewing appointments would extend into evening, particularly, she learnt and related to him, if things were going well, she could sense that the client’s interest in a particular property was rising; advantage must be taken of this by continuing discussion relaxed over a drink in some elegant hotel bar. If she arrived back from these other houses only when the meal father and son had concocted was greasy-cold, it didn’t matter: she felt the deal was done. He heated up food for her. She would smile to him, almost nervously, for acknowledgement: commission on the sale of such a prime property was going to be higher than she, without qualifications for any profession, could ever have expected to gain, any way, any place.