Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  After the meal with her at Ginnie’s or Ba’s house, one of them, her daughters or their husbands, insisted on a sense of reality by bringing up the subject; the only subject. How did things stand now? Was there any exchange of ideas, say, about the future, going on between him and her?

  Her lawyer had met him and an allowance for her had been arranged; there were other matters to be cleared up. Possessions. These were not specified, as if it had nothing to do with anyone but herself. It was Carl who was able to say, out of his privileged innocence close to nature’s organic cycles of change and renewal, Maybe your absence will be the right thing. For both of you. When you come back you may find you can work things out again together.

  She looked at him half-pityingly, for his concern.

  Things are worked out. It was his work.

  And she turned away as of her right to grandmotherly talk with Ginnie’s small boy, for whom she had brought a model jeep, and then to a low exchange in intimate tone with her favourite, the elder of the two teenage daughters, who happened to be at home in the family that evening. No boyfriends around tonight? Usually when I come at the weekend I hear a lot of music and laughing going on upstairs. Helen’s friends, the girl says. And not yours, not your type—I understand. What’s your type … all right, the one, then—I have a pretty good idea of what would interest you, you know.

  And the girl lies, describing the non-existent one as she thinks an adult would wish him to be.

  When the mother-grandmother had left, Ginnie’s husband Alister told them: Isabel thinks we’re on his side, that’s the problem.

  Why should we be.—Nobody takes up Ba’s statement.

  May he survive.

  Best of all. Early in the morning some days to wake at the sound of the key turning in the lock; her key. Hear it but not sufficiently awake to open eyes; and there’s a cold fresh cheek laid against the unshaven one. She’s left her apartment before seven to deliver the child to nursery school and after, she’s suddenly here. Yesterday. Heard her shoes drop and opened eyes to follow her clothes to the floor. She glides into bed, the cheek is still cold and the rest of her is her special warmth. Not today: waiting for the key to turn. Tomorrow. Again it will turn. Again and again.

  They broach to one another the obligation—the usefulness, perhaps—of inviting him to bring her along some time. Sunday lunch? No, too familial a gesture, and Ba and Carl would not be there, why should Ginnie and Alister deal with this on their own, you can’t count on Jamie. Come by for a drink sixish, that would do. What’s she like—look like? The two men want to know in advance—after all, they are the father’s fellow males—what to expect in order to put themselves in his place. But the splash of stage lights drops a mask on faces, there were cavehollows of eyes, white cheeks, bright mouth. It was the hands in movement by which an identity was followed.

  The man who brings her to Ginnie’s house is another personage: their father? He who always listened, talks. Although this is not his home, he is not the host, he rises to refill glasses and offer snacks. He is courting her, in front of them, they see it! Their mother is much better-looking; still beautiful; this one has a long, thin, voracious face, the light did not exaggerate its hollows, and her intelligently narrowed eyes—hazel? greenish? doesn’t matter—are iconised by makeup in the style of Egyptian statues. She’s chosen a loose but clinging tunic and the sisters see that she has firm breasts. When they compare impressions afterwards it seems it was the women who noted this rather than, as they would have thought, the men. Her hands are unadorned (the mother has had gifts of beautiful rings from him, over the years) and lie half-curled, the palms half-open on chair-arm or lap; it’s as if the hands’ lack of tension is meant to put them at ease, these hands that make music. And pleasure their father. She has a voice with what the women suspect as an adopted huskiness they believe men find attractive. It turns out no-one of the men—Jamie was present—noticed it either as an affectation or an attraction he might have responded to.

  The talk was quite animated and completely artificial; they were all other people; chatting about nothing that mattered to whom and what they really were. There are so many harmless subjects, you can really get along in any situation by sticking to what has been in the newspapers and on television about the floods/drought, the times of day to avoid driving in traffic congestion (keep off wars and politics, both local and international, those are intimate subjects), and, of course about music. It is the lover who brings that up; Ginnie and Ba would have preferred to keep off that, too. She might somehow sense how their eyes had been upon her while she played … He even boasts about her: Alicia will go with the orchestra to an international music festival in Montreal in the winter, and it will be particularly enjoyable for her because Alicia also speaks fluent French. He might be—ought to be—boring someone with the achievements of his seventeen-year-old grand-daughter, Ginnie’s eldest child. Ginnie’s biological after-thought, four-year-old Shaun, had been playing with his jeep around everyone’s feet. When the father and his woman were leaving, she bent to the child: I’ve got a little boy like you, you know. He has a collection of cars but I don’t think he has a jeep, yours’s great.

  They are not embarrassed about anything, these lovers.

  The new father of some other man’s progeny makes a pledge for the rainbow child. We’ll have to find one for him. Where did you get it?

  Shaun asserts the presence not admitted to the drinks party. My grandmother did bring it for me.

  A curious—almost shaming—moment comes to the siblings and husbands when they suddenly laugh about the whole business—mother, father, the woman. It begins to happen when they get together—less and less frequently—dutifully to try and decide yet again what they ought to be doing about it. The outbreak’s akin to the hysterical giggle that sometimes accompanies tearful frustration. What can you do about Papa in his bemused state, and oh my God, next thing is he’ll get her pregnant, he’ll be Daddy all over again. No no no—spare us that! What do you mean no—presumably that’s what it’s all about, his pride in an old man’s intact male prowess! And Alister in an aside to Jamie—Apparently he’s still able to get it up—right on, as you would say—and they all lose control again. What is there to do with the mother who is unapproachable, wants to be left alone like a sulky teenager, and a father who’s broken loose like a youth sowing wild oats? Who could ever do anything with people in such conditions? Ah—but these are mature people! So nobody knows what maturity is, after all? Is that it? Not any longer, not any more, now that the mother and father have taken away that certainty from their sons and daughters. Matthew calls and sends e-mail from his safe distance, reproaching, What is the matter with all of you? Why can’t you get some reality into them, bring them together for what’s left after their forty-two years? How else can this end?

  Well, the mother seems to be making an extended holiday-of-a-lifetime out of the situation, and he, he’s out of reach (spaced out: Jamie) dancing to a fiddle. Shaking their heads with laughter; that dies in exasperation. There’s nothing you can do with the parents.

  Only fear for them. Ba’s tears are not of laughter.

  At least adolescents grow up; that could have been counted on to solve most of the general trouble they’d given. In the circumstances of parents it seems there isn’t anything to be counted on, least of all the much-vaunted wisdom of old age. The mother wrote a long round-robin letter (copy to each sibling, just a different name after ‘Dearest’) telling that she was going to Matthew in Australia. So Mauritius had been halfway there, halfway from her rightful home, all along, in more than its geographical position across the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia. She would ‘keep house’ in Matthew’s bachelor apartment while she looked for a new place of her own, with space enough for them to come and visit her. Send the grandchildren.

  Alicia Parks, second violinist, did not return from Montreal. He continued to exchange letters and calls with her over many months. The family gat
hered this when he gave them news of her successes with the orchestra on tour, as if whether this was of interest or welcome to them or not, they must recognise her as an extension of his life—and therefore theirs. They, it obviously implied, could make up their minds about that.

  What he did not tell them was that she had left the orchestra at the invitation to join a Montreal chamber group. As first violinist: an ambition he knew she had and he wanted to see fulfilled for her. But Canada. She had taken into consideration (that was her phrase) that there were not many such opportunities for her back in Africa.

  With him. In his long late-night calls to her he completed, to himself, what she didn’t say.

  She sent for her child; told him only after the child had left the country. Then she did not tell him that she was with someone other than her child, a new man, but he knew from her voice.

  Ginnie came out with it to their father. Is she coming back?

  When she gets suitable engagements here, of course. She’s made a position for herself in the world of music.

  So he’s waiting for her, they decided, poor man. Why can’t he accept it’s over, inevitably, put the whole thing behind him, come back to ageing as a father, there’s a dignified alternative to this disastrous regression to adolescence.

  May he survive.

  Together and individually, they are determined in pursuit of him.

  The best was the cold cheek. Just that. What alternative to that.

  In the mirror in the bathroom, there was her body as she dried herself after the love-making bath together, towelling between her spread legs, and then across the back of her neck as beautifully as she bowed across the violin, steam sending trickles of her hair over her forehead. A mirror full of her. For me, old lover she knew how to love so well, so well, her old lover sixty-seven. What alternative.

  Death is a blank mirror, emptied of all it has seen and shown.

  Death waits, was waiting, but I took the plane to Cape Town, instead.

  L, U, C, I, E.

  My name’s Lucie—no, not with a ‘y’. I’ve been correcting that all my life, ever since my name was no longer vocables I heard and responded to like a little domestic animal (here, puss, puss) and I learnt to draw these tones and half-tones as a series of outlines: L, U, C, I, E. This insistence has nothing to do with identity. The so-called search for identity bores me. I know who I am. You know well enough who you are: every ridge in a toe-nail, every thought you keep private, every opinion you express is your form of life and your responsibility. I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation. It’s a habit, my pedantry; as a matter of fact, in this instance simply perpetuates another orthographic inaccuracy: I’m named for my father’s Italian grandmother, and the correct Italian form of the name is Lucia. This had no significance for me until I saw her name on her tomb: LUCIE.

  I’ve just been on holiday in Italy with my father. My mother died a few months ago; it was one of those journeys taken after the death of a wife when the male who has survived sees the daughter as the clone woman who, taken out of present time and place to the past and another country, will protect him from the proximity of death and restore him to the domain of life. (I only hope my father has understood that this was one-off, temporary, a gift from me.) I let him believe it was the other way round: he was restoring something to me by taking me to the village where, for him, I had my origin. He spent the first five years of his life dumped by poor parents in the care of that grandmother, and although he then emigrated to Africa with them and never returned, his attachment to her seems never to have been replaced. By his mother, or anyone else; long after, hers was the name he gave to his daughter.

  He has been to Europe so many times—with my mother, almost every year.

  ‘Why haven’t you come here before?’ I asked him. We were sitting in a sloping meadow on what used to be the family farm of his grandmother and her maiden sisters. The old farmhouse where he spent the years the Jesuits believe definitive had been sold, renovated with the pink and green terrace tiles, curly-cue iron railings and urns of red geraniums favoured by successful artisans from the new industrial development that had come up close to the village. The house was behind us; we could forget it, he could forget its usurpation. A mulberry tree shaded the meadow like a straw hat. As the sun moved, so did the cast of its brim. He didn’t answer; a sudden volley of shooting did—stuttering back and forth from the hills in cracking echoes through the peace where my question drifted with the evaporating moisture of grass.

  The army had a shooting range up there hidden in the chestnut forests, that was all; like a passing plane rucking the fabric of perfect silence, the shots brought all that shatters continuity in life, the violence of emotions, the trajectories of demands and contests of will. My mother wanted to go to art galleries and theatres in great European cities, he was gratified to be invited to speak at conferences in Hong Kong and Toronto, there were wars and the private wars of cartels and, for all I know, love affairs—all that kept him away. He held this self hidden from me, as parents do in order to retain what they consider a suitable image before their children. Now he wanted to let me into his life, to confirm it, as if I had been a familiar all along.

  We stayed in the only albergo in the village and ate our meals in a dark bar beneath the mounted heads of stag and mountain goats. The mother of the proprietor was brought to see my father, whom she claimed to remember as a small child. She sniffled, of course, recollecting the three sisters who were the last of a family who had been part of the village so long that—that what? My father was translating for me, but hesitantly, not much is left of his Italian. So long that his grandmother’s mother had bred silkworms, feeding them on mulberry leaves from her own trees, and spinning silk as part of the home industry which existed in the region before silk from the Orient took away the market. The church square where he vividly remembered playing was still there and the nuns still ran an infant school where he thought he might have been enrolled for a few months. Perhaps he was unhappy at the school and so now could not picture himself entering that blue door, before us where we sat on a bench beside the church. The energy of roaring motorcycles carrying young workers in brilliantly studded and sequinned windbreakers to the footwear and automobile parts factories ripped his voice away as he told me of the games drawn with a stick in the dust, the cold bliss of kicking snow about, and the hot flat bread sprinkled with oil and salt the children would eat as a morning snack. Somewhere buried in him was a blue-pearl, translucent light of candles that distorted ‘like water’ he said, some figures that were not real people. In the church, whose bells rang the hours tremulously from hill to hill, there were only the scratched tracings of effaced murals; he thought the image must have come from some great event in his babyhood, probably the local saint’s day visit to a shrine in a neighbouring town.

  We drove there and entered the chapels along the sides of a huge airport-concourse of a basilica—my mother was not a Catholic and this analogy comes to me naturally out of my experience only of secular spaces. There were cruel and mournful oil paintings behind the liquid gouts of votive candlelight; he dropped some coins in the box provided but did not take a candle, I don’t know whether the dingy representation of the present snuffed out his radiant image or whether his image transformed it for him. We had strong coffee and cakes named for the shrine, in an arcade of delicious-smelling cafés opposite. He had not tasted those cakes for fifty-eight years, since Lucie bought them as a treat; we had found the right context for the candles that had kept alight inside him all that time. The cafés were filled with voluble old men, arguing and gesticulating with evident pleasure. They were darkly unshaven and wore snappy hats. I said: ‘If you’d stayed, you’d be one of them’ and I didn’t know whether I’d meant it maliciously or because I was beguiled by the breath of vanilla and cof
fee into the fascination of those who have a past to discover.

  At night he drank grappa in the bar with the proprietor and picked up what he could of the arguments of village cronies and young bloods over the merits of football teams, while the TV babbled on as an ignored attraction. These grandchildren of the patriarchs blew in on a splendid gust created by the sudden arrest of speed as they cut the engines of their motorcycles. They disarrayed themselves, flourishing aside tinsel-enamelled or purple-luminous helmets and shaking out haloes of stiff curls and falls of blond-streaked locks. They teased the old men, who seemed to tolerate this indulgently, grinningly, as a nostalgic resurrection of their own, if different, wild days.

  No women came to the bar. Up in my room each night, I leant out of my window before bed; I didn’t know how long I stayed like that, glitteringly bathed in the vast mist that drowned the entire valley between the window and the dark rope of the Alps’ foothills from which it was suspended, until the church clock—a gong struck—sent waves layering through the mist that I had the impression I could see undulating silvery, but which I was feeling, instead, reverberating through my rib-cage. There was nothing to see, nothing. Yet there was the tingling perception, neither aural nor visual, that overwhelms in the swoon before an anaesthetic whips away consciousness. The night before we went to the cemetery, I was quite drunk with it. The reflection of the moon seeped through the endless insubstantial surface, silence inundated this place he had brought me to; the village existed out there no more than it had ever done for me when I had never sat in its square, never eaten under the glass eyes of timid beasts killed in its chestnut forests and mountains, or sat in the shade of its surviving mulberry tree.