Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  —I promised.—She was deeply tempted, since this man had not proved never to be met again, to place something else before him as she had five minutes in the Rue de la Harpe.—I undertook to have a holiday. Like everybody else.—Her manner was teasing.

  —We’ll come tomorrow.—He spoke as if they had agreed to shelve some decision.—Does she open in the middle of the day? About twelve.—On the way out he returned to the old singer and kissed her hand. There was another flurry between the two.—She wants to open a bottle of champagne. Her boys would be jealous, êh, she obviously didn’t stand them a Quatorze Juillet celebration. I told her, tomorrow.—As the girl’s head preceded him into the street he was at once pleading and strict.—I’ll be waiting here.—

  There were times when she was there before him. He began to make it a rule that he got up early enough to have worked three hours before he appeared for her through Arnys’ tabernacle-shaped doors with the panes of syrupy amber blistered glass at the top. They opened inwards and usually only for him; hardly anyone came in the mornings. Pépé or Toni or Jacques—whichever had happened to take the keys for Arnys when the bar closed at four or five in the morning—prowled listlessly between the hole of a kitchen, the restaurant alcove smelling of corks swollen with wine and corners where the Maltese had leaked into the sawdust, and the espresso machine set gargling and spitting into cup after cup taken up with dirtied, delicate, trembling ringed hands. The self-absorption of the young homosexual was strangely restful. He would drink the coffee as if it were the source of existence, smoke as if what he drew into his lungs and elaborately expelled through mouth and nostrils was a swilling-out with pure oxygen; reviving, his closed face marked by sleep and caresses like a child’s by forgotten tears and a creased pillow would change and flicker with what was passing in his mind. Now and then he would give the bar counter a half-moon swipe. In the presence of a creature so contained, Rosa came to awareness of her own being like the rising tick of a clock in an empty room. She had a newspaper, or a book she and Bernard were exchanging, but she didn’t read. The huge wooden screws of the olive press, the mirror wall behind the bar, the photographs whose signatures were a performance in themselves, the green satin that covered the walls of the alcove, held in place where it was coming loose by the pinned card, Ouvert jusqu’à l’aube; the china fish with pencils in its mouth, the bottles of Suze, Teacher’s, Ricard, Red Heart, ranged upside-down like the pipes of an organ, the TV on the old rattan table facing the kitchen at the whim of whoever currently was cook, so that he could be seen in the evenings, cutting or chopping or beating while he watched; the ribbons saved from chocolates or flowers curled like wood-shavings among the bill-spikes on Arnys’ roll-top desk: in a state exactly the reverse of that of the young homosexual, all these were strongly the objects of Rosa’s present. She inhabited it completely as everything in place around her, there and then. In the bar where she had sat seeing others living in the mirror, there was no threshold between her reflection and herself. The pillars she had noticed only as a curiosity she read over like a score, each nick and groove and knot sustaining the harmony and equilibrium of the time-space before the door pushed inwards.

  —You choose something you hope someone else isn’t writing about already. That’s the extent of the originality—The irony was not unforgiving, of himself or others. He held her innocent of the pettiness of Europe. He took her hand a moment, in her lap.—I also wanted to give myself time.—He pulled a comic, culpable face. —If you are too topical, the interest will have passed on to something else before you’ve finished. And if it’s something purely scholarly, well, unless you are a great savant...what will I contribute... ? No one will take the slightest notice. But the influence of former French colonists who’ve come back to France since the colonial empire ended—I haven’t got a working title yet—that’s something that will go on for years. I don’t have to worry. At first I thought I would do something about the decline of Ladnity—in fact I’ve given a few little talks on the radio...—

  —To do with linguistics ?—

  —No, no—the decline of the Latin source of the French temperament, ideas and so on—I don’t know, it sounds a lot of shit? You know it’s true the life of the French becomes directed more and more by Anglo-Saxon and American concepts... It’s tied up with the Common Market, OTAN...god knows what else. If you want to be fancy you can compare it with the destruction of the ancient culture that fllourished in southern France and Catalonia in the Middle Ages, the civilisation occitane : instinctive, imaginative, self-renewing qualities losing out to sterile technological and military ones. But I don’t much like it. What d‘you think ? Too nationalistic. And it leaves out of reckoning Descartes, Voltaire... Where does that kind of thing end ? But of course I make a big fuss like everybody else when I see old bistrots like this disappearing and being replaced by drug-store bars, and markets pulled down for supermarkets... oh on that level... Enfin—when I was playing with the Latinity idea, I spent some time around Montpellier, in the Languedoc (the region’s named after the language of that civilization—the tongue they spoke was called the langue d’oc...‘oc’ simply means ‘yes’, that’s all...). And of course I was also in Provence. Provençal isn’t just a dialect, you know—it’s one of the langues d‘oc. Not much more than a remnant; oh there still are attempts at publishing works in it, but the great Provençal revival took place in the last century—Frédéric Mistral, the poet—you’ve heard of him ?—yes. Well then I found I was beginning to think about something different, though in a way...related, because migrations, social change...I began to think about the pied noir concentrated in Provence, here on the coast particularly, and what effect their mentality is having on modern French culture. Part of the consequences of colonialism and all that. Ouf—He had gestures estimating how little all this was worth in the intellectual market. But he was practical.—They’ve come back—some after generations in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco. What gives the idea an interesting nuance, most of them came from this part of the world—their families, originally; southern France, Corsica, Spain. It even relates a bit to the old Latinity business: they have in their blood somewhere the qualities of the ancient cultures, the temperament, but they now bring back to France from her imperialist period the particular values and mores colonizers develop. The locust people. Descend on the land, eat the crop, and be ready to fly when the enslaved population comes after you... Anyway, there are hundreds of thousands back here and they’re very successful. That ancient spontaneousness, capacity for improvisation, alive in their veins? Maybe. A million unemployed in France this summer, but I don’t think you’ll find one among them. Many have their money in Monaco—tax reasons. I’ve been to talk to some people...d’you know that 2 per cent of the population there is pied noir... Not a bad subject, êh. It’s just controversial enough.—

  —Why must it be a thesis ? It would make a good book.—

  —Rosa. Rosa Burger.—He leaned back, elbow on the bar, picked up the china fish and put it down again.

  —Oh the style of a thesis—the long-winded footnotes. What you want to say gets buried.—

  —I’m a schoolteacher. If I don’t get a Ph. D. I won’t get a job at a university. We have it all worked out—such-and-such a number of francs against such-and-such at the lycée. We can buy a piece of land in Limousin or Bretagne. In so many years build a small country house. To take a chance on a book—you have to be poor, you have to be alone, you can’t have middle-class standards.—He caught her by the wrist, persuasively, smiling, as if to make fall a weapon he imagined in her fist.—You don’t know how careful we are, we French Leftist bourgeoisie. So much set aside every month, no possibility of living dangerously.—

  She was considering and curious.—Who need live dangerously, in Europe ?—

  —Oh there are some. But not the Eurocommunists... Not the Left that votes. Terrorists holding one country to ransom for horrors happening in another. Hijackers. People who push drugs. No one else.
—

  —One of the people you thought I was.—

  —I know who you are.—The third time they met he returned with this discovery. He did not so much mean that someone had told him, as one of Madame Bagnelli’s friends no doubt had: her father was on the side of the blacks, out there—he was imprisoned, killed or something—a terrible story. Bernard Chabalier was among the signatures of academics and journalists that filled sheets headed by Sartre, de Beauvoir and Yves Montand on petitions for the release of political prisoners in Spain, Chile, Iran, and on manifestos protesting the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and censorship in Argentina. He had once signed an Amnesty International petition for the release of an ageing and ill South African revolutionary leader, Lionel Burger. ‘At a time’ (it was an expression he used often, not quite English, and somehow thereby more tentative than in its correct form) there had been a suggestion he should be on the anti-apartheid committee in Paris. He had spoken a short introduction to a film made clandestinely by blacks showing the bulldozing of their houses in mass removals. The facts came from the black exiles who were hawking the film around Europe; his ability to communicate with them in English was his primary qualification.—And I gave it as a talk on France Culture—I sometimes get asked to do things; usually the sociological consequences of political questions—that sort of programme.—

  —I’d like to hear you. If I could understand.—

  —I should talk only French to you, really...you’d improve quickly... But you’ll never say anything real to me except in English. I won’t give that up.—Before there was time to settle an interpretation, he became practical and amusing.—If I had a tape recorder here I could do an interview with you for the radio, you know. They’d buy it I’m sure. We’ll split the fee. A grand sum. What could we do with it ? Change our brand of champagne ?—They drank every day without remarking it the loving-cup of the first meeting, the same citron pressé. Pépé/Toni/Jacques prepared it each time as if he had not known what the order would be: a signal of contempt for heterosexual trysts.—We could buy two cheap tickets to Corsica. On the ferry. Vomit all the way—I am terribly seasick. I know you will not be.—A moment of gloomy jealousy.

  —I’ve never been on board a ship.—

  —But it would be good—people would hear your voice, and I would translate you (finger-tips pursed together by the drawstring of a gesture, then opening away)—im-pec-cable.—

  —I promised. I can’t speak.—

  Arnys was at her old roll-top desk as soon as she arrived; she spent the first hour of her day in meditative retreat behind three walls of minute drawers and cubby-holes : her misty spectacles hung on the little pert nose of the celebrity photographs and her hands went about spearing invoices on spikes with the brooding orderly anxiety, over money, of hardened arteries in the brain. Their voices came to her as the voices of so many who were lovers or would be lovers, whose intense abrupt interrogations and monologues of banalities too low to be made out sounded as if secret and irrevocable matters were being discussed.

  He put aside what he had said like a trinket he had been playing with.—Who was it you promised ?—

  Rosa caught the abstracted peer above the old singer’s glasses, tactfully dropped in respect for sexual privacies everyone knows from common experiences and indulges. The protection of Arnys’ unimaginable life, and the life to which the one called Pépé was at that moment connected on the phone—the pillars, the enclosed reality of the mirror—all contained her safely.—That’s how I got here. How they let me out.—

  —The police ?—The awkward respectful tone of initiative surrendered.

  —Not directly. But in effect, yes. Oh don’t worry...—Her eyes moved to smile, a parenthetic putting out of a hand to him.—I didn’t talk. I made sure I had nothing to talk about before I went to them. But I made a deal. With them.—

  —Sensible.—He defended her.

  She repeated:—With them, Bernard.—

  —You didn’t betray anybody.—

  ‘Oppress’. ‘Revolt’. ‘Betray’. He used the big words as people do without knowing what they can stand for.

  —I asked. No one I know would do that. I did what none of the others has done.—

  —What did they say ?—

  —I didn’t tell anyone. I kept away.—

  He was working well; the regulation of his days had fallen into place round the daily meetings in Arnys’ bar, hardly open for business but tolerant of certain needs. She saw in the rim of shaving-foam still wet on an earlobe that he had broken off concentration at the last minute, jumped up in the virtue of achievement to prepare himself for her. He was superstitious about acknowledging progress, but the calm elation with which he slid onto the stool beside her, or the gaiety of his exchanges with Arnys were admittance.

  —I’d like to have you there in the room. I’ve always resented having anyone in the same room while I work.—It was a declaration ; a reverie of a new relationship. But he refused himself.—I’ll make love to you, that’s the trouble.—

  After the first Sunday of their acquaintance, when each had been committed to excursions with other people, they had gone on Tuesday straight from Arnys to the room where he lived.—I thought of an hotel. I’ve been worrying since Quatorze Juillet, where can we go ?—His hosts were out; but it would not often happen that the house would be empty.—Do you know that little one in the street near the big garage ? Behind the Crédit Lyonnais.——You mean opposite the parking ground where they play boule ?——I like the look of those two little windows above.——There’s a bird-cage outside one.——You saw it too.——That’s the little restaurant where Katya and I eat couscous—they make couscous every Wednesday. Fourteen francs.—

  His suitcase lay open on a chair, never unpacked but delved into, socks and shirts that had been worn stuffed among clean shirts carefully folded in imitation of the format of the shirt box and clean socks rolled into neat fists. Someone had packed shoe-trees for him. They were serving to hold down piles of cuttings and papers sorted on the bed.

  It was exactly the hour of the day when she had arrived and come out into the village on Madame Bagnelli’s terrace. He moved his papers in their order to the floor, already naked, with the testicles appearing between his thighs as his male rump bent, equine and beautiful. They emerged for each other all at once: they had never seen each other on a beach, the public habituation to all but a genital triangle. He might never have been presented with a woman before, or she a man. Tremendous sweet possibilities of renewal surged between them; to explode in that familiar tender explosion all that has categorized sexuality, from chastity to taboo, illicit licence to sexual freedom. In a drop of saliva there was a whole world. He turned the wet tip of his tongue round the whorl of the navel Didier had said was like that of an orange.

  In the heat they had shut out, people were eating in soft clatter, laughter, and odours of foods that had been cooked in the same way for so long their smell was the breath of the stone houses. Behind other shutters other people were also making love.

  The little Rôse has a lover.

  I spend less time with you; you understand that sort of priority well. You were the one who said, Chabalier, why go home—stay tonight and we can make an early start in the morning. The little expeditions to show me something of the country are arranged by the two of you, now. The big bed in the room you gave me—the room I’ll be able to keep the sense of in the moments before I have to open my eyes in other places, as Dick Terblanche knew the proportions of his grandfather’s dining-table when he couldn’t remember poetry in solitary confinement—the bed in my lovely room is intended for two people. Once dragged shut the heavy old black door doesn’t let through the sounds you have known so well, yourself. If they are audible through the windows they merge with the night traffic of motorbikes and nightingales. When the three of us have breakfast together in the sun before he goes off to his work I notice you make up your eyes and brush your hair out of respect for ma
le presence and as an aesthetic delicacy of differentiation from the stage in life of a young woman in perfect lassitude and carelessness of sensuality—I can’t help yawning till the tears come to my eyes, thirsty and hungry (you buy croissants filled with almond paste to satisfy and indulge me), spilling over in affection towards you a bounty I can afford to be generous with. Bernard says to me: —I am full of semen for you.—It has nothing to do with passion that had to be learned to deceive prison warders; and you’re no real revolutionary waiting to decode my lovey-dovey as I dutifully report it.

  With Solvig, with old Bobby (rambling off over her own hopelessly philosophical grievances in a bright English voice:—I used to do all Henry Torren’s correspondence at one time. Ten francs an hour! You couldn’t get someone to wash your floors for that. How many millions d’you think he’s worth! Oh but I don’t really mind. I don’t expect anything different. His grandmother wore clogs, a cotton-hand, it’s true, my dear—)—with all the little group of you who once lived with lovers: I imagine in your voices down there on the terrace or in the kitchen a discussion of the prospects, for me, you all know so well.

  Manolis was having an exhibition of his paintings on glass; Georges, reversing their roles and taking up housewifely responsibility for the opening, calculated with Madame Bagnelli the number of people for whom he was on his way to order amuse-gueules from Perrin: Donna and Didier, twelve, Tatsu—and Henry; maybe—fourteen, you and Rosa and Chabalier, seventeen... Pierre Grosbois had built himself an ‘American barbecue’ and the Grosbois initiated it with a party—No madonnas and flying donkeys (he looks too much at Chagall, êh), the bouzouki records his boyfriend buys him were the only Greek inspiration, what did you think ? But I also can make things with my hands—and the little Rôse will bring her professor, of course.