Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

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 gathered 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.

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.