Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

An imperious scream from under a bower. — Bon jour! Bon soir! Hullo! Ça va? — reminds: and Auguste, what will happen to the parrot? Can he be bought along with the premises?

The parrot will move to the apartment. What a question.

But there is a question: what life will it be for him, alone with an old couple gazing at the sea. Oh the family, the children and grandchildren will visit. Sometimes. Everyone has found other work.

The final week of the restaurant’s life it is more fully patronised than ever. One must eat there just one time again, it’s going to be the last time. For some people: of many phases, stages, stations of lifetime. The parrot has witnessed these; those that people remember, have forgotten, or want to forget. He is particularly talkative during his last chance of recollection declared, it seems that if the creature is long-lived, it also has a relentless memory. It is all there in whatever strange faculty is hidden in that feathered throat and blunt grey tongue behind the probing beak. He laughs the crescendo laugh of a coquettish woman who may or may not hear herself in it as she comes stooping on an invalid’s walker to sit for one last lunch at her usual table. Now he’s tittering nonsensically from the adolescence of girls who have disappeared into the cities; the parents, eating their ultimate Daube Provençale , haven’t had news for months. The tittering sweeps away to a drunken blast (that poor devil, relic of former habitués, begs now outside the market). The murmur of lovers across a table (the hostile couple who don’t exchange a word while they eat), the insinuating laugh of gossips whose predictions of mismatch and betrayal have come to pass, there — and someone smiling a farewell, cajoling, Auguste, Auguste, turns away from the cage at lack of response, the creature has gone silent. He fidgets about the cage as if to find a bribe of sugar he has missed. But it’s more than that. He yells anguish, PAPA PAPA PA — PAA! Where is that child from whom this cry came, and is stored, maybe for the rest of a hundred years? PA — PAA! Where is the father who was called for in desperate appeal, and did he ever come. HULLO HULLO PA — PAAA PA — PAAA! BON JOUR BON SOIR WHAT? WHAT? ÇA VA? ÇA VA? The parroting that isn’t only that of parrots repeats how we hide from one another’s hurts. ÇA VA?

How goes it.

And from the depths of whatever he has that mocks vocal chords, low and angry, there is what was overheard, what he shouldn’t have overheard. Ça ne va pas du tout .

Doesn’t go at all.

CACHES of old papers are graves, you shouldn’t open them.

Her mother had been cremated. There is no marble page incised Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.

She always lied about her age; it wasn’t her natal name, that was too ethnically limiting, inherited generations back, to suggest her uniqueness in a programme cast list. It wasn’t her married name, either. She had baptised herself; professionally. She was long divorced although only in her late fifties when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career. Her daughter Charlotte has her father’s surname and has been close to him as a child can be subject to an ex-husband’s conditions of access while the ex-wife, customarily, has custody. As Charlotte has grown up she’s felt more compatible with him than with her, fondly though she feels towards her mother’s — somehow — childishness. Perhaps acting is really continuing the make-believe games of childhood — fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way she had wanted to follow. Although named after the character in which her mother had an early success (Charlotte Corday, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade ) and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow because of lack of talent: her mother’s unspoken interpretation of disappointment, if not expressed in reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover so far as marrying again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as he called her) could remark to her father, ‘Why should she expect me to take after her?’

Her father was a neurologist. They laughed together; at any predestinatory prerogative of the mother, or the alternative paternal one, to be expected to become a doctor! Poking around in people’s brains? They nudged one another with the elbowing of more laughter at the daughter’s distaste.

Her father helped to arrange the memorial gathering in place of a funeral service, sensitive as always to any need in her life. She certainly wouldn’t have expected or wanted him to come along to an ex-wife’s apartment and get down to sorting the clothes, personal possessions to be kept or given away. A friend from the firm where she worked as an actuary agreed to help for a free weekend. Unexpectedly, the young civil rights lawyer with whom there had been a sensed mutual attraction taken no further than dinner and a cinema date, offered himself — perhaps a move towards a love affair, which was coming about anyway. The girls emptied the cupboards of clothes, the friend exclaiming over the elaborate range of different styles women of that generation wore, seems they had many personalities to project — as if you could choose, now you belonged to the outfit of jeans and T-shirt. Oh of course! Charlotte’s mother was a famous actress!

Charlotte did not correct this out of respect for the ambitions of her mother. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically, for her, press cuttings and programmes, photographs displaying Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned a few programmes and remarked to be overheard by him rather than to him, ‘Never really had the leads she believed she should have after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn’t it. I’ve never seen the play.’ Confiding the truth of her mother’s career, betraying Laila’s idea of herself; perhaps also a move towards a love affair.

The three young people broke out of trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by not the usual litigation? No robberies, highjacks? Did the two young women feel they were discriminated against, did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it t’other way about, did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were elevated to positions they weren’t really up to? Women of any colour; and black men, same thing? What would have been the sad and strange task alone became a lively evening, animated exchange of opinions and experiences.

Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, kwaito. After a dinner and dancing together, that first bodily contact to confirm attraction, he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed as would be natural to the beautiful and inviting bed with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, notion of respect for the dead, as if her mother still lay there in possession.

The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.

Charlotte brushed aside any offers, also from her office friend, to continue with the sorting of Laila’s — what? The clothes were packed up, some seemed wearable only in the context of a theatrical wardrobe and were given to an experimental theatre group, others went to the Salvation Army for distribution to the homeless. Her father arranged with an estate agent to advertise the apartment for sale; unless you want to move in, he suggested. It was too big, his Charlie couldn’t afford to, didn’t want to live in a style not her own, even rent-free. They laughed again in their understanding, not in criticism of her mother. Laila was Laila. He agreed, but as if in relation to some other aspect. Yes, Laila.