Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

THAT Saturday. It landed in the apartment looted by the present filled it with blasting amazement, the presence of the past. That Saturday just as it had come to him. Charlotte/Charlie (what was she) received exactly as he had, what Laila (yes, her mother, giving birth is proof) had told.

How to recognise something not in the vocabulary of your known emotions. Shock is like a ringing in the ears, to stop it you snatch back to the first page, read the letter again. It said what is said. This sinking collapse from within, from flared breathless nostrils down under breasts, stomach, legs and hands, hands that not only feel passively but go out to grasp what can’t be. Dismay that feeble-sounding word has this ghastly meaning. What do you do with something you’ve been Told? Something that now is there in the gut of your existence. Run to him. Thrust his letter at him, at her — but she’s out of it, she’s escaped in smoke from the crematorium. And she’s the one who really knows — knew.

Of course he didn’t get custody. He was awarded the divorce decree but the mother was given the four-year-old child. It is natural, particularly in the case of a small girl, for a child to live with the mother. In spite of this ‘deposition’ of his in which he is denied paternity he paid maintenance for the child. The expensive boarding school, the drama and dance classes, even those holidays in the Seychelles, three times in Spain, once in France, once in Greece, with the mother. Must have paid generously. He was a neurologist more successful in his profession than the child’s mother was on the stage. But this couldn’t be the reason for the generosity.

Charlotte/Charlie couldn’t think about that either. She folded the two sheets, fumbled absently for an envelope they should have been in, weren’t, and with them in her hand left the boxes, the letters, Laila’s apartment, locked, behind the door.

HE can only be asked: why he’s been a father, loving.

The return of his Saturday, it woke her at three, four in the morning when she had kept it at bay through the activities of the day, work, navigating alone in her car the city’s crush, mustn’t be distracted, leisure occupied in the company of friends who haven’t been Told. She and her father had one of their regular early dinners at his favourite restaurant, went on to a foreign movie by a director whose work she admired and the Saturday couldn’t be spoken: was unreal.

In the dark when the late-night traffic was over and the dawn traffic hadn’t begun: silence.

The reason.

He believed in the one chance of conception that single night of the party. Laila’s farewell. Even though his friend expert in biological medicine said, implying if one didn’t know the stage of the woman’s fertility cycle you couldn’t be sure, the conception might have achieved itself in other intercourse a few days before or even after that unique night. I am Charlie, his.

The reason.

Another night-thought; angry mood — who do they think they are deciding who I am to suit themselves, her vanity, she at least can bear the child of an actor with a career ahead in the theatre she isn’t attaining for herself, he in wounded macho pride refusing to accept another male’s potency. His seed has to have been the winner.

And in the morning, before the distractions of the day take over, shame on herself, Charlie, for thinking so spitefully, cheaply about him.

The next reason that offers itself is hardly less unjust, offensive — confusedly hurtful to her, as whatever it is that comes, called up by her. He paid one kind of maintenance, he paid another kind of maintenance, loving her, to keep up the conventions before what he sees as the world. The respectable doctors in their white coats who have wives to accompany them to medical council dinners. If he had married again it would have been a woman like these. Laila was Laila. Never risk another.

The letter that didn’t belong to anyone’s daughter was moved from place to place, in a drawer under sweaters, an Indian box where she kept earrings and bracelets, behind books of plays, Euripides and Racine, Shaw to Brecht, Dario Fo, Miller, Artaud, Beckett, and of course Weiss’s annotated Marat/Sade ; Charlotte’s inheritance, never read.

When you are in many minds, the contention makes someone who has been not quite what one wanted, who doesn’t count, the only person to be Told. In bed, yet another night, after love-making when the guards go down with the relaxed physical tensions. Dale, the civil rights lawyer who didn’t act in the mess of divorce litigation unless this infringed Constitutional Rights, told in turn of the letter: ‘Tear it up.’ When she appealed, it was not just a piece of paper—‘Have a DNA test.’ How to do that without taking the whole cache that was the past to the father. ‘Get a snip of his hair.’ All that’s needed to go along with a sample of her blood. Like who was it in the bible cutting off Samson’s beard. How was she supposed to do that, stealing upon the father in his sleep somewhere?

Tear it up. Easy advice from someone who had understood nothing. She did not.

But a circumstance came about as if somehow summoned… Of course, it was fortuitous… A distinguished actor-director had been invited by a local theatre to direct a season of classical and avant-garde plays, taking several lead roles himself. It was his first return to the country, the city where he was born and had left to pursue his career, he said in newspaper interviews and on radio, television — how long? — oh twenty-five years ago. Rendall Harris. Newspaper photographs: an actor’s assumed face for many cameras, handsomely enough late-middle-aged, defiant slight twist to the mouth to emphasise character, eyebrows heightened together amusedly just above nose, touch of white in short sideburns. Eyes are not clearly to be made out on newsprint. On television, alive; something of the upper body, gestures coming into view, the close-up of changing expressions in the face, the actual meeting with deep-set long eyes, grey darkening by some deliberate intensity almost flashing-black, to yours, the viewer’s. What did she expect, a recognition. Hers of him. His, out of the lit-up box, of her. An actor’s performance face.

She can’t ignore the stir at the idea that the man named by her mother is about in the city. Laila was Laila. Yes. If she had not gone up in smoke would he have met her, remembered her. Did he ever see the baby, the child was two before he went off for twenty-five years. What does a two-year-old remember. Has she ever seen this man in a younger self, been taken in by these strikingly interrogative eyes; received.

She was accustomed to go to the theatre with friends of the lawyer-lover although he preferred films, one of his limited tastes she could at least share. Every day — every night — she thought about the theatre. Not with Dale. Not to sit beside any of her friends. No. For a wild recurrent impulse there was the temptation to be there with her father, who did not know she knew, had been Told as he was that Saturday, passed on to her in the letter under volumes of plays. Laila was Laila. For him and for her.

She went alone when Rendall Harris was to play one of the lead roles. There had been ecstatic notices. He was Laurence Olivier reincarnated for a new, the twenty-first, century, a deconstructed style of performance. She was far back in the box office queue when a board went up, House Full. She booked for another night, online, an aisle seat three rows from the proscenium. She found herself at the theatre, for some reason hostile. Ridiculous. She wanted to disagree with the critics. That’s what it was about.

Rendall Harris — how do you describe a performance that manages to create for his audience the wholeness, the life of a man, not just in ‘character’ for the duration of the play, but what he might have been before those events chosen by the playwright and how he’ll be, alive, continuing after. Rendall Harris is an extraordinary actor: man. Her palms were up in the hands applauding like a flight of birds rising. When he came out to take the calls summoning the rest of the cast round him she wasn’t in his direct eye-line as she would have been if she’d asked for a middle of the row seat.