Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

One month — when was it — she found she was pregnant; kept getting ready to tell him but didn’t. He was going on a concert tour in another part of the country and when he came back there was nothing to tell. The process was legal, fortunately, under the new laws of the country, conveniently available at a clinic named for Marie Stopes, past campaigner for women’s rights over their reproductive systems. Better not to have him — what? Even regretful, maybe, you know how men no matter how rewarded with success, buoyant with the tide of applause, still feel they must prove themselves potent. (Where had she picked up that? Eavesdropping adolescent, on tea-parties…)

She was so much part of the confraternity of orchestras. The rivalry among the players, all drowned out by exaltation of the music they created together. The gossip — as she was not one of them, both the men and women would trust her with indiscretions they wouldn’t risk with one another. And when he had differences with a guest conductor from Bulgaria or Tokyo or god knows where, their egos as complex as the pronunciation of their names, his exasperation found relief as he unburdened himself, in bed, of the podium dramas and moved on to the haven of love-making. If she were in a low mood — bungles of an inefficient colleague at work, her father’s ‘heart condition’ and her mother’s long complaints over the telephone about his breaking doctor’s orders with his whisky-swilling golfers — the cello would join them in the bedroom and he’d play for her. Sometimes until she fell asleep to the low tender tones of what had become his voice, to her, the voice of the big curved instrument, its softly-buffed surface and graceful bulk held close against his body, sharing this intimacy which was hers. At concerts when his solo part came she did not know she was smiling in recognition that here was the voice she would have recognised anywhere among other cellists bowing other instruments.

Each year, music critics granted, he played better. Exceeded himself. When distinguished musicians came for the symphony and opera season it was appropriate that he and she would entertain them at the house far from the pad they’d once dossed down in. Where others might keep a special piece of furniture, some inheritance, there stood in the livingroom, retired, the cello he’d learned to play on loan. He now owned an Amati, mid-18th-century cello found for him by a dealer in Prague. He had been hesitant. How could he spend such a fortune. But she was taken aback, indignant as if someone already had dared remark on presumptuous extravagance. An artist doesn’t care for material possessions as such. You’re not buying a Mercedes, a yacht! He had bought a voice of incomparable beauty, somehow human though of a subtlety and depth, moving from the sonority of an organ to the faintest stir of silences no human voice could produce. He admitted as if telling himself in confidence, as much as her, this instrument roused skilled responses in him he hadn’t known.

In the company of guests whose life was music as was his, he was generous as a pop singer responding to fans. He would bring out the precious presence in its black reliquary, free it and settle himself to play among the buffet plates and replenished wine glasses. If he’d had a few too many he’d joke, taking her by the waist a moment, I’m just the wunderkind brought in to thump out Für Elise on the piano, and he’d play so purely, that the voice of the aristocratic cello she knew as well as she had that of the charity one, made all social exchange strangely trivial. But the musicians, entrepreneurs and guests favoured to be among them, applauded, descended upon him, the husbands and gays hunching his shoulders in their grasp, the women giving the accolade and sometimes landing on his lips. It wasn’t unusual for one of the distinguished male guests — not the Japanese — specially the elderly German or Italian conductors, to make a pass at her. She knew she was attractive enough, intelligent enough musically and otherwise (even her buffet was good), for this to happen, but she was aware that it was really the bloom on her of being the outstandingly gifted cellist’s woman which motivated these advances. Imagine if, next time the celebrated cellist played under your baton in Strasbourg, you would be able to remark aside to another musician your own age, ‘And his wife’s pretty good, too, in bed.’ Once the guests had gone, host and hostess laughed in the bedroom about the attention paid flirtatiously he hadn’t failed to notice. The cello stood grandly against the wall. Burglaries are common in the suburbs and there are knowledgeable gangs who don’t look for TV sets and computers but for paintings and other valuable objects. If anyone broke in they’d have to come to the bedroom to catch sight of his noble Amati, and face the revolver kept under his pillow.

Bach, Mozart, Hindemith, Cage, Stockhausen, Glass are no longer regarded in the performance world patronisingly as music blacks neither enjoy nor understand, don’t play. The national orchestra which was his base, while his prestige meant he could absent himself whenever he was invited to festivals or to join a string ensemble on tour, had a black trombonist and a young second violinist with Afro braids that fell about her ebony neck as she wielded her bow. She spoke German to a visiting Austrian conductor; she’d had a scholarship to study in Strasbourg. Professional musicians have always been a league of nations, for a time the orchestra had a tympanist from Brazil. He became a particular friend, taken into the house on occasion as a live-in guest, and to keep her company when the beautiful cello accompanied its player overseas.

She was aware that, without a particular ability of her own outside the everyday competence in commercial communications, she was privileged enough to have an interesting life: a remarkably talented man whose particular milieu was also hers.

What was the phrase — she ‘saw the world’, often travelling with him. She’d arranged leave, to accompany the string ensemble to Berlin, one of the many musical events in commemoration of Mozart’s two-and-a-half-century birth date, but couldn’t go after all because her father was dying — cheerfully, but her mother must be supported.

The ensemble met with exceptional success, where there were musicians of high reputation from many countries. He brought back a folder full of press cuttings — a few in English — glowing. He tipped his head dismissively; maybe you can become inured to praise, in time. Or he was tired, drained by the demands of his music. She had suggestions for relaxation — a film, a get-together dinner, away from concert-hall discipline, with the ensemble musicians, one becomes close to people, a special relationship she’s long recognised in him, with whom something has been achieved in common. He was not enthusiastic. Next week, next week. He took the revered cello out of its solitude in the case carved to its shape and played, to himself. To her — well, she was in the room, those evenings.

It is his voice, that glorious voice of his cello; saying something different, not speaking to her but some other.

He makes love to her, isn’t that always the signal of return when he’s been away?

There’s a deliberation in the caresses. She’s almost moved to say stupidly what they’d never thought to say between them, do you still love me?

He begins to absent himself from her at unexplained times or for obligations that he must know she knows don’t exist.

The voice of the cello doesn’t lie.

How to apply to the life of this man the shabby ordinary circumstance, what’s the phrase? He’s having an affair. Artists of any kind attract women. They scent some mysterious energy of devotion there, that will always be the rival of their own usually reliable powers of seduction. Something that will be kept from even the most desired woman. Who’d know that attraction better than herself; but for her that other, mysterious energy of devotion, made of love a threesome. The cello with its curved body reverentially in the bedroom.