Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

She, the woman official who introduced him, as were others to the director of the Institute, chairman of the conference; what her position was, not clear. As this is the host country the welcoming entourage is British, with all the vocal variations of that identity, Scots, Irish, some accents class rather than territorial in origin. Among the French, German, Ukrainian and far-flung delegates his Kitchen isiZulu wasn’t much use. But everyone had more than Kitchen English — even us Americans, disarmingly quipped one of them, and all had the vocabulary of their related branch of science to supplement with its jargon in Latin and Greek a more general colloquial understanding across disciplines. Whatever she might be at the Institute, the young woman was to be heard clear as running water talking to an Italian in his own language and then her cadence coming from another part of the bar, to a trio of French, in theirs. He and Alvaro instinctively resisted getting together aside, after so long. Having been introduced as from Africa, he was approached and drawn into questions not restricted to any territory of the continent, while he was conscious of his own particular identity. Well, again, this’s not a political get-together. Yet this enclave standing and sitting about in the curve of a worn cushioned area turns to talk about AIDS.

From South Africa? One of them challenges the apocryphal spinach, garlic and beetroot cure. The Minister of Health’s made us the laughing stock of the world; laughter can be an expression of being appalled, he’s laughing with them: cuts off — reproach to himself — and confirms, his country has the highest number of infected population in the world.

— Who has discovered the virus — the cause — where from?—

Someone gives a token snort — Not in the field of discussion tomorrow.—

— It’s supposed to have first occurred in Africa, yes, people eating monkeys.—

— How were the monkeys host to the virus? — A delegate with a shaved head (unlikely to be to disguise a circle of bald pate, he’s young) and a beard that may be signal of strong sexuality to attract women and or men.

— That’s out of date. — Cast away by someone’s tipped hand.

Because it was racist — if only blacks eat monkeys maybe because they had nothing else. But he doesn’t produce his inevitable reaction.

The bold image of manhood potency speaks with underlying reproach at the casual dismissal of a subject by a gathering of scientists, lack of the compulsion of inquiry that is science. His question isn’t irrelevant to a conference on the presence of toxins in industrial production, domestic products, the food industry — What did the monkeys eat.—

Dismissal, a professor’s second chin wobbles. — They’re omnivorous from what I’ve seen with my kids at the zoo.—

— Omnivorous. What did they ingest in that diet spectrum, what did they inhale as mines, coal, gold, producing waste dumps from the underground elements, invaded their habitat. The environment.—

Others in the academic discourse habit must introduce their ranges of knowledge. — Oh that’s all known since way back, silicosis—

Just as this is getting to be contentious the way you’d expect, the Lindsay woman flashes interruption — Look, there isn’t a dinner tonight, that’s after the opening tomorrow, but some of us could go to a restaurant if you don’t fancy eating at the hotel. — It clearly isn’t a general invitation but perhaps would interest this small enclave apparently getting on animatedly.

She’s chosen the bistro, as a Londoner habituée. The group was along with her, it would have looked unappreciative of hospitality to have dropped out on some obvious-sounding excuse of a previous arrangement — they’ve hardly arrived. She patted the shaven-head bearded contestant to the seat at her side, a kind of recognition, and then looking round passingly over the others, randomly nodded upon anyone to take the table seat at her other side — it happened to be him, Steve. She was cosily warming to both, as if they were children strangers to her adult self and each other at a birthday party. — It’s a bit of a joint, but the food’s not as bad as ‘intercontinental’ suggests, I don’t want any complaints from Dr Milano that the osso buco is tough and Professor Jacquard turning up his nose at the hollandaise on the asperges. — It turns out that she’s the Conference Chairman’s Personal Assistant. She gives this information with upper case initials mouthing formality.

— What a relief, I thought you were his wife.—

The mood lifted by Dr Milano as if the waiter had then drawn the cork from the bottle of Antinori. How happily ridiculous! Probably in her thirties, she could more likely have been his daughter.

— Why the relief—

— Taste the wine, someone — you, Dr Sommerfelt, no one trusts a woman to decide whether it’s what it should be—

— Why? — because it means we don’t have to watch our tongues with the danger of indiscretions coming to our chairman in pillow talk.—

— Let’s not talk shop, anyway. Serious for five days of sessions that’s enough, come tomorrow.—

The volume rises, anecdotal. A nuclear physicist from Texas tells the colleague from Norway his adventure in the fjords last summer. The Mexican virologist discovers a fellow bird-watcher in a German from Stuttgart — You know, Herr Doktor, — I’m Gerhardt, please — Oh thank you, this is Carlos — in my country people like to eat the birds but I like to be with them, look at the beauty of the world that is in the conformation, structure of bone and nerve in the movements on the ground — not only up there, the first astronauts—

Someone is vague about which of the Africas he comes from — You’re at Makerere, I was once offered a sabbatical in Kenya but unfortunately…—

— South Africa — no, no doesn’t matter.—

After the rapid apologies habitual to an educated upper-class Englishman Dr Thomlinson tells a confession that he heads the department of the university where he actually graduated ‘donkey’s years ago’.—What about you? You study here or in your own country? Is it where you teach now? I feel I’m the stick-in-the-mud academic curiosity.—

— Then I’m another one.—

— Oh so you’re back in the same science department that produced you. — Glass raised to this shared status.

— Not exactly. There were interruptions. — Raising his glass perhaps to these, the wine is not the stuff passed round at Sunday swimming pool and it’s so instructive to the tongue and wakening, down the gullet that he’s thinking back to what he won’t relate, what it’s releasing; the absences in the camps and the other kind, Detention. Has no place in the objectivity of science, its history is of discoveries not battles in the bush.

Dr Thomlinson stretches to fill their glasses, to hell with the Pakistani waiter’s sense of protocol. — So you were the bad boy playing hookey.—

His glass meets the neck of the bottle halfway; each is laughing at a different reference of the amiable remark. For Thomlinson it will be having missed lectures after a thick night, student skipping Monday classes, gone beyond the youthful Sunday limit of an amorous weekend.

He couldn’t have an exchange with the bearded guy, lean either behind Lindsay Wilson’s back or across her breasts, although he would have liked to take further the monkey diet theory with him. She did throw-away rather than address him — We ought to do a Mad Hatter’s tea party, but then didn’t suggest this move to the rest of the table. A woman opposite him (maybe old but partly reconstructed by a branch of science) took the salt cellar from him, meeting his eyes widely, hers held not in a frame of glasses but of outlining blue and green cosmetics. — I know it may be toxic but I have a craving for this stuff, this Neapolitan’s rather tasteless. — It was the opening of a conversation at the pace of savour and swallow, carry on with what was being said, take another mouthful. She was eloquent over any attempt, accepted as useless, of the man beside her to add an opinion or make a comment. Had to guess what it might have been from the phrase or two not overridden; she would tilt her head in her neighbour’s direction now and then, and use what must be an intimately abbreviated ‘Malcolm’ to indicate he agreed or (second’s pause, lift of the shoulders) he would be privately disagreeing. Who — which — was the delegate and who — which — was the consort, gender identity couldn’t decide. The subject the woman set with the opening command of the salt cellar was effectiveness or otherwise of conferences. Were they a process, or an end in themselves. Was there ever a practice that the intention, the duly passed, minuted, published record of proceedings was complied with, that anything was actually being carried out. Significantly. That all a conference accomplished, arrived at, was simply the agenda for the next conference. And the next.