Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s American, he’s the boy with the three leather cases—’

‘Yes, all right—’

‘You’ll see him this afternoon. He’s got a Beatle cut.’ This last was addressed to the young girl, who turned, halfway up the stone stairs with a train of wet footprints behind her.

But of course Jenny, who was old enough to introduce people as adults do, at once asked the American boy who he was. She got a very full reply. ‘Well, I’m usually called Matt, but that’s short for my second name, really — my real names are Nicholas Matthew Rootes Keller.’

‘Junior?’ she teased, ‘The Third?’

‘No, why should I be? My father’s name is Donald Rootes Keller. I’m named for my grandfather on my mother’s side. She has one hell of a big family. Her brothers won five decorations between them, in the war. I mean, three in the war against the Germans, and two in the Korean War. My youngest uncle, that’s Rod, he’s got a hole in his back — it’s where the ribs were — you can put your hand in. My hand, I mean’ — he made a fist with a small, thin, tanned hand — ‘not an adult person’s. How much more would you say my hand had t’grow, I mean — would you say half as much again, as much as that? — to be a full-size, man’s hand—’ He measured it against Clive’s; the two ten-year-old fists matched eagerly.

‘Yours and Clive’s put together — one full-size, king-size, man-size paw. Clip the coupon now. Enclose only one box-top or reasonable facsimile.’

But the elder brother’s baiting went ignored or misunderstood by the two small boys. Clive might react with a faint grin of embarrassed pleasure and reflected glory at the reference to the magazine ad culture with which his friend was associated by his brother Mark. Matt went on talking in the innocence of one whose background is still as naturally accepted as once his mother’s lap was.

He came to the villa often after that afternoon when the new Beatle record was heard for the first time on his player. The young people had nothing to do but wait while the parents slept after lunch (the place , where Jenny liked to stroll, in the evenings, inviting mute glances from boys who couldn’t speak her language, was dull at that time of day) and they listened to the record again and again in the courtyard summerhouse that had been a pigsty before the peasant cottage became a villa. When the record palled, Matt taped their voices — ‘Say something African!’ — and Mark made up a jumble of the one or two Zulu words he knew, with cheerleaders’ cries, words of abuse and phrases from familiar road signs, in Afrikaans. ‘ Sakabona! Voetsak hambakahle hou links malingi mushle — Vrystaat! ’

The brothers and sister rocked their rickety chairs back ecstatically on two legs when the record was played, but Matt listened with eyes narrowed and tongue turned up to touch his teeth, like an ornithologist who is bringing back alive the song of rare birds. ‘Boy, thanks. Fantastic. That’ll go into the documentary I’m going to make. Partly with my father’s movie camera, I hope, and partly with my candid stills. I’m working on the script now. It’s in the family, you see.’ He had already explained that his father was writing a book (several books, one about each country they visited, in fact) and his mother was helping. ‘They keep to a strict schedule. They start work around noon and carry on until about one a.m. That’s why I’ve got to be out of the house very early in the morning and I’m not supposed to come back in till they wake up for lunch. And that’s why I’ve got to keep out of the house in the afternoons, too; they got to have peace and quiet. For sleep and for work.’

Jenny said, ‘Did you see his shorts — that Madras stuff you read about? The colours run when it’s washed. I wish you could buy it here.’

‘That’s a marvellous transistor, Dad.’ Mark sat with his big bare feet flat on the courtyard flagstones and his head hung back in the sun — as if he didn’t live in it all the year round, at home; but this was France he basked in, not sunlight.

‘W-e-ll, they spoil their children terribly. Here’s a perfect example. A fifty-pound camera’s a toy. What’s there left for them to want when they grow up.’

Clive would have liked them to talk about Matt all the time. He said, ‘They’ve got a Maserati at home in America, at least, they did have, they’ve sold it now they’re going round the world.’

The mother said, ‘Poor little devil, shut out in the streets with all that rubbish strung around his neck.’

‘Ho, rubbish, I’m sure!’ said Clive, shrugging and turning up his palms exaggeratedly. ‘Of course, hundreds of dollars of equipment are worth nothing, you know, nothing at all.’

‘And how much is one dollar, may I ask, mister?’ Jenny had learned by heart, on the plane, the conversion tables supplied by the travel agency.

‘I don’t know how much it is in our money — I’m talking about America—’

‘You’re not to go down out of the village with him, Clive, ay, only in the village,’ his father said every day.

He didn’t go out of the village with the family, either. He didn’t go to see the museum at Antibes or the potteries at Vallauris or even the palace, casino and aquarium at Monte Carlo. The ancient hill village inside its walls, whose disorder of streets had been as confusing as the dates and monuments of Europe’s overlaid and overlapping past, became the intimate map of their domain — his and Matt’s. The alley cats shared it but the people, talking their unintelligible tongue, provided a babble beneath which, while performed openly in the streets, his activities with Matt acquired secrecy: as they went about, they were hidden even more than by the usual self-preoccupation of adults. They moved from morning till night with intense purpose; you had to be quick around corners, you mustn’t be seen crossing the street, you must appear as if from nowhere among the late afternoon crowd in the place and move among them quite unobtrusively. One of the things they were compelled to do was to get from the church — very old, with chicken wire where the stained glass must have been, and a faint mosaic, like a flaking transfer — to under the school windows without attracting the attention of the children. This had to be done in the morning, when school was in session; it was just one of the stone houses, really, without playgrounds: the dragging chorus of voices coming from it reminded him of the schools for black children at home. At other times the village children tailed them, jeering and mimicking, or in obstinate silence, impossible to shake off. There were fights and soon he learnt to make with his fingers effective insulting signs he didn’t understand, and to shout his one word of French, their bad word — merde !

And Matt talked all the time. His low, confidential English lifted to the cheerful rising cadence of French as his voice bounced out to greet people and rebounded from the close walls back to the privacy of English and their head-lowered conclave again. Yet even when his voice had dropped to a whisper, his round dark eyes, slightly depressed at the outer corners by the beginning of an intelligent frown above his dainty nose, moved, parenthetically alert, over everyone within orbit. He greeted people he had never seen before just as he greeted local inhabitants. He would stop beside a couple of sightseers or a plumber lifting a manhole and converse animatedly. To his companion standing by, his French sounded much more French than when the village children spoke it. Matt shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip while he talked, and if some of the people he accosted were uncomfortable or astonished at being addressed volubly, for no particular reason, by someone they didn’t know, he asked them questions (Clive could hear they were questions) in the jolly tone of voice that grown-ups use to kid children out of their shyness.