Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Suddenly the car braked, the forearm tanned with tea-leaf marks went out to stop Rosa from pitching forward.

— Didn’t I tell you. So there you are! The day, the time, everything. Pure nerves. What a state Madame Bagnelli was in about your arrival. I had to dash after her with the eggs she left in the épicerie this morning. You don’t look too forbidding to me — A man’s voice with the precision of an English stage vicar, and a long, thick beardless face under a captain’s braided peak bent to the window.

— Yes, safe and sound — Rosa Burger, Constance Darby-Littleton. Are you walking up the hill…?—

— Of course I want to walk. It’s my constitutional. I thought everyone was perfectly aware of my habits by now — Night-blue slits between puffy lids had no whites, no eyelashes, and moved from driver to passenger like mechanical eyes set in one of those anthropomorphic clock-faces. The car passed on at the level of matron’s breasts slung under a checked shirt.

In a parking ground scooped out below trees a fat young Bacchus wearing cement-stained cowboy boots leapt from a pick-up loaded with broken tiles and window-frames. — Madame Bagnelli —Loud, indignant and laughing exchange; not necessary to understand the language adequately to be able to follow that this was workman and client taking up some long-standing wrangle. — He came around and couldn’t get in! Now isn’t that just too bad! How many days I’ve waited in for nothing! I won’t see him for another six weeks and after another dozen phone-calls. He’s supposed to put a floor in my cave —rather the junk-pit that’s hopefully going to be a cave . He gets whatever’s there. — The car was held on the clutch at the top of the spiral where the road forked at a broken city wall. The castle waved bright handkerchiefs of unidentified nations. The car announced itself with a gay warning blast, turning right. Greasy locks and a beautiful, lover’s face were approaching. — Madame Bagnelli — the man counted out three letters from his mail-bag and presented them to her; they thanked each other as if for the pleasure of it, using that language. Rosa Burger was presented by a new name with the accent on the final syllable: the friend — all the way from Africa! — who would be getting mail so addressed.

The car swung past the postman into a steep little alley blocked by a studded double gate and she was about to get out to open it for the first time on a house where she was told she would sleep, up flights of stairs, a room with a terrace: for that moment, there was nothing behind that gate with its push-button bell and card under a plastic slot, Bagnelli .

— What do I call you?—

— Call me?—

— Do I call you Madame Bagnelli, or — (Colette was the name, ‘Colette Swan’. ‘Colette Burger’.)

The woman pressed back from arms braced against the steering wheel; she relaxed suddenly, turned her head full on with an expression of sly voluptuous complicity, as if her hand closed on the shy, casual question as on some inert but electrified shape that came to life on contact. — Katya. You call me Katya.—

On the gate there was a note under Scotch tape and a big dried sunflower like a dead burst star. MADAME BAGNELLI URGENT — exclamation mark scored within its outline. The gate dragged screeching across courtyard paving; the smell of stony damp and a perfume never smelled before; and then it brushed Rosa Burger’s face as the door was opened, the suitcase bumped through: lilac, real European lilac.

— Dah-dah-dah-dah; dedah — well that can wait. Why the hell should I phone the moment I come in… — The note flew into a straw basket. — You want to go straight up? No — let’s just dump everything. I’ve got a little (swimming colours, fronds blobbing out of focus and a sea horizon undulating in uneven panes of glass) — just a little something ready — the glass doors shook open, the new arrival was on a leafy shelf of sun, offered to the sea midway between sky and tumbling terraces of little dark trees decorated with oranges. She smelled cats and geranium. The elaborate toy villas of the dead in a steep cemetery took on their façades the light off the sea. She felt it on her cheeks and eyelids. She saw — saw a crack up a white urn that was a line of ants, a tiny boat like a fingernail scored across the sea, saw the varicose vein wriggling up behind the knee of the ex-dancer putting down the tray with the bottle of champagne in a bucket.

They drank leaning together on the balustrade, great open spaces of the sea drawing away the farting stutter of motorcycles and gear-whine of trucks, music and voices wreathing their own, from other terraces and balconies. Now and then something came tinkling-clear to Rosa Burger: once a man’s sudden derisive laugh, the gobbling bark when a dog has a cat treed; a woman’s yell to stop someone driving off. These shattered lightly against her; her palm felt the still cold of the glass and her tongue the live cold of the wine. They sat in tilted chairs with their feet up on the balustrade among falls of geranium and ice-plant drowsy with big European bees in football stripes. The woman toed off the heel of each espadrille and ran the arch of her bare foot over the head and back of a Manx cat. (—Not mine but he likes me better than his owner. — ) Out of her boots Rosa’s feet were released cramped and marked, her jeans were pushed up to the knee. The woman was telling the history of the village with the enjoyment of one who projects herself into the impression it must have for someone who has never seen anything like it before. — A nobility of robber barons, from the crusades to the casinos, a suzerainty — do I mean sovereignty — these weren’t kings — They laughed together in seraglio ease. — Feudal exploitation (these terms slipped in as an old soldier will use the few phrases he remembers from a foreign campaign, when he meets a native of that country) right up to the time of the French revolution. That big garden with the cypress and fig, here behind us, just below the castle, you must have noticed the trees as we drove — it was a monastery. My friend Gaby Grosbois’ house is part of the monks’ pig-sties. But after the revolution the new industrial entrepreneurs and businessmen bought up these church properties for nothing and used them as their country houses, they lived like the aristocrats. During our war the Resistance in this part of the country had its headquarters in the cellars. Oh you’ll hear all the tales, they love to have someone who hasn’t heard them before — everyone a hero of ‘the Resistance, if you want to believe…but a few years ago — Bagnelli was still alive, no; just after — it was going to be made into an hotel, some actor was interested in the investment. It came to nothing. Now it belongs to an arms dealer, not that they ever come here, no one sees them…the old Fenouil couple keep up the garden. The suzerain changes his nationality… Japanese are the ones buying up big properties here now; North Africans are the serfs making roads and living in their bidonville —squatters. And people like me (laughing) — we manage to survive in between. — Again and again, the cat slid under the high-arched foot. — I can imagine how you’ve been brought up (eyes closed and smiling face tilted back into the sun a moment)…here you forget about degrees of social usefulness — good god, nobody would understand what on earth I’m talking about. But on the other hand I suppose you’ll be surprised at the way anybody will do anything; no question that what you do’s infra dig — Back and forth the cat raked by maroon-painted toenails. — I cook for Americans sometimes, in the summer — I know the kind of French food they like. Solvig pays me to vacuum her books and pack away her winter clothes once a year. She’s a friend, but she’s the widow of a big Norwegian publisher, she’s got money, and so… I look after the local hardware shop when the owner goes skiing for her two weeks every January. Cold little hole, selling toilet rolls and plastic dishes…when the French are concentrating on making money they make no attempt to be comfortable. Other friends, a Greek painter and his boy-friend — they take jobs at the race-course when the trotting season starts. But women aren’t hired. Oh I patch up old furniture—‘restore antiques’ —sounds better, eh. Sometimes I get a chance to give English lessons — I taught dancing at the Maison des Jeunes until I got so heavy the floorboards quaked.—