Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The head weaved, making its way, setting aside in the soft confusion of wine all that had been emerged from.

— Never.—

— Of course never. —

— And you have never been back.—

The woman drew her elbows against her body, rocked herself cherishingly, fists together under her chin, the newspaper fell. — Ah, they wouldn’t get me. Never.—

She sprang up on her wide-planted feet; balance and agility contradicted bulk. — Can we do the monkey-trick? Up my staircase, swing by tails—

There was scarcely room for her to pass between wall and wall with a thick silky cord, a theatre prop, swagged up one in place of a rail. As she led she was explaining how to manage some eccentricity of the hot-water tap in the bathroom; she panted cheerfully.

At the top was a room clear with different qualities of light. It brimmed against the ceiling; underneath, patterns and forms showed shallowly ribbed. A big jar of lilac, scent of peaches furry in a bowl, dim mirrors, feminine bric-a-brac of bottles and brushes, a little screen of ruched taffeta for sociable intimacies, a long cane chair to read the poetry and elegant magazines in, a large low bed to bring a lover to. It was a room made ready for someone imagined. A girl, a creature whose sense of existence would be in her nose buried in flowers, peach juice running down her chin, face tended at mirrors, mind dreamily diverted, body seeking pleasure. Rosa Burger entered, going forward into possession by that image. Madame Bagnelli, smiling, coaxing, saw that her guest was a little drunk, like herself.

If I’d been black that would at least have given the information I was from Africa. Even at a three-hundred-year remove, a black American. But nobody could see me, there, for what I am back where I come from. Nobody in Paris — except, of course, there’s the cousin. The daughter of Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen, with whom I share our grandmother’s name. She was in Paris, with me, selling South African oranges somewhere in these buildings flaring to a prow from diminishing perspectives where two streets merge V-shaped, in my single evening, walking them. I could have looked up the Citrus Board under its French title in the directory. The boerevrou with her tour group’s pin beside me in the plane remarked as we chatted in our language, it’s a great pity we Afrikaners don’t travel enough. Stick-at-homes, she said. True, for one reason or another. She at forty-three (she confessed) and I at twenty-seven (she asked) going to Europe for the first time.

I knew from books and talk of people like Flora and William I was in the quarter tourists went to because the nineteenth-century painters and writers whose lives and work have been popularized romantically once lived there. Thousands of students seem to occupy their holes of hotels and haunts now, blondes and gypsies in displayed poverty the poor starve to conceal, going in fishermen’s boots or barefoot through the crowds, while back on Uncle Coen’s farm people save shoes for Sundays. Girls and men whose time is mine, talking out their lives the way clocks tick, buying tiny cups of coffee for the price of a bag of mealie-meal, drinking wine in the clothes of guerrillas surviving in the bush on a cup of water a day. Dim stairs, tiny bent balconies, endless dovecotes of dormer windows were nearly all dark; everyone in the streets. I walked where they walked, I turned where they turned, taking up the purpose of these or those for a few yards or a block. They met and kissed, kissed and parted, ate thin pancakes made in a booth glaring as a forge, bought papers, paraded for a pick-up. If students play charades, there were surely others wearing the garb playing at being students, and still others wanting to be taken for their idea of models, actors, painters, writers, film directors. Which were the clerks and waiters off duty? How could I tell. Only the male prostitutes, painted and haughty enough to thrill and intimidate prospective clients, are plainly what they are: men preserving the sexual insignia of the female, creature extinct in the preferences of their kind. One went up and down before the café where I sat with the drink I bought myself. He wore a long jade-green suede coat open on a bare midriff with a silver belt round it and his face of inhumanly stylized beauty was a myth. If I had been a man I would have approached just to see if words would come from it as from any ordinary being.

The Boulevard Saint-Michel was my thread back to the hotel with its cosmetic gilt-and-glass foyer and old-clothes cupboard of a room with the bidet smelling of urine. I kept wandering down side streets to the sight of eddies of people in the soft coloured light from little restaurants and stalls of bright sticky sweetmeats and lurid skewers of meat. Under the sagging, bulging buildings of this Paris along streets that streamed into one another was a kind of Eastern bazaar; more my idea of a souk, where also I have never been. Bouzouki music wound above the heads of people in sociable queues outside small cinemas burrowed into existing buildings. The cobbled streets with beautiful names were closed to traffic; from the steep end of one called Rue de la Harpe, a crowd pressed back to form an open well down which I looked on a man from whose mouth flames leapt and scrolled in a fiery proliferation of tongues. I was moved into the crowd, kneaded slowly along by the shifting of shoulders. There were still heads in front of me but I could see the man with his anxious, circus-performer’s eyes sizing up the audience while he turned himself into a dragon with a swill of petrol and a lighted faggot. He pranced up and down my patch of vision between collars, necks and the swing of hair. I was enclosed in this amiable press of strangers, not a mob because they were not brought together by hostility or enthusiasm, but by mild curiosity and a willingness to be entertained. I couldn’t easily move on until their interest loosened, but closeness was not claustrophobic. Our heads were in the open air of a melon-green night; buoyed by these people murmuring and giggling in their quick, derisive, flirtatious language, I could look up at the roof-tops and chimney-pots and television aerials so black and sharp and one-dimensional they seemed to ring out the note of a metal bar struck and swallowed into the skies of Paris. Close to bodies I was comfortably not aware of individually and that were not individually aware of me, I instantly was alive to the slight swift intimacy of a movement directed only to me. As swiftly, my hand went down to that flutter of a caress; I seized, as it slid out between the flap of my sling-bag and my hip, a hand.

I held very tightly.

The fingers were pressed together extended helpless and the knuckle bones bent inwards across the palm to the curve of my grip, unable to make a fist. The arm above the hand could not jerk it free because the arm was pressed shoulder to shoulder with me, the body to which the arm belonged was jammed against mine.

Still locked to that hand I couldn’t see, I turned to find the face it must belong to. Among this crowd of strangers in this city of Europe, among Frenchmen and Scandinavians and Germans and Japanese and Americans, blue eyes and curly blondness, Latin pallor, the lethargic Lebanese and dashing Greeks, the clear and delicate-skulled old Vietnamese who had passed me unseeingly, the Arabs with caps of dull springy hair, pale brown lips and almost Scottish rosiness on the cheekbones whom I had identified as I heard their oracular gabble on the streets I walked — among all these a black man had been edged, pushed, passed along to my side. The face was young and so black that the eyes, far-apart in taut openings, were all that was to be made out of him. Eyeballs of agate in which flood and volcanic cataclysms are traced; the minute burst blood-vessels were held in the whites like a fossil-pattern of fern. If he hadn’t been black he might have succeeded in looking like everybody else — sceptically or boredly absorbed in the spectacle of the fire-eater. But the face could not deny the hand in anonymous confusion with like faces. He was what he was. I was what I was, and we had found each other. At least that is how it seemed to me — this ordinary matter of pickpocket and victim, that’s all, nothing but a stupid tourist with a bag, deserving to be discovered.