Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

What happened to Vaki-the-Greek?

I pipe up from time to time, like a child listening to folk-lore. I am beginning to understand that there is a certain range of possibilities that can occur within the orbit of a particular order of life; they recur in gossip, in close conversations at the tables big enough only for elbows in the back of Jean-Paul’s bar, in noisy discussions on the terrace of this one’s house or that. Vaki-the-Greek went off to South America with the director of a German electronics company he picked up here in the village, on the place , Darby witnessed the whole thing and told Donna after the little bitch had disappeared with the Alfa Romeo that had been registered in his name, for her tax reasons. Didier is straight (I don’t know whether by this is meant not bisexual) and although he rightly expects to be treated generously, he’s not likely to be a thief — never! — When he goes, he’ll just go. — Gaby approves, endorsing Katya.

Didier knows his job. How to please them; all of you. How to please Donna, although that may require some skill, at times he opts out of the company, sets up in the ivory tower of his youth to remind her of his confinement, at other times he is a shrewd and haughty personal aide confronting the garage over the price charged for repairs, going with her to argue with her lawyers — whatever the relationship is between them, I notice it is never so smoothly bonded as when we meet them either before or after one of their sessions with the lawyers, sharing the same preoccupation as other lovers would fondle under a table. And there are the occasions, perfectly timed, when I see him turn and go back to the room he is leaving as with some premonition of the significance of the moment, to kiss her once, on the mouth, holding her gravely by the upper arms. She is never the one to make the move to fondle him in public. That must be one of the unspoken arrangements between them, to save her face before other women? By some sound instinct he knows when to make the move towards her that she cannot allow herself to make towards him.

His professionalism extends to me. He and Donna exchange the left-and-right cheek-greeting with me as everyone else has been doing since my first few days in your house but he doesn’t flirt with me as he does with women older than Donna. Heterosexual or Lesbian, you all belong to a category that cannot challenge her. That’s the code. There was that particularly hot day when Donna’s yacht was being painted and he decided to come with us to swim from one of the beaches too polluted for her. Katya, Madame Grosbois, Solvig — he lies among them safe from demands as they are. If I try to describe him to myself in a word it’s to call him precocious — a boy at home with preoccupations on the other side of test and struggle. To be made rich is ageing, if you are young. On the beach, even the sexuality of his body, the curve of his genitals making a shield of the white trunks, was not aggressive. The Norwegian lady took off her bikini bra, Madame Grosbois displayed a belly puckered and loosened by child-bearing long ago. His body’s presence didn’t shame any of you. I begin to see here that modesty’s really a function of vanity. When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like old dogs or cats grateful for the sun. No offence was meant.

We swam the waveless peacock-shaded sea, Rosa, Didier, Katya — you talking and calling and flinging away from yourself bits of floating plastic board as if you believe, like an early navigator, somewhere there is an edge of the world over which they’ll be carried and break the global cycle by which what you rid yourself of returns. You tired and floated; Didier and I swam on round a small headland into a stripe of deep blue and came ashore among rocks, where I cut my toe on a sardine-tin. Threadworms of blood came from me in the water; when I took my foot out, from under an eyelid of skin red pain runnelled. I hopped over the pebbles. It hadn’t hurt after the first stab, in the water, but now it was seared by the air. We examined my toe together; blood; the reminder of vulnerability, life always under the threat of being spilled. A little ceremony of blood-brotherhood, every time.

— We need something to tie. — He was very severe.

Well, two people in a bikini and trunks; we didn’t have it. I smiled — it would be all right, the water would wash out the cut well on the swim back.

I must hold the foot high to reverse the flow. I said no, no, it was all right, the chill of the water would staunch it.

— But it hurts you, no? — Water was shaken on him where he crouched with my foot between his knees. The sprinkle on his face already dried stiff in the sun came from my hair, he called — Hey! — flashed me a squinting annoyed look against the light. My toe disappeared from the exposure to pain; I felt it surrounded by gentle warmth and softness. Because his head was ducked I felt before I saw that he had my toe in his mouth. Ridiculous — ridiculous at the same time as sensual, as so many sensual moves are, if you set yourself outside them. But it was done with such confidence I understood it as I was meant to.

As he squatted there before me I saw and felt his head, his tongue as if it were between my legs — he knew it.

— My dirty foot! I walked all round the valley early this morning.—

— How can it be dirty, your foot — out of the sea, Rôse, tell me — He held it between his palms like a rabbit or a bird, and he knew he was holding it to suggest this.

— Come on Didier. We must swim back.—

He mimicked. — Come on Didier, we must go — Rôse, it’s true your feet are a bit broad, peasant feet, but you have a beautiful navel, it’s really like the one on the top of an orange — now why do you pull your face, why shouldn’t we laugh together — Rôse—

— Didier, not with me.—

— With you?—

— You don’t have to.—

— What do you mean, don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything. I do what I feel.—

— I put it badly.—

— Rôse, you are talking — what are you talking.—

— You know. If a new woman turns up — a girl, among the friends, you…it’s like being nice to the older women; appropriate—

— But we’re young, Rôse — He seems sometimes to take up lines of dialogue he has heard in television serials. — Mnh? It’s natural, êh. We are the only young ones! — what’s the matter with you?—

I said to this strange being, as if I knew him — You think it’s wrong then, with Donna, unnatural — making love, living with her?—

He frowned sceptically.

— Because she’s so much older? A sacrifice? She owes you something?—

— What? Donna is a generous woman.—

— Me. Owes me to you.—

He made a mouth like the mouths of cherubs blowing the four winds in the Italian pictures in Solvig’s collection. They tell me this part of France was Italian a hundred years ago; I see faces I thought belonged to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. — She doesn’t expect I should not like girls. She must understand, êh. She likes a young man.—

If I am curious about them, these people, to me it seems they allow me to be so because I am a foreigner. But I see it’s that they are not afraid of being found out, the nature of their motives is shared and discussed; because the premise is accepted by everybody: live where it’s warm, buy, sell or take pleasure honestly — that is, according to your circumstances. They recognize their only imperatives as dependence on a tight-knotted net of friendship, and dedication to avoiding tax wherever possible while using all the state welfare one can contrive to qualify for — the rebates, allocations, grants and pensions they are always discussing, whether rich or poor. — So it’s all right, then?—