Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— You will be a nice friend for me. We are same age. — The text of a children’s first reader; the Japanese girl said it at one of those daily meetings at the top of steps or on the place , when people ran into each other and stood about talking. The girl prattled to her beautiful dog in some anthropomorphic game — Rosa looked down from her own private roof-top and saw her, so pretty in tight French trousers and high clogs she wore with the close-elbowed, close-kneed femininity of exotic dress, turning up a smiling, wide-jawed face on its frail stem. She lived with an Englishman Madame Bagnelli’s guest hadn’t yet met. He passed below on a morning walk with a stick, the girl and the dog; a white-haired man with the majesty of a slow-grown tree casually carried in the denim egalitarianism first taken over by students from peasants and labourers, and then from the young by the rich. He was a Lancashire shipyard owner — had been, everyone had been something else before they came to live as they wanted to, here — for whom Ugo Bagnelli, whose name Madame Bagnelli continued although she had never been married to anyone but Lionel Burger, had worked. — If Tatsu invites you, you should go — just to see what Ugo did. Everything in that boat’s his idea. He fitted out…must have been three or four — a whole succession of yachts and cabin cruisers for Henry Torren. Oh Henry happened to like him…not many that one does. He’s a solitary. Apart from whatever young woman he marries or lives with. He’s never mixed here. He likes to think he’s not like us… there’re so many failures, you know? But people who haven’t got money also do what they like, here. I don’t think he approves of that, it spoils things for him, ay? He would like to think he doesn’t enjoy the things the rest of us do! Not a snob, no, no, you have to know him…we get on all right. A puritan. Ugo never charged him — w-e-ll, so little it was nothing. Ugo loved luxurious things — he lived with them — oh-ho in style! — in his imagination, you know? — while we were eating nothing but spaghetti. He could design them and make them but he knew he would never have them for himself. In a way it was the same thing…why do I fall for such men? Rather why did I… And now — The gesture, the face of mock abdication learned from Gaby Grosbois when she talked about Pierre, her husband.

Madame Bagnelli and Rosa Burger did not deliberately talk about Lionel Burger but did not avoid doing so: he was a fact between them. It changed them, each for the other, at different times and in different contexts. They had not known each other before they became a middle-aged woman and her young guest fortunate to find themselves in a state that could not have been anticipated, arranged for or explained. Compatible: that was enough, in itself; comfortably, they began to exist only at the moment each turned out to be the one the other was looking for on an airport. That fact — the fact of Lionel — when the passing of daily life thinned or shifted to reveal it, made, like a change of light transforming the aspect of a landscape, the two women into something else for each other.

As Madame Bagnelli was talking, the girl was looking at the woman who had fallen in love with Lionel Burger. The woman felt the way she was suddenly seen, and became Katya. — We were young, all the ideas were so wonderful. You’ve heard it all before, god knows. But they were. ‘We were going to change the world’. When I tell you even now — I could still begin to tremble, my hands…you know? And I thought that was going to happen! No more hunger, no more pain. But that is the biggest luxury, ah? I must have been a stupid little creature — I was. Unattainable. Not to be achieved in our lifetime; in Lionel’s. He understood that. He was prepared for it, don’t ask me how. — But if it should be never? What then? I couldn’t wait, I can’t wait, I don’t want to wait. I’ve always had to live…I couldn’t give it up. When I saw your mother — you remember I told you? — I thought: that’s the end of me.—

The girl corrected her. — No, you said — you could see she was a ‘real revolutionary’—. A precisely-imposed pause. Smiling. They were skinning big sweet peppers that had been grilled.

— Yes, that’s what I mean. So that was the end of me. I wouldn’t stand a chance against her. The end of me with him. — The skin of the peppers was transparent when it lifted in finicky curls and the hot flesh beneath was succulent, scarlet; the tips of their fingers burned. — Like this, about half-an-inch, don’t worry if they’re not regular — Rosa watched while she laid strips of flesh in a bowl. — But I was also free of them . That was something. Those bastards. I was wearing a pair of shoes once, summer shoes, very pretty ones. Everyone wore white shoes in summer in those days. I must have innocently let slip the servant girl had blancoed them for me. The next thing, a complaint at a meeting: Comrade Katya was showing bourgeois tendencies not fitting in a Party member. They wouldn’t be specific. Nobody admitted it — I lost my temper and screamed at the meeting — I knew it was the shoes, nothing but a bloody stupid pair of white shoes — Now a little dribble of oil between each layer— Her stained fingers, followed by those of the girl, dripping juice to the wrists, arranged a lattice of gleaming red. The girl looked at her; she answered, prompted — A sprinkle of salt.—

In the bar tabac young Swedes and Germans, English men and girls crushed in to drink something labelled La Veuve Joyeuse and in the evenings Madame Bagnelli’s friends moved over instead to Josette Arnys’ bar for the summer season. The old singer was surrounded by young homosexuals as by a large family, affectionate, bored and dependent. Some served behind the bar or were served as clients, indiscriminately; Madame Bagnelli had towards them the easy, bossy, cuffing and teasing manner that all the women in the village who for various reasons had denuded themselves of their own children, adopted towards young men. — Oh pardon! Je m‘excuse — je suis désolée, bien sur…Je vous avais pris pour le garçon… Rosa Burger’s French was beginning to piece together whole patches of talk but comprehension tattered when jokes and insults began to fly between Madame Bagnelli and some distant-faced young man taking up his wrist-strap bag, cigarettes and gilt lighter. One of them cooked for Arnys in the cellar-kitchen off the cove of tiny tables beside the bar. Paper place-mats painted by another advised the choice of spécialités antillaises (among the old recordings that played continuously was the voice of Arnys in the Thirties singing of ‘the island where Joséphine Beauharnais and I were born’). In the white toque worn as a transvestite wears a wig, gold chains tangled with the blond hair on his chest, her chef sat most of the time playing cards with Arnys in her corner under photographs of herself with Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, and others whose names were not so well known to a foreigner.

The bar counter was central and majestic as a fine altar in a church. When Rosa Burger lost track of the talk she could follow with her eyes again and again the spiral of magnificent dark oak corkscrew pillars that flanked the mirror where they were all reflected — Darby’s captain’s cap, Madame Bagnelli’s breasts leaning on the mahogany surface, Tatsu’s eyes opaque as molasses, the gaze of one of the homosexuals flirting with himself, the detachment of a French couple dazed by sunburn and love-making, the excited hunch of Pierre Grosbois as he gave his frank opinions, his warnings on this or that subject to Marthe and Françoise, the shrivelled, bright-lipped pair with long cigarette-holders whose flowery courtyard bordering the place was a shop where feather boas, old bathtubs with dragon’s feet, the broken faces of romanesque angels, wore price-tags as trees are named in a botanical garden. The oak pillars — when Pierre explained something to Rosa he considerately used a special, didactically-enunciated French — were screws from old olive presses that had been numerous in the countryside round about, from Roman times (What are you saying! And long before that! — his wife thrust her face over her shoulder) until the end of the nineteenth century (—The ’14-’18 war, Pierre!—).