Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

There were times when she was there before him. He began to make it a rule that he got up early enough to have worked three hours before he appeared for her through Arnys’ tabernacle-shaped doors with the panes of syrupy amber blistered glass at the top. They opened inwards and usually only for him; hardly anyone came in the mornings. Pépé or Toni or Jacques — whichever had happened to take the keys for Arnys when the bar closed at four or five in the morning — prowled listlessly between the hole of a kitchen, the restaurant alcove smelling of corks swollen with wine and corners where the Maltese had leaked into the sawdust, and the espresso machine set gargling and spitting into cup after cup taken up with dirtied, delicate, trembling ringed hands. The self-absorption of the young homosexual was strangely restful. He would drink the coffee as if it were the source of existence, smoke as if what he drew into his lungs and elaborately expelled through mouth and nostrils was a swilling-out with pure oxygen; reviving, his closed face marked by sleep and caresses like a child’s by forgotten tears and a creased pillow would change and flicker with what was passing in his mind. Now and then he would give the bar counter a half-moon swipe. In the presence of a creature so contained, Rosa came to awareness of her own being like the rising tick of a clock in an empty room. She had a newspaper, or a book she and Bernard were exchanging, but she didn’t read. The huge wooden screws of the olive press, the mirror wall behind the bar, the photographs whose signatures were a performance in themselves, the green satin that covered the walls of the alcove, held in place where it was coming loose by the pinned card, Ouvert jusqu’à l’aube ; the china fish with pencils in its mouth, the bottles of Suze, Teacher’s, Ricard, Red Heart, ranged upside-down like the pipes of an organ, the TV on the old rattan table facing the kitchen at the whim of whoever currently was cook, so that he could be seen in the evenings, cutting or chopping or beating while he watched; the ribbons saved from chocolates or flowers curled like wood-shavings among the bill-spikes on Arnys’ roll-top desk: in a state exactly the reverse of that of the young homosexual, all these were strongly the objects of Rosa’s present. She inhabited it completely as everything in place around her, there and then. In the bar where she had sat seeing others living in the mirror, there was no threshold between her reflection and herself. The pillars she had noticed only as a curiosity she read over like a score, each nick and groove and knot sustaining the harmony and equilibrium of the time-space before the door pushed inwards.

— You choose something you hope someone else isn’t writing about already. That’s the extent of the originality — The irony was not unforgiving, of himself or others. He held her innocent of the pettiness of Europe. He took her hand a moment, in her lap. — I also wanted to give myself time. — He pulled a comic, culpable face. — If you are too topical, the interest will have passed on to something else before you’ve finished. And if it’s something purely scholarly, well, unless you are a great savant…what will I contribute…? No one will take the slightest notice. But the influence of former French colonists who’ve come back to France since the colonial empire ended — I haven’t got a working title yet — that’s something that will go on for years. I don’t have to worry. At first I thought I would do something about the decline of Ladnity — in fact I’ve given a few little talks on the radio…—

— To do with linguistics?—

— No, no — the decline of the Latin source of the French temperament, ideas and so on — I don’t know, it sounds a lot of shit? You know it’s true the life of the French becomes directed more and more by Anglo-Saxon and American concepts… It’s tied up with the Common Market, OTAN…god knows what else. If you want to be fancy you can compare it with the destruction of the ancient culture that fllourished in southern France and Catalonia in the Middle Ages, the civilisation occitane : instinctive, imaginative, self-renewing qualities losing out to sterile technological and military ones. But I don’t much like it. What d‘you think? Too nationalistic. And it leaves out of reckoning Descartes, Voltaire… Where does that kind of thing end? But of course I make a big fuss like everybody else when I see old bistrots like this disappearing and being replaced by drug-store bars, and markets pulled down for supermarkets… oh on that level… Enfin —when I was playing with the Latinity idea, I spent some time around Montpellier, in the Languedoc (the region’s named after the language of that civilization — the tongue they spoke was called the langue d’oc… ‘oc’ simply means ‘yes’, that’s all…). And of course I was also in Provence. Provençal isn’t just a dialect, you know — it’s one of the langues d‘oc. Not much more than a remnant; oh there still are attempts at publishing works in it, but the great Provençal revival took place in the last century — Frédéric Mistral, the poet — you’ve heard of him? — yes. Well then I found I was beginning to think about something different, though in a way…related, because migrations, social change…I began to think about the pied noir concentrated in Provence, here on the coast particularly, and what effect their mentality is having on modern French culture. Part of the consequences of colonialism and all that. Ouf — He had gestures estimating how little all this was worth in the intellectual market. But he was practical. — They’ve come back — some after generations in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco. What gives the idea an interesting nuance, most of them came from this part of the world — their families, originally; southern France, Corsica, Spain. It even relates a bit to the old Latinity business: they have in their blood somewhere the qualities of the ancient cultures, the temperament, but they now bring back to France from her imperialist period the particular values and mores colonizers develop. The locust people. Descend on the land, eat the crop, and be ready to fly when the enslaved population comes after you… Anyway, there are hundreds of thousands back here and they’re very successful. That ancient spontaneousness, capacity for improvisation, alive in their veins? Maybe. A million unemployed in France this summer, but I don’t think you’ll find one among them. Many have their money in Monaco — tax reasons. I’ve been to talk to some people…d’you know that 2 per cent of the population there is pied noir… Not a bad subject, êh. It’s just controversial enough.—

— Why must it be a thesis? It would make a good book.—

— Rosa. Rosa Burger. — He leaned back, elbow on the bar, picked up the china fish and put it down again.

— Oh the style of a thesis — the long-winded footnotes. What you want to say gets buried.—

— I’m a schoolteacher. If I don’t get a Ph. D. I won’t get a job at a university. We have it all worked out — such-and-such a number of francs against such-and-such at the lycée. We can buy a piece of land in Limousin or Bretagne. In so many years build a small country house. To take a chance on a book — you have to be poor, you have to be alone, you can’t have middle-class standards. — He caught her by the wrist, persuasively, smiling, as if to make fall a weapon he imagined in her fist. — You don’t know how careful we are, we French Leftist bourgeoisie. So much set aside every month, no possibility of living dangerously.—

She was considering and curious. — Who need live dangerously, in Europe?—

— Oh there are some. But not the Eurocommunists… Not the Left that votes. Terrorists holding one country to ransom for horrors happening in another. Hijackers. People who push drugs. No one else.—