Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

— One of the people you thought I was.—

— I know who you are. — The third time they met he returned with this discovery. He did not so much mean that someone had told him, as one of Madame Bagnelli’s friends no doubt had: her father was on the side of the blacks, out there — he was imprisoned, killed or something — a terrible story. Bernard Chabalier was among the signatures of academics and journalists that filled sheets headed by Sartre, de Beauvoir and Yves Montand on petitions for the release of political prisoners in Spain, Chile, Iran, and on manifestos protesting the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and censorship in Argentina. He had once signed an Amnesty International petition for the release of an ageing and ill South African revolutionary leader, Lionel Burger. ‘At a time’ (it was an expression he used often, not quite English, and somehow thereby more tentative than in its correct form) there had been a suggestion he should be on the anti-apartheid committee in Paris. He had spoken a short introduction to a film made clandestinely by blacks showing the bulldozing of their houses in mass removals. The facts came from the black exiles who were hawking the film around Europe; his ability to communicate with them in English was his primary qualification. — And I gave it as a talk on France Culture —I sometimes get asked to do things; usually the sociological consequences of political questions — that sort of programme.—

— I’d like to hear you. If I could understand.—

— I should talk only French to you, really…you’d improve quickly… But you’ll never say anything real to me except in English. I won’t give that up. — Before there was time to settle an interpretation, he became practical and amusing. — If I had a tape recorder here I could do an interview with you for the radio, you know. They’d buy it I’m sure. We’ll split the fee. A grand sum. What could we do with it? Change our brand of champagne? — They drank every day without remarking it the loving-cup of the first meeting, the same citron pressé. Pépé/Toni/Jacques prepared it each time as if he had not known what the order would be: a signal of contempt for heterosexual trysts. — We could buy two cheap tickets to Corsica. On the ferry. Vomit all the way — I am terribly seasick. I know you will not be. — A moment of gloomy jealousy.

— I’ve never been on board a ship.—

— But it would be good — people would hear your voice, and I would translate you (finger-tips pursed together by the drawstring of a gesture, then opening away) — im-pec-cable.—

— I promised. I can’t speak.—

Arnys was at her old roll-top desk as soon as she arrived; she spent the first hour of her day in meditative retreat behind three walls of minute drawers and cubby-holes: her misty spectacles hung on the little pert nose of the celebrity photographs and her hands went about spearing invoices on spikes with the brooding orderly anxiety, over money, of hardened arteries in the brain. Their voices came to her as the voices of so many who were lovers or would be lovers, whose intense abrupt interrogations and monologues of banalities too low to be made out sounded as if secret and irrevocable matters were being discussed.

He put aside what he had said like a trinket he had been playing with. — Who was it you promised?—

Rosa caught the abstracted peer above the old singer’s glasses, tactfully dropped in respect for sexual privacies everyone knows from common experiences and indulges. The protection of Arnys’ unimaginable life, and the life to which the one called Pépé was at that moment connected on the phone — the pillars, the enclosed reality of the mirror — all contained her safely. — That’s how I got here. How they let me out.—

— The police? — The awkward respectful tone of initiative surrendered.

— Not directly. But in effect, yes. Oh don’t worry… — Her eyes moved to smile, a parenthetic putting out of a hand to him. — I didn’t talk. I made sure I had nothing to talk about before I went to them. But I made a deal. With them.—

— Sensible. — He defended her.

She repeated — With them, Bernard.—

— You didn’t betray anybody.—

‘Oppress’. ‘Revolt’. ‘Betray’. He used the big words as people do without knowing what they can stand for.

— I asked. No one I know would do that. I did what none of the others has done.—

— What did they say?—

— I didn’t tell anyone. I kept away.—

He was working well; the regulation of his days had fallen into place round the daily meetings in Arnys’ bar, hardly open for business but tolerant of certain needs. She saw in the rim of shaving-foam still wet on an earlobe that he had broken off concentration at the last minute, jumped up in the virtue of achievement to prepare himself for her. He was superstitious about acknowledging progress, but the calm elation with which he slid onto the stool beside her, or the gaiety of his exchanges with Arnys were admittance.

— I’d like to have you there in the room. I’ve always resented having anyone in the same room while I work. — It was a declaration; a reverie of a new relationship. But he refused himself. — I’ll make love to you, that’s the trouble.—

After the first Sunday of their acquaintance, when each had been committed to excursions with other people, they had gone on Tuesday straight from Arnys to the room where he lived. — I thought of an hotel. I’ve been worrying since Quatorze Juillet, where can we go? — His hosts were out; but it would not often happen that the house would be empty. — Do you know that little one in the street near the big garage? Behind the Crédit Lyonnais. — You mean opposite the parking ground where they play boule? — I like the look of those two little windows above. — There’s a bird-cage outside one. — You saw it too. — That’s the little restaurant where Katya and I eat couscous — they make couscous every Wednesday. Fourteen francs.—

His suitcase lay open on a chair, never unpacked but delved into, socks and shirts that had been worn stuffed among clean shirts carefully folded in imitation of the format of the shirt box and clean socks rolled into neat fists. Someone had packed shoe-trees for him. They were serving to hold down piles of cuttings and papers sorted on the bed.

It was exactly the hour of the day when she had arrived and come out into the village on Madame Bagnelli’s terrace. He moved his papers in their order to the floor, already naked, with the testicles appearing between his thighs as his male rump bent, equine and beautiful. They emerged for each other all at once: they had never seen each other on a beach, the public habituation to all but a genital triangle. He might never have been presented with a woman before, or she a man. Tremendous sweet possibilities of renewal surged between them; to explode in that familiar tender explosion all that has categorized sexuality, from chastity to taboo, illicit licence to sexual freedom. In a drop of saliva there was a whole world. He turned the wet tip of his tongue round the whorl of the navel Didier had said was like that of an orange.

In the heat they had shut out, people were eating in soft clatter, laughter, and odours of foods that had been cooked in the same way for so long their smell was the breath of the stone houses. Behind other shutters other people were also making love.

The little Rôse has a lover.

I spend less time with you; you understand that sort of priority well. You were the one who said, Chabalier, why go home — stay tonight and we can make an early start in the morning. The little expeditions to show me something of the country are arranged by the two of you, now. The big bed in the room you gave me — the room I’ll be able to keep the sense of in the moments before I have to open my eyes in other places, as Dick Terblanche knew the proportions of his grandfather’s dining-table when he couldn’t remember poetry in solitary confinement — the bed in my lovely room is intended for two people. Once dragged shut the heavy old black door doesn’t let through the sounds you have known so well, yourself. If they are audible through the windows they merge with the night traffic of motorbikes and nightingales. When the three of us have breakfast together in the sun before he goes off to his work I notice you make up your eyes and brush your hair out of respect for male presence and as an aesthetic delicacy of differentiation from the stage in life of a young woman in perfect lassitude and carelessness of sensuality — I can’t help yawning till the tears come to my eyes, thirsty and hungry (you buy croissants filled with almond paste to satisfy and indulge me), spilling over in affection towards you a bounty I can afford to be generous with. Bernard says to me: —I am full of semen for you. — It has nothing to do with passion that had to be learned to deceive prison warders; and you’re no real revolutionary waiting to decode my lovey-dovey as I dutifully report it.