Burger's Daughter (32 page)

—He's lucky if Georges can afford to indulge his whims, that's all I can say.—

—Donna and Didier went along.—

—What for?—

Madame Bagnelli appealed to her house-guest against the absurdity of the question.—For the ride. For fun.—

—Spoiling that boy, too. Just as she did the others. You'll see.—

A French voice flew through the house like a trapped cuckoo. Another woman arrived and the same sort of conversation continued in French. The first woman stopped in the doorway to talk another five minutes.—Well, I hope you enjoy your holiday or whatever it is. Did Darby meet her, this morning?—

—Of course, for a moment. Why ?—

With the Englishwoman hardly out of earshot Madame Bagnelli was explaining:—Wanted to be the one to tell Darby she'd met the girl at Katya's—did you see that!—It was repeated in French and she and the Frenchwoman rose to a heightened pitch of laughter, each cutting across the comments of the other. There was an anxious attempt at English now and then.—But
you
have the beautiful sunshine too, êh...it's a wonderful country? I know. I like to go there, but—The Frenchwoman pulled the enchanting face of a woman twenty years younger and rubbed first-finger and thumb together. The two women then fell into a discussion about money, serious and with twitches of pain in the expression about their mouths, calculations reeled off in which Rosa distinguished only
milles
and
cents
colliding along chains of hyphens as the bees did sottishly round the dregs of wine. A young man had appeared; she turned her chair away from the sun, and found the battlements of the castle up there behind her in the sky, the flags luminous as stained glass, and down in the indoor shadowy hush of the house was aware that one of the objects detached itself and moved into human shape. She saw him eavesdropping before he made himself known. Out in the light of the terrace, he had come upon them all on bare feet, tightly bound in blinding white pants to just below the navel and naked above it. Two sea-pumiced brown hands over Madame Bagnelli's eyes and she seemed to know the touch instantly. —But you're in Vintimille—What happened?—

He bent round to her face and kissed her, then ceremoniously, leisurely, went over to bend to the face of the Frenchwoman. When he had kissed her she took his face in her palms and said something whose cadence was adoring and admiring, motherly-lustful.

—What are you doing here? Didier!—

He leaned against the balustrade before his audience.—I didn't go.—In a dark-tanned face the nostrils had the pink rawness of one who has been diving.

—And Donna ?—

—She went.—

—Didier ? But why ?—

The Frenchwoman said of the lost opportunity, things were so much cheaper over the border in Vintimille; he had seen the leather coat Manolis got there last winter ?

—Didier ? What've you been doing all day alone, then ?—

—Fishing. Spear-fishing. You don't need anyone to do it with.—They were introduced but he didn't address himself to Rosa Burger. The questions and comments of the women fawned round him inquisitively and appreciatively; he seemed not to address anyone, eyeing himself in an accompanying vision of himself, like a mirror. He went purposefully about the table under the awning finding morsels he ate quickly, licking his fingers. He waved down offers to fetch something more for him to eat; wiped round the salad bowl, soaking bread in the oil, served himself cheese wrapped in straw, with a certain professional deftness. His dark cloudy blue eyes under lashes so long he seemed to trail them on his cheeks, his chewing jaw, followed the return of the women's talk to the subject of taxes. Now and then he put in an objection or correction; they argued. He belched, hit flat belly-muscles, ran fine hands over smooth pectorals. They laughed;—Like that cat, Didier. Come for titbits and just stalk off.—He was embracing the women again, swinging gracefully from one to the other. He said goodbye to the girl in English used in the casual manner of an habitual tongue but with a marked French and slight American accent.

—When are they coming back ?—

The voice was caught before the slam of the door.—How should I know ?—

—Naughty boy! What are you sulking about ?—Madame Bagnelli yelled, bold and laughing, out of range. She performed a little caper of activity and swooped on the table, scooping up dishes, emptying bees and dregs among the flower-urns. The Frenchwoman left. They tidied away the remains of the meal, lingering in the cool livingroom to talk, Madame Bagnelli's voice flitting without cease from where she bent into the refrigerator in the kitchen, or sank suddenly, legs crossed at the ankle balletically, to a little sofa. Her guest had opened the suitcase and brought out the offerings that are part of the ritual of arrival. The girl eyed them warily now that they had found their recipient—safe options chosen for someone not known, they might seem only to do for
anybody
, the interchangeable airport gifts she herself had had her share of, all the years she had stayed at home. Only one suggested a particular being imagined, asserted associations that might not exist, or might be unwelcome: a double necklace of finely-carved hexagonal wooden spools separated by cheap store beads.

The woman looked at it looped in her hands; quickly at Rosa Burger; at the necklace, and parted a bead from a spool.—See what they're strung on. What's it called...that palm...
Ilala
. Ilala palm thread spun by rolling the fibres up and down on your bare thigh. I've seen them do it. Look, not cotton! Ilala palm—She broke into pleased pride at the verification, identification in herself. —And the wood—don't say, wait—His daughter stood there before her.—Tambuti. Yes ? That scent! It's Tambuti.—

—I think so. They're the things the Herero women wear. There's a shop...very occasionally you find something—

—It's from Namibia—even the Afrikaners don't call it South West anymore, eh ?—She wandered round her livingroom considering the disposition of a strange blood-dark head of Christ on leather embossed in flaky gold, staring almond eyes; a picture of a nude girl with an eel or other sea-monster mutilated beside her; a great iron key; jagged with age and an ancient fervour that had hacked it from the whole, a fragment of a rigid wooden saint raising a pleated hand and upright finger over the fireplace. She hung the necklace from a candle-bracket marbled thick with the lava of wax. —When I'm not wearing it, I want to enjoy seeing it.—

—The day before yesterday's. I thought you might like to— Rosa Burger hesitated before dumping along with crumpled wrappings the South African newspaper that had been standing up from her bag when the woman first singled her out.

—Good god. How many years...—Madame Bagnelli sank down holding the paper at arm's length.—Same old mast-head... In the kitchen, you'll see a pair of specs. Probably on the shelf where the coffee-grinder...on the fridge or
in
the fridge—sometimes I take something out and put them down without...—She dismissed herself with a twirl of fingers.—You were still there. Only the day before yesterday.—She was looking at Rosa Burger as at someone whose existence she, too, could not believe in. His daughter wagged her head slowly; they were together.—Have you ever been out before ?—

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.

I
f 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.