Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Sure you won’t have another drink?—

  She was standing, ready for the lie, also. —My train to catch.—

  As she hung her bag over her shoulder some hard shape in it nudged her hip; she had forgotten to give the man the bottle of wine she had brought along at the last minute before closing the door of her conference hotel room—as she knew she wasn’t going to look up the friends she had bought it for, it had seemed to serve as a useful gesture of apology for an intrusion.

  He received it with appreciative pleasure. —All the way from South Africa! Charlie and I’ll regale ourselves tonight.—He read out the name on the label, two words run into one, most likely those of a Boer wine farmer after the old war lost to the British, the defeated still spelling in Dutch from which his own language, Afrikaans, derived. —Allesverloren, ‘everything lost’—ah, you see, from my Holland side—grandmother—I can translate . . .—

  She walked block after block before remembering to look for a taxi or bus stop. Should have asked if there was perhaps a photograph from that time. Could have, since the terms of the visit had been violated. But no.

  You know the one you knew. Cannot know the other, any other. Allesverloren.

  history

  THE parrot’s been thirty years an attraction in this restaurant, but of course nobody knows how old it is. A parrot can live for a century, it’s said—probably an old seafarer’s tale; didn’t the birds used to be sailors’ companions on ancient lonely voyages? They were brought to Europe from Africa, the Amazon, everywhere what was thought of as The World sent ships lurching, venturing the seas to worlds known by others. Those others couldn’t speak, so far as the sailors were concerned—that is, not the language of the sailors, whatever it might be. But the bird could. Very soon it asked questions, made demands, cursed, even laughed in their language. The world of others talked back from what The World was set to make of those others—its own image. The sailors didn’t know—does anyone—how a bird can speak. But it did. And as if it understood, at least the laughter, the abuse. Else how could it have produced the expression of these?

  That’s all centuries ago, the restaurant parrot must have come from a pet shop, although Madame Delancy remembers it was given to her husband by some friend. —We would never have bought a parrot! For a restaurant! It’s not a zoo!—But she gives a tilt-of-the-head greeting to the parrot as to a member of the staff, or rather a member of the family because this is a restaurant in the South of France of the usual village kind where the employees are all descendant from the chef father and the hostess mother to sons and daughters and even grandchildren who come by on their velos to eat and help clear tables, after school.

  The parrot’s plumage is green and yellow, with a touch of red somewhere, a grey curved beak that, because the creature’s been there as long as the founding habitués at their tables, seems to have aged that way like some old man’s nose. English tourists and those retired from their cold shires, by their culture amateur ornithologists, know that the parrot is African, and also know him by name, Auguste. But the most constant clientele, out as well as in season, is local. The older habitués, native and foreign, have seen them, heard them grow up, from the time of baby carriages, the racing past tables chasing balls, to the sexy tattooed biceps, the giggling and flirting over cigarettes, the transformation of bared be-ringed navels to the swelling mounds of pregnancy.

  In season the parrot in his domed cage is outdoors under a tree on the territory of the Place where the restaurant spreads its tables and umbrellas. Out of season he is thrust away with summer in a corner of the restaurant if the weather is bad; a sort of hibernation imposed on him that is surely contrary to the cycle of his species, wherever its origin. Sometimes there’s even his night-time cloth thrown over the roof of his cage. Take a nap. But most of the year, in that mild climate, he is at his post outdoors in the middle of the day, and clients favour eating there. —Auguste! Hullo!— People call out as they stroll to be seated. —Auguste! Bon jour!— As if they must be acknowledged by him, the sign, the character of their choice of where to eat and drink, as some feel prestige in being recognised by a maître d’hôtel. And with the assertion of dignity of a maître d’ sometimes he calls back or murmurs in that mysterious throat of his, Hullo bon jour. Sometimes not. He pretends to be busy attending to some displacement of his plumage or shifting the precise prehensile grip of his claws. They, like his beak, have taken on the human characteristics of the clients beyond his cage but long around him—the skin of the claws of his kind of hands furrowed, hardened, cross-wrinkled by mutual ageing.

  Parents send their children from the tables to greet him. Go and see the parrot, say something to it, it can talk, you know. So the adults get rid of infant chatter and whining. Don’t put your finger through the bars! This’s not a kittycat! Go—see that parrot over there?

  The children surround the cage and stare. His half-lidded insignificant eyes—he is all beak, all the attribute of what takes food and utters—look back at them as a public figure endures the sameness of the face of the crowd. He won’t speak although mummy and daddy say so and what mummy and daddy say must be true. Right. Auguste is presumed to be a male because of his raucous voice: suddenly he obliges with raging shrieks, the yells of a street fight. Some children run away, others laugh and tease him for more. It’s as if inappropriate violence has brought an unsuitable reminder to the pleasant security of choosing from the menu with the member of the chef’s family offering advice of the specials of the day. Madame Delancy may even come out, shrugging and smiling, gently to direct the taunting children away. Perhaps she has the segment of a tangerine or an open mussel in her fingers to soothe the bird. (When clients are astonished at the spectacle of a parrot enjoying moules marinières she cocks her head and says—iodine—maybe that’s why he lives so long.) He will take the titbit and continue to grumble with quiet indignation to himself, while apparently listening acutely to all around him, for as suddenly as he flew into a rage he enters unbidden across all the conversations the clichés of his vocabulary over the clichés of theirs. —Santé cheers wha-tt! really? well-l so! so-oo ça va? come on! tu parles! love . . . ly bye now ça va?— All the nuances of hilarity, derision, irritation, disbelief, boredom are faithfully introduced, reproduced. The inflections of what must be called his voice adapt to whether he’s having his say in French or English—it seems the advent of German and Scandinavian clients has not, in this latter part of his thirty years, enabled him to reproduce their locutions.

  But now there’s change coming to the charming village—of course it has kept its character through many changes, longer than the legendary longevity of a parrot. The revolution that sent the monks fleeing from their monastery whose cloisters are now the garden bar of its avatar as a five-star hotel; the German occupation in the 1940s in which young men of village families still extant (look at those baby carriages) were killed in the Resistance—there’s a street where one was born, named after him. There has been the restoration of rotting beams in old houses by Scandinavians, Germans and the English, who in the boom years of Europe discovered a delightful unspoilt place to acquire a historic maison secondaire.

  This latest change has a finality about it—as no doubt they all have had for whoever lived in or visited the village ‘as it used to be’. Before. For each individual another ‘before’. But one of the finalities, now, is the announced closing of the restaurant of the parrot. After thirty years! Madame Delancy knows she owes an explanation to the habitués, whether the survivors of the lesbian community from the Twenties, the regular summer visitors, or the youngsters who take their right as a species of collateral grandchildren to sit smoking, jeering and chattering for more than an hour over a single coffee or a shared icecream. The chef, her dear husband who (everyone has heard related many times) learned his skills in the kitchens of Maxim’s in Paris, has been cooking for more than forty years. For some while they have had a small apartment with a view of the sea, ready in
preparation for this time that has come. So the tables with their white napery and flowers, the chairs on which everyone is at ease, raising glasses, all will be folded away, the ice buckets where bottles of Provençal Rosé are powdered with chill, and the chef’s incomparable Tarte Tatin that is displayed among desserts—all will disappear. No. No? A German gentleman has bought the restaurant. As if one can ‘buy’ a restaurant whose character has been formed over thirty years. A German. Sauerkraut and sausages. Or worse, something imagined as international French cuisine by those who are not French.

  An imperious scream from under a bower. —Bon jour! Bon soir! Hullo! Ça va?— reminds: and Auguste, what will happen to the parrot? Can he be bought along with the premises?

  The parrot will move to the apartment. What a question.

  But there is a question: what life will it be for him, alone with an old couple gazing at the sea. Oh the family, the children and grandchildren will visit. Sometimes. Everyone has found other work.

  The final week of the restaurant’s life it is more fully patronised than ever. One must eat there just one time again, it’s going to be the last time. For some people: of many phases, stages, stations of lifetime. The parrot has witnessed these; those that people remember, have forgotten, or want to forget. He is particularly talkative during his last chance of recollection declared, it seems that if the creature is long-lived, it also has a relentless memory. It is all there in whatever strange faculty is hidden in that feathered throat and blunt grey tongue behind the probing beak. He laughs the crescendo laugh of a coquettish woman who may or may not hear herself in it as she comes stooping on an invalid’s walker to sit for one last lunch at her usual table. Now he’s tittering nonsensically from the adolescence of girls who have disappeared into the cities; the parents, eating their ultimate Daube Provençale, haven’t had news for months. The tittering sweeps away to a drunken blast (that poor devil, relic of former habitués, begs now outside the market). The murmur of lovers across a table (the hostile couple who don’t exchange a word while they eat), the insinuating laugh of gossips whose predictions of mismatch and betrayal have come to pass, there—and someone smiling a farewell, cajoling, Auguste, Auguste, turns away from the cage at lack of response, the creature has gone silent. He fidgets about the cage as if to find a bribe of sugar he has missed. But it’s more than that. He yells anguish, PAPA PAPA PA—PAA! Where is that child from whom this cry came, and is stored, maybe for the rest of a hundred years? PA—PAA! Where is the father who was called for in desperate appeal, and did he ever come. HULLO HULLO PA—PAAA PA—PAAA! BON JOUR BON SOIR WHAT? WHAT? ÇA VA? ÇA VA? The parroting that isn’t only that of parrots repeats how we hide from one another’s hurts. ÇA VA?

  How goes it.

  And from the depths of whatever he has that mocks vocal chords, low and angry, there is what was overheard, what he shouldn’t have overheard. Ça ne va pas du tout.

  Doesn’t go at all.

  a beneficiary

  CACHES of old papers are graves, you shouldn’t open them.

  Her mother had been cremated. There is no marble page incised Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.

  She always lied about her age; it wasn’t her natal name, that was too ethnically limiting, inherited generations back, to suggest her uniqueness in a programme cast list. It wasn’t her married name, either. She had baptised herself; professionally. She was long divorced although only in her late fifties when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career. Her daughter Charlotte has her father’s surname and has been close to him as a child can be subject to an ex-husband’s conditions of access while the ex-wife, customarily, has custody. As Charlotte has grown up she’s felt more compatible with him than with her, fondly though she feels towards her mother’s—somehow—childishness. Perhaps acting is really continuing the make-believe games of childhood—fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way she had wanted to follow. Although named after the character in which her mother had an early success (Charlotte Corday, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade) and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow because of lack of talent: her mother’s unspoken interpretation of disappointment, if not expressed in reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover so far as marrying again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as he called her) could remark to her father, ‘Why should she expect me to take after her?’

  Her father was a neurologist. They laughed together; at any predestinatory prerogative of the mother, or the alternative paternal one, to be expected to become a doctor! Poking around in people’s brains? They nudged one another with the elbowing of more laughter at the daughter’s distaste.

  Her father helped to arrange the memorial gathering in place of a funeral service, sensitive as always to any need in her life. She certainly wouldn’t have expected or wanted him to come along to an ex-wife’s apartment and get down to sorting the clothes, personal possessions to be kept or given away. A friend from the firm where she worked as an actuary agreed to help for a free weekend. Unexpectedly, the young civil rights lawyer with whom there had been a sensed mutual attraction taken no further than dinner and a cinema date, offered himself—perhaps a move towards a love affair, which was coming about anyway. The girls emptied the cupboards of clothes, the friend exclaiming over the elaborate range of different styles women of that generation wore, seems they had many personalities to project—as if you could choose, now you belonged to the outfit of jeans and T-shirt. Oh of course! Charlotte’s mother was a famous actress!

  Charlotte did not correct this out of respect for the ambitions of her mother. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically, for her, press cuttings and programmes, photographs displaying Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned a few programmes and remarked to be overheard by him rather than to him, ‘Never really had the leads she believed she should have after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn’t it. I’ve never seen the play.’ Confiding the truth of her mother’s career, betraying Laila’s idea of herself; perhaps also a move towards a love affair.

  The three young people broke out of trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by not the usual litigation? No robberies, highjacks? Did the two young women feel they were discriminated against, did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it t’other way about, did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were elevated to positions they weren’t really up to? Women of any colour; and black men, same thing? What would have been the sad and strange task alone became a lively evening, animated exchange of opinions and experiences.

  Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

  There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, kwaito. After a dinner and dancing together, that first bodily contact to confirm attraction, he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed as would be natural to the beautiful and inviting bed with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, notion of respect for the dead, as if her mother still lay there in possession.

  The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.

  Charlotte brushed aside any offers, also from her office friend, to continue with the sorting of Laila’s—what? The clothes were packed up, some seemed wearable only in the context of a theatrical wardrobe and were given to an experimental theatre group, others went to the Salvation Army for distribution to the homeless. Her father arranged with an est
ate agent to advertise the apartment for sale; unless you want to move in, he suggested. It was too big, his Charlie couldn’t afford to, didn’t want to live in a style not her own, even rent-free. They laughed again in their understanding, not in criticism of her mother. Laila was Laila. He agreed, but as if in relation to some other aspect. Yes, Laila.

  The movers came to take the furniture to be sold. She half-thought of inheriting the bed, it would be luxurious to flop diagonally across its generosity; but you wouldn’t be able to get it past the bedroom door, in her small flat. When the men had departed with their loads there were pale shapes on the floors where everything had stood. She opened windows to let out the dust, the special atmosphere of an occupation like the air of a cave, and turning back suddenly saw something had been left behind. A couple of empty boxes, the cardboard ones of supermarket delivery. Irritated, she went to gather them; one wasn’t empty. It seemed to be filled with letters. What makes you keep some letters and crumple others for the bin. In her own comparatively short life she’d thrown away giggly schoolgirl stuff, sexy propositions scribbled on the back of menus, once naïvely found flattering, polite letters of rejection in response to a job beyond her qualifications she had applied for—a salutary lesson on what her set called the Real World. This box apparently contained memorabilia different from the other stuff already dealt with. The envelopes had the look of personal letters. Hand-addressed, without printed logos of business, bank. Did Laila have a personal life at all that wasn’t her family-the-theatre? One child, daughter of a divorced marriage, hardly counts as ‘family’.

  Charlotte—that was the identity she had in any context of her mother—sifted over the envelopes. If her mother did have a personal life it was not a material possession to be disposed of like garments taken on and off; a personal life can’t be ‘left to’ a daughter, a beneficiary in a will. Whatever letters Laila chose to keep were still hers; just quietly burn them, as Laila herself was consumed, to join her. They say (read somewhere) nothing no-one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space—atoms infinitely minute beyond conception of existence are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. Just as she had noticed this one box that was not empty, as she shook it so that the contents would settle and not spill when lifted, she noticed some loose sheets of writing paper face-down. Not held in the privacy of an envelope. She picked them out face-up. Her father’s handwriting. More deliberately formed than Charlie knew it, what was the date at the top of the page under the address of the house she remembered as home when she was a small girl. A date twenty-four years back—of course his handwriting had changed a bit, it does with different stages in one’s life. His Charlie is twenty-eight, so she would have been four years old when he wrote the date, that’s about right, must have been just before the divorce and her move to a new home with Laila.