Burger's Daughter (38 page)

—Where do you stay when you come to Paris ?—

—I don't come to Paris.—

—You thought you were being followed.—

—Ah that. Two nights; I was on my way here. The first and only time.—

His hunch of face against hands accepted that he had not been answered.—Do you want more wine ? Or coffee?—For himself he spoke to the barman plainly and severely, as if to forestall any irritating objections.—I know it's summer. I know it's Quatorze Juillet. But you have lemons ? I want lemon juice—hot.—

—No more wine. I'll have that too.—

—You're sure you'll like it ? Not some exotic French drink, you know, just sour lemon juice.—

—I understood.—

—When I was a student in London I used to ask the way on a bus. They would tell me, ten kind people at once... Yes, yes, grinning at them, thank you—but I was lost. It's a matter of pride, standing up to the chauvinism of the foreign language. At press conferences you hear a visiting statesman so eloquent in his own language—and then suddenly he tries a few words in French...an idiot speaking, an analphabetic from some wretched forgotten hamlet learning to read at the age of seventy.—

The girl did not seem intimidated.—I'm used to it. I've been speaking two mother-tongues all my life and I've always been surrounded by other languages I don't understand.—

—I speak English—

She gestured his competence; he was not impressed by his achievement—Well I worked there six years—but I don't know that we'll understand each other, eh.—

—Why not ?—She took up the formula for a man and woman amusing themselves for half an hour.

—If you talk like that, yes. I say what I think will flatter you and make myself interesting.
I like this. Don't you think that
. Each makes an exhibit—I can't go through that. That's not what I... That's right, don't answer...it's embarrassing not to flirt, not to spread the tail-feathers and cocorico—

One of Arnys' young men looking down his cheeks glided two glasses in saucers before them. The man poured the little packet of sugar into the cloudy liquid and stirred medicinally; Rosa did the same. He reached for more sugar.

—What did you do ?—

She felt again the grip in which she held a hand in the street named Rue de la Harpe. He waited for her to answer and she tasted the lemon juice and took swallows in sips because it was very hot. —Nothing.—

She turned to him for a verdict, proof of his own words—he would not understand.

—I have done nothing.—

—What could you have done ?—

—Ah, I can't explain that—She looked indulgently round the bar at the young men like chorus girls touching at their hair and clothes in perpetual expectation of making an entrance, the old singer satisfying a sense of control over all she had lived by the resolution of the right card coming down.

—There are many things I could say you could've done. Girls in the streets of Paris like tourists with their tired feet and
Guide bleu
who are hijackers on the run. Little students with art nouveau tresses who have cocaine for sale in their satchels. Deputies dining at the Matignon—silver hair, manicured—Anne-Aymone talks gardening with them—who are selling arms to both sides in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, anywhere.—

—None of those.—He did not have a pullover knotted round his neck (a worn leather jacket had been put down on the bar stool beside him); he separated from the awareness in which a few common characteristics ran into one. A high forehead with distinct left and right lobes was almost a pate; thinning curly hair edged it against the light and straggled out in wings above and behind the ears. A wide thin mouth, with mobilities of muscle that modelled in the firm flesh around it expression more usually conveyed by lips.

—W-ell. There are also those who imagine they must have committed something, they feel they're being followed. It's all right.—The thick eyebrows that compensate men for losing their hair lifted with tolerance. The eyes had a trance-like steadiness, showing the arch of the eyelid rather low over the eyeball in a hollow of bone.

—I don't imagine. There's nothing either neurotic or mysterious—She had a need to be plain; as he had said, to make oneself ‘an exhibit' was not acceptable.—If you are followed by policemen you get used to it, so do they. You know whether they fall asleep waiting for you and whether they slip away at regular times for a beer. I've known them since I was a child. But in a foreign town, it wouldn't have been so easy to recognize one. I don't know the sort of person who'd do the work, here—the kind of clothes, the haircut—

She gave up, smiling.

—If you don't live like that—haven't... And here—even I—if one isn't living like that—

He was looking at her with detached respect.—You've been in trouble. All right. I told you, it's impossible... I know about it but I haven't been in it.—

—First of all, I don't think of it like that—as ‘trouble'—

—No of course not. You see ? It's less and less possible for me. When I said we wouldn't understand each other I didn't think it would be something like this. I was thinking only we wouldn't admit why I said come and why you came. About the things between men and women. You attract me very much—you know it, and you answer it by leaving the others, with me. Perhaps you haven't found a man you want among all those who must have shown themselves interested ?—Oh yes. But you couldn't tell me... And how would you understand about me. I am eating the food and drinking the wine of friends I don't think much of, living on them...and perhaps I also think a new girl is part of my little sabbatical...I don't know. You know that I'm a teacher. ‘Professor'—we were introduced yes, but names... Every Frenchman who teaches in a lycée is a professor, every German is Herr Doktor. The people I'm staying with will tell you I'm writing a book—in their house, it's a wonderful process to them. Would I tell you it's my old Ph. D. thesis I entered myself for at the Sorbonne three years ago and that I hope maybe—maybe—someone will publish it if it is ever finished.—

—You can tell me.—She could laugh, unembarrassed. She put out a hand, tendons spoked widely on the back, and felt down round the spiral of the olive-press pillar she had followed with her eyes when she had been with other people.

A woman's voice recorded thirty years before was singing about the island where she and Napoleon's Josephine were born. He had fished the slice of lemon out of the bottom of his glass and was gobbling the skin with a mouth drawn by the zest.—A pig. Excuse me, I love it.—Do you know what that is ? That's Arnys singing—unmistakable. She was the best of the lot. Like some voice coming up from the street when you're falling asleep or not really awake yet.—

Rosa leaned to whisper and was touched by the springy hair behind his ear, smelled him for the first time.—That's Arnys there. It's her bar.—

—Ah no.—

—People keep on telling me. It doesn't mean much to me.—He was looking at the old woman in some kind of partisan pride and bravado at endurance.—You chose Arnys' bar. Something like that happens...—He swung down from his stool and was over to the old woman; she looked up, mouth parted girlishly as in the photographs on the walls. He spoke low and fast in French. She growled an uncertain Monsieur ?—a bass note with snapped strings. And then one of those extraordinary bursts of French animation broke out. They protested to each other, they talked both at once, lifting faces like birds challenging beaks, Arnys half-closed her eyes, they laid hands upon one another, Professor Bernard Chabalier repeating with reverent formality,
chère madame
,
Josette Arnys
,
Josette Arnys
. Her dog struggled under her arm to get at him or be let down.

He came back laughing privately past amiable glances; he might have been showing himself appreciative of any other local landmark. —
Very modest
—d‘you know what she says ?—she told me there will never be anyone like her. ‘This whole feminist thing' means women won't be able to sing about love any more, they'll be ashamed. So I said but the island song, it's not about love, at least not that kind of love, it's about origins, it was even romantically political, êh, in advance of its time (I didn't say that to her)—the Antilles, the hankering of Europe for a particular humanism it believes to flourish in a creole world ? But she says the real source of song remains only one—look at the birds, who can sing only because they must call for a mate.—

—Hadn't you ever seen her before ?—

—Where would I see her ? In Paris nightclubs when I was a kid ? We have some old records at home—my wife's family is the kind that never throws anything away—we play them once a year or so, when there is a party, you know, like tonight—everybody drinks too much wine and jumps round... Are you working tomorrow?—

—I'm not working.—

—Oh god, I will have to drive myself. The whole year I say: if I could get away from the flat, children, committees, Sunday lunches, everybody, if I could have three weeks, that's all. And now I'm alone with my thesis I'm always talking too much about. The whole summer has been arranged around me, my wife and children given up their holiday, even my mother writing me letters saying don't reply, you are too busy concentrating.—He drew back from himself. —Do people like you have holidays ? Can you say,
arrête.
Set a date for the
rentrée
.—

—I promised.—She was deeply tempted, since this man had not proved never to be met again, to place something else before him as she had five minutes in the Rue de la Harpe.—I undertook to have a holiday. Like everybody else.—Her manner was teasing.

—We'll come tomorrow.—He spoke as if they had agreed to shelve some decision.—Does she open in the middle of the day? About twelve.—On the way out he returned to the old singer and kissed her hand. There was another flurry between the two.—She wants to open a bottle of champagne. Her boys would be jealous, êh, she obviously didn't stand them a Quatorze Juillet celebration. I told her, tomorrow.—As the girl's head preceded him into the street he was at once pleading and strict.—I'll be waiting here.—

 

 

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...—