Burger's Daughter (42 page)

The Englishman set his profile as if for a resolute portrait.—The lies. The cruelty. Too much pain has come from it.—

—But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results.—As Rosa spoke, Katya paused in passing and put an arm round her; looked at them all a moment, basking in the reflection of a past defiance, an old veteran showing he can still snap to attention, and went on her way to sponge a stain of spilt wine off the bosom of her dress.—This terrible balcony of mine, it catches every drip.—

The Englishman's authority reared and wheeled. He took another pastis from Didier's tray without being aware of the exchange of his empty glass for a full one.—Not a question of moral justification, we must get away from all that. The evil utopia—the monolithic state that's all the utopian dream is capable of producing has taken over moral justification and made it the biggest lie of the lot.—

—Yes, yes, exactly what they are saying—whether it's the Communist Party or some giant multinational company, people are turning against huge, confining structures—

—Our only hope lies in a dispassionate morality of technology, our creed must be, broadly speaking, ecological—always allowing the premise that man's place is central—

Bernard met Rosa in the thicket of the others' self-absorption. —For them, it livens up a party.—

She shrugged and imitated his gesture of puffing out the lower lip : for all of us. She gave a quick smile to him.

They moved away as if they had no common destination, would separate and go to Didier's bar or join the Grosbois faction where Darby was being egged on to growl out some story which brought down upon her such bombardments of laughter that Donna watched, annoyed. They moved measuredly, like a pair meeting by appointment to exchange a message under cover of the crowd. He suddenly began to speak.—There's plenty you can do, Rosa. In Paris, in London, for that matter. Enough for a lifetime. If you must. But I begin to think—He stopped; the two moved slowly on. —Ah, my reasons are not theirs—

He couldn't have said what he did, anywhere else; not alone with her; the presence of the crowd made it possible, safe from any show of emotions let loose.—I want to say to you—you can't enter someone else's cause or salvation. Look at those idiots singing in the streets with shaved heads a few years ago... They won't attain the Indian nirvana.—Her head was down, bent towards his low voice. They might have been murmuring some gossip about the group they had just quitted.—Oh I know, how can I compare...—He paused for her quick glance but it did not come.—The same with your father and the blacks—their freedom. You'll excuse me for saying...the same with you and the blacks. It's not open to you.—

—Go on.—She held him to it in the knowledge that he might not be able to find the time and place where he would dare to speak again: a meeting away from the lovers Bernard and Rosa.

—Not even you.—

But he was afraid. He disappeared into thoughts in his own language and the surf of human company broke high all around them. The view of the sea from Donna's terrace was paraded by red and blue and yellow sails of the local people's tiny pleasure craft on a Saturday afternoon all tacking in and turning at the buoys that marked the limit of sheltered waters. He could see Corsica wavering through the distortion of distance.—I really feel like pushing off to Ajaccio. You know ? We ought to get the feeling of what's going on there. The cellar the autonomists occupied when they killed those two gendarmes belongs to one of my
pieds noirs
. The French Algerians are making a fortune in Corsica. I'd like to talk to them.—

—Was the rioting actually against them, or was it also against French rule—to put it the other way about, I mean was the choice of that particular man's cellar deliberate ?—

He took pleasure in explaining what interested her; in her practised understanding of the way things happen in events of that category.—Oh the two are closely connected, the moving in of settlers from Algeria is seen by the independence movement as part of France's colonialist exploitation—when they got kicked out of Algeria, they came nearer home to another one of France's poor ‘colonies', though Corsica's supposed to be part of metropolitan France... So it's the same thing. The French Algerians represent Paris, to the Corsicans. They even reject Napoleon as some sort of sell-out: the great hero of the French, the assimilator. The Simeoni brothers who lead the independence movement have taken up Paoli as hero. Ever heard of Pascal Paoli ? In the eighteenth century he fought the French for an independent Corsica... It might be fascinating, for us now...and for my book. A popular revolt that's actually within its scope—the riots are the most serious trouble there's been in Corsica. Make a good chapter.—

—It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach.—When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.

—We'll fly. To hell with the ferry.—

—I wanted to go on that lovely white ship.—

—Good god, I don't want you to see me vomiting...it's not a lovely ship, my Rosa, it's just a floating belly full of cars.—

—When ? There's no problem about visas, I suppose ? They'll let me in ?—

—You are in. I told you, it's colonized, it's France—

He gripped her wrist where she leaned on her elbow, wrestling with their joy.

Georges and Manolis joined them. Didier had put on an old Marlene Dietrich record and pulled up Tatsu from the cushions piled on the floor as in a stage harem. She did not grin and giggle when she danced; hers was another face. Manolis was letting Didier's tango lead his eyes:—I was saying to Georges—beau, mais très ordinaire—

D
ancing, the Japanese girl's face was as it has never been before, grave, dreamy, fully expectant, and I felt what she had wanted—one age, with her. Something is owed us. Young women, girls still. The capacity I feel, running down the sluiced alleys under flower-boxes to meet the man who tells me his flesh rises when his ears recognize the slither of my sandals, the flashes of bright feeling that buffet me at this point where I see the sea, the abundance for myself I sense in whiffs from behind the plastic ribbons of open kitchen doors and greetings from the street-cleaners paused for a glass of wine at the bar tabac. School comes out for lunch and a swirl and clatter of tiny children giddy round my legs, they clasp me anywhere that offers a hold, I dodge from this side to that like a goal-keeper, arms out...

I see everything, everything, have to stop to stroke each cat taking up the pose of a Grimaldi lion on a doorstep. Or I go blindfold in the darkness of sensations I have just experienced, deaf to everything but a long dialectic of body and mind that continues within Bernard Chabalier and me even when we are not together. Suddenly a woman stood before me; the other day, a woman in a nightgown stopped me in one of these close streets that are the warren of my loving.—One of the old girls, the Lesbians or beauties from the nineteen thirties.—I thought for a moment it was Bobby there.

She clutched me by the arm; the nerves in her fingers twitched like fleas. I saw that there were tears runnelling the creases of her neck.
Help me, help me
. I broke surface into her need with the cringe and bewilderment at the light of a time of day or night one doesn't recognize. And that was what she herself inhabited:
What time is it ?
She wanted to know if she had just got up or was ready to go to bed; she had slipped the moorings of nights and days. When I asked what was wrong she searched my face, gaping tense, the lipstick staining up into the vertical folds breaking the lips' outline: that was what was wrong—that she didn't know, couldn't remember what it was that was wrong.

I took her away from the street that exposed through folds of blue nylon the dangle of dark nipples at the end of two flaps of skin. The door to a little house—
Lou Souliou
in wrought-iron script—stood open behind her. I offered to help her dress or get back to bed (supposing she had been in bed; she couldn't say). But as soon as we were inside she began to chatter with matter-of-fact, everyday animation. We did not mention what had happened in the street. She put on something that looked more like an old velvet evening coat than a dressing-gown. She offered me coffee—or vodka ? There should be a bottle of vodka in the fridge, and some tomato juice? When she heard my French pidgin she answered in English with a formal American turn of phrase like a character out of Henry James. Photographs and mementoes in a dim, cosy room—like all the houses where women live around here. A free-range life; some of the things looked Peruvian, Mexican—American Indian. The Provençal
panetière
with books and small treasures behind its wooden bars, the curlicued spindly desk—it was stacked with rolls of unopened newspapers.—You're Arnys' little friend, aren't you ? That's where we've met. Arnys loves young people—Bernard is Arnys' little friend, but I suppose this must have been one of the women who have seen me in the bar so often this summer. When I come back another year they may even remember, your—Madame Bagnelli's—girl, the great love of the Parisian professor who was writing a book.

I wanted to go and she wanted to keep me with her in case the woman I had met in the street took possession of her again. I came flying up the hill to look for you singing while you upholster an old chair or paint a brave coat of red on your toenails. I wanted to ask who she was and tell you what happened. But when I saw you, Katya, I said nothing. It might happen to you. When I am gone. Someday. When I am in Paris, or in Cameroun picking up things that take my fancy, the mementoes I shall acquire.

T
he prospects: what are the prospects ? For Burger's first wife, Ugo Bagnelli's mistress, for Rosa Burger.

You have your nightingales every May and the breasts that gave such sweet pleasure are palpated clinically every three months in the routine of prolonging life. The bed Ugo Bagnelli came to when he could get away from his family in Toulon—I sleep in it with Bernard, now—will not be filled with another man of yours. As Gaby Grosbois says, there could only be an arrangement, one pays for the hotel room oneself, like Pierre's dentist's wife and the policeman. And dear old Pierre in his blue Levis—it does not worry his wife that he might still find you desirable; there's nothing for it but to make a joke between you of his impotence. You laugh at her when she says ‘You have still a beauty, Katya'; today I saw you in the good light that's only to be found in the bathroom, of the dim rooms in this house I wish I could stay in for the rest of my life—I've seen you plucking bristles from your chin.

It's possible to live within the ambit of a person not a country. Paris, Cameroun, Brazzaville; home. There's the possibility with Chabalier, my Chabalier. He tells me that once installed in Paris, I'll have my Chabalier who is the only one who counts. He's not disloyal. He doesn't say he doesn't love his wife and children; ‘I live among them, not with them'. We don't say ritual words between us; I don't want to use the ones I had to use to establish bona fides for a prison. How is it he knew that—he was somehow recognizing that, in his distaste for going through the motions of flirtation the first night in the bar.

‘I have to satisfy her sometimes.'

I have asked him outright: you will have to make love to her when you go home. We knew I meant not only when he goes home from here, but when I am living ‘near by' the lycée and he has been with me. He never lies; and mine was a question only a foreign woman would ask, surely. I realize that. I feel no jealousy although I have seen her photograph—she was on one he showed me when I asked to see his children. She is a pretty woman with a pert, determined head whom I can imagine saying, as you told me Ugo's wife did: You can have as many women as you like so long as you don't bring them into my home and I don't know about them. —An indestructible bourgeoise—you said of Ugo's wife, and you laughed generously, Katya.—That was good. I didn't want to destroy anyone; I didn't want anything of hers.—And you had your Bagnelli for more than fifteen years. Bobby had her Colonel. It's possible.

We could even have a child.—You're the kind of woman who can do that—He's said it to me.—I wouldn't be afraid to let us have a child. I don't agree in general with the idea that a girl should go ahead and have a child just because she wants to show she doesn't need a husband—like showing one can get a degree. It's no easier than it ever was. A child without a family, brothers and sisters... But ours. A boy for your father.—

When I'm middle-aged I'll have with me a young son at the Lycée Louis le Grand named after Lionel Burger; he would have no need to claim the name of the Chabalier children. We have kin in Paris, my child and I : I think sometimes of looking her up one day when I'm living there, cousin Marie who promotes oranges. In Paris there will be no reason to avoid anyone once I have new papers. Free to talk. Free. If I should meet Madame Chabalier accompanying her husband at one of the left-wing gatherings ?—It doesn't matter. You will probably like each other. You'll chat like you do with anyone else who has political ideas more or less in common...that's all. She tries to keep up.—He scoops the soggy slice of lemon out of my glass when he's eaten his own, and sucks that.—You haven't done her any harm.—

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault.—One is married and there is nothing to be done.—Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there ? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other. Bernard Chabalier's mistress isn't Lionel Burger's daughter; she's certainly not accountable to the Future, she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest. ‘This is the creature that has never been'—he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature.
Un paradis inventé.