Burger's Daughter (34 page)

We swam the waveless peacock-shaded sea, Rosa, Didier, Katya —you talking and calling and flinging away from yourself bits of floating plastic board as if you believe, like an early navigator, somewhere there is an edge of the world over which they'll be carried and break the global cycle by which what you rid yourself of returns. You tired and floated; Didier and I swam on round a small headland into a stripe of deep blue and came ashore among rocks, where I cut my toe on a sardine-tin. Threadworms of blood came from me in the water; when I took my foot out, from under an eyelid of skin red pain runnelled. I hopped over the pebbles. It hadn't hurt after the first stab, in the water, but now it was seared by the air. We examined my toe together; blood; the reminder of vulnerability, life always under the threat of being spilled. A little ceremony of blood-brotherhood, every time.

—We need something to tie.—He was very severe.

Well, two people in a bikini and trunks; we didn't have it. I smiled—it would be all right, the water would wash out the cut well on the swim back.

I must hold the foot high to reverse the flow. I said no, no, it was all right, the chill of the water would staunch it.

—But it hurts you, no?—Water was shaken on him where he crouched with my foot between his knees. The sprinkle on his face already dried stiff in the sun came from my hair, he called—Hey!—flashed me a squinting annoyed look against the light. My toe disappeared from the exposure to pain; I felt it surrounded by gentle warmth and softness. Because his head was ducked I felt before I saw that he had my toe in his mouth. Ridiculous—ridiculous at the same time as sensual, as so many sensual moves are, if you set yourself outside them. But it was done with such confidence I understood it as I was meant to.

As he squatted there before me I saw and felt his head, his tongue as if it were between my legs—he knew it.

—My dirty foot! I walked all round the valley early this morning.—

—How can it be dirty, your foot—out of the sea, Rôse, tell me—He held it between his palms like a rabbit or a bird, and he knew he was holding it to suggest this.

—Come on Didier. We must swim back.—

He mimicked.—Come on Didier, we must go—Rôse, it's true your feet are a bit broad, peasant feet, but you have a beautiful navel, it's really like the one on the top of an orange—now why do you pull your face, why shouldn't we laugh together—Rôse—

—Didier, not with me.—

—With you ?—

—You don't have to.—

—What do you mean, don't have to. I don't have to do anything. I do what I feel.—

—I put it badly.—

—Rôse, you are talking—what are you talking.—

—You know. If a new woman turns up—a girl, among the friends, you...it's like being nice to the older women; appropriate—

—But we're young, Rôse—He seems sometimes to take up lines of dialogue he has heard in television serials.—Mnh ? It's natural, êh. We are the only young ones!—what's the matter with you ?—

I said to this strange being, as if I knew him:—You think it's wrong then, with Donna, unnatural—making love, living with her ?—

He frowned sceptically.

—Because she's so much older? A sacrifice? She owes you something ?—

—What ? Donna is a generous woman.—

—Me. Owes me to you.—

He made a mouth like the mouths of cherubs blowing the four winds in the Italian pictures in Solvig's collection. They tell me this part of France was Italian a hundred years ago; I see faces I thought belonged to the eighteenth or nineteenth century.—She doesn't expect I should not like girls. She must understand, êh. She likes a young man.—

If I am curious about them, these people, to me it seems they allow me to be so because I am a foreigner. But I see it's that they are not afraid of being found out, the nature of their motives is shared and discussed; because the premise is accepted by everybody : live where it's warm, buy, sell or take pleasure honestly—that is, according to your circumstances. They recognize their only imperatives as dependence on a tight-knotted net of friendship, and dedication to avoiding tax wherever possible while using all the state welfare one can contrive to qualify for—the rebates, allocations, grants and pensions they are always discussing, whether rich or poor.—So it's all right, then ?—

He was still playing with my foot, but one of the grey beach pebbles would have been the same, to his hand.—It's fine. We go along very well together. She's a good business woman, you know. She looks after her money.—(Doesn't he know about Vaki the Greek ? Of course he does; what went wrong there is regarded by him as a calculated risk in relations of the category of hers with Vaki and himself: I'm learning.)—She knows how to enjoy it. I've been around the world. We go wherever we like.—

—And it's your whole life ?—

—Oh, I'll do other things. I've got ideas.—

His sulks are a ploy, then, something to bring Donna to an edge of apprehension about holding him. He feels free, this kept boy: free to be one.

—Things you'd be doing if you weren't with her.—

—Not necessarily. I have a good friend in America—we want to set up in Paris what they have at the Metropolitan Museum there (I shook my head, I have never been to the Metropolitan Museum) —get a franchise for making reproductions of works of art to sell in the French museums. Egyptian cats and imitations of jewellery and so on. It's a good thing. Nobody in France thought of it before. You just have to be the first—the same with everything. Donna and I are looking into the possibility of bringing truffles by air from the desert somewhere near where you...I forget. We are meeting a man about it in Milan.—

—But you don't work, here. You do feel it's your life, this ?—

—Why not ? You'll find somebody. You can't go back, êh ?—

—Katya must have said that.—

—Donna mentioned... I suppose they talk.
Botswana—
that's the name. The man in Milan says the natives in the desert sometimes have nothing to eat but truffles...the poor things, êh... 600 francs a kilo...!—He began to link his fingers through my toes again, prepared to give himself a second chance at rousing me.—I know a lot—well, not a lot—about where you come from. I'm from Maurice, you know that ?—Mauritius, you call it. Nearly Africa ! Oh god...—He was laughing.—It's nothing for me. Filthy. Poor. Sometimes I like to make Donna sick when I tell her how the dogs, some dogs in Port Louis have ruptures here—he drew a breath to suck in his narrow belly—they hang down right onto the street.—

He laughed again, at my face, but he didn't see the donkey that still exists somewhere.

—Donna goes crazy.—

—I don't know why Katya should have said that.—

—Africa is no good for white people any more. Same on the islands. It was okay when I was a kid.—

—I was born there. It's my home.—

—What does that matter. Where you can live the way you like, that's what counts. We have to forget about it.—

—My father died in prison there.—

—You know why we went to Maurice? My father was a collaborator with the Germans and he was sent to prison after the war. People only talk about their families who were in the Resistance. Oh yes. Nobody thought maybe the Germans were going to win—oh no. Donna makes me swear not to tell anybody! She's from Canada, what does she know about it, can you tell me! I know people whose mothers had their hair shaved off for sleeping with Germans. We have to forget about them. It's not our affair. I'm not my father, êh ?—

He helped me back into the water, supported by my arm round his neck. There was nothing sexual about the closeness; it was the huddle of the confidences common among all of you, the friends in the village—the divorced women and women widowed, like Madame Bagnelli, by lovers, the old Lesbians and young homosexuals. When we got back to you on the beach he must have remembered my stupidity, not having taken the easy opportunity of making love, and he was cool to me and sharp with Donna for the next few days when she and he were in my presence. Sometimes he trails a caress as I pass him; but it's only to see if I will pounce. It's playful and even derogatory.

A
morning can be filled by shopping in the market. Not in the sense of passing time; filled with the peppery-snuff scent of celery, weak sweet perfume of flowers and strawberries, cool salty secretions of sea-slippery fish, odour of cheeses, contracting the nasal membranes; the colours, shapes, shine, density, pattern, texture and feel of fruits and vegetables; the encounters and voices of people handling them. By the time Madame Bagnelli and her guest had moved along the stalls—meeting acquaintances, admiring dogs or children entangled with their legs—comparing prices between this vendor and that, had bought a pot-plant not on Madame Bagnelli's list and eaten a piece of spinach tart, they needed an espresso at the bar on the corner where the young workmen were coming in and out off their vélos and the old men in casquettes deciding bets for the tiercé were already drinking small glasses of red wine. By the time the women got back up the hill to her house, Madame Bagnelli had tooted at someone who asked them in for an aperitif, or Gaby Grosbois and her husband Pierre dropped by to take theirs on Madame Bagnelli's terrace—Pierre and the little Rôse drinking pastis, and the two older women following Gaby's
régime,
telling them how good vegetable juice was for ridding the body of toxins.

Madame Bagnelli carried whatever she had to do out onto that terrace. Squatting on a stool in her frayed espadrilles she picked over herbs she had gathered with her guest on the Col de Vence and was going to dry. She sand-papered an old table she had bought cheaply when they went to the street market near the old port in Antibes, and hoped to sell to some Germans who had taken a house next door to Poliakoff; her chin settled into the flesh of her neck and flecks of gilt caught on the clotted mascara of her eyelashes. In the same position, uncomfortable-looking for a woman her size, with her sewing machine on a low table between her legs, she made the flowing garments Gaby Grosbois cut out—I tell her, Rôse, she is still a woman, êh, men still look...she must know what to wear. This year nobody is wearing like this—tight, short—for her the style is good, very loose, décolleté—no, no, Katya, you have still a beauty, I'm telling you—The two women laugh, embracing.—If with Pierre everything was still working—(more laughter, her mouth playing at tragedy)—I will be worried—

Reading in the room that had been waiting for her, Rosa Burger was aware in the afternoons of Madame Bagnelli's activities down there, the scissors snapping at threads like a dog at flies, the slap and slither of a paint-brush; the striking up of the record she had set playing indoors. The Goldberg Variations, the first side of the Christmas Oratorio, some Provençal songs punctuated by clucks as the needle rode a scratch, and now and then accompanied by a second voice—Katya's, following and anticipating phrases she knew so well the recording had become a kind of conversation. At some point it would become a real one: that was the masculine croak of Darby and the hoarse patter of one of her cronies. Their voices were changed by age like schoolboys' at adolescence, so that the one who had been as famous in Paris as Baker and Piaf—people in the village told Rosa again and again: You know that Arnys lives here ? —could not be distinguished from the Lesbians who had perhaps cultivated the lower register or the old Americans, expatriate for thirty or forty years, who had ‘granulated the vocal chords' (Madame Bagnelli's attempt at translating a local expression, ‘la voix enrouee par la vinasse') with deposits from the alcohol they had consumed.—At 33 per cent flat rate he surely might be better off... but if you have a fluctuating income coming in from a dozen different sources ? ...it only makes sense if you're certain you can't spread your assets in such a way that you can get into a lower tax bracket—The English comes from Donna, and the wriggling, ticklish laughter means the Japanese girl with the dog.

—You will be a nice friend for me. We are same age.—The text of a children's first reader; the Japanese girl said it at one of those daily meetings at the top of steps or on the
place
, when people ran into each other and stood about talking. The girl prattled to her beautiful dog in some anthropomorphic game—Rosa looked down from her own private roof-top and saw her, so pretty in tight French trousers and high clogs she wore with the close-elbowed, close-kneed femininity of exotic dress, turning up a smiling, wide-jawed face on its frail stem. She lived with an Englishman Madame Bagnelli's guest hadn't yet met. He passed below on a morning walk with a stick, the girl and the dog; a white-haired man with the majesty of a slow-grown tree casually carried in the denim egalitarianism first taken over by students from peasants and labourers, and then from the young by the rich. He was a Lancashire shipyard owner—had been, everyone had been something else before they came to live as they wanted to, here—for whom Ugo Bagnelli, whose name Madame Bagnelli continued although she had never been married to anyone but Lionel Burger, had worked.—If Tatsu invites you, you should go—just to see what Ugo did. Everything in that boat's his idea. He fitted out...must have been three or four—a whole succession of yachts and cabin cruisers for Henry Torren. Oh Henry happened to like him...not many that one does. He's a solitary. Apart from whatever young woman he marries or lives with. He's never mixed here. He likes to think he's not like us... there're so many failures, you know ? But people who haven't got money also do what they like, here. I don't think he approves of that, it spoils things for him, ay ? He would like to think he doesn't enjoy the things the rest of us do! Not a snob, no, no, you have to know him...we get on all right. A puritan. Ugo never charged him—w-e-ll, so little it was nothing. Ugo loved luxurious things—he lived with them—oh-ho in style!—in his imagination, you know ?—while we were eating nothing but spaghetti. He could design them and make them but he knew he would never have them for himself. In a way it was the same thing...why do I fall for such men ? Rather why did I... And now—The gesture, the face of mock abdication learned from Gaby Grosbois when she talked about Pierre, her husband.