She stirred denial, in her chair. — We’ve had — I have many good friends among homosexuals…—
He took an audible gulp of his vodka and laughed, with a gesture to her to do the same. — Oh yes some of my best friends are Jews man’s best friend is his dog.—
What could she say? She was not equipped for this kind of repartee, it was not the encounter or the occasion for it, if he was choosing to make her the butt of insults he’d received in his lifetime. She had told, told him, nothing personal and now he was transgressing the limits of recall she had assured him of.
He was suddenly looking at her in an inescapable way she couldn’t elude, couldn’t interpret, confidential or goading.
— Of course I didn’t want him to go.—
Why did this man who had forgotten her man among many others, couldn’t give her the plain facts that were all she asked of him, want to assert — claim — shared feelings with her: her man who had left her for death, his sometime lover who had left him; their man. Was it amusing him to do so? He went on to recount as an old incident recalled for her benefit — I’d gone off on a trip with someone else, it was to Surinam. As you can see, I’m half-and-half, the name Dutch, the skin Malay, fine old colonial ancestry, isn’t it. I had a notion to find my Malay roots there, the new affair went along with this. He didn’t understand it was an adventure I needed at the time. So when I returned to our flat I found the place empty — he’d gone back to South Africa. I don’t know to what. That crazy woman. God knows.—
— If he wasn’t divorced before you met him he divorced then. — She knew herself being lured into confidences never meant to come about.
He poured himself another vodka, gestured to her glass, over which she placed her palm. — I’ll tell you something. I did come to South Africa once, maybe ten, twelve years ago. On an assignment. I asked whether he was around; so then I heard about you. Just curious, what had become of him. Someone told me where you and he lived. But I didn’t try to look him up, considering…—
There was a hiatus that could not be called silence because while they did not speak there was passing between them a vivid dialogue of the unexpressed.
Then she took up the ready lug of ordinary social intercourse, slotted into place the polite visitor about to leave. — Well, thank you for letting me bother you, I must be off, now.—
— 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.