Nadine Gordimer
You Name It
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This story by Nadine Gordimer originally appeared in the June/July 1974 edition of The London Magazine.
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She has never questioned who her father was. Why should she? Why should I tell her?
And yet there are times – times when we are getting on each other’s nerves as only women and their daughters can – I have such a flash of irritable impulse: You are not… I had—
I think I am stopped only by not knowing how to put it most sensationally. How to make her stand in her tracks as she’s walking out the door with her boy for a ‘drive’ (=to make love in the car; that old synonym). To see her face, when she’s been keeping it turned away from me half-listening while I talk to her, suddenly wrenched round. Or when I feel it’s time to leave the room because I’ve been monopolizing the conversation among her friends and they are boring, anyway. How to break in. With a name, a statement.
I took a piece of cane waste from the flotsam and wrote on the wet sand:
Arno Arno Arkanius
The cane was hollow, blackened by fire, and the sharp broken end was a bold quill; it incised letters cleanly.
She couldn’t read. There were hundreds of tiny flies feeding on the rotting seaweed among the cane and she sat turning her hands from the wrist in their swarm. She enjoyed the weightless feel of the insects or admired their gratifying response to her presence, I don’t know which, she was still too young to speak. While the other children were at kindergarten we walked every morning on that beach which could not be called deserted because there never had been anyone there to be counted absent, except the island women who came to dig for bait. They did not look up and I never learnt so much as a greeting in their language. We made the staggering progress of a woman with a small child who cannot speak, has no sense of time, and to whom the dirt rim of the sea’s bathtub is something to grasp while the blown-glass swells of the Indian Ocean, the porpoises jack-knifing in and out the water, the spice off the spray, and the cliffs and hollows of Strelitzia palms in flower are outside awareness. Yes – it was a kind of paradise, I suppose, the kind open to people who drill for oil or man air bases or negotiate the world’s purchase of sugar or coconut oil. I was born on one and married onto another and met the man who made her with me when transferred to this one. Our names were no guide to our place of habitation. They were the names of different origins all over Europe, cross-pollinated in the sports and games and parties in colonies and islands to which none were native. I don’t know exactly what he was; Swedes sometimes have Latin names, but he came from a cotton pasha family that had to leave Egypt, went to school in Lausanne, and was in the trade section of the consulate of one of the European countries who were losing their colonies but still setting the price for what they bought from them. He stayed two years before he was posted somewhere else – it was the usual tour of duty.
When the baby was born it looked, the first time, exactly like him but it was all right: never again. When I saw it I was filled with love – not for the infant but for him. It was six months since he had made love to me on the stripped bed with his suitcases standing by ready for the airport. Once again I yearned wildly. The emotion brought milk to my breasts. A few warm drops welled from the nipples, like tears. The nurses were pleased. My husband, delighted to have a girl child after two boys, tender and jocular in his happiness: now I’m prepared to let her off any more. Duty nobly done, dynasty assured. Unfortunately my daughter’s as ugly as her brothers but give her time, we’ll marry her yet.
It was true that she became like her brothers as babies; a baby like all other babies, drooling saliva down the back of my dress when I held her, the way she yelled to be held with her face over my shoulder, going slowly red in the face with silent concentration when she sat relieving herself, clutching my skirt when she wanted to pull herself up from the floor, holding her breath to the point of suffocation, in temper, looking so beautiful in her nightly drunken stupor with her bottle slack in her hand that my husband would take guests into the bedroom to gaze at her.
Her father never saw her. We wrote to each other all through the months before she was born; he had tried to persuade an island doctor whom he knew to give me an abortion, but there was his position at the consulate to consider, and my husband’s position in the company. We were afraid the story would leak out. Whereas there was nothing exceptionable about my having a third child. He dared not keep a photograph of her in case his wife came upon it. By the time the child was nearly a year old he was on home leave – apparently Europe was selected as home – and we wrote more seldom but I could take advantage of Christmas to send a card showing a colour photograph of the family with the baby girl smiling in the middle. He wrote that she seemed to have a very large mouth? – was that just the photograph? His wife had remarked on it, too. I remember that I walked around the house carrying the letter and stared – nothing but sea, out there, nothing to be got from it but the sound of its endlessly long yawn and the tough glitter of its midday skin, and I went into the bedroom and lay down on the floor in the darkened room with my legs open, spread-eagled on my own cross, waiting for him. I cried to relieve myself, rolled onto my face and let the saliva run out of my open mouth upon the dust and lint of the carpet, like the baby. After a long time I began to hear the sea again, and saw, under the bed in which I slept with my husband, a coin and his lost espadrilles with the backs flattened to the soles by the way he always pushed his feet into them. When the island girl who helped with the children brought them up from the beach I met the baby with resentment for not being prettier, but she did not notice; like everything and everyone around me, she was living a life where this did not matter; and there was no other. There was no other, for me.
I had boasted to him of men who pursued me, including an ambassador, very distinguished and old enough to be my father. But now I wrote that I wanted a tidal wave to engulf the whole stupid life of the island; I did not tell him that I was flirting, and getting drunk at parties, and quarrelling with my husband because he said I neglected the children; to tell the truth these things didn’t seem to me to be real – they were what I did to pass the time. Sometimes I wrote and said I was going to get divorced and take the baby and live alone. He replied that he was terrified ‘something would happen to me’. We wrote as if these two sets of circumstances – his fearing for me, and I deciding to get divorced – had come about independently of each other, and of us. He instructed me not to write again until he could send a suitable new address – the two years were up once more, he was being re-posted once more, and we didn’t want my letters lying round the consulate for prying hands to forward. At this time my husband had taken it upon himself to send for his mother to supervise the children and the atmosphere in the house was one of blinding, deafening, obsessive antagonism: the tidal wave that I had wished on myself – I did not even realize that a month had passed without any new address coming. Now I did leave my husband; I went without the baby, without any child. The old reason for leaving was submerged under the fierce rows and recriminations that swept through the house so that the servants went about subdued, eyes lowered, before all that was laid waste while furniture and flower vases stood as usual and the outside man went on skimming the swimming pool with a net scoop. Once my husband had suddenly shouted that I ought to have been taken to a doctor, that’s what he should have done – it was only since the last baby was born that I’d behaved like this, I’d changed with the birth of that baby, he wished the bloody baby had never been born!
He, who was so besotted with her that she has been the overindulged darling of the family, all her life. And I, not having the impulse then, at all, to fling back at him a name, a statement to stand out on his face harder than the print of any hand.
It was true that pretty terrible things could happen to me. I took a job as an air hostess on the inter-island service. I had no training for any occupation. The ceiling of the old DC 3’s flight was in the blanket of humidity and turbulence that rose from lovely mountains covered in tropical forest and lowland plantations of silky green cane. The cabins were not pressurized and I went up and down the aisles collecting bags of vomit. He must have heard about it, I’m sure, in his new posting to another set of island paradises, in Malaysia. Because, of course, carrying my burdens along the aisles, I met the astonished eyes of passengers who knew me as the wife of the such-and-such company’s man. The ambassador who had once brought me a box of real lilies-of-the-valley from Europe (orchids were nothing, they grew wild on the island) stared at me from his seat, unsure whether or not to recognize me, although, like most women who have good taste in clothes and who for some reason have to put on a vulgarly provocative outfit, a waitress’s dirndl or an air hostess’s Courrèges, I know my looks had been made more sexual by the uniform. Another passenger and his wife, to whom I made myself known as a face from the sailing club and diplomatic parties, were on their way to a new posting and she remarked that it was to be Malaysia, this time, where, of course, the ——’s were now; it would be good to have someone they already knew, when they got there, and the ——’s had always been such fun, the island hadn’t been the same since they left, had it? She would give them my best wishes, they would be glad to have news of their friends.
No letter. I did not expect one; I thought of him passionately as someone just as I was, ejected from the mould of myself, unrecognizable even to myself, spending nights in towns that while familiar (all the islands had the same palms, nightclubs, fruit-bats, the same creaking air conditioners and the long yawn of the sea) were not home. Being the distinguished man he was, the ambassador had been particularly friendly and amusing, once I had shown I was to be recognized in my new circumstance, but now that I was, theoretically, available, he did not try to see me again. The pilots were bored with their wives and pestered me. I slept in Curepipe one night with a Canadian businessman who felt it was fated because twice, three months apart, he had come to the islands and found me serving his whisky on the plane. I got what I wanted out of the encounter; a climax of sobbing and self-pity gave me back my yearning for my lover.
Long after, many months later, when I was home and my husband and I were having the house altered and the garden landscaped, there was a letter. Are you mad? A mixture between a skivvy and a chorus-girl on one of those terrible old crates? What will happen to you? How he must have struggled with himself, telling himself, as I did every day, there was no use to write. I would see my face in the mirror as if he were looking at it: only twenty-nine, thinner in the jaw since the drudgery and irregular hours of the airline, longer hair, now, and the haughty look that unhappiness and dissatisfaction give when you are still young. My husband had gone into the shipping business, on his own initiative; the island was about to run up the new flag as an independent state and he had ingratiated himself with the ruling coterie. I still couldn’t speak a word of the language and I was one of the first white women to appear at official banquets wearing the long, graceful island dress. My husband became confidential financial adviser to the new president; anyone from the foreign trade consulates who wanted privileges in the regime had to come to him, now.
There were riots in the native town or the up-country districts but we really only were aware of them from the newspapers. The regime survived and my husband made a lot of money. His triumph in my return had opened a source of energy in him that nothing could check. Not that we had ever been poor; once you had a house in the bluff district, a swimming pool, and some sort of craft in the yacht club harbour, there wasn’t much else money could add to life on the island. Anybody could have the sea, sun, the flowers for the picking and the oysters off the rocks. He wanted to send pictures of the children taken with his super cameras as Christmas cards but I flew out against it and he liked confidently to give in to my whims. He had to travel often to Europe and enjoyed taking me with him. I did a lot of shopping for myself; his greatest pleasure was to buy presents for the children, in particular pretty dresses for the girl. In those days my lady ran about the beach like a little bedraggled princess, wearing hand-tucked Liberty lawn as a bathing wrap – a wild and spoilt child. We used to have to visit his mother who had retired to a hill village in the South of France and on one of these visits I drove into Nice to shop. Sitting in a café open to and noisy as the street, I found I had lost the car key; and it was there, in the telephone booth that smelt (I remember it perfectly) of sweaty feet and sour wine, while I was waiting distastefully for my call to the village, that I saw out of the scribblings on the dirty wall, a name.
Arno Arno Arno Arkanius
Someone had stood waiting for a connection in that telephone booth in that café and written, again and again, as you might pick up a stick and write on the sand where no one will read, that name. There were many others jotted down, with numbers that belonged along with them: Pierre, Jan, Delphine, Marc, Maria, Horst, Robert. I read them all carefully. They were names common to thousands of men and women, but this name, this combination of first and surname – could it come about to signify another identity? I knew, as if my own hand had held that dark-leaded pencil (it was not a ball-point; a ball-point would never have written so clearly on that greasy wall), that this was he, this statement was about him and no other. Impossible to say who had made it, or when; only why. The telephone ring leapt counter to the dulled noise from without pressing upon the glass door and I spoke what I had to say, not taking my eyes off the wall. Arno Arno Arno Arkanius. I hung up. I collected from the dirty floor my bag and parcels and went to the bar to pay for the call. So I had forgotten. Somebody else wept and indulged erotic fantasies, somebody else pronounced the name. While this had been happening I had forgotten, the baby with the big mouth had become my husband’s child – it was true, I was deceived and not he, about her identity – because I had forgotten, for days, months on end. I had thought I was permanently unhappy but how could that be? – I had forgotten. There must be many children such as she, happy to be who they are, whose real identity could be resuscitated only if their mother’s youth could be brought back to life.
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Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, and her novel, The Conservationist, won the Booker Prize in 1974.
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