Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,232
happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of command. He is one of those who are racing out over the glistening seabed, the past – detritus=treasure, one and the same – stripped bare.
Like all the other looters with whom he doesn’t mix, has nothing in common, he races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the sculptures created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine-vintaged wine casks, a plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist’s chair, his stride landing on disintegrated human ribs and metatarsals he does not identify. But unlike the others, he takes nothing – until: there, ornate with tresses of orange-brown seaweed, stuck fast with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral, is the object. (A mirror?) It’s as if the impossible is true; he knew that was where it was, beneath the sea, that’s why he didn’t know what it was, could never find it before. It could be revealed only by something that had never happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth ever measured on the Richter scale.
He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was the only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him, taking possession at last.
And the great wave comes from behind his bedhead and takes him.
His name well known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognised them, that day, where they lie?
No carnation or rose floats.
Full fathom five.
The Generation Gap
He was the one told: James, the youngest of them. The father to the son – and it was Jamie, with whom he’d never got on since Jamie was a kid; Jamie who ran away when he was adolescent, was brought back resentful, nothing between them but a turned-aside head (the boy’s) and the tight tolerant jaw of suppressed disapproval (the father’s). Jamie who is doing – what was it now? Running a cybersurfers’ restaurant with a friend, that’s the latest, he’s done so many things but the consensus in the family is that he’s the one who’s done nothing with his life. His brother and sisters love him but see it as a waste: of charm and some kind of ill-defined talent, sensed but not directed in any of the ways they recognise.
So it was from Jamie that they received the announcement. The father had it conveyed by Jamie to them – Virginia, Barbara, and Matthew called at some unearthly hour in Australia. The father has left the mother.
A husband leaves his wife. It is one of the most unexceptional of events. The father has left the mother: that is a completely different version, their version.
A husband leaves his wife for another woman. Of course. Their father, their affectionate, loyal, considerate father, announces, just like that: he has left their mother for another woman. Inconceivable.
And to have chosen, of all of them, the younger brother as confidant, confessor, messenger – whatever the reasoning was?
They talked to each other on the telephone, calls those first few days frustratingly blocked while numbers were being dialled simultaneously and the occupied whine sounded on and on. Matthew in Brisbane sent an email. They got together in Barbara’s house – his Ba, his favourite. Even Jamie appeared, summoned – for an explanation he could not give.
Why should I ask why, how?
Or would not give. He must have said something beyond this announcement; but no. And Jamie had to get back to the bar nook and the espresso machine, leave them to it with his archaic smile of irresponsible comfort in any situation.
And suddenly, from the door – We’re all grown up now. Even he.
It was established that no one had heard from the mother. Ginnie had called her and waited to see if she would say anything, but she chatted about the grandchildren and the progress of a friend she had been visiting in hospital. Not a word. Perhaps she doesn’t know. But even if he kept the affair somehow secret from her until now, he would hardly ‘inform’ his children before telling his wife of a decision to abandon her.
Perhaps she thinks we don’t know.
No, can’t you see – she doesn’t want us to know because she thinks he’ll