Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black by Nadine Gordimer

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

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    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 remembersit 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 favoureating 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