Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black by Nadine Gordimer Page A

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.
    But now there’s change coming to the charming village—of course it has kept its character through many changes, longer than the legendary longevity of a parrot. The revolution that sent the monks fleeing from their monastery whose cloisters are now the garden bar of its avatar as a five-star hotel; the German occupation in the 1940s in which young men of village families still extant (look at those baby carriages) were killed in the Resistance—there’s a street where one was born, named after him. There has been the restoration of rotting beams in old houses by Scandinavians, Germans and the English, who in the boom years of Europe discovered a delightful unspoilt place to acquire a historic
maison secondaire.
    This latest change has a finality about it—as no doubt they all have had for whoever lived in or visited the village ‘as itused to be’. Before. For each individual another ‘before’. But one of the finalities, now, is the announced closing of the restaurant of the parrot. After thirty years! Madame Delancy knows she owes an explanation to the habitués, whether the survivors of the lesbian community from the Twenties, the regular summer visitors, or the youngsters who take their right as a species of collateral grandchildren to sit smoking, jeering and chattering for more than an hour over a single coffee or a shared icecream. The chef, her dear husband who (everyone has heard related many times) learned his skills in the kitchens of Maxim’s in Paris, has been cooking for more than forty years. For some while they have had a small apartment with a view of