Burger's Daughter Read Free Page B

?—
    â€”Yes, but I’ve got permission for a visit today.—
    â€”It’s virtually on your way back.—
    The mansion and garden of the early nineteen-hundreds to which the cottage belonged had been expropriated for a freeway that was being delayed by ratepayers’ objections; in the meantime the cottage was let without official tenure at an address that no longer existed.
    The wavy galvanized iron roof was painted blue and so were the railings of the wooden verandah. From an abandoned tennis court brilliant with glossy weeds a mournful bird presaged rain. The bauhinia tree lifted from shrubs and ornamental palms become a green-speared jungle; the two rooms were sunk in it like a hidden pool. It was safe and cosy as a child’s playhouse and sexually arousing as a lovers’ hideout. It was nowhere.
    She came in out of the sun and the traffic of the highway straight from the prison and he got up from some dim piece of furniture where he made no pretence not to have been lying, probably all afternoon, and kept her standing just within the doorway, rubbing himself against her. The directness of the caress was simply the acting-out, in better and more appropriate circumstances, of what was happening in the coffee-bar. Desire can be very comforting. Lying with the vulnerable brassy smell of a stranger’s hair close to her breathing, she saw flies swaying a mobile beneath a paper concertina lantern, the raised flower pattern within the counted squares of a lead ceiling over-patterned with shadows cast from the garden, his watch, where his hand lay on her, showing the time—exactly one hour and twenty minutes since she had been sitting on the bench on the visitors’ side of the wire grille that fragmented her father’s face as the talk of other prisoners and their visitors broke the sequence of whatever he was trying to tell her.
    â€”Lucky to find a place like this. It’s what everybody always looks for.—
    â€”Easy. Convincing the rich old girl or old guy who owns it is the only trouble. They’d have a black if it was allowed to have blacks living in, because you can control a black, he’s got to listen to you. But a white who will live in a shack like this will always be young and have no money. They’re afraid you’ll push drugs or be politically subversive, make trouble. When I said I worked at the race-course that was okay; the kind of honest living they understand, although not socially acceptable to them, at least part of the servicing of their kind of pleasures. You keep your mouth shut about university, they don’t trust students at all. Not that I blame them. Anyway, suits me. If I can finish the bloody thesis and make my hundred, hundred-and-fifty a week among those crooks and suckers at the race-course, I’ll push off to Mexico.—
    â€”Mexico now! Why Mexico!—
    He got up, stretched naked, yawned so that his penis bobbed and the yawn became a cat’s grin. He put the flat of his hand on some books on a brass tray with a rickety stand.—No good reason for people who must have good reasons. If I read poetry or novels I like then I want to go and live in the country the writer knows. I mean I just want to know what he knows...—
    â€”Lend me something.—
    She tried the names on the books he handed her.—Octavio Paz. Carlos Fuentes.—
    He corrected the pronunciation.
    â€”Ah, you’ve learnt Spanish ?—
    He came over and touched a breast as one might adjust the angle of a picture.—There’s a girl giving me a few lessons.—
    She would not have noticed if he had no longer been about; if he had disappeared at any time during the seven months of her father’s trial, she would simply have assumed he had gone off to Mexico or wherever. In fact, once when, chin on hands across the table among friends and hangers-on, at tea-break while an observer from the International Council of Jurists was