Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Out of loneliness, out of pity too, perhaps, for this unhappy, graceless foreigner with her poor English, he invites Astrid out again. Afterwards, for no good reason, he persuades her to come back with him to his room. She is not yet eighteen, still has baby fat on her; he has never been with someone so young – a child, really. Her skin, when he undresses her, feels cold and clammy. He has made a mistake, already he knows it. He feels no desire; as for Astrid, though women and their needs are usually a mystery to him, he is sure she feels none either. But they have come too far, the two of them, to pull back, so they go through with it.

  In the weeks that follow they spend several more evenings together. But time is always a problem. Astrid can come out only after her employers’ children have been put to bed; they have at most a hurried hour together before the last train back to Kensington. Once she is brave enough to stay the whole night. He pretends to like having her there, but the truth is he does not. He sleeps better by himself. With someone sharing his bed he lies tense and stiff all night, wakes up exhausted.

  Eleven

  Years ago, when he was still a child in a family trying its best to be normal, his parents used to go to Saturday night dances. He would watch while they made their preparations; if he stayed up late enough, he could interrogate his mother afterwards. But what actually went on in the ballroom of the Masonic Hotel in the town of Worcester he never got to see: what kind of dances his parents danced, whether they pretended to gaze into each other’s eyes while they did it, whether they danced only with each other or whether, as in American films, a stranger was allowed to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and take her away from her partner, so that the partner would have to find another partner for himself or else stand in a corner smoking a cigarette and sulking.

  Why people who were already married should go to the trouble of dressing up and going to a hotel to dance when they could have done it just as well in the living room, to music on the radio, he found hard to understand. But to his mother Saturday nights at the Masonic Hotel were apparently important, as important as being free to ride a horse or, when no horse was to be had, a bicycle. Dancing and horse riding stood for the life that had been hers before she married, before, in her version of her life-story, she became a prisoner (‘I will not be a prisoner in this house!’).

  Her adamancy got her nowhere. Whoever it was from his father’s office who had given them lifts to the Saturday night dances moved house or stopped going. The shiny blue dress with its silver pin, the white gloves, the funny little hat that sat on the side of the head, vanished into closets and drawers, and that was that.

  As for himself, he was glad the dancing had come to an end, though he did not say so. He did not like his mother to go out, did not like the abstracted air that came over her the next day. In dancing itself he saw no sense anyway. Films that promised to have dancing in them he avoided, repelled by the goofy, sentimental look that people got on their faces.

  ‘Dancing is good exercise,’ insisted his mother. ‘It teaches you rhythm and balance.’ He was not persuaded. If people needed exercise, they could do calisthenics or swing barbells or run around the block.

  In the years that have passed since he left Worcester behind he has not changed his mind about dancing. When as a university student he found it too much of an embarrassment to go to parties and not know how to dance, he enrolled for a package of lessons at a dance school, paying for them out of his own pocket: quickstep, waltz, twist, cha-cha. It did not work: within months he had forgotten everything, in an act of willed forgetting. Why that happened he knows perfectly well. Never for a moment, even during the lessons, was he really giving himself to the dance. Though his feet followed the patterns, inwardly he remained rigid with resistance. And so it still is: at the deepest level he can see no reason why people need to dance.

  Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance stands for inviting her to have intercourse; accepting the invitation stands for agreeing to have intercourse; and dancing is a miming and fore-shadowing of intercourse. So obvious are the correspondences that he wonders why people bother with dancing at all. Why the dressing up, why the ritual motions; why the huge sham?

  Old-fashioned dance music with its clodhopping rhythms, the music of the Masonic Hotel, has always bored him. As for the crude music from America to which people of his own age dance, he feels only a fastidious distaste for it.

  Back in South Africa the songs on the radio all came from America. In the newspapers the antics of American film stars were obsessively followed, American crazes like the hula hoop slavishly imitated. Why? Why look to America in everything? Disowned by the Dutch and now by the British, had South Africans made up their minds to become fake Americans, even though most had never in their lives clapped eyes on a real American?

  In Britain he had expected to get away from America – from American music, American fads. But to his dismay the British are no less eager to ape America. The popular newspapers carry pictures of girls screaming their heads off at concerts. Men with hair down to their shoulders shout and whine in fake American accents and then smash their guitars to pieces. It is all beyond him.

  Britain’s saving grace is the Third Programme. If there is one thing he looks forward to after a day at IBM, it is coming home to the quiet of his room and switching on the radio and being visited with music he has never heard before, or cool, intelligent talk. Evening after evening, without fail and at no cost, the portals open at his touch.

  The Third Programme broadcasts only on long wave. If the Third Programme were on short wave he might have picked it up in Cape Town. In that case, what need would there have been to come to London?

  There is a talk in the ‘Poets and Poetry’ series about a Russian named Joseph Brodsky. Accused of being a social parasite, Joseph Brodsky has been sentenced to five years of hard labour in a camp on the Archangel peninsula in the frozen north. The sentence is still running. Even as he sits in his warm room in London, sipping his coffee, nibbling his dessert of raisins and nuts, there is a man of his own age, a poet like himself, sawing logs all day, nursing frostbitten fingers, patching his boots with rags, living on fish heads and cabbage soup.

  ‘As dark as the inside of a needle,’ writes Brodsky in one of his poems. He cannot get the line out of his mind. If he concentrated, truly concentrated, night after night, if he compelled, by sheer attention, the blessing of inspiration to descend upon him, he might be able to come up with something to match it. For he has it in him, he knows, his imagination is of the same colour as Brodsky’s. But how to get word through to Archangel afterwards?

  On the basis of the poems he has heard on the radio and nothing else, he knows Brodsky, knows him through and through. That is what poetry is capable of. Poetry is truth. But of him in London Brodsky can know nothing. How to tell the frozen man he is with him, by his side, day by day?

  Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, Zbigniew Herbert: from lone rafts tossed on the dark seas of Europe they release their words into the air, and along the airwaves the words speed to his room, the words of the poets of his time, telling him of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they. ‘Signal heard in London – please continue to transmit’: that is the message he would send them if he could.

  In South Africa he had heard one or two pieces by Schoenberg and Berg – Verklärte Nacht, the violin concerto. Now for the first time he hears the music of Anton von Webern. He has been warned against Webern. Webern goes too far, he has read: what Webern writes is no longer music, just random sounds. Crouched over the radio, he listens. First one note, then another, then another, cold as ice crystals, strung out like stars in the sky. A minute or two of this raptness, then it is over.

  Webern was shot in 1945 by an American soldier. A misunderstanding, it was called
, an accident of war. The brain that mapped those sounds, those silences, that sound-and-silence, extinguished for ever.

  He goes to an exhibition of the abstract expressionists at the Tate Gallery. For a quarter of an hour he stands before a Jackson Pollock, giving it a chance to penetrate him, trying to look judicious in case some suave Londoner is keeping an amused eye on this provincial ignoramus. It does not help. The painting means nothing to him. There is something about it he does not get.

  In the next room, high up on a wall, sits a huge painting consisting of no more than an elongated black blob on a white field. Elegy for the Spanish Republic 24 by Robert Motherwell, says the label. He is transfixed. Menacing and mysterious, the black shape takes him over. A sound like the stroke of a gong goes out from it, leaving him shaken and weak-kneed.

  Where does its power come from, this amorphous shape that bears no resemblance to Spain or anything else, yet stirs up a well of dark feeling within him? It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously. Why does Motherwell have this power and not Pollock, or Van Gogh, or Rembrandt? Is it the same power that makes his heart leap at the sight of one woman and not another? Does Elegy for the Spanish Republic correspond to some indwelling shape in his soul? What of the woman who is to be his fate? Is her shadow already stored in his inner darkness? How much longer before she reveals herself? When she does, will he be prepared?

  What the answer is he cannot say. But if he can meet her as an equal, her, the Destined One, then their lovemaking will be unexampled, that he is sure of, an ecstasy bordering on death; and when he returns to life afterwards it will be as a new being, transformed. A flash of extinction like the touching of opposite poles, like the mating of twins; then the slow rebirth. He must be ready for it. Readiness is all.

  At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu’s bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father, he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode – he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which – catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that lasts long after the film has ended.

  Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs. Now he encounters something that is not in Bach, though there are intimations of it: a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers.

  He hunts through record shops, and in one of them finds an LP of a sitar player named Ustad Vilayat Khan, with his brother – a younger brother, to judge from the picture – on the veena, and an unnamed tabla player. He does not have a gramophone of his own, but he is able to listen to the first ten minutes in the shop. It is all there: the hovering exploration of tone-sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes. He cannot believe his good fortune. A new continent, and all for a mere nine shillings! He takes the record back to his room, packs it away between sleeves of cardboard till the day when he will be able to listen to it again.

  There is an Indian couple living in the room below him. They have a baby that sometimes, faintly, cries. He exchanges nods with the man when they pass on the stairs. The woman rarely emerges.

  One evening there is a knock at his door. It is the Indian. Would he like to have a meal with them?

  He accepts, but with misgivings. He is not used to strong spices. Will he be able to eat without spluttering and making a fool of himself? But he is at once put at his ease. The family is from South India; they are vegetarians. Hot spices are not an essential part of Indian cuisine, explains his host: they were introduced only to hide the taste of rotting meat. South Indian food is quite gentle on the palate. And indeed, so it proves to be. What is set before him – coconut soup spiced with cardamom and cloves, an omelette – is positively milky.

  His host is an engineer. He and his wife have been in England for several years. They are happy here, he says. Their present accommodation is the best they have had thus far. The room is spacious, the house quiet and orderly. Of course they are not fond of the English climate. But – he shrugs his shoulders – one must take the rough with the smooth.

  His wife barely enters the conversation. She serves them without herself eating, then retires to the corner where the baby lies in his cot. Her English is not good, her husband says.

  His engineer neighbour admires Western science and technology, complains that India is backward. Though paeans to machines usually bore him, he says nothing to contradict the man. These are the first people in England to invite him into their home. More than that: they are people of colour, they are aware he is South African, yet they have extended a hand to him. He is grateful.

  The question is, what should he do with his gratitude? It is inconceivable that he should invite them, husband and wife and no doubt crying baby, to his room on the top floor to eat packet soup followed by, if not chipolatas, then macaroni in cheese sauce. But how else does one return hospitality?

  A week passes and he does nothing, then a second week. He feels more and more embarrassed. He begins listening at his door in the mornings, waiting for the engineer to leave for work before he steps out on to the landing.

  There must be some gesture to make, some simple act of reciprocation, but he cannot find it, or else will not, and it is fast becoming too late anyway. What is wrong with him? Why does he make the most ordinary things so hard for himself? If the answer is that it is his nature, what is the good of having a nature like that? Why not change his nature?

  But is it his nature? He doubts that. It does not feel like nature, it feels like a sickness, a moral sickness: meanness, poverty of spirit, no different in its essence from his coldness with women. Can one make art out of a sickness like that? And if one can, what does that say about art?

  On a noticeboard outside a Hampstead newsagent’s he reads an advertisement: ‘Fourth required for flat in Swiss Cottage. Own room, share kitchen.’

  He does not like sharing. He prefers living on his own. But as long as he lives on his own he will never break out of his isolation. He telephones, makes an appointment.

  The man who shows him the flat is a few years older than he. He is bearded, wears a blue Nehru jacket with gold buttons down the front. His name is Miklos, and he is from Hungary. The flat itself is clean and airy; the room that will be his is larger than the room he rents at present, more modern too. ‘I’ll take it,’ he tells Miklos without hesitation. ‘Shall I give you a deposit?’

  But it is not as simple as that. ‘Leave your name and number and I’ll put you on the list,’ says Miklos.

  For three days he waits. On the fourth day he telephones. Miklos is not in, says the girl who answers. The room? Oh, the room is gone, it went days ago.

  Her voice has a faint foreign huskiness to it; no doubt she is beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated. He does not ask whether she is Hungarian too. But if he had got the room, he would now be sharing a flat with her. Who is she? What is her name? Was she his destined love, and has his destiny now escaped him? Who is the fortunate one who has been granted the room and the future that should have been his?

  He had the impression, when he called at the flat, that Miklos was showing him around rather perfunctorily. He can only think that Miklos was looking for someone who would bring more to the economy of the household than just a quarter of the rent, someone who would offer gaiety or style or romance as well. Summing him up in a glance, Miklos found him lacking in gaiety, style and romance, and rejected him.

  He should have taken the initiative. ‘I am not what I may seem to be,’ he should have said. ‘I may look like a clerk, but in reality I am a poet, or a poet to be. Furthermore, I will pay my share of the rent punctiliously, which is more than most poets will do.’ But he had not spoken up, had not pleaded, however abjectly, for himself and his vocation; and now it i
s too late.

  How does a Hungarian come to dispose over a flat in fashionable Swiss Cottage, to dress in the latest mode, to wake up in the lazy late morning with the no doubt beautiful girl with the husky voice beside him in bed, while he has to slave the day away for IBM and live in a dreary room off the Archway Road? How have the keys that unlock the pleasures of London come into the possession of Miklos? Where do such people find the money to support their life of ease?

  He has never liked people who disobey the rules. If the rules are ignored, life ceases to make sense: one might as well, like Ivan Karamazov, hand back one’s ticket and retire. Yet London seems to be full of people who ignore the rules and get away with it. He seems to be the only one stupid enough to play by the rules, he and the other dark-suited, bespectacled, harried clerks he sees in the trains. What, then, should he do? Should he follow Ivan? Should he follow Miklos? Whichever he follows, it seems to him, he loses. For he has no talent for lying or deception or rule-bending, just as he has no talent for pleasure or fancy clothes. His sole talent is for misery, dull, honest misery. If this city offers no reward for misery, what is he doing here?

  Twelve

  Each week a letter arrives from his mother, a pale-blue aerogramme addressed in neat block capitals. It is with exasperation that he receives these evidences of her unvarying love for him. Will his mother not understand that when he departed Cape Town he cut all bonds with the past? How can he make her accept that the process of turning himself into a different person that began when he was fifteen will be carried through remorselessly until all memory of the family and the country he left behind is extinguished? When will she see that he has grown so far away from her that he might as well be a stranger?