Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Why I made no deeper investment in John has much to do, I now suspect, with his project of turning himself into what I described to you, a gentle man, the kind of man who would do no harm, not even to dumb animals, not even to a woman. I should have made myself clearer to him, I now think. If for some reason you are holding yourself back, I should have said, then don’t, there is no need. If I had told him that, if he had taken it to heart, if he had allowed himself to be a little more impetuous, a little more imperious, a little less thoughtful, then he might actually have yanked me out of a marriage that was already bad for me and would become worse later. He might actually have saved me, or saved the best years of my life for me, which, as it turned out, were wasted.

  [Silence.]

  I’ve lost track. What were we talking about?

  Dusklands.

  Yes, Dusklands. A word of caution. That book was actually written before he met me. Check the chronology. Don’t be tempted to read it as about the two of us.

  The thought did not cross my mind.

  I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. ‘There is always something or other I am working on,’ he said. ‘If I yielded to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.’

  That surprised me – his need to write, I mean. I knew hardly anything about his habits, about how he spent his time, but he had never struck me as an obsessive worker.

  ‘Do you mean that?’ I said.

  ‘I get depressed if I am not writing,’ he replied.

  ‘Then why the endless house repairs?’ I said. ‘You could pay someone else to do the repairs, and devote the time you saved to writing.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Even if I had the money to employ a builder, which I don’t, I would still feel the need to spend X hours a day digging in the garden or moving rocks or mixing concrete.’ And he launched into another of his speeches about the need to overthrow the taboo on manual labour.

  I wondered whether there might not be some criticism of myself hanging in the air: that the paid labour of my black domestic set me free to have idle affairs with strange men, for instance. But I let it pass. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you certainly don’t understand economics. The first principle of economics is that if we all insisted on spinning our own thread and milking our own cows rather than employing other people to do it for us, we would be stuck for ever in the Stone Age. That is why we have invented an economy based on exchange, which has in turn made possible our long history of material progress. You pay someone else to lay the concrete, and in exchange you get the time to write the book that will justify your leisure and give meaning to your life. That may even give meaning to the life of the workman laying the concrete for you. So that we all prosper.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ he said. ‘That books give meaning to our lives?’

  ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. What else should it be?’

  ‘A gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality.’

  ‘No one is immortal. Books are not immortal. The entire globe on which we stand is going to be sucked into the sun and burnt to a cinder. After which the universe itself will implode and disappear down a black hole. Nothing is going to survive, not me, not you, and certainly not minority-interest books about imaginary frontiersmen in eighteenth-century South Africa.’

  ‘I didn’t mean immortal in the sense of existing outside time. I mean surviving beyond one’s physical demise.’

  ‘You want people to read you after you are dead?’

  ‘It affords me some consolation to cling to that prospect.’

  ‘Even if you won’t be around to witness it?’

  ‘Even if I won’t be around to witness it.’

  ‘But why should the people of the future bother to read the book you write if it doesn’t speak to them, if it doesn’t help them find meaning in their lives?’

  ‘Perhaps they will still like to read books that are well written.’

  ‘That’s silly. It’s like saying that if I build a good enough gram-radio then people will still be using it in the twenty-fifth century. But they won’t. Because gram-radios, however well made, will be obsolete by then. They won’t speak to twenty-fifth-century people.’

  ‘Perhaps in the twenty-fifth century there will still be a minority curious to hear what a late-twentieth-century gram-radio sounded like.’

  ‘Collectors. Hobbyists. Is that how you intend to spend your life: sitting at your desk handcrafting an object that might or might not be preserved as a curiosity?’

  He shrugged. ‘Have you a better idea?’

  You think I am showing off. I can see that. You think I make up dialogue to show how smart I am. But that is how they were at times, conversations between John and myself. They were fun. I enjoyed them; I missed them afterwards, after I stopped seeing him. In fact our conversations were probably what I missed most. He was the only man I knew who would let me beat him in an honest argument, who wouldn’t bluster or obfuscate or go off in a huff when he saw he was losing. And I always. beat him, or nearly always.

  The reason was simple. It wasn’t that he couldn’t argue; but he ran his life according to principles, whereas I have always been a pragmatist. Pragmatism beats principles; that is just the way things are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our feet; principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality. I know he had a reputation for being dour, but John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy. Dour comedy. Which, in an obscure way, he knew, even accepted. That is why I still look back on him with affection. If you want to know.

  [Silence.]

  I was always good at arguing. At school everyone used to be nervous around me, even my teachers. A tongue like a knife, my mother used to say half-reprovingly. A girl should not argue like that, a girl should learn to be more soft. But at other times she would say: A girl like you should be a lawyer. She was proud of me, of my spirit, of my sharp tongue. She came from a generation when a daughter was still married out of the father’s home straight into the husband’s, or the father-in-law’s.

  Anyway, ‘Have you a better idea,’ John said – ‘a better idea for how to use one’s life than writing books?’

  ‘No. But I have an idea that might shake you up and help give direction to your life.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Find yourself a good woman and marry her.’

  He looked at me strangely. ‘Are you making me a proposal?’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am already married, thank you. Find a woman better suited to you, someone who will take you out of yourself.’

  I am already married, therefore marriage to you would constitute bigamy: that was the unspoken part. Yet what was wrong with bigamy, come to think of it, aside from it being against the law? What made bigamy a crime when adultery was only a sin, or a recreation? I was already an adulteress; why should I not be a bigamist or bigamiste too? This was Africa, after all. If no African man was going to be hauled before a court for having two wives, why should I be forbidden to have two spouses, a public one and a private one?

  ‘This is not, emphatically not, a proposal,’ I repeated, ‘but – just hypothetically – if I were free, would you marry me?’

  It was only an inquiry, an idle inquiry. Nevertheless, without a word he took me in his arms and held me so tight that I could not breathe. It was the first act of his I could recollect that seemed to come straight from the heart. Certainly I had seen him worked on by animal desire – we did not spend our time in bed discussing Aristotle – but never before had I seen him in the grip of emotion. So, I asked myself in some wonderment, does this cold fish have feelings after all?

  ‘What’s up?’ I said, disengaging myself from his grasp. ‘Is there someth
ing you want to tell me?’

  He was silent. Was he crying? I switched on the bedside lamp and inspected him. No tears, but he did wear a look of stricken mournfulness. ‘If you can’t tell me what’s up,’ I said, ‘I can’t help you.’

  Later, when he had pulled himself together, we collaborated to make light of the moment. ‘For the right woman,’ I said, ‘you would make a prima husband. Responsible. Hard-working. Intelligent. Quite a catch, in fact. Good in bed too,’ though that was not strictly true. ‘Affectionate,’ I added as an afterthought, though that was not true either.

  ‘And an artist to boot,’ he said. ‘You forgot to mention that.’

  ‘And an artist to boot. An artist in words.’

  [Silence.]

  And?

  That’s all. A difficult passage between the two of us, which we successfully negotiated. My first inkling that he cherished deeper feelings for me.

  Deeper than what?

  Deeper than the feelings any man might cherish for his neighbour’s attractive wife. Or his neighbour’s ox or ass.

  Are you saying he was in love with you?

  In love…In love with me or with the idea of me? I don’t know. What I do know is that he had reason to be thankful to me. I made things easy for him. There are men who find it hard to court a woman. They are afraid to expose their desire, to open themselves to rebuff. Behind their fear there often lies a childhood history. I never forced John to expose himself. I was the one who did the courting. I was the one who did the seducing. I was the one who managed the terms of the affair. I was even the one who decided when it was over. So you ask, Was he in love? and I reply, He was in gratitude.

  [Silence.]

  I often wondered, afterwards, what would have happened if instead of fending him off I had responded to his surge of feeling with a surge of feeling of my own. If I had had the courage to divorce Mark back then, rather than waiting another thirteen or fourteen years, and hitched up with John. Would I have made more of my life? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But then I would not be the ex-mistress talking to you. I would be the grieving widow.

  Chrissie was the problem, the fly in the ointment. Chrissie was very attached to her father, and I was finding it more and more difficult to handle her. She was no longer a baby – she was getting on for two – and although her progress in speech was disturbingly slow (as it turned out, I needn’t have worried, she made up for it in a burst later on), she was growing more agile by the day – agile and fearless. She had learned to clamber out of her cot; I had to hire a handyman to put in a gate at the head of the stairs in case she came tumbling down.

  I remember one night Chrissie appeared without warning at my bedside, rubbing her eyes, whimpering, confused. I had the presence of mind to gather her up and whisk her back to her room before she registered that it wasn’t Daddy in bed beside me; but what if I wasn’t so lucky next time?

  I was never quite sure what subterranean effect my double life might be having on the child. On the one hand I told myself that as long as I was physically fulfilled and at peace with myself, the beneficial effects ought to seep through to her too. If that strikes you as self-serving, let me remind you that at that time, in the 1970s, the progressive view, the bien-pensant view, was that sex was a force for the good, in any guise, with any partner. On the other hand it was clear that Chrissie was finding the alternation between Daddy and Uncle John in the household puzzling. What was going to happen when she began to speak? What if she got the two of them mixed and called her father Uncle John? There would be hell to pay.

  I have always tended to regard Sigmund Freud as bunk, starting with the Oedipus complex and proceeding to his refusal to see that children were routinely being sexually abused, even in the homes of his middle-class clientele. Nevertheless I do agree that children, from a very early age, spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out their place in the family. In the case of Chrissie, the family had up to then been a simple affair: she herself, the sun at the centre of the universe, plus Mommy and Daddy, her attendant planets. I had put some effort into making it clear that Maria, who appeared at eight o’clock in the morning and disappeared at noon, was not part of the family set-up. ‘Maria must go home now,’ I would say to her in front of Maria. ‘Say ta-ta to Maria. Maria has her own little girl to feed and look after.’ (I referred to Maria’s little girl in the singular in order not to complicate matters. I knew perfectly well that Maria had seven children to feed and clothe, five of her own and two passed on by a sister dead of tuberculosis.)

  As for Chrissie’s wider family, her grandmother on my side had passed away before she was born and her grandfather was tucked away in a sanatorium, as I told you. Mark’s parents lived in the rural Eastern Cape in a farmhouse ringed by a two-metre-high electrified fence. They never spent a night away from home for fear the farm would be plundered and the livestock driven off, so they might as well have been in jail. Mark’s elder sister lived thousands of miles away in Seattle; my own brother never visited the Cape. So Chrissie had the most stripped-down version of a family possible. The sole complication was the uncle who at midnight sneaked in at the back door and into Mommy’s bed. How did this uncle fit in? Was he one of the family or on the contrary a worm eating away at the heart of the family?

  And Maria – how much did Maria know? I could never be sure. Migrant labour was the norm in South Africa in those days, so Maria must have been all too familiar with the phenomenon of the husband who says goodbye to wife and children and goes off to the big city to find work. But whether Maria approved of wives fooling around in their husbands’ absence was another matter. Though Maria never actually laid eyes on my night-time visitor, it was hardly likely that she was deceived. That kind of visitor leaves too many traces behind.

  But what is this? Is it really six o’clock? I had no idea it was so late. We must stop. Can you come back tomorrow?

  I’m afraid I am due to head home tomorrow. I fly from here to Toronto, from Toronto to London. I’d hate it if…

  Very well, let’s press on. There is not much more. I’ll be quick.

  One night John arrived in an unusually excited state. He had with him a little cassette player, and put on a tape, the Schubert string quintet. It was not what I would call sexy music, nor was I particularly in the mood, but he wanted to make love, and specifically – excuse the explicitness – wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement.

  Well, the slow movement in question may be very beautiful but I found it far from arousing. Added to which I could not shake off the image on the box containing the tape: Franz Schubert looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold.

  I don’t know if you remember the slow movement, but there is a long violin aria with the viola throbbing below, and I could feel John trying to keep time with it. The whole business struck me as forced, ridiculous. Somehow or other my remoteness communicated itself to John. ‘Empty your mind!’ he hissed at me. ‘Feel through the music!’

  Well, there can be nothing more irritating than being told what you must feel. I turned away from him, and his little erotic experiment collapsed at once.

  Later on he tried to explain himself. He wanted to demonstrate something about the history of feeling, he said. Feelings had natural histories of their own. They came into being within time, flourished for a while or failed to flourish, then died or died out. The kinds of feeling that had flourished in Schubert’s day were by now, most of them, dead. The sole way left to us to re-experience them was via the music of the times. Because music was the trace, the inscription, of feeling.

  Okay, I said, but why do we have to fuck while we listen to the music?

  Because the slow movement of the quintet happens to be about fucking, he replied. If, instead of resisting, I had let the music flow into me and animate me, I would have experienced glimmerings of something quite unusual: what it had felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria.

  ‘What it fe
lt like for post-Bonaparte man or what it felt like for post-Bonaparte woman?’ I said. ‘For Mr Schubert or for Mrs Schubert?’

  That really annoyed him. He didn’t like his pet theories to be made fun of.

  ‘Music isn’t about fucking,’ I went on. ‘That is where you lose the plot. Music is about foreplay. It is about courtship. You sing to the maiden before you are admitted to her bed, not while you are in bed with her. You sing to her to woo her, to win her heart. If you aren’t happy with me in bed, maybe it is because you haven’t won my heart.’

  I should have called it a day at that point, but I didn’t, I went further. ‘The mistake the two of us made,’ I said, ‘was that we skimped the foreplay. I’m not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless. Sex is better when it is preceded by a good, long courtship. More emotionally satisfying. More erotically satisfying too. If you are trying to improve our sex life, you won’t achieve it by making me fuck in time to music.’

  I expected him to fight back, to argue the case for musical sex. But he did not rise to the bait. Instead he put on a sullen, defeated look and turned his back on me.

  I know I am contradicting what I said earlier, about him being a good sport and a good loser, but this time I really seemed to have touched a sore spot.

  Anyway, there we were. I had gone on the offensive, I couldn’t turn back. ‘Go home and practise your wooing,’ I said. ‘Go on. Go away. Take your Schubert with you. Come again when you can do better.’

  It was cruel; but he deserved it for not fighting back.

  ‘Right – I’ll go,’ he said in a sulky voice. ‘I have things to do anyway.’ And he began to put on his clothes.

  Things to do! I picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a quite nice little baked-clay plate, brown with a painted yellow border, one of a set of six that Mark and I had bought in Swaziland. For an instant I could still see the comic side of it: the dark-tressed, bare-breasted mistress exhibiting her stormy central-European temperament by shouting abuse and throwing crockery. Then I hurled the plate.