Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Mrs Jonker?’ A fresh young nurse. ‘Your mother is awake, she is asking for you.’

  ‘Come,’ she says. Jack and John follow her.

  Her mother is conscious, she is calm, so calm as to seem a little remote. The oxygen mask has been replaced with a tube into her nose. Her eyes have lost their colour, turned into flat grey pebbles. ‘Margie?’ she whispers.

  She presses her lips to her mother’s brow. ‘I’m here, Ma,’ she says.

  The doctor enters, the same doctor as before, with the dark-rimmed eyes. Kiristany says the badge on his coat. On duty yesterday afternoon, still on duty this morning.

  Her mother has had a cardiac episode, says Doctor Kiristany, but is now stable. She is very weak. Her heart is being stimulated electrically.

  ‘I would like to move my mother to a private hospital,’ she says to him, ‘somewhere quieter than this.’

  He shakes his head. Impossible, he says. He cannot give his consent. Perhaps in a few days’ time, if she rallies.

  She stands back. Jack bends over his sister, murmuring words she cannot hear. Her mother’s eyes are open, her lips move, she seems to be replying. Two old people, two innocents, born in olden times, out of place in the loud, angry place this country has become.

  ‘John?’ she says. ‘Do you want to speak to Ma?’

  He shakes his head. ‘She won’t know me,’ he says.

  [Silence.]

  And?

  That’s the end.

  The end? But why stop there?

  It seems a good place. She won’t know me: a good line.

  [Silence.]

  Well, what is your verdict?

  My verdict? I still don’t understand: if it is a book about John why are you putting in so much about me? Who is going to want to read about me – me and Lukas and my mother and Carol and Klaus?

  You were part of your cousin. He was part of you. That is plain enough, surely. What I am asking is, can it stand as it is?

  Not as it is, no. I want to go over it again, as you promised.

  Interviews conducted in Somerset West, South Africa,

  December 2007 and June 2008.

  Adriana

  SENHORA NASCIMENTO, YOU ARE Brazilian by birth, but you spent several years in South Africa. How did that come about?

  We went to South Africa from Angola, my husband and I and our two daughters. In Angola my husband worked for a newspaper and I had a job with the National Ballet. But then in 1973 the government declared an emergency and shut down his newspaper. They wanted to call him up into the army too – they were calling up all men under the age of forty-five, even those who were not citizens. We could not go back to Brazil, it was still too dangerous, we saw no future for ourselves in Angola, so we left, we took the boat to South Africa. We were not the first to do that, or the last.

  And why Cape Town?

  Why Cape Town? No special reason, except that we had a relative there, a cousin of my husband’s who owned a fruit and vegetable shop. After we arrived we stayed with him and his family, it was difficult for all of us, nine people in three rooms, while we waited for our residence papers. Then my husband managed to find a job as a security guard and we could move into a flat of our own. That was in a place called Epping. A few months later, just before the disaster that ruined everything, we moved again, to Wynberg, to be nearer the children’s school.

  What disaster do you refer to?

  My husband was working night shifts guarding a warehouse near the docks. He was the only guard. There was a robbery – a gang of men broke in. They attacked him, hit him with an axe. Maybe it was a machete, but more likely it was an axe. One side of his face was smashed in. I still don’t find it easy to talk about. An axe. Hitting a man in the face with an axe because he is doing his job. I can’t understand it.

  What happened to him?

  There were injuries to his brain. He died. It took a long time, nearly a year, but he died. It was terrible.

  I’m sorry.

  Yes. For a while the firm he worked for went on paying his wages. Then the money stopped coming. He was not their responsibility any more, they said, he was the responsibility of Social Welfare. Social Welfare! Social Welfare never gave us a cent. My older daughter had to leave school. She took a job as a packer in a supermarket. That brought in a hundred and twenty rands a week. I looked for work too, but I couldn’t find a position in ballet, they weren’t interested in my kind of ballet, so I had to teach classes at a dance studio. Latin American. Latin American was popular in South Africa in those days. Maria Regina stayed at school. She still had the rest of that year and the next year before she could matriculate. Maria Regina, my younger daughter. I wanted her to get her certificate, not follow her sister into the supermarket, putting cans on shelves for the rest of her life. She was the clever one. She loved books.

  In Luanda my husband and I had made an effort to speak a little English at the dinner table, also a little French, just to remind the girls Angola wasn’t the whole world, but they didn’t really pick it up. In Cape Town English was Maria Regina’s weakest school subject. So I enrolled her for extra lessons in English. The school ran these extra lessons in the afternoons for children like her, new arrivals. That was when I began to hear about Mr Coetzee, the man you are asking about, who, as it turned out, was not one of the regular teachers, no, not at all, but was hired by the school to teach these extra classes.

  This Mr Coetzee sounds like an Afrikaner to me, I said to Maria Regina. Can’t your school afford a proper English teacher? I want you to learn proper English, from an English person.

  I never liked Afrikaners. We saw lots of them in Angola, working for the mines or as mercenaries in the army. They treated the blacks like dirt. I didn’t like that. In South Africa my husband picked up a few words of Afrikaans – he had to, the security firm was all Afrikaners – but as for me, I didn’t even like to listen to the language. Thank God the school did not make the girls learn Afrikaans, that would have been too much.

  Mr Coetzee is not an Afrikaner, said Maria Regina. He has a beard. He writes poetry.

  Afrikaners can have beards too, I told her, you don’t need a beard to write poetry. I want to see this Mr Coetzee for myself, I don’t like the sound of him. Tell him to come here to the flat. Tell him to come and drink tea with us and show he is a proper teacher. What is this poetry he writes?

  Maria Regina started to fidget. She was at an age when children don’t like you to interfere in their school life. But I told her, as long as I pay for extra lessons I will interfere as much as I want. What kind of poetry does this man write?

  I don’t know, she said. He makes us recite poetry. He makes us learn it by heart.

  What does he make you learn by heart? I said. Tell me.

  Keats, she said.

  What is Keats? I said (I had never heard of Keats, I knew none of those old English writers, we didn’t study them in the days when I was at school).

  A drowsy numbness overtakes my sense, Maria Regina recited, as though of hemlock I had drunk. Hemlock is poison. It attacks your nervous system.

  That is what this Mr Coetzee makes you learn? I said.

  It’s in the book, she said. It’s one of the poems we have to learn for the exam.

  My daughters were always complaining I was too strict with them. But I never yielded. Only by watching over them like a hawk could I keep them out of trouble in this strange country where they were not at home, on a continent where we should never have come. Joana was easier, Joana was the good girl, the quiet one. Maria Regina was more reckless, more ready to challenge me. I had to keep Maria Regina on a tight rein, Maria with her poetry and her romantic dreams.

  There was the question of the invitation, the correct way to phrase an invitation to your daughter’s teacher to visit her parents’ home and drink tea. I spoke to Mario’s cousin, but he was no help. So in the end I had to ask the receptionist at the dance studio to write the letter
for me. ‘Dear Mr Coetzee,’ she wrote, ‘I am the mother of Maria Regina Nascimento, who is in your English class. You are invited to a tea at our residence’ – I gave the address – ‘on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time. Transport from the school will be arranged. RSVP Adriana Teixeira Nascimento.’

  By transport I meant Manuel, the eldest son of Mario’s cousin, who used to give Maria Regina a lift home in the afternoons, in his van, after he had made his deliveries. It would be easy for him to pick up the teacher too.

  Mario was your husband.

  Mario. My husband, who died.

  Please go on. I just wanted to be sure.

  Mr Coetzee was the first person who was invited to our flat – the first one outside Mario’s family. He was only a schoolteacher – we met plenty of schoolteachers in Luanda, and before Luanda in São Paulo, I had no special esteem for them – but to Maria Regina and even to Joana schoolteachers were gods and goddesses, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them. The evening before his visit the girls baked a cake and iced it and even wrote on it (they wanted to write ‘Welcome Mr Coetzee’ but I made them write ‘St Bonaventure 1974’). They also baked trayfuls of the little biscuits that in Brazil we call brevidades.

  Maria Regina was very excited. Come home early, please, please! I heard her urging her sister. Tell your supervisor you are feeling ill! But Joana wasn’t prepared to do that. It is not so easy to take time off, she said, they dock your pay if you don’t complete your shift.

  So Manuel brought Mr Coetzee to our flat, and I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn’t have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me at once, I can’t say why, as célibataire. I mean not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impressions). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step towards civilized manners.

  ‘How long are you a teacher, Mr Coetzee?’ I asked.

  He squirmed in his seat, said something I don’t remember any more about America, about being a teacher in America. Then, after more questions, it emerged that in fact he had never taught in a school before this one, and – what is worse – did not even have a teacher’s certificate. Of course I was surprised. ‘If you don’t have a certificate, how come you are Maria Regina’s teacher?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  The answer, which again took a long time to squeeze out of him, was that, for subjects like music and ballet and foreign languages, schools were permitted to hire persons who had no qualifications, or at least did not have certificates of competence. These unqualified persons would not be paid salaries like proper teachers, they would instead be paid by the school with money collected from parents like me.

  ‘But you are not English,’ I said. It was not a question this time, it was an accusation. Here he was, hired to teach the English language, paid out of my money and Joana’s money, yet he was not a teacher, and moreover he was an Afrikaner, not an Englishman.

  ‘I agree I am not of English descent,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless I have spoken English from an early age and have passed university examinations in English, therefore I believe I can teach English. There is nothing special about English. It is just one language among many.’

  That is what he said. English is just one language among many. ‘My daughter is not going to be like a parrot that mixes up languages, Mr Coetzee,’ I said. ‘I want her to speak English properly, and with a proper English accent.’

  Fortunately for him, this was the moment when Joana arrived home. Joana was already twenty by then, but in the presence of a man she was still bashful. Compared with her sister she was not a beauty – look, here is a snapshot of her with her husband and their little boys, it was taken some time after we moved back to Brazil, you can see, not a beauty, all the beauty went to her sister – but she was a good girl and I always knew she would make a good wife.

  Joana came into the room where we were sitting, still wearing her raincoat (I remember that long raincoat of hers). ‘My sister,’ said Maria Regina, as if she was explaining who this new person was rather than introducing her. Joana said nothing, just looked shy, and as for Mr Coetzee the teacher, he almost knocked over the coffee table trying to get to his feet.

  Why is Maria Regina besotted with this foolish man? What does she see in him? That was the question I asked myself. It was easy enough to guess what a lonely célibataire might see in my daughter, who was turning into a real dark-eyed beauty though she was still only a child, but what made her learn poems by heart for this man, something she had never done for her other teachers? Had he perhaps been whispering words to her that had turned her head? Was that the explanation? Was there something going on between the two of them that she was keeping secret from me?

  Now if this man were to become interested in Joana, I thought to myself, it would be a different story. Joana may not have a head for poetry, but at least she has her feet on the ground.

  ‘Joana is working this year at Clicks,’ I said. ‘To get experience. Next year she will take a management course. To be a manager.’

  Mr Coetzee nodded abstractedly. Joana said nothing at all.

  ‘Take off your coat, my child,’ I said, ‘and drink some tea.’ We did not normally drink tea, we drank coffee. Joana brought home some tea the day before for this guest of ours, Earl Grey tea it was called, very English but not very nice, I wondered what we were going to do with the rest of the packet.

  ‘Mr Coetzee is from the school,’ I repeated to Joana, as if she did not know. ‘He is telling us how he is not English but is nevertheless the English teacher.’

  ‘I am not, properly speaking, the English teacher,’ Mr Coetzee interjected, addressing Joana. ‘I am the Extra English teacher. That means I have been hired by the school to help students who are having difficulty with English. I try to get them through the examinations. So I am a kind of examination coach. That would be a better description of what I do, a better name for me.’

  ‘Do we have to talk about school?’ said Maria Regina. ‘It is so boring.’

  But what we were talking about was not boring at all. Painful, perhaps, for Mr Coetzee, but not boring. ‘Go on,’ I said to him, ignoring her.

  ‘I do not intend to be an examination coach for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘It is something I am doing for the present, something I happen to be qualified to do, in order to make a living. But it is not my vocation. It is not what I was called into the world to do.’

  Called into the world. More and more strange.

  ‘If you would like me to explain my philosophy of teaching I can do so,’ he said. ‘It is quite brief, brief and simple.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’

  ‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them ascend to a higher realm. So to speak.’

  He paused, smiling. Now that he had had his say he seemed more relaxed. What a strange, vain man! I thought. Burn herself up! What nonsense he talks! Dangerous nonsense too! Out of Plato! Is he making fun of us? But Maria Regina, I noticed, was leaning forward, devouring his face with her eyes. Maria Regina did not think he was joking. This is not good! I said to myself.

  ‘That does not sound l
ike philosophy to me, Mr Coetzee,’ I said, ‘it sounds like something else, I will not say what, since you are our guest. Maria, you can fetch the cake now. Joana, help her; and take off that raincoat. My daughters baked a cake last night in honour of your visit.’

  The moment the girls were out of the room I went to the heart of the matter, speaking softly so that they would not hear. ‘Maria is still a child, Mr Coetzee. I am paying for her to learn English and get a good certificate. I am not paying for you to play with her feelings. Do you understand?’ The girls came back, bearing their cake. ‘Do you understand?’ I repeated.

  ‘We learn what we most deeply want to learn,’ he replied. ‘Maria wants to learn – do you not, Maria?’

  Maria flushed and sat down.

  ‘Maria wants to learn,’ he repeated, ‘and she is making good progress. She has a feeling for language. Maybe she will become a writer one day. What a magnificent cake!’

  ‘It is good when a girl can bake,’ I said, ‘but it is even better when she can speak good English and get good marks in her English examination.’

  ‘Good elocution, good marks,’ he said. ‘I understand your wishes perfectly.’

  When he had left, when the girls had gone to bed, I sat down and wrote him a letter in my bad English, I could not help that, it was not the kind of letter my friend at the studio should see.

  Respected Mr Coetzee, I wrote, I repeat what I told you during your visit. You are employed to teach my daughter English, not to play with her feelings. She is a child, you are a grown man. If you wish to expose your feelings, expose them outside the classroom. Yours faithfully, ATN.

  That is what I said. It may not be how you speak in English, but it is how we speak in Portuguese – your translator will understand. Expose your feelings outside the classroom – that was not an invitation to him to pursue me, it was a warning to him not to pursue my daughter.