Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘If you know the story, you will remember that it is cast in the form of a monologue, a monologue by the ape. Within this form there is no means for either speaker or audience to be inspected with an outsider’s eye. For all we know, the speaker may not “really” be an ape, may be simply a human being like ourselves deluded into thinking himself an ape, or a human being presenting himself, with heavy irony, for rhetorical purposes, as an ape. Equally well, the audience may consist not, as we may imagine, of bewhiskered, red-faced gents who have put aside their bushjackets and topis for evening dress, but of fellow apes, trained, if not to the level of our speaker, who can mouth complicated sentences in German, then at least to sit still and listen; or, if not trained to that pitch, then chained to their seats and trained not to jabber and pick fleas and relieve themselves openly.

  ‘We don’t know. We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story: whether it is about a man speaking to men or an ape speaking to apes or an ape speaking to men or a man speaking to apes (though the last is, I think, unlikely) or even just a parrot speaking to parrots.

  ‘There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, “On the table stood a glass of water,” there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.

  ‘But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes. The lecture hall itself may be nothing but a zoo. The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming “I mean what I mean!” The dictionary that used to stand beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has become just one code book among many.

  ‘This is the situation in which I appear before you. I am not, I hope, abusing the privilege of this platform to make idle, nihilistic jokes about what I am, ape or woman, and what you are, my auditors. That is not the point of the story, say I, who am, however, in no position to dictate what the point of the story is. There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think of this as a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out – it looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room. Remove your gaze for but an instant, and the mirror falls to the floor and shatters.

  ‘There is every reason, then, for me to feel less than certain about myself as I stand before you. Despite this splendid award, for which I am deeply grateful, despite the promise it makes that, gathered into the illustrious company of those who have won it before me, I am beyond time’s envious grasp, we all know, if we are being realistic, that it is only a matter of time before the books which you honour, and with whose genesis I have had something to do, will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered. And properly so. There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren. They will have a world of their own, of which we should be less and less part. Thank you.’

  The applause starts hesitantly, then swells. His mother takes off her glasses, smiles. It is an engaging smile: she seems to be relishing the moment. Actors are allowed to bathe in applause, ill deserved or well deserved – actors, singers, violinists. Why should his mother not have her moment of glory too?

  The applause dies down. Dean Brautegam leans into the microphone. ‘There will be refreshments –’

  ‘Excuse me!’ A clear, confident young voice cuts through the Dean’s.

  There is a flurry in the audience. Heads turn.

  ‘There will be refreshments in the foyer, and an exhibition of Elizabeth Costello’s books. Please join us there. It remains for me –’

  ‘Excuse me!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have a question.’

  The speaker is standing up: a young woman in a white-and-red Altona College sweatshirt. Brautegam is clearly nonplussed. As for his mother, she has lost her smile. He knows that look. She has had enough, she wants to be away.

  ‘I am not sure,’ says Brautegam, frowning, peering around for support. ‘Our format tonight does not allow for questions. I would like to thank –’

  ‘Excuse me! I have a question for the speaker. May I address the speaker?’

  There is a hush. All eyes are on Elizabeth Costello. Frostily she gazes into the distance.

  Brautegam pulls himself together. ‘I would like to thank Ms Costello, whom we have gathered tonight to honour. Please join us in the foyer. Thank you.’ And he switches off the microphone.

  As they leave the auditorium there is a buzz of talk. An incident, no less. He can see the girl in the red-and-white shirt ahead of him in the throng. She walks stiff and erect and seemingly angry. What was the question going to be? Would it not have been better to have it aired?

  He fears that the scene will repeat itself in the foyer. But there is no scene. The girl has left, gone out into the night, perhaps stormed out. Nevertheless, the incident leaves a bad taste; say what one may, the evening has been spoiled.

  What was she going to ask? Whispering, people huddle together. They seem to have a shrewd idea. He has a shrewd idea too. Something to do with what Elizabeth Costello the famous writer might have been expected to say on an occasion like this, and did not say.

  He can see Dean Brautegam and others fussing around his mother now, trying to smooth things over. After all they have invested, they want her to go home thinking well of them and of the college. But they must be glancing ahead too to 1997, hoping that the 1997 jury will come up with a more winning winner.

  We skip the rest of the foyer scene, move to the hotel.

  Elizabeth Costello retires for the night. For a while her son watches television in his room. Then he grows restless and goes down to the lounge, where the first person he sees is the woman who interviewed his mother for the radio, Susan Moebius. She waves him over. She is with a companion, but the companion soon departs, leaving the two of them alone.

  He finds Susan Moebius attractive. She dresses well, better than the conventions of the academy usually allow. She has long, golden-blonde hair; she sits upright in her chair, squaring her shoulders; when she tosses her hair the movement is quite queenly.

  They skirt the events of the evening. Instead they speak about the revival of radio as a cultural medium. ‘An interesting session you had with my mother,’ says John. ‘I know you have written a book on her, which unfortunately I haven’t read. Do you have good things to say about her?’

  ‘I believe I do. Elizabeth Costello has been a key writer forour times. My book isn’t about her alone, but she figures strongly in it.’

  ‘A key writer . . . Is she a key writer for all of us, would you say, or just for women? I got the feeling during the interview that you see her solely as a woman writer or a woman’s writer. Would you still consider her a key writer if she were a man?’

  ‘If she were a man?’

  ‘All right: if you were a man?’

  ‘If I were a man? I don’t know. I have never been a man. I will let you know when I have tried it.’

  They smile. There is definitely something in the air.

  ‘But my mother has been a man,’ he persists. ‘She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn’t that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?’

  ‘Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.’

  ‘I don’
t see that. I find her men perfectly believable.’

  ‘You don’t see because you wouldn’t see. Only a woman would see. It is something between women. If her men are believable, good, I am glad to hear so, but finally it is just mimicry. Women are good at mimicry, better at it than men. At parody, even. Our touch is lighter.’

  She is smiling again. See how light my touch can be, her lips seem to say. Soft lips.

  ‘If there is parody in her,’ he says, ‘I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up.’ There is a long silence. ‘So is that what you think,’ he says at last: ‘that we live parallel lives, men and women, that we never really meet?’

  The drift of the conversation has changed. They are no longer speaking about writing, if they ever were.

  ‘What do you think?’ she says. ‘What does your experience tell you? And is difference such a bad thing? If there were no difference, what would become of desire?’

  She looks him candidly in the eye. It is time to move. He stands up; she puts her glass down, slowly stands up too. As she passes him he takes her elbow, and at the touch a shock runs through him, dizzying him. Difference; opposite poles. Midnight in Pennsylvania: what is the time back in Melbourne? What is he doing on this foreign continent?

  They are alone in the elevator. Not the elevator he and his mother used: a different shaft. Which is north, which south in this hexagon of a hotel, this beehive? He presses the woman against the wall, kisses her, tasting smoke on her breath. Research: will that be her name for it afterwards? Using a secondary source? He kisses her again, she kisses him back, kissing flesh of the flesh.

  They exit on the thirteenth floor; he follows her down the corridor, turning right and left until he loses track. The core of the hive: is that what they are seeking? His mother’s room is 1254. His is 1220. Hers is 1307. He is surprised there is such a number. He thought that floors went twelve–fourteen, that that was the rule in the hotel world. Where is 1307 in relation to 1254: north, south, west, east?

  We skip ahead again, a skip this time in the text rather than in the performance.

  When he thinks back over those hours, one moment returns with sudden force, the moment when her knee slips under his arm and folds into his armpit. Curious that the memory of an entire scene should be dominated by one moment, not obviously significant, yet so vivid that he can still almost feel the ghostly thigh against his skin. Does the mind by nature prefer sensations to ideas, the tangible to the abstract? Or is the folding of the woman’s knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night?

  They are lying in the dark, flank to flank, in the text of memory, talking.

  ‘So: has it been a successful visit?’ she asks.

  ‘From whose point of view?’

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘My point of view doesn’t matter. I came for Elizabeth Costello’s sake. Hers is the point of view that matters. Yes, successful. Successful enough.’

  ‘Do I detect a touch of bitterness?’

  ‘None. I am here to help – that is all.’

  ‘That is very good of you. Do you feel you owe her something?’

  ‘Yes. Filial duty. It is a perfectly natural feeling among humankind.’

  She ruffles his hair. ‘Don’t be cross,’ she says.

  ‘I am not.’

  She slides down beside him, strokes him. ‘Successful enough – what does that mean?’ she murmurs. She is not giving up. A price has yet to be paid for this time in her bed, for what counts as a conquest.

  ‘The speech didn’t come off. She is disappointed about that. She put a lot of work into it.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with the speech in itself. But the title was not appropriate. And she should not have relied on Kafka for her illustrations. There are better texts.’

  ‘There are?’

  ‘Yes, better, more suitable. This is America, the 1990s. People don’t want to hear the Kafka thing yet again.’

  ‘What do they want to hear?’

  She shrugs. ‘Something more personal. It doesn’t have to be intimate. But audiences no longer react well to heavy historical self-ironization. They might at a pinch accept it from a man, but not from a woman. A woman doesn’t need to wear all that armour.’

  ‘And a man does?’

  ‘You tell me. If it is a problem, it is a male problem. We didn’t give the award to a man.’

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that my mother may have got beyond the man-woman thing? That she may have explored it as far as it goes, and is now after bigger game?’

  ‘Such as?’

  The hand that has been stroking him pauses. The moment is important, he can feel it. She is waiting for his answer, for the privileged access he promises. He too can feel the thrill of the moment, electric, reckless.

  ‘Such as measuring herself against the illustrious dead. Such as paying tribute to the powers that animate her. For instance.’

  ‘Is that what she says?’

  ‘Don’t you think that that is what she has been doing all her life: measuring herself against the masters? Does no one in your profession recognize it?’

  He should not be speaking like this. He should be keeping out of his mother’s business. He is in this stranger’s bed not for his bonny blue eyes but because he is his mother’s son. Yet here he is spilling the beans like a nincompoop! This must be how spy-women work. Nothing subtle to it. The man is seduced not because he has a will to resist that is cleverly overcome, but because being seduced is a pleasure in itself. One yields for the sake of yielding.

  He wakes once during the night, overwhelmed with sadness, such deep sadness that he could cry. Lightly he touches the naked shoulder of the woman beside him, but she does not respond. He runs the hand down her body: breast, flank, hip, thigh, knee. Handsome in every detail, no doubt about that, but in a blank way that no longer moves him.

  He has a vision of his mother in her big double bed, crouched, her knees drawn up, her back bared. Out of her back, out of the waxy, old person’s flesh, protrude three needles: not the tiny needles of the acupuncturist or the voodoo doctor but thick, grey needles, steel or plastic: knitting needles. The needles have not killed her, there is no need to worry about that, she breathes regularly in her sleep. Nevertheless, she lies impaled.

  Who has done it? Who would have done it?

  Such loneliness, he thinks, hovering in spirit over the old woman in the bare room. His heart is breaking; sadness pours down like a grey waterfall behind his eyes. He should never have come here, to room 13 whatever it is. A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep. Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters all their lives would come up with those words in that arrangement. Out of the dark emerging, out of nowhere: first not there, then there, like a newborn child, heart working, brain working, all the processes of that intricate electrochemical labyrinth working. A miracle. He closes his eyes.

  A gap.

  She, Susan Moebius, is already there when he comes down for breakfast. She is wearing white, she looks rested and content. He joins her.

  From her purse she takes something and lays it on the table: his watch. ‘It is three hours out,’ she says.

  ‘Not three,’ he says. ‘Fifteen. Canberra time.’

  Her eyes rest on his, or his on hers. Green-flecked. He feels a tug. An unexplored continent, from which he is about to part! A pang, a tiny pang of loss, shoots through him. Pain not without pleasure, like certain grades of toothache. He can conceive of something quite serious with this woman, whom he will probably not see again.

  ‘I know what you are thinking,’ she says. ‘You are thinking we won’t see each other again. You are thinking, A was
ted investment.’

  ‘What else do you know?’

  ‘You think I have been using you. You think I have been trying to reach your mother through you.’

  She is smiling. No fool. A capable player.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘No.’ He draws a deep breath. ‘I will tell you what I really think. I think you are baffled, even if you won’t admit it, by the mystery of the divine in the human. You know there is something special about my mother – that is what draws you to her – yet when you meet her she turns out to be just an ordinary old woman. You can’t square the two. You want an explanation. You want a clue, a sign, if not from her then from me. That is what is going on. It’s all right, I don’t mind.’

  Strange words to be speaking over breakfast, over coffee and toast. He did not know he had them in him.

  ‘You really are her son, aren’t you. Do you write too?’

  ‘You mean, am I touched by the god? No. But yes, I am her son. Not a foundling, not an adoptee. Out of her very body I came, caterwauling.’

  ‘And you have a sister.’

  ‘A half-sister, from the same place. The real thing, both of us. Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.’

  ‘And you have never married.’

  ‘Wrong. Married and unmarried. What about you?’

  ‘I have a husband. A husband, a child, a happy marriage.’

  ‘That’s good then.’

  There is nothing more to be said.

  ‘Will I have a chance to say goodbye to your mother?’

  ‘You can catch her before the television interview. At ten, in the ballroom.’

  A gap.

  The television people have chosen the ballroom because of the red velvet drapes. In front of the drapes they have set up a rather ornate chair for his mother, and a plainer chair for the woman who will engage with her. Susan, when she comes, has to cross the whole length of the room. She is ready to travel; she has a calf-leather satchel over her shoulder; her stride is easy, confident. Again, lightly, like the brush of a feather, comes a pang, the pang of forthcoming loss.