Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘It cannot be done, you say. Because – though none of them were aware of it – the Greeks were damned, the Indians were damned, the Zulus were damned.’

  ‘I said nothing about damnation. I am talking only about history, about the record of the humanist enterprise. It cannot be done. Extra ecclesiam nulla salvatio.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,’ she says. ‘Who would have thought you would end up such a hardliner.’

  Blanche gives her a wintry smile. The light flashes on her glasses.

  V

  It is Saturday, her last full day in Africa. She is spending it at Marianhill, the station which her sister has made her life’s work and her home. Tomorrow she will travel to Durban. From Durban she will fly to Bombay and then on to Melbourne. And that will be that. We will not see each other again, Blanche and I, she thinks, not in this life.

  It was the graduation ceremony she came for, but what Blanche really wanted her to see, what lay behind the invitation, was the hospital. She knows that, yet she resists. It is not something she wants. She has not the stomach for it. She has seen it all on television, too often, till she cannot bear to look any more: the stick limbs, the bloated bellies, the great impassive eyes of children wasting away, beyond cure, beyond care. Let this cup be taken from me! she pleads inwardly. I am too old to withstand these sights, too old and weak. I will just cry.

  But in this case she cannot refuse, not when it is her own sister. And, in the event, it proves to be not too bad, not bad enough to break down over. The nursing staff is spick and span, the equipment is new – the fruit of Sister Bridget’s fund-raising – and the atmosphere is relaxed, even happy. In the wards, mingling with the staff, are women in native dress. She takes them to be mothers or grandmothers until Blanche explains: they are healers, she says, traditional healers. Then she remembers: this is what Marianhill is famous for, this is Blanche’s great innovation, to open the hospital to the people, to have native doctors work beside doctors of Western medicine.

  As for the children, perhaps Blanche has tucked the worst cases away out of sight, but she is surprised at how gay even a dying child can be. It is as Blanche said in her book: with love and care and the right drugs, these innocents can be brought to the very gate of death without fear.

  Blanche takes her to the chapel too. Entering the unpretentious brick and iron building, she is struck at once by the carved wooden crucifix behind the altar, showing an emaciated Christ with a masklike face crowned with a wreath of real acacia thorns, his hands and feet pierced not by nails but by steel bolts. The figure itself is of near life size; the cross reaches up to the bare rafters; the whole construction dominates the chapel, overbears it.

  The Christ was done by a local carver, Blanche tells her. Years ago the station adopted him, providing him with a workshop and paying him a monthly wage. Does she want to meet the man?

  Which is why, now, this old man with the stained teeth and the overalls and the uncertain English, introduced to her simply as Joseph, is unlocking, for her benefit, the door of a shed in an outlying corner of the station. The grass is thick around the door, she notices: a long time since anyone was here.

  Inside she has to brush away cobwebs. Joseph fumbles for the switch, clicks it up and down fruitlessly. ‘Bulb is gone,’ he says, but does nothing about it. The only light comes from the open door and from cracks between the roof and the walls. It takes a while for her eyes to adjust.

  There is a long, makeshift table down the centre of the shed. Piled on the table, or against it, lie a jumble of wooden carvings. Against the walls, stacked on pallets, are lengths of wood, some with the bark still on, and dusty cardboard boxes.

  ‘Is my workshop,’ says Joseph. ‘When I am young I work here all day. But now I am too old.’

  She picks up a crucifix, not the largest, but large nevertheless: an eighteen-inch Christ on the cross, in a heavy reddish wood. ‘What do you call this wood?’

  ‘Is karee. Karee wood.’

  ‘And you carved it?’ She holds the crucifix out at arm’s-length. As in the chapel, the face of the tortured man is a formalized, simplified mask in a single plane, the eyes slits, the mouth heavy and drooping. The body, on the other hand, is quite naturalistic; copied, she would guess, from some European model. The knees are raised, as if the man were trying to relieve the pain in his arms by putting his weight on the nail piercing his feet.

  ‘I carve all the Jesus. The cross, sometimes my assistant make it. My assistants.’

  ‘And where are your assistants now? Does no one work here any more?’

  ‘No, my assistants all gone. Too many crosses. Too many crosses to sell.’

  She peers into one of the boxes. Miniature crucifixes, three or four inches high, like the one her sister wears, scores of them, all with the same flat mask-face, the same raised-knee posture.

  ‘Don’t you carve anything else? Animals? Faces? Ordinary people?’

  Joseph pulls a face. ‘Animals is just for tourists,’ he says disdainfully.

  ‘And you don’t carve for tourists. You don’t carve tourist art.’

  ‘No, no tourist art.’

  ‘Why do you carve then?’

  ‘For Jesus,’ he says. ‘Yes. For Our Saviour.’

  VI

  ‘I saw Joseph’s collection,’ she says. ‘A bit obsessive, wouldn’t you call it? Just the one image, over and over again.’

  Blanche does not reply. They are having lunch, a lunch she would under normal circumstances call exiguous: sliced tomato, a few wilted lettuce leaves, a boiled egg. But she has no appetite. She toys with the lettuce; the smell of the egg nauseates her.

  ‘How does the economics of it work,’ she continues – ‘the economics of religious art, in our day and age?’

  ‘Joseph used to be a paid employee of Marianhill. Paid to do his carvings, and some odd jobs as well. For the last eighteen months he has been on pension. He has arthritis in his hands. You must have noticed that.’

  ‘But who buys those carvings of his?’

  ‘We have two outlets in Durban that take them. Other missions accept them as well, for resale. They may not be works of art by Western standards but they are authentic. A few years ago Joseph did a commission for the church at Ixopo. That put a couple of thousand rand in his pocket. We still get bulk orders for the small-size crucifix. Schools, Catholic schools, buy them for prize-givings.’

  ‘For prize-givings. You come top in Catechism and you get one of Joseph’s crucifixes.’

  ‘More or less. Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. Still, he has overproduced, hasn’t he? There must be hundreds of pieces in that shed, all identical. Why didn’t you get him to make something else besides crucifixes, crucifixions? What does it do to a person’s – if I dare use the word – soul to spend his working life carving a man in agony over and over again? When he isn’t doing odd jobs, that is.’

  Blanche gives her a steely smile. ‘A man, Elizabeth?’ she says. ‘A man in agony?’

  ‘A man, a god, a man-god, don’t make an issue of it, Blanche, we’re not in theology class. What does it do to a man with gifts to spend his life as uncreatively as your Joseph has done? His gifts may be limited, he may not be an artist properly speaking; still, might it not have been wiser to encourage him to expand his horizon a little?’

  Blanche sets down her knife and fork. ‘All right, let us face the criticism you make, let us face it in its most extreme form. Joseph is not an artist but he might perhaps have become one if we – if I – had encouraged him, years ago, to extend his range by visiting art galleries or at least other carvers to see what else was being done. Instead Joseph remained – Joseph was kept at the level of – a craftsman. He lived here at the mission, in total obscurity, doing the same carving over and over again in different sizes and different woods, until arthritis struck
him and his working life was over. So Joseph was prevented from, as you put it, expanding his horizon. He was denied a fuller life, specifically an artist’s life. Does that cover your charge?’

  ‘More or less. Not necessarily an artist’s life, I would not be so foolish as to recommend that, just a fuller life.’

  ‘Right. If that is your charge, I will give you my reply. Joseph spent thirty years of his earthly existence representing, for the eyes of others certainly but principally for his own eyes, Our Saviour in his agony. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, he imagined that agony and, with a fidelity you can behold for yourself, reproduced it, to the best of his ability, without varying it, without importing new fashions into it, without injecting into it any of his own personality. Which of us, I now ask, will Jesus be most gladdened to welcome into his kingdom: Joseph, with his wasted hands, or you, or me?’

  She does not like it when her sister gets on her high horse and preaches. It happened during her speech in Johannesburg and it is happening again. All that is most intolerant in Blanche’s character emerges at such times: intolerant and rigid and bullying.

  ‘I think Jesus would be gladder still,’ she says as drily as she is able, ‘if he knew that Joseph had had some choice. That Joseph had not been dragooned into piety.’

  ‘Go out. Go and ask Joseph. Ask him whether he has been dragooned into anything.’ Blanche pauses. ‘Do you think Joseph is just a puppet in my hands, Elizabeth? Do you think Joseph has no comprehension of how he has spent his life? Go and speak to him. Listen to what he has to say.’

  ‘I will. But I have another question, one that Joseph cannot answer because it is a question to you. Why does the model you, or if not you then the institution you represent – why does the specific model you set before Joseph and tell him to copy, to imitate, have to be what I can only call Gothic? Why a Christ dying in contortions rather than a living Christ? A man in his prime, in his early thirties: what do you have against showing him alive, in all his living beauty? And, while I am about it, what do you have against the Greeks? The Greeks would never have made statues and paintings of a man in the extremes of agony, deformed, ugly, and then knelt before those statues and worshipped them. If you wonder why the humanists whom you wish us to sneer at looked beyond Christianity and the contempt that Christianity exhibits for the human body and therefore for man himself, surely that ought to give you a clue. You ought to know, you cannot have forgotten, that representations of Jesus in his agony are an idiosyncrasy of the Western Church. They were entirely foreign to Constantinople. The Eastern Church would have regarded them as indecent, and quite right too.

  ‘Frankly, Blanche, there is something about the entire crucifixional tradition that strikes me as mean, as backward, as medieval in the worst sense – unwashed monks, illiterate priests, cowed peasants. What are you up to, reproducing that most squalid, most stagnant phase of European history in Africa?’

  ‘Holbein,’ says Blanche. ‘Grünewald. If you want the human form in extremis, go to them. The dead Jesus. Jesus in the tomb.’

  ‘I don’t see what you are getting at.’

  ‘Holbein and Grünewald were not artists of the Catholic Middle Ages. They belonged to the Reformation.’

  ‘This is not a quarrel I am conducting with the historical Catholic Church, Blanche. I am asking what you, you yourself, have against beauty. Why should people not be able to look at a work of art and think to themselves, That is what we as a species are capable of being, that is what I am capable of being, rather than looking at it and thinking to themselves, My God, I am going to die, I am going to be eaten by worms?’

  ‘Hence the Greeks, I suppose you want to say. The Apollo Belvedere. The Venus of Milo.’

  ‘Yes, hence the Greeks. Hence my question: What are you doing, importing into Africa, importing into Zululand, for God’s sake, this utterly alien, Gothic obsession with the ugliness and mortality of the human body? If you have to import Europe into Africa, is there not a better case for importing the Greeks?’

  ‘Do you think, Elizabeth, that the Greeks are utterly foreign to Zululand? I tell you again, if you will not listen to me, at least have the decency to listen to Joseph. Do you think that Joseph carves suffering Jesus because he does not know better, that if you took Joseph on a tour around the Louvre his eyes would be opened and he would set about carving, for the benefit of his people, naked women preening themselves, or men flexing their muscles? Are you aware that when Europeans first came in contact with the Zulus, educated Europeans, men from England with public-school educations behind them, they thought they had rediscovered the Greeks? They said so quite explicitly. They took out their sketch blocks and drew sketches in which Zulu warriors with their spears and their clubs and their shields are shown in exactly the same attitudes, with exactly the same physical proportions, as the Hectors and Achilles we see in nineteenth-century illustrations of the Iliad, except that their skins are dusky. Well-formed limbs, skimpy clothes, a proud bearing, formal manners, martial virtues – it was all here! Sparta in Africa: that is what they thought they had found. For decades those same ex-public schoolboys, with their romantic idea of Greek antiquity, administered Zululand on behalf of the Crown. They wanted Zululand to be Sparta. They wanted the Zulus to be Greeks. So to Joseph and his father and his grandfather the Greeks are not a remote foreign tribe at all. They were offered the Greeks, by their new rulers, as a model of the kind of people they ought to be and could be. They were offered the Greeks and they rejected them. Instead, they looked elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. They chose to be Christians, followers of the living Christ. Joseph has chosen Jesus as his model. Speak to him. He will tell you.’

  ‘That is not a byway of history I am familiar with, Blanche – Britons and Zulus. I cannot dispute with you.’

  ‘It is not just in Zululand that it happened. It happened in Australia too. It happened all over the colonized world, just not in so neat a form. Those young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge and St Cyr offered their new barbarian subjects a false ideal. Throw away your idols, they said. You can be as gods. Look at the Greeks, they said. And indeed, who can tell gods from men in Greece, the romantic Greece of those young men, heirs of the humanists? Come to our schools, they said, and we will teach you how. We will make you disciples of reason and the sciences that flow from reason; we will make you masters of nature. Through us you will overcome disease and all corruption of the flesh. You will live for ever.

  ‘Well, the Zulus knew better.’ She waves a hand towards the window, towards the hospital buildings baking under the sun, towards the dirt road winding up into the barren hills. ‘This is reality: the reality of Zululand, the reality of Africa. It is the reality now and the reality of the future as far as we can see it. Which is why African people come to church to kneel before Jesus on the cross, African women above all, who have to bear the brunt of reality. Because they suffer and he suffers with them.’

  ‘Not because he promises them another, better life after death?’

  Blanche shakes her head. ‘No. To the people who come to Marianhill I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross.’

  VII

  Eight thirty on Sunday morning, but the sun is already fierce. At noon the driver will come to take her to Durban and the flight home.

  Two young girls in gaudy dresses, barefoot, race to the bell rope and begin tugging it. Atop its post the bell jangles spasmodically.

  ‘Will you be coming?’ says Blanche.

  ‘Yes, I will be there. Do I need to cover my head?’

  ‘Come as you are. There are no formalities here. But be warned: we are having a visit from a television crew.’

  ‘Television?’

  ‘From Sweden. They are making a film about Aids in KwaZulu.’

  ‘And the priest? Has the priest been told the service is being filmed? Who is the priest anyhow?’

&nbs
p; ‘Father Msimungu from Dalehill will be taking Mass. He has no objection.’

  Father Msimungu, when he arrives in a still quite smart Golf, is young, gangly, bespectacled. He goes off to the dispensary to be robed; she joins Blanche and the other half-dozen sisters of the Order at the front of the congregation. The camera lights are already in place and trained on them. In their cruel glare she cannot fail to see how old they all are. The Sisters of Mary: a dying breed, an exhausted vocation.

  Under its metal roof the chapel is already stiflingly hot. She does not know how Blanche, in her heavy outfit, bears it.

  The Mass Msimungu leads is in Zulu, though here and there she is able to pick out a word of English. It starts sedately enough; but by the time of the first collect there is already a humming among the flock. Launching into his homily, Msimungu has to raise his voice to make himself heard. A baritone voice, surprising in so young a man. It seems to come from effortlessly deep in the chest.

  Msimungu turns, kneels before the altar. A silence falls. Above him looms the crowned head of the tortured Christ. Then he turns and holds up the Host. There is a joyous shout from the body of worshippers. A rhythmic stamping commences that makes the wooden floor vibrate.

  She feels herself swaying. The air is thick with the smell of sweat. She clasps Blanche’s arm. ‘I must get out!’ she whispers. Blanche casts an appraising glance. ‘Just a little while longer,’ she whispers back, and turns away.

  She takes a deep breath, trying to clear her head, but it does not help. A wave of cold seems to ascend from her toes. It rises to her face, her scalp prickles with the chill, and she is gone.

  She wakes flat on her back up in a bare room she does not recognize. Blanche is there, gazing down on her, and a young woman in a white uniform. ‘I am so sorry,’ she mumbles, struggling to sit up. ‘Did I faint?’