Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  It is the same with the business of belief. I believe in the irrepressible human spirit: that is what she should have told her judges. That would have got her past them, and with foot-stamping applause too. I believe that all humankind is one. Everyone else seems to believe it, believe in it. Even she believes in it, now and then, when the mood takes her. Why can she not, just for once, pretend?

  When she was young, in a world now lost and gone, one came across people who still believed in art, or at least in the artist, who tried to follow in the footsteps of the great masters. No matter that God had failed, and Socialism: there was still Dostoevsky to guide one, or Rilke, or Van Gogh with the bandaged ear that stood for passion. Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?

  Her first inclination would be to say no. Her books certainly evince no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that lifetime labour of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she, and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. If, in the end, she believes in her books themselves more than she believes in that person, it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel. Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is.

  From a change in the air, a change that penetrates even the sluggish space of the dormitory, she knows the sun is declining. She has let the whole afternoon slip by. She has neither gone dancing nor worked on her statement, merely brooded, wasted her time.

  In the poky little washroom at the back she freshens up as best she can. When she returns there is a new arrival, a woman younger than herself, slumped on a bunk with her eyes shut. It is someone she has noticed before, on the square, in the company of a man wearing a white straw hat. She took her to be a local. But evidently not. Evidently she is a petitioner too.

  Not for the first time, the question occurs to her: Is that what we are, all of us: petitioners awaiting our respective judgements, some new, some, the ones I call locals, long enough here to have settled down, settled in, become part of the scenery?

  About the woman on the bunk there is something familiar that she cannot pin down. Even when she first saw her on the square she seemed familiar. But from the beginning there has been something familiar about the square itself, the whole town. It is as though she has been transported to the set of a dimly remembered film. The Polish cleaning woman, for instance, if that is what she is, Polish: where has she seen her before, and why does she associate her with poetry? Is this younger woman a poet too? Is that where she is: not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park, set up to divert her while she waits, with actors made up to look like writers? But if so, why is the make-up so poor? Why is the whole thing not done better?

  That is, finally, what is so eerie about this place, or would be eerie if the tempo of life were not so languid: the gap between the actors and the parts they play, between the world it is given her to see and what that world stands for. If the afterlife, if that is what this is, give it that name for the moment – if the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently, not just by a hair’s breadth – one could forgive it that – but by a hand’s breadth?

  It is the same with the Kafka business. The wall, the gate, the sentry, are straight out of Kafka. So is the demand for a confession, so is the courtroom with the dozing bailiff and the panel of old men in their crows’ robes pretending to pay attention while she thrashes about in the toils of her own words. Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody.

  And why is it Kafka in particular who is trundled out for her? She is no devotee of Kafka. Most of the time she cannot read him without impatience. As he veers between helplessness and lust, between rage and obsequiousness, she too often finds him, or at least his K selves, simply childish. So why is the mise en scène into which she has been hurled so – she dislikes the word but there is no other – so Kafkaesque?

  One answer that occurs to her is that the show is put together in this way because it is not her kind of show. You do not like the Kafkaesque, so let us rub your nose in it. Perhaps that is what these border towns are for: to teach pilgrims a lesson. Very well; but why submit to the lesson? Why take it all so seriously? What can these so-called judges do to her except hold her up, day after day after day? And the gate itself, that bars her way: she has seen what lies beyond it. There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league. If they are going to block her from passing through, very well then, basta, let them block her. Let her spend the rest of her life, so to speak, here, idling the daytime hours away on the square and retiring at nightfall to lie in the smell of someone else’s sweat. Not the worst of fates. There must be things she could do to pass the time. Who knows, she might even, if she finds a shop that hires out typewriters, take up novel-writing again.

  It is morning. She is at her table on the pavement, working on her statement, trying out a new approach. Since she boasts that she is secretary of the invisible, let her concentrate her attention, turn it inward. What voice does she hear from the invisible today?

  For the moment, all she hears is the slow thud of the blood in her ears, just as all she feels is the soft touch of the sun on her skin. That at least she does not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster that has been given to her to look after, this shadow turned to flesh that stands on two feet like a bear and laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be, she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies too.

  Somehow; but how? How on earth can bodies not only keep themselves clean using blood (blood!) but cogitate upon the mystery of their existence and make utterances about it and now and again even have little ecstasies? Does it count as a belief, whatever property she has that allows her to continue to be this body when she has not the faintest idea how the trick is done? Would they, the bench of judges, the panel of examiners, the tribunal that demands she bare her beliefs – would they be satisfied with this: I believe that I am? I believe that what stands before you today is I? Or would that be too much like philosophy, too much like the seminar room?

  There is an episode in the Odyssey that always sends a shiver down her back. Odysseus has descended into the kingdom of the dead to consult the seer Tiresias. Following instructions, he digs a furrow, cuts the throat of his favourite ram, lets its blood flow into the furrow. As the blood pours, the pallid dead crowd around, slavering for a taste, until to hold them off Odysseus has to draw his sword.

  The pool of dark blood, the expiring ram, the man, at a crouch, ready to thrust and stab if need be, the pale souls hard to distinguish from cadavers: why does the scene haunt her? What, coming from the invisible, does it say? She believes, most unquestionably, in the ram, the ram dragged by its master down to this terrible place. The ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though right now it is dying. If she believes in the ram, then does she believe in its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black, pumped out in gouts on to soil where nothing will grow? The favourite ram of the king of Ithaca, so runs the story, yet treated in the end as a mere bag of blood, to be cut open and poured from. She could do the same, here and now: turn herself into a bag, cut her veins and let herself pour on to the pavement, into the gutter. For that, finally, is all it means to b
e alive: to be able to die. Is this vision the sum of her faith: the vision of the ram and what happens to the ram? Will it be a good enough story for them, her hungry judges?

  Someone sits down opposite her. Preoccupied, she does not look up.

  ‘Are you working on your confession?’

  It is the woman from the dormitory, the one with the Polish accent, the one she thinks of as the Kapo. This morning she is wearing a cotton dress, flowery, lemon-green, somewhat old-fashioned, with a white belt. It suits her, suits her strong blonde hair and sunburnt skin and broad frame. She looks like a peasant at harvest time, sturdy, capable.

  ‘No, not a confession, a statement of belief. That is what I have been asked for.’

  ‘We call them confessions here.’

  ‘Really. I would not call it that. Not in English. Perhaps in Latin, perhaps in Italian.’

  Not for the first time, she wonders how it is that everyone she meets speaks English. Or is she mistaken? Are these folk in fact speaking other languages, languages unfamiliar to her – Polish, Magyar, Wendish – and are their utterances being translated into English, instantaneously and by miraculous means, for her benefit? Or on the other hand is it a condition of existence in this place that all speak a common tongue, Esperanto for example, and are the sounds that issue from her own lips not, as she deludedly believes, English words but Esperanto words, just as the words the Kapo woman speaks are Esperanto, though the woman may believe they are Polish? She herself, Elizabeth Costello, has no recollection of ever having studied Esperanto, but she could be mistaken, as she has been mistaken about so many things. But why then are the waiters Italian? Or is what she thinks of as their Italian simply Esperanto with an Italian accent and Italian hand gestures?

  The couple sitting at the next table have their little fingers hooked together. Laughingly they tug at each other; they bump foreheads, whisper. They do not seem to have confessions to write. But perhaps they are not actors, full actors like this Polish woman or this woman playing a Polish woman; perhaps they are just extras, instructed to do what they do every day of their lives in order to fill out the bustle of the square, to give it verisimilitude, the reality effect. It must be a nice life, the life of an extra. Yet after a certain age anxiety must begin to creep in. After a certain age, the life of an extra must begin to seem like a waste of precious time.

  ‘What are you saying in your confession?’

  ‘What I said before: that I cannot afford to believe. That in my line of work one has to suspend belief. That belief is an indulgence, a luxury. That it gets in the way.’

  ‘Really. Some of us would say the luxury we cannot afford is unbelief.’

  She waits for more.

  ‘Unbelief – entertaining all possibilities, floating between opposites – is the mark of a leisurely existence, a leisured existence,’ the woman goes on. ‘Most of us have to choose. Only the light soul hangs in the air.’ She leans closer. ‘For the light soul, let me offer a word of advice. They may say they demand belief, but in practice they will be satisfied with passion. Show them passion and they will let you through.’

  ‘Passion?’ she replies. ‘Passion the dark horse? I would have thought that passion leads one away from the light, not towards it. Yet in this place, you say, passion is good enough. Thank you for informing me.’

  Her tone is mocking, but her companion is not rebuffed. On the contrary, she settles more comfortably into her chair and gives a little nod, a little smile, as if inviting the question that has now to come.

  ‘Tell me, how many of us get through, pass the test, pass through the gate?’

  The woman laughs, a low laugh, strangely attractive. Where has she seen her before? Why is it such an effort to remember, like feeling one’s way through a fog? ‘Through which gate?’ says the woman. ‘You believe there is only one gate?’ A new laugh passes through her, a long, luxurious shudder of the body that makes her heavy breasts quake. ‘Do you smoke?’ she says. ‘No? Do you mind?’

  From a gold cigarette case she takes a cigarette, strikes a match, puffs. Her hand is stubby, broad, a peasant’s hand. Yet the fingernails are clean and neatly buffed. Who is she? Only the light soul hangs in the air. It sounds like a quotation.

  ‘Who knows what we truly believe,’ says the woman. ‘It is here, buried in our heart.’ Lightly she smites her bosom. ‘Buried even from ourselves. It is not belief that the boards are after. The effect is enough, the effect of belief. Show them you feel and they will be satisfied.’

  ‘What do you mean, the boards?’

  ‘The boards of examiners. We call them the boards. And we call ourselves the singing-birds. We sing for the boards, for their delight.’

  ‘I do not give shows,’ she says. ‘I’m not an entertainer.’ The cigarette smoke drifts into her face; she waves it away. ‘I cannot drum up what you call passion when it is not there. Cannot turn it on and off. If your boards will not understand that –’ She shrugs. She had been about to say something about her ticket, about handing back her ticket. But that would be too grand, too literary, for so petty an occasion.

  The woman stubs out her cigarette. ‘I must go,’ she says. ‘I have purchases to make.’

  Of what nature these purchases might be she does not say. But it strikes her, Elizabeth Costello (Here names fade away: well, her name is not fading away, not in the least), how passive she has become, how incurious. There are purchases she herself would like to make. Aside from the fantasy of the typewriter, she needs suncream, and soap of her own, not the harsh carbolic soap of the washroom. Yet she makes no move to enquire where in this place one does one’s purchasing.

  There is something else that strikes her. She has no appetite any more. From yesterday she has the faint after-memory of a lemon gelato and macaroons with coffee. Today the very thought of eating fills her with distaste. Her body feels unpleasantly heavy, unpleasantly corporeal.

  Is a new career beginning to beckon: as one of the thin folk, the compulsive fasters, the hunger artists? Will her judges take pity if they see her waste away? She sees herself, a sticklike figure on a public bench in a patch of sunlight scribbling away at her task, a task never to be completed. God save me! she whispers to herself. Too literary, too literary! I must get out of here before I die!

  The phrase comes back to her again at dusk, as she is taking a stroll along the town wall, watching the swallows swoop and dive above the square. A light soul. Is she a light soul? What is a light soul? She thinks of soap bubbles floating up among the swallows, rising even higher into the blue empyrean. Is that how the woman sees her, the woman whose job it is to scrub the floor and clean the lavatory (not that she ever sees her doing these things)? Certainly her life has not been a hard one, by most standards, but nor has it been easy. Quiet perhaps, protected perhaps: an antipodean life, removed from the worst of history; but driven too, the word is not too strong. Should she seek out the woman and set her right? Would the woman understand?

  She sighs, walks on. How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum! At least there is that to fall back on.

  It is the same courtroom, with the same bailiff, but the panel of judges (the board, as she must now learn to call it) is new. There are seven of them, not nine, one of them a woman; she recognizes none of the faces. And the public benches are no longer empty. She has a spectator, a supporter: the cleaning woman, sitting by herself with a string bag on her lap.

  ‘Elizabeth Costello, applicant, hearing number two,’ intones the spokesman of today’s board (the chief judge? the judge-in-chief?). ‘You have a revised statement, we understand. Please proceed with it.’

  She steps forward. ‘What I believe,’ she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation. ‘I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled
the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it.

  ‘When the waters subsided – I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon – acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas.

  ‘Where do they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent.

  ‘Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens.

  ‘Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead – it is a story I present transparently, without disguise.