In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  20. To her full dark lips the glutted widow raises a finger in cryptic gesture. Does she warn me to silence? Does my candid body amuse her? Through the open curtains stream the rays of the full moon on to her shoulders, her full ironical lips. In the shadow of her haunch lies the man asleep. To her mouth she raises a cryptic hand. Is she amused? Is she startled? The night breeze wafts through the parted curtains. The room is in darkness, the sleeping figures so still I cannot hear their breathing above the hammer of my heart. Should I go to them clothed? Are they phantoms who will vanish when I touch them? She watches me with full ironical lips. I drop my clothes at the door. In the glare of the moonlight she goes over my poor beseeching body. I weep, hiding my eyes, wishing for a life story that will wash over me tranquilly as it does for other women.

  21. When he came in hot and dusty after a day’s work my father expected that his bath should be ready for him. It was my childhood duty to light the fire an hour before sunset so that the hot water could be poured into the enamelled hipbath the moment he stamped through the front door. Then I would retire to the dark side of the floral screen to receive his clothes and lay out the clean underlinen. Tiptoeing out of the bathroom I would hear the wash of his entry, the sucking of the water under his armpits and between his buttocks, and inhale the sweet damp heavy miasma of soap and sweat. Later this duty ceased; but when I think of male flesh, white, heavy, dumb, whose flesh can it be but his?

  22. Through a chink in the curtain I watch them. Taking his hand, lifting her skirt, she steps down, one-two, from the dog-cart. She stretches her arms, smiling, yawning, a little parasol dangling closed from a gloved finger. He stands behind her. Low words pass. They come up the steps. Her eyes are full and happy, the kind of eyes that do not notice fingers at the lace curtains. Her legs swing easily, at peace with her body. They pass through the door and out of sight, sauntering, a man and a woman come home.

  23. Into the evening, as the shadows first lengthen and then cover everything, I stand at the window. Hendrik crosses the yard on his way to the storeroom. The massed twitter of birds in the riverbed rises and wanes. In the last light the swallows swoop to their nest under the eaves and the first bats flit out. From their various lairs the predators emerge, muishond, meerkat. What are pain, jealousy, loneliness doing in the African night? Does a woman looking through a window into the dark mean anything? I place all ten fingertips on the cool glass. The wound in my chest slides open. If I am an emblem then I am an emblem. I am incomplete, I am a being with a hole inside me, I signify something, I do not know what, I am dumb, I stare out through a sheet of glass into a darkness that is complete, that lives in itself, bats, bushes, predators and all, that does not regard me, that is blind, that does not signify but merely is. If I press harder the glass will break, blood will drip, the cricket-song will stop for a moment and then resume. I live inside a skin inside a house. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me. I am a torrent of sound streaming into the universe, thousands upon thousands of corpuscles weeping, groaning, gnashing their teeth.

  24. They sweat and strain, the farmhouse creaks through the night. Already the seed must have been planted, soon she will be sprawling about in her mindless heat, swelling and ripening, waiting for her little pink pig to knock. Whereas a child I bore, assuming that such a calamity could ever befall me, would be thin and sallow, would weep without cease from aches in his vitals, would totter from room to room on his rickety pins clutching at his mother’s apron-strings and hiding his face from strangers. But who would give me a baby, who would not turn to ice at the spectacle of my bony frame on the wedding-couch, the coat of fur up to my navel, the acrid cavities of my armpits, the line of black moustache, the eyes, watchful, defensive, of a woman who has never lost possession of herself? What huffing and puffing there would have to be before my house could be blown down! Who could wake my slumbering eggs? And who would attend my childbed? My father, scowling, with a whip? The brown folk, cowed servitors, kneeling to offer a trussed lamb, first fruits, wild honey, sniggering at the miracle of the virgin birth? Out of his hole he pokes his snout, son of the father, Antichrist of the desert come to lead his dancing hordes to the promised land. They whirl and beat drums, they shake axes and pitchforks, they follow the babe, while in the kitchen his mother conjures over the fire, or tears out the guts of cocks, or cackles in her bloody armchair. A mind mad enough for parricide and pseudo-matricide and who knows what other atrocities can surely encompass an epileptic Führer and the march of a band of overweening serfs on a country town from whose silver roofs the sunfire winks and from whose windows they are idly shot to pieces. They lie in the dust, sons and daughters of the Hottentots, flies crawl in their wounds, they are carted off and buried in a heap. Labouring under my father’s weight I struggle to give life to a world but seem to engender only death.

  25. By the light of a storm-lantern I see that they sleep the sleep of the blissfully sated, she on her back, her nightdress rucked about her hips, he face down, his left hand folded in hers. I bring not the meat-cleaver as I thought it would be but the hatchet, weapon of the Valkyries. I deepen myself in the stillness like a true lover of poetry, breathing with their breath.

  26. My father lies on his back, naked, the fingers of his right hand twined in the fingers of her left, the jaw slack, the dark eyes closed on all their fire and lightning, a liquid rattle coming from the throat, the tired blind fish, cause of all my woe, lolling in his groin (would that it had been dragged out long ago with all its roots and bulbs!). The axe sweeps up over my shoulder. All kinds of people have done this before me, wives, sons, lovers, heirs, rivals, I am not alone. Like a ball on a string it floats down at the end of my arm, sinks into the throat below me, and all is suddenly tumult. The woman snaps upright in bed, glaring about her, drenched in blood, bewildered by the angry wheezing and spouting at her side. How fortunate that at times like these the larger action flows of itself and requires of the presiding figure no more than presence of mind! She wriggles her nightdress decently over her hips. Leaning forward and gripping what must be one of their four knees, I deliver much the better chop deep into the crown of her head. She dips over into the cradle of her lap and topples leftward in a ball, my dramatic tomahawk still embedded in her. (Who would have thought I had such strokes in me?) But fingers are scratching at me from this side of the bed, I am off balance, I must keep a cool head, I must pick them off one by one, recover (with some effort) my axe, and hack with distaste at these hands, these arms until I have a free moment to draw a sheet over all this shuddering and pound it into quiet. Here I am beating with a steady rhythm, longer perhaps than is necessary, but calming myself too in preparation for what must be a whole new phase of my life. For no longer need I fret about how to fill my days. I have broken a commandment, and the guilty cannot be bored. I have two fullgrown bodies to get rid of besides many other traces of my violence. I have a face to compose, a story to invent, and all before dawn when Hendrik comes for the milking-pail!

  27. I ask myself: Why, since the moment she came clip-clop across the flats in the dog-cart drawn by a horse with ostrich-plumes in its harness, dusty after the long haul, in her wide-brimmed hat, have I refused speech with her, stubbornly exerting myself to preserve the monologue of my life? Can I imagine what it would have been like to turn the pages of the mornings with her over steaming teacups, with the chickens clucking outside and the servants chattering softly in the kitchen, in whatever spirit, guarded or peaceful? Can I imagine cutting out patterns with her, or strolling through the orchard hand in hand, giggling? Is it possible that I am a prisoner not of the lonely farmhouse and the stone desert but of my stony monologue? Have my blows been aimed at shutting those knowing eyes or at silencing her voice? Might we not, bent over our teacups, have learned to coo to each other, or, drifting past each other in the dark corridor, hot and sleepless in the siesta hour, have touched, embraced, a
nd clung? Might those mocking eyes not have softened, might I not have yielded, might we not have lain in each other’s arms all afternoon whispering, two girls together? I stroke her forehead, she nuzzles my hand, I am held in the dark pools of her eyes, I do not mind.

  28. I ask myself: What is it in me that lures me into forbidden bedrooms and makes me commit forbidden acts? Has a lifetime in the desert, wrapped in this funnel of black cloth, wound me into such a coil of vicious energy that the merest pedlar or visiting third cousin would find himself poisoned at his meat or hatcheted in bed? Does an elementary life burn people down to elementary states, to pure anger, pure gluttony, pure sloth? Am I unfitted by my upbringing for a life of more complex feelings? Is that why I have never left the farm, foreign to townslife, preferring to immerse myself in a landscape of symbol where simple passions can spin and fume around their own centres, in limitless space, in endless time, working out their own forms of damnation?

  29. I ask myself: But am I doing justice to the city? Is it not possible to conceive a city above whose rooftops drift the wisps of a thousand private fires, from whose streets rises the susurrus of a thousand pattering damned voices? Perhaps; but it is too painterly, and I am not a painter.

  30. I ask myself: What am I going to do with the bodies?

  31. Far down in the earth flow the underground rivers, through dark caverns dripping with crystalline water, graves, if only they could be reached, for all the family secrets in the world. I wade out into the tepid dam looking for the sinkhole which in our dreams beckons from the deep and leads to the underground kingdom. My skirt billows and floats around my waist like a black flower. My feet are soothed by the red slime, the green duckweed. Like abandoned twins my shoes watch from the bank. Of all adventures suicide is the most literary, more so even than murder. With the story coming to its end, all one’s last bad poetry finds release. I cast a long calm look of farewell at the sky and the stars, which probably cast a long calm vacant look back, exhale the last beloved breath (goodbye, spirit!), and dive for the abyss. Then the elegiac trance passes and all the rest is cold, wet, and farcical. My underwear balloons with water. I strike bottom all too soon, as far from the mythic vortex as ever. The first willed draught of water through my nostrils sets off a cough and the blind panic of an organism that wants to live. I haul myself to the surface with legs and arms. My head breaks gasping and retching into the night air. I try to launch myself into the horizontal but I am weary, weary. Perhaps I strike out once or twice with wooden arms. Perhaps I sink a second time, tasting the water with less revulsion now. Perhaps I come to the surface again, still thrashing, but also waiting for an interlude of stillness to test and taste the languor of my muscles. Perhaps I beat the water now in one spot only, making a last bargain, giving up a breath for the sake of a single word, half water, half plea to the absent, to all the absent, who congregate now in the sky in a whirlwind of absence, removed, sightless, to call off the dogs, to call off the joke, before I sink again and turn myself to the serious exploration of my last moments.

  32. But what do I know about exploring these deeps, I, a drudgemaiden who has spent her days over a cooking-pot in a sooty corner and her nights pressing her knuckles into her eyes, watching the rings of light cascade and spin, waiting for visions? Like killing, dying is probably a story drearier than the one I tell myself. Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire? (I am unconvinced by talk about suspended dust particles.) Why crickets all night long and birdsong at dawn? But it is late. If there is a time for rumination there is also a time to go back to the kitchen, and at this moment I have a serious matter to attend to, the disposal of the corpses. For soon Hendrik is going to open the back door, and while it is true that the essence of servanthood is the servant’s intimacy with his master’s dirt, and while it is also true that there is a perspective in which corpses are dirt, Hendrik is not only essence but substance, not only servant but stranger. First Hendrik will come for the milking-pail, then, a little later, Anna, to wash the dishes, sweep the floor, make the beds. What will Anna think when she finds the household still but for the steady sound of scrubbing from the master’s bedroom? She hesitates, listening, before she knocks. I cry out in fright, she hears me muffled through the heavy door: “No, not today! Anna, is that you? Not today – come back tomorrow. Now go away, please.” She pads off. Standing with an ear to the crack I hear the back door close behind her, then, though she ought to be out of earshot, the trot of her feet on the gravel. Has she smelled blood? Has she gone to tell?

  33. The woman lies on her side with her knees drawn up to her chin. If I do not hurry she will set in that position. Her hair falls over her face in a sticky dark-red wing. Though her last act was to flinch from the terrific axe, screwing her eyes shut, clenching her teeth, the face has now relaxed. But the man, tenacious of life, has moved. His final experience must have been an unsatisfactory one, a groping with dulled muscles toward an illusory zone of safety. He lies head and arms over the edge of the bed, black with his heavy blood. It would have been better for him to have yielded the gentle ghost, following it as far as he could on its passage out, closing his eyes on the image of a swallow swooping, rising, riding.

  34. How fortunate at times like these that there is only one problem, a problem of cleanliness. Until this bloody afterbirth is gone there can be no new life for me. The bedclothes are soaked and will have to be burned. The mattress too will have to be burned, though not today. There is a quag of blood on the floor and there will be more blood when I shift the bodies. What of the bodies? They can be burned or buried or submerged. If buried or submerged they will have to leave the house. If buried they can be buried only where the earth is soft, in the riverbed. But if buried in the riverbed they will be washed out in the next spate, or in the one after that, and return to the world lolling in each other’s rotten arms against the fence where the fence crosses the river. If weighted and sunk in the dam, they will contaminate the water and reappear as chained skeletons grinning to the sky in the next drought. But buried or drowned, they will have to be shifted, whether entire in barrowloads or in parcels. How clearly my mind works, like the mind of a machine. Am I strong enough to move them unaided in a wheelbarrow, or must I hack away until I have portable sections? Am I equal to carrying even a single monolithic trunk? Is there a way of partitioning a trunk without obscenity? I should have paid more attention to the art of butchery. And how does one chain flesh to rock without drilling holes? And with what? An auger? A brace and bit? What of exposure on an antheap as an alternative, or exposure on a remote part of the farm, in a cave? What of a funeral pyre in the back yard? What of firing the house about all our ears? Am I equal to that?

  35. Of course the truth is that I am equal to anything, I am nothing if not embarrassed by my freedom, these tasks require only patience and meticulousness, of which, like the ant, I have overmuch, besides a steady stomach. If I go wandering in the hills I am sure that, in time, I will find boulders with holes through them, worn by the dripping of water in a bygone ice age, no doubt, or forged in a volcanic cataclysm. In the wagonhouse there are bound to be yards of providential chain, hitherto invisible, now suddenly leaping into sight, and casks of gunpowder, faggots of sandalwood. But what I now find myself wondering is whether it is not time for me to find a strong-thewed accomplice who, without pause for question, will swing the corpses on to his shoulders and stride off to dispose of them in some swift, effective way, such as stuffing them down an exhausted borehole and capping it with a mighty rock. For the day will come when I must have another human being, must hear another voice, even if it speaks only abuse. This monologue of the self is a maze of words out of which I shall not find a way until someone else gives me a lead. I roll my eyeballs, I pucker my lips, I stretch my ears, but the face in the
mirror is my face and will go on being mine even if I hold it in the fire till it drips. No matter with what frenzy I live the business of death or wallow in blood and soapsuds, no matter what wolfhowls I hurl into the night, my acts, played out within the macabre theatre of myself, remain mere behaviour. I offend no one, for there is no one to offend but the servants and the dead. How shall I be saved? And can this really be I (scrub-scrub-scrub), this bare-kneed lady? Have I, the true deep down I beyond words, participated in these phenomena any more deeply than by simply being present at a moment in time, a point in space, at which a block of violence, followed by a block of scrubbing, for the sake of the servants, rattled past on their way from nowhere to nowhere? If I turn my back and walk away will this whole bloody lamplit scene not dwindle down the tunnel of memory, pass through the gates of horn, and leave me grinding my knuckles in my eyes in the grim little room at the end of the passage, waiting for my father’s eyebrows to coalesce, then the black pools beneath them, then the cavern of the mouth from which echoes and echoes his eternal NO?

  36. For he does not die so easily after all. Disgruntled, saddle-sore, it is he who rides in out of the sunset, who nods when I greet him, who stalks into the house and slumps in his armchair waiting for me to help him off with his boots. The old days are not gone after all. He has not brought home a new wife, I am still his daughter, if I can unsay the bad words perhaps even his good daughter, though it would be well, I can see, to keep out of his way while he ruminates a failure which I, innocent of the ways of courtship, kept all my life in the economic dark, will fail to understand. My heart leaps at this second chance, but I move demurely, I bow my head.