In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  237. Summers and winters come and go. How they pass so swiftly, how many have passed I cannot say, not having had the foresight long ago to start cutting notches in a pole or scratching marks on a wall or keeping a journal like a good castaway. But time has flowed ceaselessly and I am now truly a mad old bad old woman with a stooped back and a hooked nose and knobbly fingers. Perhaps I am wrong to picture time as a river flowing from infinite to infinite bearing me with it like a cork or a twig; or perhaps, having flowed above ground for a while, time flowed underground for a while, and then reemerged, for reasons forever closed to me, and now flows again in the light, and I flow with it and can be heard again after all those summers and winters in the bowels of the earth during which the words must have gone on (for where would I be if they stopped?) but gone on without trace, without memory. Or perhaps there is no time, perhaps I am deceived when I think of my medium as time, perhaps there is only space, and I a dot of light moving erratically from one point in space to another, skipping years in a flash, now a frightened child in the corner of a schoolroom, now an old woman with knobbly fingers, that is also possible, my mind is open, and it would explain some of the tentativeness with which I hold my memories.

  238. There has been only one more visitor to the farm. The visitor came walking up the road to the house one afternoon. I watched him from the place on the hillside where I work with the stones. He did not see me. He knocked at the kitchen door. Then, shading his eyes, he tried to peer in through a window. He was a child, a boy of twelve or thirteen, dressed in pants that came down to his knees and a baggy brown shirt. On his head he wore some kind of khaki cap or kepi such as I had never seen before. When no one answered his knock he left the house and went down to the orchard, where the orange trees stood full of fruit. It was there that I crept up on him, an old woman of the wilds. He jumped to his feet, trembling, trying to hide a half-eaten orange behind his back.

  “And who is stealing my fruit?” I said, the words dropping heavily from my lips, like stones, how strange to speak real words again to a real listener, however petrified.

  The child stared back goggle-eyed – let me re-create the scene – at the crone in the black dress flecked with foodstains and verdigris, with the big teeth pointing in all directions and the mad eyes and the mane of grey hair, knowing in that instant that all the stories were true, that worse was true, that he would never see his mother again but be butchered like a lamb and his sweet flesh be roasted in the oven and his sinews boiled down to glue and his eyeballs seethed in a potion and his clean bones thrown to the dogs. “No, no!” he panted, his little heart almost stopping, and he fell to his knees. From his pocket he pulled out a letter and raised it trembling in the air. “It’s a letter, old miss, please!”

  It was a buff envelope with a cross drawn heavily over it in blue pencil. It was addressed to my father. Therefore we were not forgotten.

  I opened the envelope. In it was a printed letter in two languages requesting the payment of taxes for road maintenance, vermin eradication, and other marvels I had never heard of.

  “Whose signature is this?” I asked the child. He shook his head, watching me, unwilling to come nearer. “Who sent the letter?”

  “Post office, old miss.”

  “Yes, but who?”

  “Don’t know, old miss. Old miss must sign. For the letter.” He held out a little notebook and a stub of pencil.

  Holding the book against my thigh I wrote “I HAVE NO MONEY,” in block letters because of the pain in my fingers.

  The child took his book and pencil back from me and put them in his pocket.

  “Sit,” I said, and he sat on his heels. “How old are you?”

  “Twelve, old miss.”

  “And what is your name?”

  “Piet, old miss.”

  “Well, Piet, tell me, have you ever done this?” I made a circle of the thumb and first finger of my left hand and plunged the first finger of my right hand back and forth through it.

  Piet shook his head slowly, looking straight into my mad old eyes, judging the moment to leap.

  I took a step closer and put a hand on his shoulder. “Would you like to learn, Piet?”

  There was a scuffle of dust and he was gone, racing through the orange trees, up the bank, and off up the road with his cap clutched in his hand.

  That was the one visit.

  239. I also hear voices. It is my commerce with the voices that has kept me from becoming a beast. For I am sure that if the voices did not speak to me I would long ago have given up this articulated chip-chop and begun to howl or bellow or squawk. The sailor on the desert island speaks to his pets: “Pretty Polly!” he says to his parrot, “Fetch!” he says to his dog. But all the time he feels his lips harden, his tongue thicken, his larynx coarsen. “Woof!” says the dog, “Squawk!” says the parrot. And soon the sailor is bounding on all fours, clubbing the indigenous goats with thighbones, eating their flesh raw. It is not speech that makes man man but the speech of others.

  240. The voices speak to me out of machines that fly in the sky. They speak to me in Spanish.

  241. I know no Spanish whatsoever. However, it is characteristic of the Spanish that is spoken to me out of the flying machines that I find it immediately comprehensible. I have no way of explaining this circumstance save to suggest that while in their externals the words may present themselves as Spanish, they belong in fact not to a local Spanish but to a Spanish of pure meanings such as might be dreamed of by the philosophers, and that what is communicated to me via the Spanish language, by mechanisms I cannot detect, so deeply embedded in me do they lie, is therefore pure meaning. This is my guess, my humble guess. The words are Spanish but they are tied to universal meanings. If I do not believe this then I must believe either that my witness is unreliable, which while it may disturb a third party does not concern either my voices or myself, the two parties who matter, since we seem to believe in each other; or that there is continuous miraculous intervention on my behalf in the form of translation, an explanation I choose not to accept until all others fail, preferring the less outrageous to the more outrageous.

  242. How can I be deluded when I think so clearly?

  243. The voices do not come directly to me out of the flying machines in any simple way. That is to say, men do not lean out of the flying machines and shout their words down to me. Indeed, if the flying machines are large enough to hold men as I understand men, then they are only barely so. The flying machines, which look like narrow silver pencils with two pairs of rigid wings, a long pair in front and a short pair behind, are about six feet long, but fly hundreds of feet up in the air, higher than most birds, and consequently seem smaller than they are. They fly from north to south on the first and fourth days and from south to north on the second and fifth days, leaving the skies empty on the third, sixth, and seventh days. A cycle of seven days is one of the regularities I have discovered about the machines.

  244. It is quite possible that there is only one machine which flies back and forth across the sky four times a week, rather than four machines or many machines. My mind is open on this point.

  245. What flies across the sky is more like a machine than an insect because its drone is continuous and its flight perfectly regular. I call it a machine. It is possible that it is an insect. If so the joke is truly cruel.

  246. The words I hear are not shouted down to me from the machines. Rather they seem to hang in suspension in the air, all those crystal Spanish vocables, and then to sift down as they grow colder, just as the dew does, and the frost in frost-time, and to reach my ears by night, or more often in the early morning just before dawn, and to seep into my understanding, like water.

  247. I am not deluded; or if I am, my delusions are privileged. I could not make up such words as are spoken to me. They come from gods; or, if not, then from another world.

  The words last night w
ere: When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand. I ponder this text. I am sure it does not refer to my present state. I have never dreamt that I am dreaming. I do not dream at all nowadays, but sleep a blissful passiveness waiting for the words to come to me, like a maiden waiting for the holy ghost. I am sure that I am real. This is my hand, bone and flesh, the same hand every day. I stamp my foot: this is the earth, as real to the core as I. Therefore the words must allude to a time yet to come. Perhaps they warn me that one day I will wake up feeling a trifle airier, a trifle more phantasmal than now, and, drawing the curtain and staring out across the veld for the millionth time, will find myself seeing each bush and tree, each stone and grain of sand, in its own halo of clarity, as if every atom of the universe were staring back at me. The rasp of the cicadas, so familiar as to be unheard, will begin to pulse in my ears, first with a soft pulse as though from a distant star, then louder until my skull reverberates with the shrilling, then softer, soft and steady, inside me. What will I say to myself then? That I have a fever, that my senses are for the time being deranged, that in a few days, if I rest, I will be my old self again? What incentive do fever microbes have to cross seven leagues of waterless scrub dotted with the pelts of long-dead merinos, assuming that fever is transmitted by microbes and microbes have wings? The reward of a single desiccated old maid? Surely the pickings are richer elsewhere. No, I fear that all I could say to myself would be: This cannot go on, I am losing myself, slumbertime is over, the moment of waking is at hand. And what shall I wake to? To that half-forgotten brown man lying tense and angry in my bed, his arm flung over his eyes? To the cold corridor outside my father’s room, and the bedsprings’ stealthy creak? To a rented room in a strange city where, on a stomachful of salt pork and potato salad, I have dreamed bad dreams all night? Or to some other predicament so bizarre as to be unimaginable?

  248. The voices speak: Lacking all external enemies and resistances, confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, man at last has no choice but to turn himself into an adventure. They accuse me, if I understand them, of turning my life into a fiction, out of boredom. They accuse me, however tactfully, of making myself more violent, more various, more racked with torment than I really am, as though I were reading myself like a book, and found the book dull, and put it aside and began to make myself up instead. That is how I understand their accusation. It is not in rebellion against true oppression that I have made my history, they say, but in reaction against the tedium of serving my father, ordering the maids, managing the household, sitting out the years; when I could find no enemy outside, when hordes of brown horsemen would not pour out of the hills waving their bows and ululating, I made an enemy out of myself, out of the peaceful, obedient self who wanted no more than to do her father’s will and wax fat and full of days.

  Are they gods and yet do not see, I ask myself, or is it I who am wilfully blind? Which is the more implausible, the story of my life as lived by me or the story of the good daughter humming the psalms as she bastes the Sunday roast in a Dutch kitchen in the dead centre of the stone desert? As for inventing enemies, the pitiful warrior in the hills was never as formidable as the enemy who walked in our shadow and said Yes baas. To the slave who would only say Yes my father could only say No, and I after him, and that was the start of all my woe. Therefore I protest. Some things are not visible from the skies. But how do I persuade my accusers? I have tried forming messages with stones, but stones are too unwieldy for the distinctions I need to make. And can I be sure they will even understand the words I use? If they are gods and omniscient, this is not a conclusion pointed to by their monolingualism. Can I even be sure they know about me? Perhaps they are quite ignorant of me. Perhaps I have been wrong all the time in thinking they speak to me. Perhaps their words are meant only for Spaniards, because unknown to me it has been decreed that Spaniards are the elect. Or perhaps the Spaniards do not live as far away as I had thought, but just over the hills. Think of that. Or perhaps I take their words too much to heart, perhaps they are meant neither for the Spaniards alone nor for me alone but for all of us, whoever we are, who understand Spanish, and we all stand accused of creating specious adventures, though this is harder to believe, not many people have as much time on their hands as I.

  249. The innocent victim can only know evil in the form of suffering. That which is not felt by the criminal is his crime. That which is not felt by the innocent victim is his own innocence.

  I am troubled here by my ignorance of the nuances of Spanish. I would be happier if these dicta were less sibylline. Do the voices here define crime and innocence or do they tell me of the modes in which victim and criminal experience the crime? If the former, do they assert that when evil is known as evil innocence is thereby destroyed? In that case I can enter the kingdom of the saved only as a farmgirl, never as a heroine of consciousness. Dare I say, Then I’ll be damned? Will the voices cease to speak to me? If that happens I will truly be lost.

  250. It is the slave’s consciousness that constitutes the master’s certainty of his own truth. But the slave’s consciousness is a dependent consciousness. So the master is not sure of the truth of his autonomy. His truth lies in an inessential consciousness and its inessential acts.

  These words refer to my father, to his brusqueness with the servants, his unnecessary harshness. But my father was harsh and domineering only because he could not bear to ask and be refused. All his commands were secret pleas – even I could see that. How then did the servants come to know that they could hurt him most essentially by obeying him most slavishly? Were they too instructed by the gods, through channels we were unaware of? Did my father grow harsher and harsher toward them simply to provoke them out of their slavishness? Would he have embraced a rebellious slave as a father embraces a prodigal son, though his next act might be to chastise him? Was my father crucified on the paradox the voices expound: that from people who bent like reeds to his whims he was asking, in his way, for an affirmation of his truth in and for himself? And was it their provocation to reply Yes baas to his provocation, casting their eyes down, hiding their smiles, biding their time till he overreached himself? They must have known he had overreached himself when he moved Klein-Anna into the house. They must have known it before, when they saw his infatuation. Is that why Hendrik swallowed his pride? Did Hendrik not see in the seduction of Anna my father’s last attempt to compel from the lips of a slave, albeit in the dead of night, words such as one free being addresses to another, words he could have had from me or from any of the perfumed widows of the region, but which coming from us would have been worthless? Or did Hendrik see it all clearly, and forgive nothing of it, but vow revenge? Is my banishment here Hendrik’s revenge? Is it a sign of my innocence that I feel my banishment only as suffering, not as a crime against me? Where, unless compassion intervenes, does the round of vindictiveness end? The voices stop too soon. I am grateful for what they give me. Their words are golden. Neglected once, I am honoured for my years of solitude as few can have been. There is justice in the universe, I acknowledge. But the words from the sky raise more questions than they answer. I am gagging on a diet of universals. I will die before I get to the truth. I want the truth, certainly, but I want finality even more!

  251. The stones. When first the machines began to fly overhead and speak to me I was eager to speak back. I would stand on the head of rock behind the house dressed for preference in white, in my patched old white nightdress, and signal with my arms and call out my responses, first in English, then later, when I began to see I was not understood, in Spanish. “ES MI,” I shouted, “VENE!” in a Spanish which I had to invent from first principles, by introspecting, as I went along.

  252. Then it occurred to me that the beings in the machines might be flying in an ecstasy of self-absorption with their eyes fixed on the endless blue horizon, letting slip their messages parenthetically, so to speak, to float down in their own good time. I therefore wo
ndered whether I ought not to imitate the classic castaways and light a pyre to draw their attention. Labouring for three days I piled a mountain of dry brushwood. Then on the fourth day, as the first silver glint appeared in the northern sky, I set fire to my beacon and ran to my signalling post. Gigantic flames leapt into the sky. The air was filled with the crackling of thorns and the wheezes of expiring insects. “ISOLADO!” I shouted against the roar, dancing about and waving a white handkerchief. Like a ghost the machine drifted above me. “ES MI! VIDI!” I heard no answering voice.

  253. But even if the being in the machine had spoken, I later realized, his voice would have been lost in the noise. Besides, I asked myself, what is there to make them think the fire is a signal? Might it not be simply a traveller’s fire, or the straw bonfire of a contented agriculturist, or a veld-fire lit by a bolt of lightning, a mere phenomenon? I am, after all, not obviously a castaway, there is nothing to show that I cannot put one foot in front of the other till I reach the nearest aid post and ask for whatever it is I want, the comforts of civilization, say.

  254. But perhaps, I then thought, I do them an injustice, perhaps they know very well I am a castaway, and smile among themselves, watching me dance about proclaiming my uniqueness while from horizon to horizon the world is dense with dancing folk signalling out of their private fires. Perhaps I am making a fool of myself, perhaps I will draw their attention and approval only when I give up my song and dance and go back to sweeping and polishing. Perhaps I am behaving like an ugly sister in a story in which only Cinderella is saved. Perhaps the millennium came and I, lacking a calendar, did not notice it, and now the prince is scouring the farthest reaches of the globe for his bride, and I, who have been hugging the parable so long to my heart, reading it as an allegory of my vindication, will find myself left behind with the clods while the blissful pair fly off to a new life on the farther planets. What am I to do? I am lost both ways. Perhaps I should ponder further those words about the innocence of the innocent.