Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  No, I don’t. Which is why I have tried to make it clear to you that I was not one of his conquests. If anything, he was one of mine. But tell me – I’m curious – to whom did he say that I was important?

  To various people. In letters. He doesn’t name you, but you are easy enough to identify. Also, he kept a photograph of you. I came across it among his papers.

  A photograph! Can I see it? Do you have it with you?

  I’ll make a copy and send it.

  Yes, of course I was important to him. He was in love with me, in his way. But there is an important way of being important, and an unimportant way, and I have my doubts that I made it to the important important level. I mean, he never wrote about me. I never entered his books. Which to me suggests that I never quite flowered within him, never quite came to life.

  [Silence.]

  No comment? You have read his books. Where in his books do you find traces of me?

  I can’t answer that. I don’t know you well enough to say. Don’t you recognize yourself in any of his characters?

  No.

  Perhaps you are in his books in a more diffuse way, not immediately detectable.

  Perhaps. But I would have to be convinced of that. Shall we go on? Where was I?

  Supper. Lasagne.

  Yes. Lasagne. Conquests. I fed him lasagne and then I completed my conquest of him. How explicit do I need to be? Since he is dead, it can make no difference to him, any indiscreetness on my part. We used the marital bed. If I am going to desecrate my marriage, I thought, I may as well do so thoroughly. And a bed is more comfortable than the sofa or the floor.

  As for the experience itself – I mean the experience of infidelity, which is what the experience was, predominantly, for me – it was stranger than I expected, and then over before I could get accustomed to the strangeness. Yet it was exciting, no doubt about that, from start to finish. My heart did not stop hammering. Not something I will forget, ever. I mentioned Henry James. There are plenty of betrayals in James, but I recall nothing about the sense of excitement, of heightened self-awareness, during the act itself – by which I mean the act of betrayal. James liked to present himself as a great betrayer, but I ask myself: Did he have any experience of the real thing, of real, bodily infidelity?

  My first impressions? I found this new lover of mine bonier than my husband, and lighter. Doesn’t get enough to eat, I remember thinking. He and his father together in that mean little cottage on Tokai Road, a widower and his celibate son, two incompetents, two of life’s failures, supping on polony sausage and biscuits and tea. Since he didn’t want to bring his father to me, would I have to start dropping in on them with baskets of nourishing goodies?

  The image that has stayed with me is of him leaning over me with his eyes shut, stroking my body, frowning with concentration as if trying to memorize me through touch alone. Up and down his hand roamed, back and forth. I was, at the time, quite proud of my figure. The jogging, the callisthenics, the dieting: if there is no payoff when you undress for a man, when is there ever going to be a payoff? I may not have been a beauty, but at least I must have been a pleasure to handle: nice and trim, a good piece of woman-flesh.

  If you find this kind of talk embarrassing, say so and I will restrain myself. I am in one of the intimate professions, so plain talk doesn’t trouble me as long as it doesn’t trouble you. No? No problem? Shall I go on?

  That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth shaking, not with him.

  What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A casual fling would be one thing, an affair of the heart quite another.

  Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing. But what of him? Might he be the type to brood on what had passed between us, building it up into something bigger than it really was? Be on your guard, I told myself.

  Days went by, however, without any word from him. Each time I drove past the house on Tokai Road I slowed down and peered, but caught no sight of him. Nor was he at the supermarket. There was only one conclusion I could come to: he was avoiding me. In a way that was a good sign; but it annoyed me nevertheless. In fact it hurt me. I wrote him a letter, an old-fashioned letter, and put a stamp on it and dropped it in the mailbox. ‘Are you avoiding me?’ I wrote. ‘What need I do to reassure you I want us to be good friends, no more?’ No response.

  What I did not mention in the letter, and would certainly not mention when next I saw him, was how I passed the weekend immediately after his visit. Mark and I were at each other like rabbits, having sex in bed, on the floor, in the shower, everywhere, even when poor innocent Chrissielay wide awake in her cot, wailing, calling for me.

  Mark had his own ideas about why I was in such an inflamed state. Mark thought I could smell his girlfriend from Durban on him and wanted to prove to him how much better a – how shall I put it? – how much better a performer I was than she. On the Monday after the weekend in question he was booked to fly to Durban, but he pulled out – cancelled his flight, called the office to say he was sick. Then he and I went back to bed.

  He could not have enough of me. He was positively enraptured with the institution of bourgeois marriage and the opportunities it afforded a man to rut both outside and inside the home.

  As for me, I was – I choose my words with deliberation – I was unbearably excited at having two men so close to each other. To myself I said, in a rather shocked way, You are behaving like a whore! Is that what you are, by nature? But beneath it all I was quite proud of myself, of the effect I could have. That weekend I glimpsed for the first time the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic. Until then I had had a rather trite picture of erotic life: you arrive at puberty, you spend a year or two or three hesitating on the brink of the pool, then you plunge in and splash around until you find a mate who satisfies you, and that is the end of it, the end of your quest. What dawned on me that weekend was that at the age of twenty-six my erotic life had barely begun.

  Then at last I received a reply to my letter. A phone call from John. First some cautious probing: Was I alone, was my husband away? Then the invitation: Would I like to come over for supper, an early supper, and would I like to bring my child?

  I arrived at the house with Chrissie in her pram. John was waiting at the door wearing one of those blue-and-white butcher’s aprons. ‘Come through to the back,’ he said, ‘we’re having a braai.’

  That was where I met his father for the first time. His father was sitting hunched over the fire as if he was cold, when in fact the evening was still quite warm. Somewhat creakily he got to his feet to greet me. He looked frail, though it turned out he was only sixty-odd. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, and gave me a nice smile. He and I got on well from the start. ‘And is this Chrissie? Hello, my girl! Come to visit us, eh?’

  Unlike his son, he spoke with a heavy Afrikaans accent. But his English was perfectly passable. He had grown up on a farm in the Karoo, I discovered, with lots of siblings. They had learned their English from a tutor – there was no school nearby – a Miss Jones or Miss Smith, out from the Old Country.

  In the walled estate where Mark and I lived each of the units came with a built-in barbecue in the back courtyard. Here on Tokai Road there was no such amenity, just an open fire with a few bricks around it. It seemed stupid beyond belief to have an unguarded fire when there was going to be a child around, particularly a child like Chrissie, not yet steady on her feet. I pretended to touch the wire grid, pretended to cry out with pain, whipped my hand away, sucked it. ‘Hot!’ I said to Chrissie. ‘Careful! Don’t touch!’

  Why do I remember this detail? Because of the sucking. Because I was aware of John’s eyes on me, and therefore purposely prolonged the moment. I had – excuse me for boasting – I had a nice mouth in those days, very kissable. My family name was Kiš, which in South Africa, where no one knew
about funny diacritics, was spelled K-I-S. Kiss-kiss, the girls at school used to hiss when they wanted to provoke me. Kiss-kiss, and giggles, and a wet smacking of the lips. I could not have cared less. Nothing wrong with being kissable, I thought. End of digression. I am fully aware it is John you want to hear about, not me and my schooldays.

  Grilled sausages and baked potatoes: that was the menu these two men had so imaginatively put together. For the sausages, tomato sauce from a bottle; for the potatoes, margarine. God knows what offal had gone into the making of the sausages. Fortunately I had brought along a couple of those little Heinz jars for the child.

  I pleaded a ladylike appetite and took only a single sausage on my plate. With Mark away so much of the time, I found I was eating less and less meat. But for these two men it was meat and potatoes and nothing else. They ate in the same way, in silence, bolting down their food as if it might be whipped away at any moment. Solitary eaters.

  ‘How is the concreting coming along?’ I asked.

  ‘Another month and it will be done, God willing,’ said John.

  ‘It’s making a real difference to the house,’ his father said. ‘No doubt about that. Much less damp than there used to be. But it’s been a big job, eh, John?’

  I recognized the tone at once, the tone of a parent eager to boast about his child. My heart went out to the poor man. A son in his thirties, and nothing to be said for him but that he could lay concrete! How hard for the son too, the pressure of that longing in the parent, the longing to be proud! If there was one reason above all why I excelled at school, it was to give my parents, who lived such lonely lives in this strange country, something to be proud of.

  His English – the father’s – was perfectly passable, as I said, but it was clearly not his mother tongue. When he brought out an idiom, like No doubt about that, he did so with a little flourish, as if expecting to be applauded.

  I asked him what he did. (Did: such an inane word; but he knew what I meant.) He told me he was a bookkeeper, that he worked in the city. ‘It must be quite a schlep, getting from here to the city,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it suit you better if you lived closer in?’

  He mumbled some reply that I did not catch. Silence fell. Evidently I had touched on a sore spot. I changed the subject, but it did not help.

  I had not expected much from the evening, but the flatness of the conversation, the long silences, and something else in the air too, discord or bad temper between the two of them – these were more than I was prepared to stomach. The food had been dreary, the coals were turning grey, I was feeling chilly, darkness had begun to fall, Chrissie was being attacked by mosquitoes. Nothing obliged me to go on sitting in this weed-infested backyard, nothing obliged me to participate in the family tensions of people I barely knew, even if in a technical sense one of them was or had been my lover. So I picked Chrissie up and put her back in her cart.

  ‘Don’t leave yet,’ said John. ‘I’ll make coffee.’

  ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘It’s well past the child’s bedtime.’

  At the gate he tried to kiss me, but I wasn’t in the mood for it.

  The story I told myself after that evening, the story I settled on, was that my husband’s infidelities had provoked me to such an extent that to punish him and salvage my own amour propre I had gone out and had a brief infidelity of my own. Now that it was evident what a mistake that infidelity had been, at least in the choice of accomplice, my husband’s infidelity appeared in a new light, as probably a mistake too, and thus not worth getting upset about.

  Over the weekends when my husband was at home I think I will at this point draw a modest veil. I have told you enough. Let me simply remind you that it was against the background of those weekends that my weekday relations with John played themselves out. If John became more than a little intrigued and even infatuated with me, it was because in me he encountered a woman at the peak of her womanly powers, living a heightened sexual life – a life that in truth had little to do with him.

  Mr Vincent, I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me. But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is quite different, quite another matter, from the story of his life and my part in that. My story, the story of me, began years before John arrived on the scene and went on for years after he made his exit. In the phase I am telling you about today, Mark and I were, properly speaking, the protagonists, John and the woman in Durban members of the supporting cast. So you have to choose. Will you accept what I have to offer you? Shall I go on with my recital, or shall I call it off here and now?

  Go on.

  You are sure? Because there is a further point I wish to make. It is this. You commit a grave error if you think to yourself that the difference between the two stories, the story you wanted to hear and the story you are getting from me, will be nothing more than a matter of perspective – that while from my point of view the story of John may have been just one episode among many in the long narrative of my marriage, nevertheless, by dint of a quick flip, a quick manipulation of perspective, followed by some clever editing, you can transform it into a story about John and one of the women who passed through his life. Not so. Not so. I warn you most earnestly: if you start playing around with your text, cutting out words here and adding in words there, the whole thing will turn to ash in your hands. I really was the main character. John really was a minor player. I am sorry if I seem to be lecturing you on your profession, but you will thank me in the end. Do you understand?

  I hear what you are saying. I don’t necessarily agree, but I hear.

  Well, let it not be said I did not warn you.

  As I told you, those were great days for me, a second honeymoon, sweeter than the first and longer-lasting too. Why else do you think I remember them so well? Truly, I am coming into myself! I said to myself This is what a woman can be; this is what a woman can do!

  Do I shock you? Probably not. You belong to an unshockable generation. But it would shock my mother, what I am revealing to you, if she were alive to hear it. My mother would never have dreamed of speaking to a stranger as I am speaking now.

  From one of his trips to Singapore Mark had come back with an early-model video camera. Now he set it up in the bedroom to film the two of us making love. As a record, he said. And as a turn-on. I didn’t mind. I let him go ahead. He probably still has the film; he may even watch it when he feels nostalgic about the old days. Or perhaps it is lying forgotten in a box in the attic, and will be found only after his death. The stuff we leave behind! Just imagine his grandchildren, eyes popping as they watch their youthful granddad frolicking in bed with his foreign wife.

  Your husband…

  Mark and I were divorced in 1988. He married again, on the rebound. I never met my successor. They live in the Bahamas, I think, or maybe Bermuda.

  Shall we let it rest there? You have heard a lot, and it’s been a long day.

  But that isn’t the end of the story, surely.

  On the contrary, it is the end of the story. At least of the part that matters.

  But you and Coetzee continued to see each other. For years you exchanged letters. So even if that is where the story ends, from your point of view – my apologies, even if that is the end of the part of the story that is of importance to you – there is still a long tail to follow, a long entailment. Can’t you give me some idea of the tail end?

  A short tail, not a long one. I will tell you about it, but not today. I have things to attend to. Come back next week. Fix a date with my receptionist.

  Next week I will be gone. Can’t we meet again tomorrow?

  Tomorrow is out of the question. Thursday. I can give you half an hour on Thursday, after my last appointment.

  YES, THE TAIL END. Where shall I begin? Let me start with John’s father. One morning, not long after that dreary barbecue, I was driving down Tokai Road when I noticed someone stan
ding by himself at a bus stop. It was the elder Coetzee. I was in a hurry, but it would have been too rude to simply drive past, so I stopped and offered him a ride.

  He asked how Chrissie was getting on. I said she was missing her father, who was away from home much of the time. I asked about John and the concreting. He gave some vague answer.

  Neither of us was really in the mood for talk, but I forced myself. If he didn’t mind my asking, I asked, how long had it been since his wife passed away? He told me. Of his life with her, whether it had been happy or not, whether he missed her, he volunteered nothing.

  ‘And is John your only child?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, he has a brother, a younger brother.’ He seemed surprised I did not know.

  ‘That’s curious,’ I said, ‘because John has the air of an only child.’ Which I meant critically. I meant that he was preoccupied with himself, did not seem to make allowances for people around him.

  He gave no answer – did not inquire, for instance, what air it was that an only child might have.

  I asked about his second son, about where he lived. In England, replied Mr C. He had quit South Africa years ago and never come back. ‘You must miss him,’ I said. He shrugged. That was his characteristic response: the wordless shrug.

  I must tell you, from the very first I found something unbearably sorrowful about this man. Sitting next to me in the car in his dark business suit, giving off a smell of cheap deodorant, he may have seemed the personification of stiff rectitude, but if he had suddenly burst into tears I would not have been surprised, not in the slightest. All alone save for that cold fish his elder son, trudging off each morning to what sounded like a soul-destroying job, coming back at night to a silent house – I felt more than a little pity for him.

  ‘Well, one misses so much,’ he said at last, when I thought he was not going to answer at all. He spoke in a whisper, gazing straight ahead.

  I dropped him in Wynberg near the train station. ‘Thanks for the lift, Julia,’ he said, ‘very kind of you.’