Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  And there was the problem of my husband. You cannot sign for this, your husband must come and sign, they would say to me. My husband cannot sign, he is in hospital, I would say. Then take it to him in the hospital and get him to sign it and bring it back, they would say. My husband cannot sign anything, I would say, he is in Stikland, don’t you know Stikland? Then let him make his mark, they would say. He cannot make his mark, sometimes he cannot even breathe, I would say. Then we cannot help you, they would say. Go to such-and-such an office and tell them your story – perhaps they can help you there.

  And all of this pleading and petitioning I had to do alone, unaided, with my bad English that I had learned in school out of books. In Brazil it would have been easy, in Brazil we have these people, we call them despachantes, facilitators: they have contacts in the government offices, they know how to steer your papers through the maze, you pay them a fee and they do all the unpleasant business for you one-two-three. That was what I needed in Cape Town: a facilitator, someone to make things easier for me. Mr Coetzee could have offered to be my facilitator. A facilitator for me and a protector for my girls. Then, just for a minute, just for a day, I could have allowed myself to be weak, an ordinary, weak woman. But no, I dared not relax, or what would have become of us, my daughters and me?

  Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress.

  Let me tell you about my poor husband. When they opened the warehouse the morning after the attack and found him lying there in his blood, they were sure he was dead. They wanted to take him straight to the morgue. But he was not dead. He was a strong man, he fought and fought against death and held death at bay. In the city hospital, I forget its name, the famous one, they did one operation after another on his brain. Then they moved him from there to the hospital I mentioned, the one called Stikland, which was outside the city, an hour by train. Sunday was the only day you were allowed to visit Stikland. So every Sunday morning I would catch the train from Cape Town, and then the train back in the afternoon. That is another thing I remember as if it were yesterday: those sad journeys back and forth.

  There was no improvement in my husband, no change. Week after week I would arrive and he would be lying in exactly the same position as before, with his eyes closed and his arms at his sides. They kept his head shaved, so you could see the stitch marks in his scalp. Also for a long time his face was covered with a wire mask where they had done a skin graft.

  In all that time in Stikland my husband never opened his eyes, never saw me, never heard me. He was alive, he was breathing, though in a coma so deep he might as well have been dead. Formally I may not have been a widow, yet as far as I was concerned I was already in mourning, for him and for all of us, stranded and helpless in this cruel land.

  I asked to bring him back to the flat in Wynberg, so that I could look after him myself, but they would not release him. They had not yet given up, they said. They were hoping that the electric currents they ran through his brain would all of a sudden do the trick (those were the words they used).

  So they kept him in Stikland, those doctors, to do their tricks on him. Otherwise they cared nothing for him, a stranger, a man from Mars who should have died yet did not.

  I promised myself, when they gave up on their electric currents I would bring him home. Then he could die properly, if that was what he wanted. Because though he was unconscious, I knew that deep inside him he felt the humiliation of what was happening to him. And if he could be allowed to die properly, in peace, then we would be released too, I and my daughters. Then we could spit on this atrocious earth of South Africa and be gone. But they never let him go, to the end.

  So I sat by his bedside, Sunday after Sunday. Never again will a woman look with love on this mutilated face, I told myself, so let me at least look, without flinching.

  In the next bed, I remember (there were at least a dozen beds crammed into a ward that should have held six), there was an old man so meagre, so cadaverous that his wristbones and the beak of his nose seemed to want to break through his skin. Though he had no visitors, he was always awake at the times when I came. He would roll his watery blue eyes towards me. Help me, please, he seemed to say, help me to die! But I could not help him.

  Maria Regina never, thank God, visited that place. A psychiatric hospital is not a place for children. On the first Sunday I asked Joana to accompany me to help with the unfamiliar trains. Even Joana came away disturbed, not just by the spectacle of her father but also by things she saw in that hospital, things no girl should have to witness.

  Why does he have to be here? I said to the doctor, the one who spoke about doing tricks. He is not mad – why does he have to be among mad people? Because we have the facilities for his kind of case, said the doctor. Because we have the equipment. I should have asked what equipment he meant, but I was too upset. Later I found out. He meant shock equipment, equipment to send my husband’s body into convulsions, in the hope of doing the trick and bringing him back to life.

  If I had been forced to spend an entire Sunday in that crowded ward I swear I would have gone mad myself. I used to take breaks, wander around the hospital grounds. There was a favourite bench I had, under a tree in a secluded corner. One day I arrived at my bench and found a woman sitting there with her baby beside her. In most places – in public gardens and on station platforms and so forth – benches used to be marked Whites or Non-whites; however, this one was not. I said to the woman, What a pretty baby or something like that, wanting to be friendly. A frightened look came over her face. Dankie, mies, she whispered, which meant Thank you, miss, and she picked up her baby and crept away.

  I am not one of them, I wanted to call out to her. But of course I did not.

  I wanted time to pass and I did not want time to pass. I wanted to be by Mario’s side and I wanted to be away, free of him. At the beginning I would bring a book with me, intending to sit beside him and read. But I could not read in that place, could not concentrate. I thought to myself, I should take up knitting. I could knit whole bedspreads while I wait for this thick, heavy time to pass.

  When I was young, in Brazil, there was never enough time for all I wanted to do. Now time was my worst enemy, time that would not pass. How I longed for it all to end, this life, this death, this living death! What a fatal mistake when we took the ship to South Africa!

  So. That is the story of Mario.

  He died in the hospital?

  He died there. He could have lived longer, he had a strong constitution, he was like a bull. When they saw their tricks would not work, however, they stopped paying attention to him. Perhaps they stopped feeding him too, I can’t say for sure, he always looked the same to me, he did not get thinner. Yet to tell the truth I did not mind, we wanted to be released, all of us, he and I and the doctors too.

  We buried him in a cemetery not far from the hospital, I forget the name of the place. So his grave is in Africa. I have never been back, but I think of him sometimes, lying there all alone.

  What is the time? All of a sudden I feel so tired, so sad. It always depresses me to be reminded of those days.

  Shall we stop?

  No, we can go on. There is not much more to say. Let me tell you about my dance classes, because that was where he pursued me, your Mr Coetzee. Then maybe you can answer one question for me. Then we will be finished.

  I could not get proper work in those days. There were no professional openings for someone like me, coming from the balet folclórico. In South Africa the companies danced nothing but Swan Lake and Giselle, to prove how European they were. So I took the job I told you about, in a dance studio, teaching Latin American dance. Most of my students were what they called Coloured. By day they worked in shops or offices, then in the evenings they came to the studio to learn the l
atest Latin American steps. I liked them. They were nice people, friendly, gentle. They had romantic illusions about Latin America, Brazil above all. Lots of palm trees, lots of beaches. In Brazil, they thought, people like themselves would feel at home. I said nothing to disappoint them.

  Each month there was a new intake, that was the system at the studio. No one was turned away. As long as a student paid, I had to teach them. One day when I walked in to meet my new class, there he was among the students, and there his name was on the list: Coetzee, John.

  Well, I cannot tell you how upset I was. It is one thing, if you are a dancer who performs in public, to be pursued by admirers. I was used to that. Now, however, it was different. I was no longer putting myself on show, I was just a teacher now, I had a right not to be harried.

  I did not greet him. I wanted him to see at once that he was not welcome. What did he think – that if he danced before me the ice in my heart would melt? How crazy! And all the crazier because he had no feeling for dance, no aptitude. I could see that from the first moment, from the way he walked. He was not at ease in his body. He moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding, a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting. Only in South Africa did I meet men like that, stiff, intractable, unteachable. Why did they ever come to Africa, I wondered – to Africa, the birthplace of dance? They would have been better off staying in Holland, sitting in their counting-houses behind their dykes counting money with cold fingers.

  I taught my class as I was paid to do, then when the hour was over left the building at once by the back exit. I did not want to speak to Mr Coetzee. I hoped he would not return.

  However, the next evening there he was again, doggedly following instructions, performing steps for which he had no feel. I could see he was not popular with the rest of the students. They tried to avoid him as a partner. As for me, his presence in the room took away all my pleasure. I tried to ignore him, but he would not be ignored, watching me, devouring my life.

  At the end of the class I called to him to stay behind. ‘Please stop this,’ I said to him as soon as we were alone. He stared back at me without protest, mute. I could smell the cold sweat on his body. I felt an urge to strike him, lash him across the face. ‘Stop this!’ I said. ‘Stop following me. I do not want to see you here again. And stop looking at me like that. Stop forcing me to humiliate you.’

  There was more I could have said, but I was afraid I would lose control and start shouting.

  Afterwards I spoke to the man who owned the studio, his name was Mr Anderson. There is a student in my class who is spoiling it for the other students, I said – please give him his money back and tell him to leave. But Mr Anderson would not. If there is a student disrupting your class it is up to you to put a stop to it, he said. This man is not doing anything wrong, I said, he is simply a bad presence. You cannot eject a student because he has a bad presence, said Mr Anderson. Find another solution.

  The next evening I again called him back. There was nowhere private to go, I had to speak to him in the corridor. ‘This is my work, you are disrupting my work,’ I said. ‘Go away from here. Leave me alone.’

  He did not answer, but reached out a hand and touched my cheek. That was the one and only time he ever touched me. The anger inside me boiled over. I knocked his hand aside. ‘This is not a love-game!’ I hissed. ‘Don’t you see I detest you? Leave me alone and leave my child alone too or I will report you to the school!’

  It was true: if he had not begun filling my daughter’s head with dangerous nonsense I would never have summoned him to our flat, and his miserable pursuit of me would never have begun. What was a grown man doing in a girls’ school anyway, Saint Bonaventure, that was supposed to be a nuns’ school, only there were no nuns?

  And it was true too that I detested him. I was not afraid to say so. He forced me to detest him.

  But when I pronounced the word detest he stared back at me in confusion as if he could not believe his ears – that a woman to whom he was offering himself could actually be refusing him. He did not know what to do, just as he did not know what to do with himself on the dance floor. It gave me no pleasure to see such bewilderment, such helplessness. It was as if he was dancing naked before me, this man who did not know how to dance. I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to beat him. I wanted to cry.

  [Silence.]

  This is not the story you wanted to hear, is it? You wanted a different kind of story for your book. You wanted to hear of the romance between your hero and the beautiful foreign ballerina. Well, I am giving you truth, not romance. Maybe too much truth. Maybe so much truth that there will be no place for it in your book. I don’t know. I don’t care.

  Go on. It is not a very dignified picture of Coetzee that emerges from your story, I won’t deny that, but I will change nothing, I promise.

  Not dignified, you say. Well, maybe that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.

  [Silence.]

  Anyway, I went back to Mr Anderson. Get this man out of my class or I will resign, I said. I will see what I can do, said Mr Anderson. We all have difficult students to cope with, you are not the only one. He is not difficult, I said, he is mad.

  Was he mad? I don’t know. But he certainly had an idée fixe about me.

  The next day I went to my daughter’s school, as I had warned him I would, and asked to see the principal. The principal was busy, I was told. I will wait, I said. For an hour I waited in the secretary’s office. Not one friendly word. No Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Nascimento? Then at last, when it became plain I would not go away, they capitulated and let me see the principal.

  ‘I have come to speak to you about my daughter’s English lessons,’ I said to her. ‘I would like my daughter to go on with her lessons, but I want her to have a proper English teacher with a proper qualification. If I must pay more I will pay.’

  The principal fetched a folder out of a filing cabinet. ‘According to Mr Coetzee, Maria Regina is making good progress in English,’ she said. ‘That is confirmed by her other teachers. So what exactly is the problem?’

  ‘I cannot tell you what is the problem,’ I said. ‘I just want her to have another teacher.’

  This principal was not a fool. When I said I could not tell her what was the problem, she knew at once what was the problem. ‘Mrs Nascimento,’ she said, ‘if I understand what you are saying, you are making a very serious complaint. But I can’t act on such a complaint unless you are prepared to be more specific. Are you complaining about Mr Coetzee’s actions towards your daughter? Are you telling me there has been something untoward in his behaviour?’

  She was not a fool, but I am not a fool either. Untoward: what does that mean? Did I want to make an accusation against Mr Coetzee and sign my name to it, and then find myself in a court of law being interrogated by a judge? No. ‘I am not making a complaint against Mr Coetzee,’ I said, ‘I am only asking you, if there is a proper English teacher, can Maria Regina take lessons from her instead.’

  The principal did not like that. She shook her head. ‘That is not possible,’ she said. ‘Mr Coetzee is the only teacher, the only person on our staff, who teaches extra English. There is no other class into which Maria Regina can move. We don’t have the luxury, Mrs Nascimento, of offering our girls a range of teachers to choose among. And furthermore, with all respect, may I ask you to reflect, are you in the best position to judge Mr Coetzee’s teaching, if it is simply the standard of his teaching we are discussing today?’

  I know you are an Englishman, Mr Vincent, so don’t take this personally, but there is a certain English manner that infuriates me, that infuriates many people, where the insult comes coated in pretty words, like sugar on a pill. Dago: you think I don’t know that word, Mr Vincent? You Portugoose dago! she was saying – How dare you come here and criticize my school! Go back to the slums where you came from!

  ‘I am Maria Regina’s mother,’ I said, ‘I alone will say what i
s good for my daughter and what is not. I do not come to make trouble for you or Mr Coetzee or anyone else, but I tell you now, Maria Regina will not continue in that man’s class. That is my word and it is final. I pay for my daughter to attend a good school, a school for girls, I do not want her in a class where the teacher is not a proper teacher, he has no qualification, he is not even English, he is a Boer.’

  Maybe I should not have used that word, it was like Dago, but I was angry, I was provoked. Boer: in that little office of hers it was like a bomb. A bomb-word. But not as bad as mad. If I had said Maria Regina’s teacher, with his incomprehensible poems and his wish to make his students burn with an intenser light, was mad, then the room would truly have exploded.

  The woman’s face grew stiff. ‘It is up to me and to the school committee, Mrs Nascimento,’ she said, ‘to decide who is and who is not qualified to teach here. In my judgment and in the judgment of the committee Mr Coetzee, who holds a university degree in English, is adequately qualified for the work he does. You may remove your daughter from his class if you so wish, indeed you may remove her from the school, that is your right. But bear it in mind, it will be your daughter who will suffer in the end.’

  ‘I will remove her from that man’s class, I will not remove her from the school,’ I replied. ‘I want her to have a good education. I will myself find an English teacher for her. Thank you for seeing me. You think I am just some poor refugee woman who doesn’t understand anything. You are wrong. If I were to tell you the whole story of our family you would see how wrong you are. Goodbye.’

  Refugee. They kept calling me a refugee in that country of theirs, when all I desired was to escape from it.

  When Maria Regina came home from school the next day a veritable storm burst over my head. ‘How could you do it, mãe?’ she shouted at me. ‘How could you do this behind my back? Why do you always have to interfere in my life?’