Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  So when Corporal Coetzee returned to South Africa at the end of hostilities, it was with a newfound passion for opera. ‘La donna è mobile,’ he would sing in the bath. ‘Figaro here, Figaro there,’ he would sing, ‘Figaro, Figaro, Feeegaro!’ He went out and bought a gramophone, their family’s first; over and over again he would play a 78 rpm recording of Caruso singing ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’. When long-playing records were invented he acquired a new and better gramophone, together with an album of Renata Tebaldi singing well-loved arias.

  Thus in his adolescent years there were two schools of vocal music at war with each other in the house: an Italian school, his father’s, manifested by Tebaldi and Tito Gobbi in full cry; and a German school, his own, founded on Bach. All of Sunday afternoon the household would drown in choruses from the B-minor Mass; then in the evenings, with Bach at last silenced, his father would pour himself a glass of brandy, put on Renata Tebaldi, and sit down to listen to real melodies, real singing.

  For its sensuality and decadence – that was how, at the age of sixteen, he saw it – he resolved he would for ever hate and despise Italian opera. That he might despise it simply because his father loved it, that he would have resolved to hate and despise anything in the world that his father loved, was a possibility he would not admit.

  One day, while no one was around, he took the Tebaldi record out of its sleeve and with a razor blade drew a deep score across its surface.

  On Sunday evening his father put on the record. With each revolution the needle jumped. ‘Who has done this?’ he demanded. But no one, it seemed, had done it. It had just happened.

  Thus ended Tebaldi; now Bach could reign unchallenged.

  For that mean and petty deed of his he has for the past twenty years felt the bitterest remorse, remorse that has not receded with the passage of time but on the contrary grown keener. One of his first actions when he returned to the country was to scour the music shops for the Tebaldi record. Though he failed to find it, he did come upon a compilation in which she sang some of the same arias. He brought it home and played it through from beginning to end, hoping to lure his father out of his room as a hunter might lure a bird with his pipes. But his father showed no interest.

  ‘Don’t you recognize the voice?’ he asked.

  His father shook his head.

  ‘It’s Renata Tebaldi. Don’t you remember how you used to love Tebaldi in the old days?’

  He refused to accept defeat. He continued to hope that one day, when he was out of the house, his father would put the new, unblemished record on the player, pour himself a glass of brandy, sit down in his armchair, and allow himself to be transported to Rome or Milan or wherever it was that as a young man his ears were first opened to the sensual beauties of the human voice. He wanted his father’s breast to swell with that old joy; if only for an hour, he wanted him to relive that lost youth, forget his present crushed and humiliated existence. Above all he wanted his father to forgive him. Forgive me! he wanted to say to his father. Forgive you? Heavens, what is there to forgive? he wanted to hear his father reply. Upon which, if he could summon up the courage, he would at last make full confession: Forgive me for deliberately and with malice aforethought scratching your Tebaldi record. And for more besides, so much more that the recital would take all day. For countless acts of meanness. For the meanness of heart in which those acts originated. In sum, for all I have done since the day I was born, and with such success, to make your life a misery.

  But no, there was no indication, not the faintest, that during his absences from the house Tebaldi was being set free to sing. Tebaldi had, it seemed, lost her charms; or else his father was playing a terrible game with him. My life a misery? What makes you think my life has been a misery? What makes you think you have ever had it in your power to make my life a misery?

  Intermittently he plays the Tebaldi record for himself; and as he listens the beginnings of some kind of transformation seem to take place inside him. As it must have been with his father in 1944, his heart too begins to throb in time with Mimi’s. As the great rising arc of her voice must have called out his father’s soul, so it now calls out his soul too, urging it to join hers in passionate, soaring flight.

  What has been wrong with him all these years? Why has he not been listening to Verdi, to Puccini? Has he been deaf? Or is the truth worse than that: did he, even as a youth, hear and recognize perfectly well the call of Tebaldi, and then with tight-lipped primness (‘I won’t!’) refuse to heed it? Down with Tebaldi, down with Italy, down with the flesh! And if his father must go down too in the general wreck, so be it!

  Of what is going on inside his father he has no idea. His father does not talk about himself, does not keep a diary or write letters. Only once, by accident, has the door opened a chink. In the Lifestyle supplement to the weekend Argus he has come upon a Yes-No quiz that his father has filled in and left lying around, a quiz titled ‘Your Personal Satisfaction Index’. Next to the third question – ‘Have you known many members of the opposite sex?’ – his father has ticked the box No. ‘Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you?’ reads the fourth. No, is the answer again.

  Out of a possible twenty, his father scores six. A score of fifteen or above, says the creator of the Index, one Ray Schwarz, MD, PhD, author of How to Succeed in Life and Love, a best-selling guide to personal development, means that the respondent has lived a fulfilled life. A score of less than ten, on the other hand, suggests that he or she needs to cultivate a more positive outlook, to which end joining a social club or taking up ballroom dancing might be a first step.

  Theme to carry further: his father and why he lives with him. The reaction of the women in his life (bafflement).

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  Over the airwaves come denunciations of the communist terrorists, together with their dupes and cronies in the World Council of Churches. The terms of the denunciations may change from day to day, but their hectoring tone does not. It is a tone familiar to him from the Worcester of his schooldays, where once a week all the children, from youngest to oldest, were herded into the school hall to have their brains washed. So familiar is the voice that at its first breath a visceral loathing rises in him and he dives for the off switch.

  He is the product of a damaged childhood, that he long ago worked out; what surprises him is that the worst damage was done not in the seclusion of the home but out in the open, at school.

  He has been reading here and there in educational theory, and in the writings of the Dutch Calvinist school he begins to recognize what underlay the form of schooling that was administered to him. The purpose of education, say Abraham Kuyper and his disciples, is to form the child as congregant, as citizen, and as parent to be. It is the word form that gives him pause. During his years at school in Worcester, his teachers, themselves formed by followers of Kuyper, had all the time been labouring to form him and the other little boys in their charge – form them as a craftsman forms a clay pot; while he, using what paltry, pathetic, inarticulate means he had at his disposal, had tried to resist them – to resist them then as he resists them now.

  But why had he so stubbornly resisted? Where did that resistance of his come from, that refusal to accept that the end goal of education should be to form him in some predetermined image, who would otherwise have no form but wallow instead in a state of nature, unsaved, savage? There can be only one answer: the kernel of his resistance, his counter-theory to their Kuyperism, must have come from his mother. Somehow or other, either from her own upbringing as the daughter of the daughter of an Evangelical missionary, or more likely from her sole year in college, a year from which she emerged with no more than a diploma licensing her to teach in primary schools, she must have picked up an alternative ideal of the educator and the educator’s task, and then somehow impressed that ideal on her children. The task of the educator, according to his mother, should be to identify and foster the natural talents of the child, the talen
ts with which the child is born and which make the child unique. If the child is to be pictured as a plant, then the educator should feed the roots of the plant and watch over its growth, rather than – as the Kuyperians preached – prune its branches and shape it.

  But what grounds does he have for thinking that in bringing him up – him and his brother – his mother followed any theory at all? Why should the truth not be that his mother let the two of them grow up wallowing in savagery simply because she herself had grown up savage – she and her brothers and sisters on the farm in the Eastern Cape where they were born? The answer is given in names he dredges up from the recesses of memory: Montessori; Rudolf Steiner. The names meant nothing when he heard them as a child. But now, in his readings in education, he comes across them again. Montessori, the Montessori Method: so that is why he was given blocks to play with, wooden blocks that he would at first fling hither and thither across the room, thinking that was what they were for, then later pile one on top of the other until the tower (always a tower!) came crashing down and he would howl with frustration.

  Blocks to make castles with, and plasticine to make animals with (plasticine which, at first, he would try to chew); and then, before he was ready for it, a Meccano set with plates and rods and bolts and pulleys and cranks.

  My little architect; my little engineer. His mother departed the world before it became incontrovertibly clear that he was going to become neither of these, and therefore that the blocks and the Meccano set had not worked their magic, perhaps not the plasticine either (my little sculptor). Did his mother wonder: Was it all a big mistake, the Montessori Method? Did she even, in darker moments, think to herself: I should have let those Calvinists form him, I should never have backed him in his resistance?

  If they had succeeded in forming him, those Worcester schoolteachers, he would more than likely have become one of their number himself, patrolling rows of silent children with a ruler in his hand, rapping on their desks as he passed to remind them who was boss. And at the end of the day he would have had a Kuyperian family of his own to go home to, a well-formed, obedient wife and well-formed, obedient children – a family and a home within a community within a homeland. Instead of which he has – what? A father to look after, a father not very good at looking after himself, smoking a little in secret, drinking a little in secret, with a view of their joint domestic situation no doubt at variance with his own: the view, for instance, that it has fallen to him, the unlucky father, to look after the grown-up son, since the son is not very good at looking after himself, as is all too evident from his recent history.

  To be developed: his own, home-grown theory of education, its roots in (a) Plato and (b) Freud, its elements (a) discipleship (the student aspiring to be like the teacher) and (b) ethical idealism (the teacher striving to be worthy of the student), its perils (a) vanity (the teacher basking in the student’s worship) and (b) sex (bodily intercourse as shortcut to knowledge).

  His attested incompetence in matters of the heart; transference (Freudian style) in the classroom and his repeated failures to manage it.

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  His father works as a bookkeeper for a firm that imports and sells components for Japanese cars. Because most of these components are made not in Japan but in Taiwan, South Korea, or even Thailand, they cannot be called authentic parts. On the other hand, because they do not come in forged manufacturers’ packaging but proclaim (in small print) their country of origin, they are not pirate parts either.

  The owners of the firm are two brothers, now in late middle age, who speak English with eastern European inflections and pretend to be innocent of Afrikaans though in fact they were born in Port Elizabeth and understand street Afrikaans perfectly well. They employ a staff of five: three counter hands, a bookkeeper, and a bookkeeper’s assistant. The bookkeeper and his assistant have a little wood and glass cubicle of their own to insulate them from the activities around them. As for the hands, they spend their time bustling back and forth between the counter and the racks of auto parts that stretch into the shadowy recesses of the store. The chief counter hand, Cedric, had been with them from the start. No matter how obscure a part may be – a fan housing for a 1968 Suzuki threewheeler, a kingpin bush for an Impact five-ton truck – Cedric will unerringly know where to find it.

  Once a year the firm does a stocktaking during which every part bought or sold, down to the last nut and bolt, is accounted for. It is a major undertaking: most dealers would shut their doors for the duration. But Acme Auto Parts has got where it has got, say the brothers, by staying open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. five days of the week, plus 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturdays, come hell or high water, fifty-two weeks of the year, Christmas and New Year excepted. Therefore the stocktaking has to be done after hours.

  As bookkeeper his father is at the centre of operations. During the stocktaking period he sacrifices his lunch hour and works late into the evening. He works alone, without help: working overtime, and therefore catching a late train home, is something that neither Mrs Noerdien, his father’s assistant, nor even the counter hands is prepared to do. Riding the trains after dark has become too dangerous, they say: too many commuters are being attacked and robbed. So after closing time it is only the brothers, in their office, and his father, in his cubicle, who stay behind, poring over documents and ledgers.

  ‘If I had Mrs Noerdien for just one extra hour a day,’ says his father, ‘we could be finished in no time. I could call out the figures and she could check. Doing it by myself is hopeless.’

  His father is not a qualified bookkeeper; but during the years he spent running his own legal practice he picked up at least the rudiments. He has been the brothers’ bookkeeper for twelve years, ever since he gave up the law. The brothers, it must be presumed – Cape Town is not a big city – are cognisant of his chequered past in the legal profession. They are cognisant of it and therefore – it must be presumed – keep a close watch on him, in case, even so close to retirement, he should think of trying to diddle them.

  ‘If you could bring the ledgers home with you,’ he suggests to his father, ‘I could give you a hand with the checking.’

  His father shakes his head, and he can guess why. When his father refers to the ledgers, he does so in hushed tones, as though they were holy books, as though keeping them were a priestly function. There is more to keeping books, his attitude would seem to suggest, than applying elementary arithmetic to columns of figures.

  ‘I don’t think I can bring the ledgers home,’ his father says. ‘Not on the train. The brothers would never allow it.’

  He can appreciate that. What would become of Acme if his father were mugged and the sacred books stolen?

  ‘Then let me come in to the city at the end of the day, at closing time, and take over from Mrs Noerdien. You and I could work together from five till eight, say.’

  His father is silent.

  ‘I’ll just help with the checking,’ he says. ‘If anything confidential comes up, I promise not to look.’

  By the time he arrives for his first stint, Mrs Noerdien and the counter hands have gone home. He is introduced to the brothers. ‘My son John,’ says his father, ‘who has offered to help with the checking.’

  He shakes their hands: Mr Rodney Silverman, Mr Barrett Silverman. ‘I’m not sure we can afford you on the payroll, John,’ says Mr Rodney. He turns to his brother. ‘Which do you think is more expensive, Barrett, a PhD or a CA? We may have to take out a loan.’

  They all laugh together at the joke. Then they offer him a rate. It is precisely the same rate he earned as a student, sixteen years ago, for copying household data onto cards for the municipal census.

  With his father he settles down in the bookkeepers’ glass cubicle. The task that faces them is simple. They have to go through file after file of invoices, confirming that the figures have been transcribed correctly to the books and to the bank ledger, ticking them off one by one in red pencil, checking the addition at
the foot of the page.

  They set to work and make steady progress. Once every thousand entries they come across an error, a piddling five cents one way or the other. For the rest the books are in exemplary order. As defrocked clergymen make the best proofreaders, so debarred lawyers seem to make good bookkeepers – debarred lawyers assisted if need be by their overeducated, under-employed sons.

  The next day, on his way to Acme, he is caught in a rain-shower. He arrives sodden. The glass of the cubicle is fogged; he enters without knocking. His father is hunched over his desk. There is a second presence in the cubicle, a woman, young, gazelle-eyed, softly curved, in the act of putting on her raincoat.

  He halts in his tracks, transfixed.

  His father rises from his seat. ‘Mrs Noerdien, this is my son John.’

  Mrs Noerdien averts her gaze, does not offer a hand. ‘I’ll go now,’ she says in a low voice, addressing not him but his father.

  An hour later the brothers too take their leave. His father boils the kettle and makes them coffee. Page after page, column after column they press on with the work, until ten o’clock, until his father is blinking with exhaustion.

  The rain has stopped. Down a deserted Riebeeck Street they head for the station: two men, able-bodied more or less, safer at night than a single man, many times safer than a single woman.

  ‘How long has Mrs Noerdien been working for you?’ he asks.

  ‘She came last February.’