Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  At the café she orders a drink in Italian – the right language, she says to herself, for such an opera-buffa town – and pays for it with notes she finds in her purse, notes she has no recollection of acquiring. In fact, they look suspiciously like play money: on the one side the image of a bearded nineteenth-century worthy, on the other the denomination, 5, 10, 25, 100, in shades of green and cerise. Five what? Ten what? Yet the waiter accepts the notes: they must in some sense be good.

  Whatever the money is, she does not have much of it: four hundred units. A drink costs five, with tip. What happens when one runs out of money? Is there a public administration on whose charity one can throw oneself?

  She raises the question with the guardian of the gate. ‘If you keep rejecting my statements I’ll have to take up residence with you in your lodge,’ she says. ‘I can’t afford hotel rates.’

  It is a joke, she just means to shake up this rather dour fellow.

  ‘For long-term petitioners,’ he replies, ‘there is a dormitory. With kitchen and ablution facilities. All needs have been foreseen.’

  ‘Kitchen or soup kitchen?’ she asks. He does not react. Evidently they are not used to being joked with in this place.

  The dormitory is a windowless room, long and low. A single bare bulb lights the passageway. On either side are bunks in two tiers, knocked together out of tired-looking wood and painted in the dark rust colour she associates with rolling stock. In fact, looking more closely, she can see stencilled characters: 100377/3 CJG, 282220/0 CXX . . . Most of the bunks have palliasses on them: straw in ticking sacks that in the close heat give off an odour of grease and old sweat.

  She could be in any of the gulags, she thinks. She could be in any of the camps of the Third Reich. The whole thing put together from clichés, with not a speck of originality.

  ‘What is this place?’ she asks the woman who has let her in.

  She need not have asked. Before it comes, she knows what the answer will be. ‘It is where you wait.’

  The woman – she hesitates to call her the Kapo just yet – is a cliché herself: a heavy-set peasant wearing a shapeless grey smock, a kerchief, sandals with blue woollen socks. Yet her gaze is even, intelligent. She has a teasing feeling she has seen the woman before, or her double, or a photograph of her.

  ‘May I choose my own bunk?’ she says. ‘Or has that too been predetermined on my behalf?’

  ‘Choose,’ says the woman. Her face is inscrutable.

  With a sigh she chooses, lifts the suitcase, unzips it.

  Even in this town time passes. The day arrives, her day. She finds herself before a high bench, in an empty room. On the bench are nine microphones in a row. On the wall behind it, an emblem in plaster relief: two shields, two crossed spears, and what looks like an emu but is probably meant to be a nobler bird, bearing a laurel wreath in its beak.

  A man she thinks of as a bailiff brings her a chair and indicates she may sit. She sits down, waits. The windows are all closed, the room is stuffy. She gestures to the bailiff, makes a motion of drinking. He pretends not to notice.

  A door opens, and in file the judges, her judges, judges of her. Under the black robes she half expects them to be creatures out of Grandville: crocodile, ass, raven, deathwatch beetle. But no, they are of her kind, her phylum. Even their faces are human. Male, all of them; male and elderly.

  She does not need the bailiff’s prompting (he has come up behind her now) to stand. A performance will be required of her; she hopes she can pick up the cues.

  The judge in the middle gives her a little nod; she nods back.

  ‘You are . . . ?’ he says.

  ‘Elizabeth Costello.’

  ‘Yes. The applicant.’

  ‘Or the supplicant, if that improves my chances.’

  ‘And this is your first hearing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you want – ?’

  ‘I want to pass the gate. To pass through. To get on with what comes next.’

  ‘Yes. As you must have learned by now, there is the question of belief. You have a statement to make to us?’

  ‘I have a statement, revised, heavily revised, revised many times. Revised to the limit of my powers, I venture to say. I don’t believe I have it in me to revise it further. You have a copy, I believe.’

  ‘We do. Revised to the limit, you say. Some of us would say there is always one revision more to do. Let us see. Will you read out your statement, please.’

  She reads.

  ‘I am a writer. You may think I should say instead, I was a writer. But I am or was a writer because of who I am or was. I have not ceased to be what I am. As yet. Or so it feels to me.

  ‘I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.

  ‘Secretary of the invisible: not my own phrase, I hasten to say. I borrow it from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz, a poet, perhaps known to you, to whom it was dictated years ago.’

  She pauses. This is where she expects them to interrupt. Dictated by whom? she expects them to ask. And she has her answer ready: By powers beyond us. But there is no interruption, no question. Instead their spokesman wags his pencil at her. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs,’ she reads. ‘I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call.’

  Again she expects an interruption: Whose call? But there are going to be no questions, it would seem.

  ‘In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.’

  ‘Without beliefs we are not human.’ The voice comes from the leftmost of them, the one she has privately labelled Grimalkin, a wizened little fellow so short that his chin barely clears the bench. In fact, about each of them there is some troublingly comic feature. Excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist’s idea of a bench of judges.

  ‘Without beliefs we are not human,’ he repeats. ‘What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?’

  She sighs. ‘Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.’

  ‘Negative capability,’ says the little man. ‘Is negative capability what you have in mind, what you claim to possess?’

  ‘Yes, if you like. To put it in another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty.’

  The little man purses his lips. His neighbour turns and gives him a glance (she can swear she hears the rustle of feathers). ‘And what effect do you think it has, this lack of belief, on your humanity?’ the little man asks.

  ‘On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect.’

  ‘Your own cynicism, you mean to say.’

  Cynicism. Not a word she likes, but on this occasion she is prepared to entertain it. With luck it will be the last occasion. With luck she will not have to subject herself again to self-defence and the pomposities that go with it.

  ‘About myself, yes, I may well be cynical, in a technical sense. I cannot afford to take myself too seriously, or my motives. But as regards other people, as regards humankind or humanity, no, I do not believe I am cy
nical at all.’

  ‘You are not an unbeliever then,’ says the man in the middle.

  ‘No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too.’

  There is a silence. ‘Go on,’ says the man. ‘Proceed with your statement.’

  ‘That is the end of it. There is nothing that has not been covered. I rest my case.’

  ‘Your case is that you are a secretary. Of the invisible.’

  ‘And that I cannot afford to believe.’

  ‘For professional reasons.’

  ‘For professional reasons.’

  ‘And what if the invisible does not regard you as its secretary? What if your appointment was long ago discontinued, and the letter did not reach you? What if you were never even appointed? Have you considered that possibility.’

  ‘I consider it every day. I am forced to consider it. If I am not what I say I am, then I am a sham. If that is your considered verdict, that I am a sham secretary, then I can only bow my head and accept it. I presume you have taken into account my record, a lifetime’s record. In fairness to me you cannot ignore that record.’

  ‘What about children?’

  The voice is cracked and wheezy. At first she cannot make out from which of them it comes. Is it Number Eight, the one with the pudgy jowls and the high colour?

  ‘Children? I don’t understand.’

  ‘And what of the Tasmanians?’ he continues. ‘What of the fate of the Tasmanians?’

  The Tasmanians? Has something been going on in Tasmania, in the interim, that she has not heard about?

  ‘I have no special opinions about Tasmanians,’ she replies cautiously. ‘I have always found them perfectly decent people.’

  He waves impatiently. ‘I mean the old Tasmanians, the ones who were exterminated. Do you have special opinions about them?’

  ‘Do you mean, have their voices come to me? No, they have not, not yet. I probably do not qualify, in their eyes. They would probably want to use a secretary of their own, as they are surely entitled to do.’

  She can hear the irritation in her voice. What is she doing, explaining herself to a gaggle of old men who might as well be small-town Italians, or small-town Austro-Hungarians, yet who somehow sit in judgement on her? Why does she put up with it? What do they know about Tasmania?

  ‘I said nothing about voices,’ says the man. ‘I asked you about your thoughts.’

  Her thoughts on Tasmania? If she is puzzled, the rest of the panel is puzzled too, for her questioner has to turn to them to explain. ‘Atrocities take place,’ he says. ‘Violations of innocent children. The extermination of whole peoples. What does she think about such matters? Does she have no beliefs to guide her?’

  The extermination of the old Tasmanians by her countrymen, her ancestors. Is that, finally, what lies behind this hearing, this trial: the question of historical guilt?

  She takes a breath. ‘There are matters about which one talks and matters about which it is appropriate to keep one’s peace, even before a tribunal, even before the ultimate tribunal, if that is what you are. I know what you are referring to, and I reply only that if from what I have said before you today you conclude that I am oblivious of such matters, you are mistaken, utterly mistaken. Let me add, for your edification: beliefs are not the only ethical supports we have. We can rely on our hearts as well. That is all. I have nothing more to say.’

  Contempt of court. She is running close to contempt of court. It is something about herself she has never liked, this tendency to flare up.

  ‘But as a writer? You present yourself today not in your own person but as a special case, a special destiny, a writer who has written not just entertainments but books exploring the complexities of human conduct. In those books you make one judgement upon another, it must be so. What guides you in these judgements? Do you persist in saying it is all just a matter of heart? Have you no beliefs as a writer? If a writer is just a human being with a human heart, what is special about your case?’

  Not a fool. Not a pig in satin robes, porcus magistralis, out of Grandville. Not the Mad Hatter’s tea party. For the first time this day she feels tested. Very well: let her see what she can come up with.

  ‘The aboriginal people of Tasmania are today counted among the invisible, the invisible whose secretary I am, one of many such. Every morning I seat myself at my desk and ready myself for the summons of the day. That is a secretary’s way of life, and mine. When the old Tasmanians summon me, if they choose to summon me, I will be ready and I will write, to the best of my ability.

  ‘Similarly with children, since you mention violated children. I have yet to be summoned by a child, but again I am ready.

  ‘A word of caution to you, however. I am open to all voices, not just the voices of the murdered and violated.’ She tries to keep her own voice even at this point, tries to hit no note that might be called forensic. ‘If it is their murderers and violators who choose to summon me instead, to use me and speak through me, I will not close my ears to them, I will not judge them.’

  ‘You will speak for murderers?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You do not judge between the murderer and his victim? Is that what it is to be a secretary: to write down whatever you are told? To be bankrupt of conscience?’

  She is cornered, she knows. But what does it matter, being cornered, if it brings what feels more and more like a contest of rhetoric closer to its end! ‘Do you think the guilty do not suffer too?’ she says. ‘Do you think they do not call out from their flames? Do not forget me! – that is what they cry. What kind of conscience is it that will disregard a cry of such moral agony?’

  ‘And these voices that summon you,’ says the pudgy man: ‘you do not ask where they come from?’

  ‘No. Not as long as they speak the truth.’

  ‘And you – you, consulting only your heart, are judge of that truth?’

  She nods impatiently. Like the interrogation of Joan of Arc, she thinks. How do you know where your voices come from? She cannot stand the literariness of it all. Have they not the wit to come up with something new?

  A silence has fallen. ‘Go on,’ the man says encouragingly.

  ‘That is all,’ she says. ‘You asked, I answered.’

  ‘Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?’

  Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists – whatever exists means – should His massive, monarchical slumber be disturbed from below by a clamour of believes and don’t believes, like a plebiscite?

  ‘That is too intimate,’ she says. ‘I have nothing to say.’

  ‘There are only ourselves here. You are free to speak your heart.’

  ‘You misunderstand. I mean, I suspect that God would not look kindly on such presumption – presumption to intimacy. I prefer to let God be. As I hope He will let me be.’

  There is silence. She has a headache. Too many heady abstractions, she thinks to herself: a warning from nature.

  The chairman glances around. ‘Further questions?’ he asks.

  There are none.

  He turns to her. ‘You will hear from us. In due course. Through established channels.’

  She is back in the dormitory, lying on her bunk. She would prefer to be sitting, but the bunks are built with raised edges like trays, one cannot sit.

  She hates this hot, airless room that has been allotted as her home. She hates the smell, revolts at the touch of the greasy mattress. And the hours here seem to be longer than the hours she is used to, particularly in the middle of the day. How long since she arrived in this place? She has lost track of time. It feels like weeks, even months.

  There is a band that emerges on to the square in the afternoons once the worst
of the heat has passed. From the ornate bandstand the musicians, in starched white uniforms with peaked caps and lots of gold braid, play Souza marches, Strauss waltzes, popular songs: ‘Il pipistrello’, ‘Sorrento’. The conductor wears the neat pencil moustache of a small-town Lothario; after each piece he smiles and bows to the applause, while the fat tuba player doffs his cap and wipes his forehead with a scarlet handkerchief.

  Exactly, she thinks to herself, what one would expect in an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912. Out of a book, just as the bunkhouse with its straw mattresses and forty-watt bulb is out of a book, and the whole courtroom business too, down to the dozy bailiff. Is it all being mounted for her sake, because she is a writer? Is it someone’s idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés? Whatever the case, she ought to be out on the square, not here in the bunkhouse. She could be sitting at one of the tables in the shade amid the murmurings of lovers, with a cold drink before her, waiting for the first touch of the breeze on her cheek. A commonplace among commonplaces, no doubt, but what does that matter any longer? What does it matter if the happiness of the young couples on the square is a feigned happiness, the boredom of the sentry a feigned boredom, the false notes that the cornet player hits in the upper register feigned false notes? That is what life has been since she arrived in this place: an elaborate set of dovetailing commonplaces, including the rattletrap bus with the labouring engine and the suitcases strapped on the roof, including the gate itself with its huge bossed nails. Why not go out and play her part, the part of the traveller cast up in a town she is doomed never to leave?

  Yet even as she skulks in the bunkhouse, who is to say she is playing no part? Why should she think that she alone has it in her power to hold herself back from the play? And what would true stubbornness, true grit, consist in anyway but going through with the performance, no matter what? Let the band strike up a dance tune, let the couples bow to each other and step on to the floor, and there, among the dancers, let her be, Elizabeth Costello, the old trouper, in her unsuitable dress, circling in her stiff yet not graceless way. And if that is a cliché too – being a professional, playing one’s part – then let it be a cliché. What entitles her to shudder at clichés when everyone else seems to embrace them, live by them?