The Death of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘Thank you for attending the game,’ he begins. ‘Our children are unused to spectators. By the nature of things they do not have families to cheer them on. And now, no doubt, you would like to know how it comes about that young David will be joining us.’

  ‘In fact, señor Julio,’ he replies, holding himself in check, ‘that is not why I am here. I am here to respond to an accusation that has been levelled against me personally, an accusation in which you must have had a hand. You must know what I am alluding to.’

  Dr Fabricante leans back, folds his hands under his chin. ‘I am sorry it has come to this, señor Simón. But David is not the first child who has come to me for protection, and you are not the first grown man I have had to confront in my role as protector. Go ahead, speak.’

  ‘When you came to the park the other day, you pretended you were there to watch football. But the truth is, you were on the lookout for recruits to this orphanage of yours. You were looking for impressionable children like David who could be sucked into the romance of being an orphan.’

  ‘That is nonsense. Nor is it a romance to be an orphan. Far from it. But proceed.’

  ‘The romance I refer to, which some children find captivating, is that their parents are not their true parents, that their true parents are kings and queens, or gypsies, or circus acrobats. You look for vulnerable children and feed them stories like that. You tell them, if they denounce their parents and run away from home, you will take them in. Why? Why spread such hurtful lies? David has never been abused. He did not even know the word until you came along.’

  ‘You do not have to know the word to suffer the injury,’ says Dr Fabricante. ‘You can die without knowing the name of what killed you. Angina pectoris. Belladonna.’

  He rises. ‘I did not come here to have a debate. I came to tell you you will not take David from us. I will fight you every step of the way, and so will his mother.’

  Dr Fabricante rises too. ‘Señor Simón, you are not the first man to come here and threaten me and you will not be the last. But I have certain obligations laid upon me by society, of which the first is to offer a refuge to abused and neglected children. You say that you will fight to keep David. But—correct me if I am wrong—you are not David’s natural father, nor is your wife his natural mother. That being so, your standing in the eyes of the law may be precarious. I will say no more.’

  After the death, three years ago, of Ana Magdalena, señor Arroyo’s second wife, and the scandal that attended it, the Academy went through hard times. Half the students were withdrawn by their parents; the wages of the staff could not be paid. He, Simón, was among a handful of well-wishers who supported señor Arroyo as he battled to save his ship.

  If the gossip is to be believed that reaches him via Inés and her colleagues at Modas Modernas, the Academy has weathered the storm and has even, in refashioned form as a school of music, begun to prosper. A core of students, largely from country towns, board on the premises and receive all their schooling there. But the majority of the Academy’s students are drawn from the public schools of Estrella, and attend only music classes. Music theory and composition are taught by Arroyo himself; for voice lessons and the various instruments he has brought in specialist teachers. There are still classes in dance, but dance is no longer central to the Academy’s mission.

  For Arroyo’s musicianship he, Simón, has the deepest respect. If Arroyo is little honoured in Estrella, that is because Estrella is a sleepy provincial city with an exiguous cultural life. As for the Arroyan philosophy of music, which invokes the higher mathematics and treats the music made by human hands as at best a faint echo of the music of the spheres, he has never been able to make sense of it. But at least it is a coherent philosophy, and David has suffered no harm by being exposed to it.

  From Dr Fabricante and his orphanage he goes straight to the Academy, to Arroyo’s chambers. Arroyo receives him with his usual courtesy, offers him coffee.

  ‘Juan Sebastián, I will be brief,’ he says. ‘David informs us that he wants to leave home. He has decided he belongs among the world’s orphans—the word huérfano has always appealed to him. He is being encouraged in this romantic nonsense by a certain Dr Julio Fabricante, who calls himself an educator and runs an orphanage on the east side of the city. Do you happen to know the man?’

  ‘I know of him. He is an advocate of practical education, a foe of book learning, which he openly disparages. He runs a school at his orphanage where children learn the rudiments of reading and writing and figuring before being trained as carpenters or plumbers or pastry-chefs—that sort of thing. What else? He is strong on discipline, character-building, team sports. The orphanage has a choir which wins prizes. Fabricante himself has his admirers on the city council. They see him as a coming man, a man of the future. But I have never met him.’

  ‘Well, Dr Fabricante has gained a hold over David by promising him a place in the orphanage’s football team. I come to the point. If David leaves home and moves into Fabricante’s orphanage, he will have to abandon his classes here at the Academy. It is too far to travel back and forth every day; and I don’t think Fabricante would permit it anyway.’

  Arroyo holds up a hand to interrupt him. ‘Before you go on, Simón, let me make a confession. I am well aware of your son’s attraction to orphanhood. In fact he has, in an indirect way, asked me to speak to you about it. He says you are unable or unwilling to understand.’

  ‘I freely confess to the crime of not understanding. There is a great deal about David besides his attraction to orphanhood that is obscure to me. To begin with, it is obscure to me why such a difficult-to-understand child was entrusted to a guardian with such weak powers of understanding. I refer to myself, but let me add at once that Inés is as baffled as I am. David would have fared better had he been left with his natural parents. But he has no natural parents. He has only the two of us, deficient as we are: parents by election.’

  ‘You believe his natural parents would have understood him better?’

  ‘At least they would be of the same substance as he, the same blood. Inés and I are just ordinary folk, out of our depth, relying on the bonds of love when clearly love is not enough.’

  ‘So if you and David were of the same blood you would find it easier to understand why he wants to leave home and live among the orphans on the east side—is that what you say?’

  Is Arroyo mocking him? ‘I am fully aware,’ he replies stiffly, ‘that it is unfair to demand of a child that he return his parents’ love. I am aware too that as he grows up a child may begin to find the embrace of the family suffocating. But David is ten years old. Ten years is an uncommonly early age to want to leave home. Early and vulnerable too. I do not like Dr Fabricante. I do not trust him. He has whispered against me, to David, in a way that I cannot bring myself to repeat. I do not believe he is the right person to direct the moral development of a child. Nor do I believe the children of the orphanage would be good companions for David. I have seen how they play football. They are bullies. They win their games by intimidating their opponents. The younger ones ape the older ones and Dr Fabricante does nothing to check them.’

  ‘So you do not trust Dr Fabricante and you fear his orphans will turn David into a bully and a savage. But consider, what if the reverse were to take place? What if David were to tame Fabricante’s savages, turning them into model citizens, gentle, well-behaved, obedient?’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, Juan Sebastián. There are children of fifteen or sixteen at the orphanage, boys and girls—perhaps even older. They are not going to take direction from a ten-year-old. They will misuse him. They will corrupt him.’

  ‘Well, you know this orphanage better than I do—I have never been there. I believe I have reached the limit of my usefulness, Simón. The best advice I can offer is that you sit down with David and discuss the situation in which you find yourselves, not omitting your own position, the position of an abandoned father, full of grief and confusion and perh
aps anger too.’

  He rises, but Arroyo stops him. ‘Simón, let me say one last word. Your son has a sense of duty, of obligation, that is unusual in a ten-year-old. It is part of what makes him exceptional. His reason for wanting to live in the orphanage is not that he finds the idea of being an orphan romantic. You are wrong in that respect. For whatever reason, perhaps no reason at all, he feels a certain duty toward Fabricante’s orphans, toward orphans in general, the world’s orphans. So at least he tells me, and I believe him.’

  ‘That is what he tells you. Why does he not tell it to me?’

  ‘Because, rightly or wrongly, he feels you will not understand. Will not sympathize.’

  CHAPTER 6

  SUPPERTIME ARRIVES but there is no sign of David. He, Simón, is about to go in search of the lost sheep when the lost sheep turns up. His shoes are caked with mud, there is mud on his clothes, his shirt is torn.

  ‘What happened to you?’ demands Inés. ‘We were sick with worry.’

  ‘My bicycle broke,’ says the boy. ‘I had to walk.’

  ‘Well, have a bath and put on your pyjamas while I warm your food in the oven.’

  Over supper they try to elicit more. But the boy wolfs down his food, refusing to speak, then retreats to his room and bangs the door shut.

  ‘What has put him in such a bad temper?’ he murmurs to Inés.

  She shrugs.

  When morning comes he visits the shed to inspect the broken bicycle, but there is no bicycle. He knocks at Inés’s door. ‘David’s bicycle is gone,’ he says.

  ‘His clothes smell of cigarette smoke,’ says Inés. ‘Ten years old and he is smoking. I do not like it at all. I have to leave now. When he wakes up, I want you to have a talk to him.’

  Gingerly he opens the door to the boy’s room. The boy is sprawled on his bed in a dead sleep. There are flecks of mud in his hair, earth under his fingernails. He grips his shoulder, shakes him gently. ‘Time to get up,’ he whispers. The boy gives a groan and turns away.

  He sniffs the discarded clothes in the bathroom. Inés is right: they reek of smoke.

  It is past ten o’clock when the boy emerges, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Can you explain what happened last night?’ he, Simón, says. ‘Start by explaining where your bicycle is.’

  ‘The wheel got bent, so I couldn’t ride it.’

  ‘Where is the bicycle?’

  ‘At the orphanage.’

  Thus, a step at a time, a story takes shape. David had ridden to the orphanage to play football. At the orphanage one of the older boys had commandeered his bicycle and ridden it into a ditch, smashing the front wheel. David had abandoned the bicycle and walked home in the dark.

  ‘You went to play football and someone smashed your bike and you walked home. Is that the whole story? Have you told me everything? David, you have never lied to us. Please do not start now. You were smoking. We could smell it on your clothes, Inés and I.’

  More of the story emerges. After football the children from the orphanage had made a fire and grilled frogs and fishes that they caught in the river. The older ones, both boys and girls, were smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. He, David, had not smoked or drunk. He did not like wine.

  ‘Do you think it is a good idea for a child of ten to be associating with boys and girls who are much older, who smoke and drink and do goodness knows what else?’

  ‘What else do they do?’

  ‘Never mind. Are your friends here at the apartments not good enough for you? Why do you need to go to the orphanage?’ Up to this point David has responded to his questioning docilely enough. But now he bridles. ‘You hate orphans! You think they are bad! You want me to be who you think I am, you don’t want me to be who I think I am.’

  ‘And who do you think you are?’

  ‘I am who I am!’

  ‘You are who you are until a bigger boy takes away your bicycle from you. Then you are just a helpless ten-year-old. I never said the children from the orphanage were bad. There is no such thing as a bad child. Children are all equal, more or less. Except in age. A ten-year-old boy is not equal to a sixteen-year-old boy from an orphanage where rules are so lax that children smoke and drink with impunity.’

  ‘What is impunity?’

  ‘Without being punished. Without being punished by Dr Julio.’

  ‘You hate Dr Julio.’

  ‘I do not hate Dr Julio but I do not like him either. I find him arrogant and vain. Nor do I believe he is a good educator. I think he has motives of his own for wanting you in his orphanage, motives that are not visible to you because you have too little experience of the world.’

  ‘You didn’t like Dmitri and now you don’t like Dr Julio! You don’t like anybody who has a big heart!’

  Dmitri! He thought the boy had forgotten Dmitri, the monster who strangled señora Arroyo, was declared insane, and has been locked up ever since.

  ‘Dmitri did not have a big heart, David—far from it. Dmitri was a bad person through and through, with the blackest of hearts. As for Dr Julio, your reasons for wanting to follow him are a complete mystery to me.’

  ‘I don’t have reasons and I am not following Dr Julio. I don’t have reasons for anything. You are the one who has reasons.’

  He gets up from the table. They have been through this argument too often before, he and the boy. He is sick of it. ‘Your mother and I have decided you should stop visiting Dr Fabricante’s orphanage. That is the end of the story.’

  When Inés comes home he delivers his report. ‘I had a talk to David. He says he was with some older children who were smoking. He did not smoke himself. I believe him. But I have told him there will be no more visits to the orphanage.’

  Inés shakes her head distractedly. ‘He should have gone to a normal school from the beginning. Then none of this orphanage business would have happened.’

  The normal school that David should have gone to: that is another argument he has been through countless times. He and Inés are into their fifth year together, long enough to have grown bored with each other. Inés is not the kind of woman he would have chosen if he had been free to choose, just as he is not the kind of man she would have chosen if she were interested in men. But she is the boy’s mother, in a sense, as he is the boy’s father, in a sense, therefore in a sense they cannot part.

  As for the boy, he is young and restless. It is hardly surprising that he should be impatient with the routine of life in the apartment block, hardly surprising that he should be ready to abandon home, abandon his parents, and plunge into the exotic new life of an orphan.

  How should Inés and he respond: ban all contact with the orphanage or set the boy loose to fly off and have his adventure, in the hope that he will sooner or later return to the nest disillusioned? His inclination is toward the latter course; but can Inés be persuaded to let her son go?

  He is woken by a steady knocking at the door. It is six-thirty; the sun is not yet up.

  It is the man in blue overalls, the driver from the orphanage. ‘Good morning, I have come to pick up the lad.’

  ‘David? You have come to pick up David?’

  There is a clatter on the stairway and David himself appears, his satchel on his back, dragging behind him one of Inés’s big shopping bags.

  ‘What is going on?’ says he, Simón.

  ‘I am going to the orphanage.’

  Now Inés appears in her dressing-gown, her hair tousled. ‘Why is this man here?’ she says.

  ‘I am going to the orphanage,’ the boy repeats.

  ‘You are doing no such thing!’

  She tries to take the bag from his hands, but he draws away. ‘Leave me alone, don’t touch me!’ he cries. ‘You are not my mother!’

  He, Simón, addresses the driver. ‘You should leave. There has been a misunderstanding. David will not be going to the orphanage.’

  ‘I will go!’ cries the boy. ‘You are not my father! You can’t tell me what to do!’

  �
�Leave!’ he repeats to the driver. ‘We will settle this by ourselves.’

  With a shrug the driver leaves.

  ‘Now let us go upstairs and talk this out calmly,’ he says.

  With a stony face the boy yields up the bag. The three of them climb the stairs to Inés’s apartment, where he withdraws to his room and slams the door shut.

  Inés tips out the bag on the floor: clothing, shoes, Don Quixote, two packets of biscuits, a can of peaches and a can-opener.

  ‘What shall we do?’ he says. ‘We can’t keep him prisoner.’

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ says Inés.

  ‘I am on your side. We are together in this.’

  ‘Then find a solution.’

  We can’t keep him prisoner. Nevertheless, when Inés goes off to work he settles down on the sofa, keeping watch.

  He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the door to the boy’s room is open and the boy is gone.

  He telephones Inés. ‘I fell asleep and David took flight,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You let him run off and now you are sorry? You are always sorry. A sorry man. Being sorry is not good enough, Simón. Go and fetch him back.’

  ‘I am not going to do that, Inés. It will be futile. His mind is made up. Let him have taste of what life is like in an orphanage. When he has learned his lesson, he will come back.’

  There is a long silence.

  ‘This is all your fault, from beginning to end,’ says Inés at last. ‘You are the one who introduced this man Fabricante into our home. You are the one who is too weak to stand up to the child, who always gives in and lets him have his way. If you refuse to fetch him, if you make me do it, everything is finished between the two of us. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand what you are saying. I understand that you are upset. But I do not agree with you about David. I think, in this case, we should let him go.’