The Death of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘No, El Lobo, until you change your nature you will not be forgiven. Now I will pronounce sentence. You are sentenced to return the puppy you devoured to life.’

  ‘Boo-hoo!’ says the boy in black, ostentatiously wiping away tears. ‘Just as it is not in my power to change my nature, so it is not in my power to return the puppy to life, much as I would like to. The puppy in question has been dismembered and chewed up and swallowed down and digested. He is no more. There is no puppy. What used to be a puppy has become part of me. What you demand is impossible to perform.’

  ‘You are wrong, El Lobo! To the king of the world all things are possible!’ He rises, bangs his staff three times. ‘I decree that the puppy shall be returned to life!’

  Alarmed, cowed, the boy in black crouches down in his box so that only his lurid green hair is visible. There are loud sounds of vomiting, one spasm after another. From the back of the box a little figure pops out, whom he, Simón, recognizes at once as El Perrito from the apartments. Bursting with glee, El Perrito skips around the stage while the audience laughs and cheers.

  Holding hands, the three actors take a bow: El Perrito, the boy with the green wig, and, wearing the letter D, Joaquín.

  The theatrics are over. The clutter is cleared from the stage. On the organ Arroyo improvises a gentle melody. The audience settles. The two Arroyo boys emerge in their tights and dancing slippers. The younger commences the familiar dance of Three. Then as the music grows more complex the older boy launches himself into the dance of Five. Obeying two different rhythms, they circle each other.

  Above the rhythms of Three and Five there emerges on the organ a rhythm that crosses both. At first he, Simón, cannot identify it. Too much is going on in this music, he thinks to himself, too much for the mind to follow. In Inés, in the people around him, he can sense the same confusion.

  The two Arroyo boys continue their elegant sweeps, circling each other but extending their radius until the centre of the stage is left bare. The music begins to simplify too. First the rhythm of Five drops out, then the rhythm of Three. Only Seven is left. So it continues for a while. The audience relaxes. The music grows softer, ceases. The two boys are still, their heads bowed. The lights dim, the stage is dark, the dance is over.

  The show comes to an end with a performance by Arroyo himself on the violin. It is not a success. The audience is restive, there is still too much excitement in the air, and the music itself, quiet, ruminative, is not easy to follow: like a restless bird, it seems unable to make up its mind where to settle. There is applause when it comes to an end, but in the applause he, Simón, detects more than a little relief.

  Parents come up to Inés and him. ‘Such a beautiful show!… So touching!…Such a loss!…We feel with you…What a sweet child he was!…And the Arroyo boys were so good, so talented!…’

  Moved by the kind words, the kind gestures, he feels an urge to ascend the stage and pour out his heart. Dear parents, dear children, dear señor Arroyo, he wants to say, this day has been unforgettable. David’s mother and I carry away imperishable memories of the loving kindness with which our son was nurtured within these walls. Long may the Academy prosper! But he bethinks himself, holds his tongue, waits for the audience to disperse.

  Arroyo stands at the door shaking hands, gravely accepting congratulations. He and Inés are last in the line.

  ‘Thank you, Juan Sebastián,’ says Inés, giving him her hand. ‘You have made us very proud.’ There is a warmth in her voice that surprises him, Simón. ‘Thank you most of all for the music.’

  ‘You approved of the music?’ says Juan Sebastián.

  ‘Yes. I feared there would be trumpets. I would not have liked trumpets.’

  ‘In my stumbling way, señora, I try to reveal what has been hidden. In such music there is no place for trumpets or drums.’

  Arroyo’s words puzzle him, but Inés seems to understand. ‘Goodnight, Juan Sebastián,’ she says.

  In an old-fashioned, courtly way, Arroyo bows and kisses her hand.

  ‘What did Juan Sebastián mean?’ he asks Inés in the car. ‘What is the hidden that he is trying to reveal?’

  But Inés only smiles and shakes her head.

  CHAPTER 23

  THERE IS the unsettled matter of the earthly remains.

  He calls the orphanage, speaks to Fabricante’s secretary. ‘David’s mother and I would like to pay a visit to the place where David is interred,’ he says. ‘Can you tell us where to go?’

  ‘Will it be just the two of you?’

  ‘Just the two of us.’

  ‘Meet me outside the office and I will conduct you,’ she says. ‘Come in the morning while the children are in class.’

  He and Inés—Inés wearing severe black—duly arrive the next morning. The secretary leads them along a winding path through the rose garden to where three modest bronze plaques are set in the brick wall of the assembly hall. ‘David’s is the one on the right,’ she says. ‘The most recent.’

  He steps closer and reads the plaque. David, it says. Recordado con afecto. He reads the other two. Tomás. Recordado con afecto. Emiliano. Recordado con afecto.

  ‘Is that all?’ he says. ‘Who are Tomás and Emiliano?’

  ‘Brothers who died in an accident some years ago. The ashes are in a little compartment behind each plaque.’

  ‘And Recordado con afecto, remembered with affection? Is that all your orphanage can manage? No mention of love? Of undying memory? No looking forward to reunion on the farther shore?’ He turns to Inés in her stiff black dress and unappealing black hat. ‘What do you think? Is affection enough for our child?’

  Inés shakes her head.

  ‘David’s mother and I are at one,’ he says. ‘We do not believe afecto is enough. It may have been enough for Tomás and Emiliano, I don’t know one way or the other, but for David it is not enough, far from enough. Either you change it or I will have it changed.’

  ‘We are a public institution,’ says the secretary. ‘An institution for the living, not the dead.’

  ‘And the flowers?’ He points to a posy of wildflowers against the wall beneath the three plaques. ‘Are the flowers institutional too?’

  ‘I have no idea who left the flowers,’ says the secretary. ‘Probably one of the children.’

  ‘At least there is someone here who has a heart,’ he says.

  To Alyosha he recounts their visit to the orphanage. ‘We were not expecting a grand monument. But it was Dr Fabricante and his people who laid claim to the body. They hovered overhead like vultures and descended on him while we were still numb with grief. Yet once they had him in their claws, they could not have treated him more indifferently, with less afecto.’

  ‘You must make allowance for the politics of the situation,’ says Alyosha. ‘We at the Academy may have our problems, but it is far worse for Dr Fabricante with all those enthusiasts he has to control. You must have heard what they have been up to in the city.’ ‘No. What have they been up to in the city?’

  ‘Bands of them have been racing from shop to shop, overturning displays, haranguing shopkeepers for charging too much. The just price! That is their cry. In one of the pet shops they broke open the cages and set the animals loose—dogs, cats, rabbits, snakes, tortoises. Set the birds loose too. Left only the goldfish. The police had to be called in. All in the cause of the just price, all in the name of David. Some of them claim they have had mystic visions, visions in which David appeared to them and told them his bidding. He has left a huge mark behind. None of which surprises me. You know how David was.’

  ‘I have had no word of this. There is nothing about it in the newspaper. Why do you say David left a mark behind?’

  ‘Look at him through their eyes, Simón, through the eyes of children who have lived in an institution all their lives, following an institutional regime, with hardly any access to the wider world. Suddenly in their midst arrives a child with strange ideas and fantastic stories, a child who has neve
r been schooled, never been tamed, who is scared of no one, certainly not his teachers, who is as beautiful as a girl yet has a flair for football—who arrives in their midst like an apparition, then before they can get used to him falls prey to a mysterious illness and is whisked away, never to set foot in the orphanage again. No wonder they swallow Dmitri’s story that he was killed by the men in white coats. No wonder they have turned him into a martyr and a legend.’

  ‘Killed by the doctors? The doctors at the hospital? Is that Dmitri’s story? Why would the doctors have wanted to kill David? They aren’t bad people. They are simply incompetent.’

  ‘Not according to Dmitri. According to Dmitri they made up a story about a train that was due to arrive at any minute bringing new blood to save him, then used that story as a cover for sucking the blood out of his body until he wasted away and died.’

  ‘I am dumbfounded. Dmitri is now accusing the doctors of being vampires?’

  ‘No, no, nothing so old-fashioned! The story he puts out is that they drew David’s blood into phials which they have stored away in some secret place to use in their nefarious researches.’

  ‘And despite being a psychiatric inmate Dmitri manages to propagate this fantastic nonsense across the city?’

  ‘I don’t know how the story is spread, but the children from the orphanage certainly got it from him, and from the orphanage it has fanned out as if with a life of its own. I come back to con afecto and the plaque you saw on the wall. You have to appreciate Dr Fabricante’s position. If he goes too far in encouraging the enthusiasts, he runs the risk of having his orphanage turned into a shrine and a breeding ground for all kinds of superstition.’

  ‘When you look at what has developed, Alyosha, don’t you regret that the Academy failed to lay claim to David, leaving it to Las Manos to take him over? Surely David was more a product of your Academy than he ever was of Las Manos.’

  ‘Yes and no. It is a pity, I agree, that Las Manos has taken ownership of him. But neither Juan Sebastián nor I nor any of the other teachers saw David as a product of the Academy. That would have been laughable. David taught us far more than we taught him. We were his students, all of us, myself included. Do you remember what Juan Sebastián said at the memorial, before we were interrupted, when he described the effect David had on him? He spoke far better than I ever could. It all came down to dance, he said. Somehow or other David translated anything and everything into dance. Dance became the master key or master language, except that it was not a language in the normal sense, with a grammar and a vocabulary and so forth that you could learn out of a book. You could learn only by following. When David danced he was somewhere else, and if you were able to follow him you would be transported to that place too—not always, but now and again, definitely. But I don’t need to tell you, you know all this. If I sound incoherent, I am sorry. You should speak to Juan Sebastián, as I said.’

  ‘You are not incoherent at all, my dear Alyosha. On the contrary, you are most eloquent. After the concert last week Juan Sebastián said something that puzzled me. He said that in his music he tried to reveal the hidden. What do you think he meant?’

  ‘You mean in the music he played that day? I have no idea. Ask him. Perhaps he meant that David was one of those people we think are going to have a huge impact on the world but then don’t because their lives are cut short. Their lives are cut short so they remain hidden from view. No one writes books about them.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t think that was the kind of hiddenness Juan Sebastián intended. Never mind. Let me get back to the matter I raised the other day, the matter of the message. David spoke of a certain message that he bore with him but could not deliver. During his time in the hospital, as I told you, he spoke quite obsessively of it, to me and to other people too. If what you say is true, if he was able to say all that he wanted through the medium of dance, why could he not have delivered this message of his in the medium of dance?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Simón. I am not the right person for such high-flown questions. Maybe it is not in the power of dance to deliver messages. Maybe dance and messages belong to different realms. I don’t know. But it always struck me as odd that the disease that killed him began by crippling him. Odd or sinister. As if the disease had a mind of its own. As if it wanted to stop him from dancing. What do you think?’

  He ignores the question. ‘As you are aware, Dmitri now claims to be in sole possession of the message. Despite the obstructions of the men in white coats, he says, David succeeded in passing on his message to him—to him and him alone. Have you no inkling of what the message may be? Do the children at the Academy have nothing to say about it?’

  ‘Not that I have heard. What they do say, what they seem to accept without question, is that Dmitri was David’s most faithful follower. That he was by David’s side throughout his last days. That he would have saved David if he could—would have stolen him out of the hospital to some place of safety—but the men in white turned out to be too many and too powerful.’

  ‘Dmitri’s associate at the hospital, señora Devito—what do the children say about her?’

  ‘Nothing. All their stories are about David and Dmitri. Dmitri has of course long been part of the folklore of the Academy. No one will go down into the basement at night for fear of being grabbed and eaten by Dmitri el Coco, Dmitri the bogeyman with the green hair.’

  ‘Ah, is that who it was, the figure at the concert: Dmitri el Coco! How I wish I had never set eyes on the man!’

  ‘If it had not been Dmitri it would have been someone like him,’ says Alyosha. ‘Such people abound, believe me.’

  CHAPTER 24

  A LETTER arrives from the selfsame Dmitri.

  Simón,

  I would have preferred to speak to you face to face, man to man, but it is not easy for me to come and go like a normal person, not until consensus is reached that I have paid for my sins, earned my pardon, etcetera. Therefore I write.

  Let us get it out in the open: you have never liked me and I have never liked you. I remember clearly the day we first met. You did not hide your feelings. I was not your type, you wanted nothing to do with me. Yet here we are, years later, our fates as entangled as ever, your fate and mine.

  While David was alive I respected his family setup. If the story you put out in public was that the three of you were a happy family, father, mother and dearly beloved son, who was I to sow doubts?

  But you know the truth. The truth is, you were never a happy family, never a family at all. The truth is, young David was nobody’s son, but an orphan whom for reasons of your own you took under your wing and ringed with a fence of thorns so that he could not escape and fly off.

  Recently I had a chat with Dr Julio Fabricante, who runs the orphanage where David took refuge from you and Inés. Dr Julio is a busy man in his way, and I am equally busy in my way, so it was not easy for the two of us to get together. Nonetheless, we found time to meet and discuss the future of David.

  The future of David? you may ask. What future does David have, who is dead?

  Here we come to a halt before the question of life and death, death and life. What does it mean, philosophically speaking, at the highest or deepest level, to be dead?

  You are a bit of a philosopher in your way, so you will appreciate the force of the question. And I too have become a bit of a philosopher, under pressure of confinement. Confinement, I always say, is the sister of reflection, or half-sister. During my confinement I have thought a lot about the past—about Ana Magdalena in particular, and what I did to her. Yes, what I, Dmitri, did to her. They keep pushing me, these doctors, to believe that I was not myself when I did it. ‘You are not a bad fellow at heart, Dmitri,’ they tell me, ‘not bad through and through. No, it was this or that that made you do it—a seizure, a fit, maybe even old-fashioned demonic possession of a transient kind. But be of good cheer, we will put you right. We are going to give you pills that will fix you for good. Take one of our pills l
ast thing at night and another first thing in the morning, and behave yourself, and in no time you will be yourself again.’

  Such simpletons, Simón, such simpletons! Take a pill and bow a contrite head and all will go back to being as it was before! What do they understand of the human heart? That little boy knew better. Go away, Dmitri! he said. I don’t forgive you! When the doctors were burying me in pills and kindly advice, it was his remembered word that saved me: I don’t forgive you! How else would I have survived their care and come out at this end untouched?

  The remains of the boy are now bricked up at the orphanage in a wall looking out on a rose garden—a most peaceful setting, Dr Julio assures me. I am not in favour of the fiery furnace myself, but Dr Julio says cremation has always been the policy at his institution, and who am I to question policy? Had I been consulted, I would have voted for burial of the entire physical remains, minus nothing, in an old-fashioned grave. Visiting a hole in a wall, as I told Dr Julio, is never quite the same thing as visiting a proper grave in a proper graveyard, where one can picture the deceased at rest beneath his blanket of earth with a smile on his lips, waiting for the next life to announce itself.

  Ashes are so insubstantial compared with a real body, don’t you think? And how can you be sure anyway that the ashes that arrive at your address in a modest vase from the crematorium are the ashes of the deceased? But, as I say, who am I to give orders?

  I return to the future of David. David was a very special youngster who happened to fall under your care, yours and the señora’s, a responsibility to which the pair of you proved yourselves inadequate. Let us not argue, you know it is true. Take comfort, however. We can tell a rosier version of the story of David, one that is kinder to you. It goes as follows. You, faithful, dependable old Simón, were never meant to be more than a minor actor in David’s life. Your role was to convey him from Novilla to Estrella and hand him over to me, Dmitri, after which you were to retire from the scene. Have you ever thought of it that way? You are a thoughtful person, so perhaps you have.