The Schooldays of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘And now you want me to tell you who he is, this child whom you met on board ship. If I were a philosopher I would reply by saying: It depends on what you mean by who, it depends on what you mean by he, it depends on what you mean by is. Who is he? Who are you? Indeed, who am I? All I can tell you with certainty is that one day a being, a male child, appeared out of nowhere on the doorstep of this Academy. You know that as well as I do because you brought him. Since that day it has been my pleasure to be his musician accompanist. I have accompanied him in his dances, as I accompany all the children in my care. I have also talked with him. We have talked a lot, your David and I. It has been enlightening.’

  ‘We agree to call him David, señor Arroyo, but his true name, if I can use that expression, if it means anything, is of course not David, as you must know if you know who he really is. David is just the name on his card, the name they gave him at the docks. Equally well I could say that Simón is not my true name, just a name given to me at the docks. To me names are not important, not worth making a fuss about. I am aware that you take a different line, that when it comes to names and numbers you and I belong to different schools of thought. But let me say my say. In my school of thought names are simply a convenience, just as numbers are a convenience. There is nothing mysterious about them. The boy we are talking about could equally well have had the name sixty-six attached to him, and I the name ninety-nine. Sixty-six and ninety-nine would have done just as well as David and Simón, once we got used to them. I have never grasped why the boy I am now calling David finds names so significant—his name in particular. Our so-called true names, the names we had before David and Simón, are only substitutes, it seems to me, for the names we had before them, and so on backwards. It is like paging through a book, back and back, looking for page one. But there is no page one. The book has no beginning; or the beginning is lost in the mists of the general forgetting. That, at least, is how I see it. So I repeat my question: What does David mean when he says you know who he is?’

  ‘And if I were a philosopher, señor Simón, I would respond by saying: It depends on what you mean by know. Did I meet the boy in a previous life? How can I be sure? The memory is lost, as you say, in the general forgetting. I have my intuitions, as no doubt you have your intuitions, but intuitions are not memories. You remember meeting the boy on board ship and deciding he was lost and taking charge of him. Perhaps he remembers the event differently. Perhaps you were the one who looked lost; perhaps he decided to take charge of you.’

  ‘You misjudge me. I may have memories but I have no intuitions. Intuitions are not part of my stock in trade.’

  ‘Intuitions are like shooting stars. They flash across the skies, here one moment, gone the next. If you don’t see them, perhaps it is because your eyes are closed.’

  ‘But what is flashing across the skies? If you know the answer, why don’t you tell me?’

  Señor Arroyo grinds his cigarette dead. ‘It depends on what you mean by answer,’ he says. He rises, grips him, Simón, by the shoulders, stares into his eyes. ‘Courage, my friend,’ he says in his smoky breath. ‘Young David is an exceptional child. The word I use for him is integral. He is integral in a way that other children are not. Nothing can be taken away from him. Nothing can be added. Who or what you or I believe him to be is of no importance. Nonetheless, I take seriously your wish to have your question answered. The answer will come when you least expect it. Or else it will not come. That too happens.’

  Irritably he shakes himself loose. ‘I cannot tell you, señor Arroyo,’ he says, ‘how much I dislike these cheap paradoxes and mystifications. Do not misunderstand me. I respect you as I respected your late wife. You are educators, you take your profession seriously, your concern for your students is genuine—I doubt none of that. But regarding your system, el sistema Arroyo, I have the most profound doubts. I say so in all deference to you as a musician. Stars. Meteors. Arcane dances. Numerology. Secret names. Mystical revelations. It may impress young minds but please don’t try to foist it on me.’

  On his way out of the Academy, preoccupied, in a bad humour, he stumbles into Arroyo’s sister-in-law, almost knocking her over. Her stick goes clattering down the stairs. He recovers the stick for her, apologizes for his clumsiness.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ she says. ‘There ought to be a light on the stairway, I don’t know why the building has to be so dark and gloomy. But since I have you, give me your arm. I need cigarettes, and I don’t want to send one of the boys, it sets a bad example.’

  He assists her to the kiosk at the street corner. She is slow, but he is in no hurry. It is a pleasant day. He begins to relax.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he proposes.

  They sit at a pavement café, enjoying the sun on their faces.

  ‘I hope you weren’t offended by my remarks,’ she says. ‘I mean my remarks about Ana Magdalena and her effect on men. Ana Magdalena was not my type, but in fact I was quite fond of her. And the death she met—no one deserves to die like that.’

  He is silent.

  ‘As I mentioned, I taught her when she was young. She showed promise, she worked hard, she was serious about her career. But the transition from girlhood to womanhood was hard for her to deal with. It is always a difficult time for a dancer, in her case especially so. She wanted to preserve the purity of her lines, the purity that comes easily to us when we are immature, but she failed, the new womanliness of her body kept coming out, kept expressing itself. So in the end she gave up, found other things to do. I lost touch with her. Then after my sister’s death she suddenly re-emerged at Juan Sebastián’s side. I was surprised—I had no idea they were in contact—but I said nothing.

  ‘She was good for him, I will say that, a good wife. He would have been lost without someone like her. She took over the children—the younger one was just a baby then—and became a mother to them. She extracted Juan Sebastián from the clock repair business, where he had no future, and got him to open his academy. He has flourished ever since. So don’t mistake me. She was an admirable person in many ways.’

  He is silent.

  ‘Juan Sebastián is a man of learning. Have you read his book? No? He has written a book on his philosophy of music. You can still find it in the bookshops. My sister helped him. My sister had a musical training. She was an excellent pianist. She and Juan Sebastián used to plays duets together. Whereas Ana Magdalena, while she is or was a perfectly intelligent young woman, was neither a musician nor what I would call a person of intellect. For intellect she substituted enthusiasm. She took over Juan Sebastián’s philosophy holus bolus and became an enthusiast for it. She applied it to her dance classes. God knows what the little ones made of it. Let me ask, Simón: What did your son make of Ana Magdalena’s teaching?’

  What did David make of Ana Magdalena’s teaching? He is about to give his reply, his considered reply, when something comes over him. Whether it is the memory flooding back of his angry outburst to Arroyo, or whether he is simply tired, tired of being reasonable, he cannot say, but he can feel his face crumple, and the voice that issues from his throat he can barely recognize as his own, so cracked and parched is it. ‘My son, Mercedes, was the one who discovered Ana Magdalena. He witnessed her on her deathbed. His memories of her are contaminated by that vision, that horror. Because she had been dead, you know, for some time. Not a sight that any child should be exposed to.

  ‘My son, to answer your question, is trying to cling to the memory of Ana Magdalena as she was in life and to the stories he heard from her. He would like to believe in a heavenly realm where the numbers dance eternally. He would like to think that, when he dances the dances she taught him, the numbers descend and dance with him. At the end of each school day Ana Magdalena used to gather the children around her and sound what she called her arc—which I later found was just an ordinary tuning fork—and get them to close their eyes and hum together on that tone. It would settle their souls, she told them, bringing them i
nto harmony with the tone that the stars gave out as they wheeled on their axes. Well, that is what my son would like to hold on to: the heavenly tone. By joining in the dance of the stars, he would like to believe, we participate in their heavenly being. But how can he, Mercedes, how can he, after what he saw?’

  Mercedes reaches across the table and pats his arm. ‘There, there,’ she says. ‘You have been through a trying time, all of you. Perhaps it would be best if your son put the Academy behind him, with its bad memories, and went to a normal school with normal teachers.’

  A second great wave of exhaustion sweeps over him. What is he doing, exchanging words with this stranger who understands nothing? ‘My son is not a normal child,’ he says. ‘I am sorry, I am not feeling well, I cannot continue.’ He signals to the waiter.

  ‘You are distressed, Simón. I will not detain you. Let me just say, I am here in Estrella not for the sake of my brother-in-law, who barely tolerates me, but for my sister’s children, two lost little boys to whom no one gives a second thought. Your son will move on, but what is their future? Having lost first their mother then their stepmother, they are left behind in this hard world of men and men’s ideas. I weep for them, Simón. They need softness as all children need softness, even boy children. They need to be caressed and cuddled, to inhale the soft odours of women and feel the softness of a woman’s touch. Where are they going to get that? They will grow up incomplete, unable to flower.’

  Softness. Mercedes hardly strikes him as soft, with her sharp beak of a nose and her bony, arthritic hands. He pays, rises. ‘I must go,’ he says. ‘It is David’s birthday tomorrow. He will be seven. There are preparations to be made.’

  CHAPTER 18

  INÉS IS determined that the boy’s birthday will be celebrated fittingly. To the party have been invited as many of his classmates from the old Academy as she has been able to track down, as well as the boys from the apartment block with whom he plays football. From the pastelería she has ordered a cake shaped like a football; she has brought home a gaily painted piñata in the form of a donkey and from her friend Claudia borrowed the paddles with which the children will beat it to pieces; she has engaged a conjuror to put on a magic show. She has not revealed to him, Simón, what her birthday gift will be, but he knows she has spent a lot of money on it.

  His first impulse is to match Inés in munificence, but he checks that impulse: as he is the minor parent, so his gift should be the minor gift. In the back room of an antiques store he finds exactly the right thing: a model ship much like the ship they came on, with a smokestack and a propeller and a captain’s bridge and tiny passengers carved in wood leaning on the rails or promenading on the upper deck.

  While he is exploring the shops of the old quarter of Estrella he looks out for the book Mercedes mentioned, Arroyo’s book on music. He fails to find it. None of the booksellers have heard of it. ‘I have been to some of his recitals,’ says one of them. ‘He is an amazing pianist, a true virtuoso. I had no idea he wrote books too. Are you sure of it?’

  By arrangement with Inés, the boy spends the night before the party with him in his rented room so that she can ready the apartment.

  ‘Your last night as a small boy,’ he remarks to the boy. ‘As of tomorrow you will be a seven-year-old, and a seven-year-old is a big boy.’

  ‘Seven is a noble number,’ says the boy. ‘I know all the noble numbers. Do you want me to recite them?’

  ‘Not tonight, thank you. What other branches of numerology have you studied besides the noble numbers? Have you studied fractions, or are fractions off limits? Don’t you know the term numerology? Numerology is the science that señor Arroyo practises in his Academy. Numerologists are people who believe that numbers exist independently of us. They believe that even if a great flood came and drowned all living creatures, the numbers would survive.’

  ‘If the flood was really big, up to the sky, the numbers would be drowned too. Then there would be nothing left, only the dark stars and the dark numbers.’

  ‘The dark stars? What are they?’

  ‘The stars between the bright stars. You can’t see them because they are dark.’

  ‘Dark stars must be one of your discoveries. There is no mention of dark stars or dark numbers in numerology as I understand it. Furthermore, according to the numerologists, numbers cannot drown, no matter how high the floodwaters rise. They cannot drown because they neither breathe nor eat nor drink. They just exist. We human beings come and we go, we voyage from this life to the next, but the numbers stay the same forever and ever. That is what people like señor Arroyo write in their books.’

  ‘I found out a way of coming back from the new life. Shall I tell you? It’s brilliant. You tie a rope to a tree, a long, long rope, then when you get to the next life you tie the other end of the rope to a tree, another tree. Then when you want to come back from the next life you just hold on to the rope. Like the man in the larebinto.’

  ‘Laberinto. That’s a very clever plan, very ingenious. Unfortunately I see a flaw in it. The flaw is that while you are swimming back to this life, holding on to the rope, the waves will reach up and wash you clean of your memories. So when you reach this side you will remember nothing of what you saw on the other side. It will be as if you had never visited the other side at all. It will be as if you had slept without dreaming.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, as I said, you will have been immersed in the waters of forgetting.’

  ‘But why? Why do I have to forget?’

  ‘Because that is the rule. You cannot come back from the next life and report what you saw there.’

  ‘Why is it the rule?’

  ‘A rule is just a rule. Rules don’t have to justify themselves. They just are. Like numbers. There is no why for numbers. This universe is a universe of rules. There is no why for the universe.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Now you are being silly.’

  Later, when David has fallen asleep on the sofa and he himself is lying in bed listening to the scurrying of mice in the ceiling, he wonders how the boy will look back on these conversations of theirs. He, Simón, thinks of himself as a sane, rational person who offers the boy a sane, rational elucidation of why things are the way they are. But are the needs of a child’s soul better served by his dry little homilies than by the fantastic fare offered at the Academy? Why not let him spend these precious years dancing the numbers and communing with the stars in the company of Alyosha and señor Arroyo, and wait for sanity and reason to arrive in their own good time?

  A rope from land to land: he should tell Arroyo about that, send him a note. ‘My son, the one who says you know his true name, has come up with a plan for our general salvation: a rope bridge from shore to shore; souls pulling themselves hand over hand across the ocean, some toward the new life, some back toward the old one. If there were such a bridge, says my son, it would mean the end of forgetfulness. We would all know who we are, and rejoice.’

  He ought really to write to Arroyo. Not just a note but something longer and fuller that would say what he might have said had he not stormed out of their meeting. If he were not so sleepy, so lethargic, he would switch on the light and do it. ‘Esteemed Juan Sebastián, forgive my show of petulance this morning. I am going through a troubled time, though of course the burden under which I labour is far lighter than yours. Specifically, I find myself at sea (I use a common metaphor), drifting further and further from solid land. How so? Allow me to be candid. Despite strenuous efforts of the intellect, I cannot believe in the numbers, the higher numbers, the numbers on high, as you do and as everyone connected with your Academy seems to do, including my son David. I understand nothing about the numbers, neither a jot nor a tittle, from beginning to end. Your faith in them has helped you (I surmise) to get through these difficult times, whereas I, who do not share that faith, am touchy, irascible, prone to outbursts (you beheld one this morning)—am in fact becoming hard to bear, not only to those around me b
ut to myself.

  ‘The answer will come to you when you least expect it. Or not. I have a distaste for paradoxes, Juan Sebastián, which you seem not to share. Is that what I must do to attain peace of mind: swallow paradoxes as they arise? And while you are about it, help me to understand why a child schooled by you, when asked to explain the numbers, should reply that they cannot be explained, can only be danced. The same child, before attending your Academy, was afraid of stepping from one paving stone to the next lest he fall through the gap and disappear into nothingness. Yet now he dances across gaps without a qualm. What magical powers does dancing have?’

  He should do it. He should write the note. But will Juan Sebastián write back? Juan Sebastián does not strike him as the kind of man who will get out of bed in the middle of the night to throw a rope to a man who, if not drowning, is at least floundering.

  As he descends into sleep an image comes to him from the football games in the park: the boy, head down, fists clenched, running and running like an irresistible force. Why, why, why, when he is so full of life—of this life, this present life—is he so interested in the next one?

  The first arrivals at the party are two boys from one of the apartments below, brothers, uncomfortable in their neat shirts and shorts with their wetted-down hair. They hurry to offer their colourfully wrapped present, which David deposits in a space he has cleared in a corner: ‘This is my present pile,’ he announces. ‘I am not going to open my presents until everyone has gone.’

  The present pile already contains the marionettes from the sisters on the farm and his, Simón’s, gift, the ship, packed in a cardboard box and tied with a ribbon.

  The doorbell rings; David rushes off to greet new guests and accept more gifts.