The Childhood of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘By goodwill do you mean you wish us well? I am struggling to grasp the concept. You feel benevolent towards us?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘Benevolence, I must tell you, is what we keep encountering here. Everyone wishes us well, everyone is ready to be kind to us. We are positively borne along on a cloud of goodwill. But it all remains a bit abstract. Can goodwill by itself satisfy our needs? Is it not in our nature to crave something more tangible?’

  Deliberately Elena extracts her hand from his. ‘You may want more than goodwill; but is what you want better than goodwill? That is what you should be asking yourself.’ She pauses. ‘You keep referring to David as “the boy.” Why don’t you use his name?’

  ‘David is a name they gave him at the camp. He doesn’t like it, he says it is not his true name. I try not to use it unless I have to.’

  ‘It is quite easy to change a name, you know. You go to the registry office and fill out a name-change form. That’s all. No questions.’ She leans forward. ‘And what are you two whispering about?’ she demands of the boys.

  Her son smiles back at her, raises his fingers to his lips, pretending that what occupies the two of them is secret business.

  The bus deposits them outside the Blocks. ‘I would have liked to invite you in for a cup of tea,’ says Elena, ‘but unfortunately it is time for Fidelito’s bath and supper.’

  ‘I understand,’ he says. ‘Goodbye, Fidel. Thank you for the walk. We had a good time.’

  ‘You and Fidel seem to get on well together,’ he remarks to the boy once they are alone.

  ‘He is my best friend.’

  ‘So Fidel feels goodwill towards you, does he?’

  ‘Lots of goodwill.’

  ‘How about you? Do you feel goodwill too?’

  The boy nods vigorously.

  ‘Anything else besides?’

  The boy gives him a puzzled look. ‘No.’

  So there he has it, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. From goodwill come friendship and happiness, come companionable picnics in the parklands or companionable afternoons strolling in the forest. Whereas from love, or at least from longing in its more urgent manifestations, come frustration and doubt and heartsore. It is as simple as that.

  And what is he up to, anyway, with Elena, a woman he barely knows, the mother of the child’s new friend? Is he hoping to seduce her, because in memories that are not entirely lost to him seducing one another is something that men and women do? Is he insisting on the primacy of the personal (desire, love) over the universal (goodwill, benevolence)? And why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living, like everyone else? Is it all part of a far too tardy transition from the old and comfortable (the personal) to the new and unsettling (the universal)? Is the round of self-interrogation nothing but a phase in the growth of each new arrival, a phase that people like Álvaro and Ana and Elena have by now successfully passed through? If so, how much longer before he will emerge as a new, perfected man?

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘YOU WERE telling me about goodwill the other day, goodwill as a universal balm for our ills,’ he says to Elena. ‘But don’t you sometimes find yourself missing plain old physical contact?’

  They are in the parklands, beside a field on which half a dozen disorderly football games are being played. Fidel and David have been allowed to join in one of the games, though they are really too young. Dutifully they surge back and forth with the other players, but the ball is never passed to them.

  ‘Anyone who brings up a child does not lack for physical contact,’ replies Elena.

  ‘By physical contact I mean something different. I mean loving and being loved. I mean sleeping with someone every night. Don’t you miss that?’

  ‘Do I miss it? I am not the kind of person who suffers from memories, Simón. What you speak of seems very far away. And—if by sleeping with someone you mean sex—quite strange too. A strange thing to be preoccupied with.’

  ‘But surely there is nothing like sex for bringing people closer. Sex would bring the two of us closer. For example.’

  Elena turns away. ‘Fidelito!’ she calls, and waves. ‘Come! We have to leave now!’

  Is he mistaken, or is there a flush on her cheek?

  The truth is, he finds Elena only mildly attractive. He does not like her boniness, her strong jaw and prominent front teeth. But he is a man, she is a woman, and the children’s friendship keeps drawing them together. So, despite one polite brush-off after another, he continues to permit himself mild freedoms, freedoms that seem to amuse more than anger her. Willy-nilly he finds himself slipping into daydreams in which some or other stroke of fortune impels Elena into his arms.

  That stroke of fortune, when it comes, takes the guise of a power cut. Power cuts are not infrequent across the city. Usually they are announced a day in advance, and apply either to even-numbered or to odd-numbered dwellings. In the case of the Blocks, they are applied to whole buildings according to a rota.

  On the evening in question, however, there is no announcement, just Fidel knocking at the door, asking whether he can come in and do his homework, since there is no electric light in their apartment.

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’ he asks the boy.

  Fidel shakes his head.

  ‘Run back at once,’ he says. ‘Tell your mother that you and she are invited to supper.’

  The supper he provides for them is no more than bread and soup (barley and squash boiled up with a can of beans; he has yet to find a shop that sells spices), but it is adequate. Fidel’s homework is soon done. The boys settle down with picture books; then suddenly, as if poleaxed, Fidel falls asleep.

  ‘He has been like that since he was a baby,’ says Elena. ‘Nothing will wake him. I’ll carry him back and put him to bed. Thank you for the meal.’

  ‘You can’t go back to that dark apartment. Stay the night. Fidel can share David’s bed. I’ll sleep in a chair. I am used to it.’

  It is a lie, he is not used to sleeping in chairs, and on the little straight-backed kitchen chair he doubts that sleep is humanly possible. But he gives Elena no chance to refuse. ‘You know where the bathroom is. Here is a towel.’

  By the time he himself returns from the bathroom she is in his bed and the two boys are asleep side by side. He wraps himself in the spare blanket and switches off the light.

  For a while there is silence. Then, out of the dark, she speaks: ‘If you are uncomfortable, as I am sure you are, I can make space.’

  He slips into bed with her. Quietly, discreetly, they do the business of sex, mindful of the children asleep an arm’s length away.

  It is not what he had hoped it would be. Her heart is not in it, he feels that at once; as for himself, the reserve of pent-up desire that he had counted on proves to be an illusion.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ she whispers when it is over. With a finger she brushes his lips. ‘It doesn’t advance us, does it?’

  Is she right? Should he take this experience to heart and bid farewell to sex, as Elena appears to have done? Perhaps. Yet merely to hold a woman in his arms, even if she is no ship-stirring beauty, buoys him.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ he murmurs back. ‘In fact, I think you are quite wrong.’ He pauses. ‘Have you ever asked yourself whether the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may not be too high?’

  She does not reply, but rearranges her underwear and turns away from him.

  Though they do not live together, he likes to think of himself and Elena, after that first shared night, as a couple, or a couple in the making, and therefore of the two boys as brothers or stepbrothers. It becomes more and more of a habit for the four of them to have their evening meal together; at weekends they go shopping or go on picnics or excursions into the countryside; and though he and Elena do not spend another whole night together, she now and again, when the boys are out of the way, allows him to make love to her. He begins to grow used to her body, with its jutti
ng hipbones and tiny breasts. She has little sexual feeling for him, that is clear; but he likes to think of his lovemaking as a patient and prolonged act of resuscitation, of bringing back to life a female body that for all practical purposes has died.

  When she invites him to make love to her, it is without the slightest coquetry. ‘If you like, we can do it now,’ she will say, and close the door and take off her clothes.

  Such matter-of-factness might once have put him off, just as her unresponsiveness might once have humiliated him. But he decides he will neither be put off nor humiliated. What she offers he will accept, as readily and as gratefully as he can.

  Usually she refers to the act simply as doing it, but sometimes, when she wants to tease him, she uses the word descongelar, thaw: ‘If you like, you can have another go at thawing me.’ It was a word he once let slip in a heedless moment: ‘Let me thaw you!’ The notion of being thawed back into life struck her then and strikes her now as limitlessly funny.

  Between the two of them there is growing up, if not intimacy, then a friendship that he feels to be quite solid, quite reliable. Whether friendship would have grown up between them anyway, on the ground of the children’s friendship and of the many hours they spend together, whether doing it has contributed anything at all, he cannot say.

  Is this, he asks himself, how families come into being, here in this new world: founded on friendship rather than on love? It is not a condition he is familiar with, being mere friends with a woman. But he can see its benefits. He can even, cautiously, enjoy it.

  ‘Tell me about Fidel’s father,’ he asks Elena.

  ‘I don’t remember much about him.’

  ‘But he must have had a father.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Was the father at all like me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t say.’

  ‘Would you, just hypothetically, consider someone like me as a husband?’

  ‘Someone like you? Like you in what respects?’

  ‘Would you marry someone like me?’

  ‘If that is your way of asking whether I would marry you, then the answer is yes, I would. It would be good for Fidel and David, both of them. When would you want to do it? Because the registry office is open only on weekdays. Can you get time off?’

  ‘I am sure I can. Our foreman is very understanding.’

  After this strange offer, and this strange acceptance (about which he does nothing), he begins to feel a certain wariness on Elena’s part, and a new tension in their relations. Yet he does not regret asking. He is finding his way. He is making a new life.

  ‘How would you feel,’ he asks on another day, ‘if I were to see another woman?’

  ‘By see do you mean have sex with?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And whom do you have in mind?’

  ‘No one in particular. I am simply exploring possibilities.’

  ‘Exploring? Hasn’t the time come for you to settle down? You are no longer a young man.’

  He is silent.

  ‘You ask how I would feel. Do you want a short answer or a full answer?’

  ‘A full answer. The fullest.’

  ‘Very well. Our friendship has been good for the boys, we can agree on that. They have grown close. They see us as guardian presences, or even as a single guardian presence. So it would not be good for them if our friendship were to come to an end. And I see no reason why it should, just because you are seeing some hypothetical other woman.

  ‘However, I suspect that with this woman you will want to conduct the same kind of experiment you have been conducting with me, and that in the course of the experiment you will lose touch with Fidel and with me.

  ‘Therefore I am going to put in words something I was hoping you would come to understand by yourself. You want to see this other woman because I do not provide what you feel you need, namely storms of passion. Friendship by itself is not good enough for you. Without the accompaniment of storms of passion it is somehow deficient.

  ‘To my ear that is an old way of thinking. In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing. The name you choose to give this something-more that is missing is passion. Yet I am willing to bet that if tomorrow you were offered all the passion you wanted—passion by the bucketful—you would promptly find something new to miss, to lack. This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.

  ‘There. You asked for a full answer and I have given you one. Is it enough, or is there yet more that you long for?’

  It is a warm day, this day of the full answer. The radio is playing softly; they are lying on the bed in her apartment, fully clothed.

  ‘For my part—’ he commences; but Elena interrupts him. ‘Hush,’ she says. ‘No more talk, at least not today.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because next thing we will be bickering, and I don’t want that.’

  So they hush, and lie in silence side by side, listening now to the gulls cawing as they circle the courtyard, now to the boys laughing together in their play, now to the music from the radio, whose unremitting, even-tempered melodiousness used once to soothe him but today simply irritates him.

  What he wants to say, for his part, is that life here is too placid for his taste, too lacking in ups and downs, in drama and tension—is too much, in fact, like the music on the radio. Anodina: is that a Spanish word?

  He remembers asking Álvaro once why there was never any news on the radio. ‘News of what?’ inquired Álvaro. ‘News of what is going on in the world,’ he replied. ‘Oh,’ said Álvaro, ‘is something going on?’ As before, he was ready to suspect irony. But no, there was none.

  Álvaro does not trade in irony. Nor does Elena. Elena is an intelligent woman but she does not see any doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way things are. An intelligent woman and an admirable woman too, who out of the most exiguous of materials—seamstressing, music lessons, household chores—has put together a new life, a life from which she claims—with justice?—that nothing is missing. It is the same with Álvaro and the stevedores: they have no secret yearnings he can detect, no hankerings after another kind of life. Only he is the exception, the dissatisfied one, the misfit. What is wrong with him? Is it, as Elena says, just the old way of thinking and feeling that has not yet died in him, but kicks and shudders in its last throes?

  Things do not have their due weight here: that is what he would like, in the end, to say to Elena. The music we hear lacks weight. Our lovemaking lacks weight. The food we eat, our dreary diet of bread, lacks substance—lacks the substantiality of animal flesh, with all the gravity of bloodletting and sacrifice behind it. Our very words lack weight, these Spanish words that do not come from our heart.

  The music reaches its graceful end. He gets up. ‘I must be going,’ he says. ‘Do you remember how the other day you told me you didn’t suffer from memories?’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, you did. While we were watching football in the park. Well, I am not like you. I suffer from memories, or the shadows of memories. I know we are all supposed to be washed clean by the passage here, and it is true, I don’t have a great repertoire to call on. But the shadows linger nevertheless. That is what I suffer from. Except that I don’t use the word suffer. I hold onto them, those shadows.’

  ‘That’s good,’ says Elena. ‘It takes all kinds to make a world.’

  Fidel and David rush into the room, flushed, sweaty, bursting with life. ‘Are there any biscuits?’ demands Fidel.

  ‘In the jar in the cupboard,’ says Elena.

  The two boys disappear into the kitchen. ‘Are you having a good time?’ Elena calls out.

  ‘Mm,’ says Fidel.

  ‘That’s good,’ says Elena.

  CHAPTER
9

  ‘HOW ARE the music lessons going?’ he asks the boy. ‘Are you enjoying them?’

  ‘Mm. Do you know what? When Fidel grows up he is going to buy himself a tiny, tiny violin’—he shows how tiny the violin will be: a mere two handbreadths—‘and he is going to wear a clown suit and play the violin in the circus. Can we go to the circus?’

  ‘When the circus next comes to town we can go, all of us. We can invite Álvaro along, and maybe Eugenio too.’

  The boy pouts. ‘I don’t want Eugenio to come. He says things about me.’

  ‘He said only one thing, that you had a devil in you, and that was just a manner of speaking. He meant you have a spark inside you that makes you good at chess. An imp.’

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘All right, we won’t invite Eugenio. What are you learning in your music lessons besides scales?’

  ‘Singing. Do you want to hear me sing?’

  ‘I would love to. I didn’t know Elena taught singing. She is full of surprises.’

  They are on the bus, heading out of the city into the countryside. Though there are several other passengers, the boy is not shy to sing. In his clear young voice he chants:

  Wer reitet so spät durch Dampf und Wind?

  Er ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;

  Er halt den Knaben in dem Arm,

  Er füttert ihn Zucker, er küsst ihm warm.

  ‘That’s all. It’s English. Can I learn English? I don’t want to speak Spanish any more. I hate Spanish.’

  ‘You speak very good Spanish. You sing beautifully too. Maybe you will be a singer when you grow up.’

  ‘No. I’m going to be a magician in a circus. What does it mean, Wer reitet so?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t speak English.’

  ‘Can I go to school?’

  ‘You will have to wait a while for that, until your next birthday. Then you can go to school along with Fidel.’

  They get off at the stop marked Terminal, where the bus turns back. The map he has picked up at the bus station shows tracks and footpaths up into the hills; his plan is to follow a winding path that leads to a lake, which on the map has a starburst next to it, signifying that it is a beauty spot.