J. Coetzee - The Childhood of Jesus

‘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.

‘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.