John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

To be in time for school at 8.30 he needs to leave home by 7.30: a half-hour walk to the station, a fifteen-minute ride in the train, a five-minute walk from station to school, and a ten-minute cushion in case of delays. However, because he is nervous of being late, he leaves home at 7.00 and is at school by 8.00. There, in the classroom just unlocked by the janitor, he can sit at his desk with his head on his arms and wait.

He has nightmares of misreading his watch face, missing trains, taking wrong turns. In his nightmares he weeps in helpless despair.

The only boys who get to school before him are the De Freitas brothers, whose father, a greengrocer, drops them off at the crack of dawn from his battered blue truck, on his way to the Salt River produce market.

The teachers at St Joseph’s belong to the Marist order. To him these Brothers, in their severe black cassocks and white starched stocks, are special people. Their air of mystery impresses him: the mystery of where they come from, the mystery of the names they have cast off. He does not like it when Brother Augustine, the cricket coach, comes to practice wearing a white shirt and black trousers and cricket boots like an ordinary person. He particularly does not like it when Brother Augustine, taking a turn to bat, slips a protector, a ‘box,’ under his trousers.

He does not know what the Brothers do when they are not teaching. The wing of the school building where they sleep and eat and live their private lives is off limits; he has no wish to penetrate it. He would like to think they live austere lives there, rising at four in the morning, spending hours in prayer, eating frugally, darning their own socks. When they behave badly, he does his best to excuse them. When Brother Alexis, for instance, who is fat and unshaven, breaks wind uncouthly and falls asleep in the Afrikaans class, he explains it to himself by saying that Brother Alexis is an intelligent man who finds teaching beneath him. When Brother Jean-Pierre is suddenly transferred from duty in the junior dormitory amid stories that he has been doing things to small boys, he simply puts the stories out of his mind. It is inconceivable to him that Brothers should have sexual desires and not withstand them.

Since few of the Brothers speak English as a first language, they have hired a Catholic layman to take the English classes. Mr Whelan is Irish: he hates the English and barely conceals his dislike of Protestants. He also makes no effort to pronounce Afrikaans names correctly, speaking them with lips distastefully pursed as though they were heathen gibberish.

Most of their time in English classes is spent on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar , where Mr Whelan’s method is to assign the boys roles and have them read their parts aloud. They also do exercises out of the grammar textbook and, once a week, write an essay. They have thirty minutes to write the essay before handing it in; since he does not believe in taking work home, Mr Whelan uses the remaining ten minutes to mark the essays. His ten-minute marking sessions have become one of his pièces de résistance , watched by the boys with admiring smiles. Blue pencil poised, Mr Whelan skims swiftly through the pile of scripts, then shuffles them together and passes them to the class monitor. There is a subdued, ironic ripple of applause.

Mr Whelan’s first name is Terence. He wears a brown leather motoring jacket and a hat. When it is cold he keeps his hat on indoors. He rubs his pale white hands together to warm them; he has the bloodless face of a corpse. What he is doing in South Africa, why he is not back in Ireland, is not clear. He seems to disapprove of the country and everything in it.

For Mr Whelan he writes essays on The Character of Mark Antony, on The Character of Brutus, on Road Safety, on Sport, on Nature. Most of his essays are dull, mechanical performances; but occasionally he feels a spurt of excitement as he writes, and the pen begins to fly over the page. In one of his essays a highwayman waits under cover at the roadside. His horse snorts softly, its breath turns to vapour in the cold night air. A ray of moonlight falls like a slash across his face; he holds his pistol under the flap of his coat to keep the powder dry.

The highwayman makes no impression on Mr Whelan. Mr Whelan’s pale eyes flicker across the page, his pencil comes down: 6½. 6½ is the mark he almost always gets for his essays; never more than 7. Boys with English names get 7½ or 8. Despite his funny surname, a boy named Theo Stavropoulos gets 8, because he dresses well and takes elocution lessons. Theo is also always allotted the part of Mark Antony, which means that he gets to read out ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’ the most famous speech in the play.

In Worcester he had gone to school in a state of apprehension but of excitement too. True, he might at any time be exposed as a liar, with terrible consequences. Yet school was fascinating: each day seemed to bring new revelations of the cruelty and pain and hatred raging beneath the everyday surface of things. What was going on was wrong, he knew, should not be allowed to happen; furthermore he was too young, too babyish and vulnerable, for what he was being exposed to. Nevertheless, the passion and fury of those Worcester days gripped him; he was shocked but he was greedy too to see more, to see all there was to see.

In Cape Town, by contrast, he feels he is wasting his time. School is no longer a place where great passions are aired. It is a shrunken little world, a more or less benign prison in which he might as well be weaving baskets as going through the classroom routine. Cape Town is not making him cleverer, it is making him stupider. The realization causes panic to well up in him. Whoever he truly is, whoever the true ‘I’ is that ought to be rising out of the ashes of his childhood, is not being allowed to be born, is being kept puny and stunted.

He has this feeling most despairingly in Mr Whelan’s classes. There is a great deal more that he can write than Mr Whelan will ever allow. Writing for Mr Whelan is not like stretching one’s wings; on the contrary, it is like huddling in a ball, making oneself as small and inoffensive as one can.

He has no wish to write about sport ( mens sana in corpore sano ) or road safety, which are so boring that he has to force out the words. He does not even want to write about highwaymen: he has a sense that the slivers of moonlight that fall across their faces and the white knuckles that grip their pistol-butts, whatever momentary impression they may make, do not come from him but from somewhere else, and arrive already wilted, stale. What he would write if he could, if it were not Mr Whelan who would read it, would be something darker, something that, once it began to flow from his pen, would spread across the page out of control, like spilt ink. Like spilt ink, like shadows racing across the face of still water, like lightning crackling across the sky.

To Mr Whelan is also allotted the task of keeping the non-Catholic boys of Standard Six busy while the Catholic boys are in catechism class. Mr Whelan is supposed to read the Gospel of St Luke with them, or the Acts of the Apostles. Instead they hear from him stories about Parnell and Roger Casement and the perfidy of the English, over and over again. On some days he comes to class bearing the day’s Cape Times , boiling with rage at the newest outrages of the Russians in their satellite countries. ‘In their schools they have created classes in atheism where children are forced to spit on Our Saviour,’ he thunders. ‘Can you believe it? And those poor children who remain true to their faith are sent off to the infamous prison camps of Siberia. That is the reality of Communism, which has the impudence to call itself the religion of Man.’