John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Strangely, he seems to be the only one afflicted. Even the plodders among his fellow students have no more trouble than usual. While his marks fall month by month, theirs remain steady. As for the stars, the real stars, they have simply left him struggling in their wake.

Never in his life has he had to call on his utmost powers. Less than his best has always been good enough. Now he is in a fight for his life. Unless he throws himself wholly into his work, he is going to sink.

Yet whole days pass in a fog of grey exhaustion. He curses himself for letting himself be sucked back into an affair that costs him so much. If this is what having a mistress entails, how do Picasso and the others get by? He simply has not the energy to run from lecture to lecture, job to job, then when the day is done turn his attention to a woman who veers between euphoria and spells of the blackest gloom in which she thrashes around, brooding on a lifetime’s grudges.

Although no longer formally living with him, Jacqueline feels free to arrive on his doorstep at all hours of the night and day. Sometimes she comes to denounce him for some word or other he let slip whose veiled meaning has only now become clear to her. Sometimes she is simply feeling low and wants to be cheered up. Worst are the days after therapy, when she rehearses over and over again what passed in her therapist’s consulting room, picking over the implications of his tiniest gesture. She sighs and weeps, gulps down glass after glass of wine, goes dead in the middle of sex.

‘You should have therapy yourself,’ she tells him, blowing smoke.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he replies. He knows enough, by now, not to disagree.

In fact he would not dream of going into therapy. The goal of therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he believes.

Nevertheless, he listens to Jacqueline as patiently as he can. He is the man, she is the woman; he has had his pleasure of her, now he must pay the price: that seems to be the way affairs work.

Her story, spoken night after night in overlapping and conflicting versions into his sleep-befuddled ear, is that she has been robbed of her true self by a persecutor who is sometimes her tyrannical mother, sometimes her runaway father, sometimes one or other sadistic lover, sometimes a Mephistophelean therapist. What he holds in his arms, she says, is only a shell of her true self; she will recover the power to love only when she has recovered her self.

He listens but does not believe. If she feels her therapist has designs on her, why not give up seeing him? If her sister disparages and belittles her, why not stop seeing her sister? As for himself, he suspects that if Jacqueline has come to treat him more as a confidant than as a lover, that is because he is not a good enough lover, not fiery or passionate enough. He suspects that if he were more of a lover Jacqueline would soon recover her missing self and her missing desire.

Why does he keep opening the door to her knock? Is it because this is what artists have to do — stay up all night, exhaust themselves, get their lives into a tangle — or is it because, despite all, he is bemused by this sleek, undeniably handsome woman who feels no shame in wandering around the flat naked under his gaze?

Why is she so free in his presence? Is it to taunt him (for she can feel his eyes upon her, he knows that), or do all nurses behave like this in private, dropping their clothes, scratching themselves, talking matter-of-factly about excretion, telling the same gross jokes that men tell in bars? Yet if she has indeed freed herself of all inhibitions, why is her lovemaking so distracted, so offhand, so disappointing?

It was not his idea to begin the affair nor his idea to continue it. But now that he is in the middle of it he has not the energy to escape. A fatalism has taken him over. If life with Jacqueline is a kind of sickness, let the sickness take its course.

He and Paul are gentlemen enough not to compare notes on their mistresses. Nevertheless he suspects that Jacqueline Laurier discusses him with her sister and her sister reports back to Paul. It embarrasses him that Paul should know what goes on in his intimate life. He is sure that, of the two of them, Paul handles women more capably.

One evening when Jacqueline is working the night shift at the nursing home, he drops by at Paul’s flat. He finds Paul preparing to set off for his mother’s house in St James, to spend the weekend. Why does he not come along, suggests Paul, for the Saturday at least?

They miss the last train, by a hair’s breadth. If they still want to go to St James, they will have to walk the whole twelve miles. It is a fine evening. Why not?

Paul carries his rucksack and his violin. He is bringing the violin along, he says, because it is easier to practise in St James where the neighbours are not so close.

Paul has studied the violin since childhood but has never got very far with it. He seems quite content to play the same little gigues and minuets as a decade ago. His own ambitions as a musician are far larger. In his flat he has the piano that his mother bought when at the age of fifteen he began to demand piano lessons. The lessons were not a success, he was too impatient with the slow, step-by-step methods of his teacher. Nevertheless, he is determined that one day he will play, however badly, Beethoven’s opus 111, and, after that, the Busoni transcription of Bach’s D minor Chaconne. He will arrive at these goals without making the usual detour through Czerny and Mozart. Instead he will practise these two pieces and them alone, unremittingly, first learning the notes by playing them very, very slowly, then pushing up the tempo day by day, for as long as is required. It is his own method of learning the piano, invented by himself. As long as he follows his schedule without wavering he can see no reason why it should not work.

What he is discovering, unfortunately, is that as he tries to progress from very, very slow to merely very slow, his wrists grow tense and lock, his finger-joints stiffen, and soon he cannot play at all. Then he flies into a rage, hammers his fists on the keys, and storms off in despair.

It is past midnight and he and Paul are no further than Wynberg. The traffic has died away, the Main Road is empty save for a street sweeper pushing his broom.

In Diep River they are passed by a milkman in his horse-drawn cart. They pause to watch as he reins in his horse, lopes up a garden path, sets down two full bottles, picks up the empties, shakes out the coins, lopes back to his cart.

‘Can we buy a pint?’ says Paul, and hands over fourpence. Smiling, the milkman watches while they drink. The milkman is young and handsome and bursting with energy. Even the big white horse with the shaggy hooves does not seem to mind being up in the middle of the night.

He marvels. All the business he knew nothing about, being carried on while people sleep: streets being swept, milk being delivered on doorsteps! But one thing puzzles him. Why is the milk not stolen? Why are there not thieves who follow in the milkman’s footsteps and filch each bottle he sets down? In a land where property is crime and anything and everything can be stolen, what renders milk exempt? The fact that stealing milk is too easy? Are there standards of conduct even among thieves? Or do thieves take pity on milkmen, who are for the most part young and black and powerless?

He would like to believe this last explanation. He would like to believe that, with regard to black people, there is enough pity around, enough of a longing to deal honourably with them, to make up for the cruelty of the laws and the misery of their lot. But he knows it is not so. Between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts. Even this young milkman, who a year ago must have been just a boy herding cattle in the deepest Transkei, must know it. In fact, from Africans in general, even from Coloured people, he feels a curious, amused tenderness emanating: a sense that he must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagines he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger. Why else would this young man, with the first stirrings of the day’s wind fingering his horse’s mane, smile so gently as he watches the two of them drink the milk he has given them?