John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

That is all. That is the end of it. There is no further mention of the war between them. But he wonders more than ever what Ganapathy is doing in England, in the Home Counties, working on a project he has no respect for. Would he not be better off in Asia, fighting the Americans? Should he have a chat to him, tell him so?

And what of himself? If Ganapathy’s destiny lies in Asia, where does his lie? Would the Viet Cong ignore his origins and accept his services, if not as a soldier or suicide bomber then as a humble porter? If not, what of the friends and allies of the Viet Cong, the Chinese?

He writes to the Chinese Embassy in London. Since he suspects the Chinese have no use for computers, he says nothing about computer programming. He is prepared to come and teach English in China, he says, as a contribution to the world struggle. What he is paid is of no importance to him.

He mails the letter and waits for a reply. Meanwhile he buys Teach Yourself Chinese and begins to practise the strange clenched-teeth sounds of Mandarin.

Day after day passes; from the Chinese there is no word. Have the British secret services intercepted his letter and destroyed it? Do they intercept and destroy all letters to the Embassy? If so, what is the point in letting the Chinese have an embassy in London? Or, having intercepted his letter, have the secret services forwarded it to the Home Office with a note to say that the South African working for International Computers in Bracknell has betrayed communist leanings? Is he going to lose his job and be expelled from England on account of politics? If it happens, he will not contest it. Fate will have spoken; he is prepared to accept the word of fate.

On his trips to London he still goes to the cinema, but his pleasure is more and more spoiled by the deterioration of his eyesight. He has to sit in the front row to be able to read the subtitles, and even then he must screw up his eyes and strain.

He visits an optician and comes away with a pair of black horn-rimmed spectacles. In the mirror he resembles even more closely Major Arkwright’s comic boffin. On the other hand, looking out through the window he is amazed to discover he can make out individual leaves on the trees. Trees have been a blur of green ever since he can remember. Should he have been wearing glasses all his life? Does this explain why he was so bad at cricket, why the ball always seemed to be coming at him out of nowhere?

We end up looking like our ideal selves, says Baudelaire. The face we are born with is slowly overwhelmed by the desired face, the face of our secret dreams. Is the face in the mirror the face of his dreams, this long, lugubrious face with the soft, vulnerable mouth and now the blank eyes shielded behind glass?

The first film he sees with his new glasses is Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew . It is an unsettling experience. After five years of Catholic schooling he had thought he was forever beyond the appeal of the Christian message. But he is not. The pale, bony Jesus of the film, shrinking back from the touch of others, striding about barefoot issuing prophecies and fulminations, is real in a way that Jesus of the bleeding heart never was. He winces when nails are hammered through the hands of Jesus; when his tomb is revealed to be empty and the angel announces to the mourning women, ‘Look not here, for he is risen,’ and the Missa Luba bursts out and the common folk of the land, the halt and the maimed, the despised and rejected, come running or hobbling, their faces alight with joy, to share in the good news, his own heart wants to burst; tears of an exultation he does not understand stream down his cheeks, tears that he has surreptitiously to wipe away before he can emerge into the world again.

In the window of a second-hand bookseller off Charing Cross Road, on another of his expeditions to the city, he spots a chunky little book with a violet cover: Watt , by Samuel Beckett, published by Olympia Press. Olympia Press is notorious: from a safe haven in Paris it publishes pornography in English for subscribers in England and America. But as a sideline it also publishes the more daring writings of the avant-garde — Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita , for instance. It is hardly likely that Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting for Godot and Endgame , writes pornography. What kind of book, then, is Watt ?

He pages through it. It is printed in the same full-bodied serif type as Pound’s Selected Poems , a type that evokes for him intimacy, solidity. He buys the book and takes it back to Major Arkwright’s. From the first page he knows he has hit on something. Propped up in bed with light pouring through the window, he reads and reads.

Watt is quite unlike Beckett’s plays. There is no clash, no conflict, just the flow of a voice telling a story, a flow continually checked by doubts and scruples, its pace fitted exactly to the pace of his own mind. Watt is also funny, so funny that he rolls about laughing. When he comes to the end he starts again at the beginning.

Why did people not tell him Beckett wrote novels? How could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time? In Ford there has always been an element of the stuffed shirt that he has disliked but has been hesitant to acknowledge, something to do with the value Ford places on knowing where in the West End to buy the best motoring gloves or how to tell a Médoc from a Beaune; whereas Beckett is classless, or outside class, as he himself would prefer to be.

The testing of the programs they write has to be done on the Atlas machine in Cambridge, during the night hours when the mathematicians who enjoy first claim on it are sleeping. So every second or third week he catches the train to Cambridge, carrying a satchel with his papers and his rolls of punched tape and his pyjamas and his toothbrush. While in Cambridge he resides at the Royal Hotel, at International Computers’ expense. From six in the evening until six in the morning he works on Atlas. In the early morning he returns to the hotel, has breakfast, and retires to bed. In the afternoon he is free to wander around the town, perhaps going to a film. Then it is time to return to the Mathematical Laboratory, the huge, hangar-like building that houses Atlas, for the night’s stint.

It is a routine that suits him down to the ground. He likes train trips, likes the anonymity of hotel rooms, likes huge English breakfasts of bacon and sausages and eggs and toast and marmalade and coffee. Since he does not have to wear a suit, he can mix easily with students on the street, even seem to be one of them. And being with the huge Atlas machine all night, alone save for the duty engineer, watching the roll of computer code that he has written speed through the tape reader, watching the magnetic tape disks begin to spin and the lights on the console begin to flash at his command, gives him a sense of power that he knows is childish but that, with no one watching, he can safely revel in.

Sometimes he has to stay on at the Mathematical Laboratory into the morning to confer with members of the Mathematics Department. For everything that is truly novel about the Atlas software comes not from International Computers but from a handful of mathematicians at Cambridge. From a certain point of view, he is merely one of a team of professional programmers from the computer industry that the Cambridge Mathematics Department has hired to implement its ideas, just as from the same point of view International Computers is a firm of engineers hired by Manchester University to build a computer according to its design. From that point of view, he himself is merely a skilled workman in the pay of the university, not a collaborator entitled to speak on an equal footing with these brilliant young scientists.