John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

As for Chrissie’s wider family, her grandmother on my side had passed away before she was born and her grandfather was tucked away in a sanatorium, as I told you. Mark’s parents lived in the rural Eastern Cape in a farmhouse ringed by a two-metre-high electrified fence. They never spent a night away from home for fear the farm would be plundered and the livestock driven off, so they might as well have been in jail. Mark’s elder sister lived thousands of miles away in Seattle; my own brother never visited the Cape. So Chrissie had the most stripped-down version of a family possible. The sole complication was the uncle who at midnight sneaked in at the back door and into Mommy’s bed. How did this uncle fit in? Was he one of the family or on the contrary a worm eating away at the heart of the family?

And Maria — how much did Maria know? I could never be sure. Migrant labour was the norm in South Africa in those days, so Maria must have been all too familiar with the phenomenon of the husband who says goodbye to wife and children and goes off to the big city to find work. But whether Maria approved of wives fooling around in their husbands’ absence was another matter. Though Maria never actually laid eyes on my night-time visitor, it was hardly likely that she was deceived. That kind of visitor leaves too many traces behind.

But what is this? Is it really six o’clock? I had no idea it was so late. We must stop. Can you come back tomorrow?

I’m afraid I am due to head home tomorrow. I fly from here to Toronto, from Toronto to London. I’d hate it if …

Very well, let’s press on. There is not much more. I’ll be quick.

One night John arrived in an unusually excited state. He had with him a little cassette player, and put on a tape, the Schubert string quintet. It was not what I would call sexy music, nor was I particularly in the mood, but he wanted to make love, and specifically — excuse the explicitness — wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement.

Well, the slow movement in question may be very beautiful but I found it far from arousing. Added to which I could not shake off the image on the box containing the tape: Franz Schubert looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold.

I don’t know if you remember the slow movement, but there is a long violin aria with the viola throbbing below, and I could feel John trying to keep time with it. The whole business struck me as forced, ridiculous. Somehow or other my remoteness communicated itself to John. ‘Empty your mind!’ he hissed at me. ‘Feel through the music!’

Well, there can be nothing more irritating than being told what you must feel. I turned away from him, and his little erotic experiment collapsed at once.

Later on he tried to explain himself. He wanted to demonstrate something about the history of feeling, he said. Feelings had natural histories of their own. They came into being within time, flourished for a while or failed to flourish, then died or died out. The kinds of feeling that had flourished in Schubert’s day were by now, most of them, dead. The sole way left to us to re-experience them was via the music of the times. Because music was the trace, the inscription, of feeling.

Okay, I said, but why do we have to fuck while we listen to the music?

Because the slow movement of the quintet happens to be about fucking, he replied. If, instead of resisting, I had let the music flow into me and animate me, I would have experienced glimmerings of something quite unusual: what it had felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria.

‘What it felt like for post-Bonaparte man or what it felt like for post-Bonaparte woman?’ I said. ‘For Mr Schubert or for Mrs Schubert?’

That really annoyed him. He didn’t like his pet theories to be made fun of.

‘Music isn’t about fucking,’ I went on. ‘That is where you lose the plot. Music is about foreplay. It is about courtship. You sing to the maiden before you are admitted to her bed, not while you are in bed with her. You sing to her to woo her, to win her heart. If you aren’t happy with me in bed, maybe it is because you haven’t won my heart.’

I should have called it a day at that point, but I didn’t, I went further. ‘The mistake the two of us made,’ I said, ‘was that we skimped the foreplay. I’m not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless. Sex is better when it is preceded by a good, long courtship. More emotionally satisfying. More erotically satisfying too. If you are trying to improve our sex life, you won’t achieve it by making me fuck in time to music.’

I expected him to fight back, to argue the case for musical sex. But he did not rise to the bait. Instead he put on a sullen, defeated look and turned his back on me.

I know I am contradicting what I said earlier, about him being a good sport and a good loser, but this time I really seemed to have touched a sore spot.

Anyway, there we were. I had gone on the offensive, I couldn’t turn back. ‘Go home and practise your wooing,’ I said. ‘Go on. Go away. Take your Schubert with you. Come again when you can do better.’

It was cruel; but he deserved it for not fighting back.

‘Right — I’ll go,’ he said in a sulky voice. ‘I have things to do anyway.’ And he began to put on his clothes.

Things to do! I picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a quite nice little baked-clay plate, brown with a painted yellow border, one of a set of six that Mark and I had bought in Swaziland. For an instant I could still see the comic side of it: the dark-tressed, bare-breasted mistress exhibiting her stormy central-European temperament by shouting abuse and throwing crockery. Then I hurled the plate.

It hit him on the neck and bounced to the floor without breaking. He hunched his shoulders and turned to me with a puzzled stare. Never before, I am sure, had he had a plate thrown at him. ‘Go!’ I shouted or perhaps even screamed, and waved him away. Chrissie woke up and began crying.

Strange to say, I felt no regret afterwards. On the contrary, I was aroused and excited and proud of myself. Straight from the heart! I said to myself. My first plate!

[Silence.]

Have there been others?

Other plates? Plenty.

[Silence.]

Was that how it ended, then, between you and him?

Not quite. There was a coda. I’ll tell you the coda, then that will be that.

It was a condom that spelled the real end, a condom tied at the neck, full of dead sperm. Mark fished it out from under the bed. I was flabbergasted. How could I have missed it? It was as if I wanted it to be found, wanted to shout my infidelity from the rooftops.

Mark and I never used condoms, so there was no point in lying. ‘How long has this been going on?’ he demanded. ‘Since last December,’ I said. ‘You bitch,’ he said, ‘you filthy, lying bitch! And I trusted you!’

He was about to storm out of the room, but then as if on afterthought he turned and — I am sorry, I am going to draw a veil over what happened next, it is too shameful to repeat, too shaming. I will simply say it left me surprised, shocked, but above all furious. ‘For that, Mark, I will never forgive you,’ I said when I recovered myself. ‘There is a line, and you’ve just crossed it. I’m going. You look after Chrissie for a change.’

At the moment I uttered the words I’m going, you look after Chrissie , I swear I meant no more than that I was leaving the house and he could look after the child for the afternoon. But in the five paces it took to reach the front door it came to me in a blinding flash that this could actually be the moment of liberation, the moment when I walked out of an un fulfilling marriage and never came back. The clouds over my head, the clouds in my head, lightened, evaporated. Don’t think! I told myself. Just do it! Without missing a step I turned, strode upstairs, stuffed some underwear into a carry-bag, and raced downstairs again.