John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘But I can see your point,’ she goes on, helping him out, since he doesn’t seem able to help himself. ‘You are right in one sense: we have become too used to keeping our hands clean, our white hands. We should be more ready to dirty our hands. I couldn’t agree more. End of subject. Are you sleepy yet? I’m not. I have a suggestion. To pass the time, why don’t we tell each other stories.’

‘You tell a story,’ he says stiffly. ‘I don’t know any stories.’

‘Tell me a story from America,’ she says. ‘You can make it up, it doesn’t have to be true. Any story.’

‘Given the existence of a personal God,’ he says, ‘with a white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia loves us deeply quaquaquaqua with some exceptions.’

He stops. She has not the faintest idea what he is talking about.

‘Quaquaquaqua,’ he says.

‘I give up,’ she says. He is silent. ‘My turn,’ she says. ‘Here follows the story of the princess and the pea. Once upon a time there is a princess so delicate that even when she sleeps on ten piled-up feather mattresses she is convinced she can feel a pea, one of those hard little dried peas, underneath the last mattress. She frets and frets all night — Who put a pea there? Why? — and as a result doesn’t get a wink of sleep. She comes down to breakfast looking haggard. To her parents the king and queen she complains: “I couldn’t sleep, and it’s all the fault of that accursed pea!” The king sends a serving-woman to remove the pea. The woman searches and searches but can find nothing.

“‘Let me hear no more of peas,” says the king to his daughter. “There is no pea. The pea is just in your imagination.”

‘That night the princess reascends her mountain of feather mattresses. She tries to sleep but cannot, because of the pea, the pea that is either underneath the bottom-most mattress or else in her imagination, it does not matter which, the effect is the same. By daybreak she is so exhausted that she cannot even eat breakfast. “It’s all the pea’s fault!” she laments.

‘Exasperated, the king sends an entire troop of serving-women to hunt for the pea, and when they return, reporting that there is no pea, has them beheaded. “Now are you satisfied?” he bellows at his daughter. “Now will you sleep?”’

She pauses for breath. She has no idea what is going to happen next in this bedtime story, whether the princess will at last manage to fall asleep or not; yet, strangely, she is convinced that, when she opens her lips, the right words will come.

But there is no need for more words. He is asleep. Like a child, this prickly, opinionated, incompetent, ridiculous cousin of hers has fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder. Fast asleep, undoubtedly: she can feel him twitching. No peas under him.

And what of her? Who is going to tell her stories to send her off to the land of nod? Never has she felt more awake. Is this how she is going to have to spend the night: bored, fretting, bearing the weight of a somnolent male?

He claims there is a taboo on whites doing manual labour, but what of the taboo on cousins of opposite sexes spending the night together? What are the Coetzees back on the farm going to say? Truly, she has no feeling towards John that could be called physical, not the faintest quiver of womanly response. Will that be enough to absolve her? Why is there no male aura about him? Does the fault lie with him; or on the contrary does it lie with her, who has so wholeheartedly absorbed the taboo that she cannot think of him as a man? If he has no woman, is that because he has no feeling for women, and therefore women, herself included, respond by having no feeling for him? Is her cousin, if not a moffie , then a eunuch?

The air in the cab is becoming stale. Taking care not to wake him, she opens the window a crack. What presences surround them — bushes or trees or perhaps even animals — she senses on her skin rather than sees. From somewhere comes the chirping of a lone cricket. Stay with me tonight , she whispers to the cricket.

But perhaps there is a type of woman who is attracted to a man like this, who is happy to listen without contradicting while he airs his opinions, and then to take on those opinions as her own, even the self-evidently silly ones. A woman indifferent to male silliness, indifferent even to sex, simply in search of a man to attach to herself and take care of and protect against the world. A woman who will put up with shoddy work around the house because what matters is not that the windows close and the locks work but that her man have the space in which to live out his idea of himself. And who will afterwards quietly call in hired help, someone good with his hands, to fix up the mess.

For a woman like that, marriage might well be passionless but it need not therefore be childless. She could give birth to a whole brood. Then of an evening they could all sit around the table, the lord and master at the head, his helpmeet at the foot, their healthy, well-behaved offspring down the two sides; and over the soup course the master could ex patiate on the sanctity of labour. What a man is my mate! the wife could whisper to herself. What a developed conscience he has!

Why is she feeling so bitter towards John, and even bitterer towards this wife she has conjured up for him out of thin air? The simple answer: because due to his vanity and clumsiness she is stranded on the Merweville road. But the night is long, there is plenty of time to unfold a grander hypothesis and inspect that hypothesis to see if it has any virtue. The grander answer: she feels bitter because she had hoped for much from her cousin, and he has failed her.

What had she hoped for from him?

That he would redeem the Coetzee men.

Why did she desire the redemption of the Coetzee men?

Because the Coetzee men are so slapgat .

Why had she placed her hopes in John in particular?

Because of the Coetzee men he was the one blessed with the best chance. He had a chance and he did not make use of it.

Slapgat is a word she and her sister throw around rather easily, perhaps because it was thrown around rather easily in their hearing while they were children. It was only after she left home that she noticed the shocked looks that the word evoked, and began to use it more cautiously. A slap gat : a rectum, an anus, over which one has less than complete control. Hence slapgat : slack, spineless.

Her uncles have turned out slapgat because their parents, her grandparents, brought them up that way. While their father thundered and roared and made them quake in their boots, their mother tiptoed around like a mouse. The result was that they went out into the world lacking all fibre, lacking backbone, lacking belief in themselves, lacking courage. The life-paths they chose for themselves were without exception easy paths, paths of least resistance. Gingerly they tested the tide, then swam with it.

What made the Coetzees so easygoing and therefore so gesellig , such good company, was precisely their preference for the easiest available path; and their geselligheid was precisely what made the Christmas get-togethers such fun. They never quarrelled, never squabbled among themselves, got along famously, all of them. It was the next generation, her generation, who had to pay for their easygoingness, who went out into the world expecting the world to be just another slap, gesellige place, Voëlfontein writ large, and found that, behold, it was not!

She herself has no children. She cannot conceive. But if, blessedly, she had children, she would take it as her first duty to work the Coetzee blood out of them. How you work slap blood out of people she does not know offhand, short of taking them to a hospital and having their blood pumped out and replaced with the blood of some vigorous donor; but perhaps a strict training in self-assertion, starting at the earliest possible age, would do the trick. Because if there is one thing she knows about the world in which the child of the future will have to grow up, it is that there will be no room for the slap .