J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

They are back at the hotel. She is tired, she must take something for her continuing nausea, she must lie down. But the question still nags at her: why this hostility on Blanche's part towards the humanities? I do not need to consult novels, said Blanche. Is the hostility, in some tangled way, aimed at her? Though she has religiously sent Blanche her books as they have come off the press, she can see no sign that Blanche has read any of them. Has she been summoned to Africa as a representative of the humanities, or of the novel, or of both, to be taught a last lesson before they both descend into the grave? Is that really how Blanche sees her? The truth – and she ought to impress this on Blanche – is that she has never been an aficionado of the humanities. Something too complacently masculine about the whole enterprise, too self-regarding. She must set Blanche straight.

'Winckelmann,' she says to Blanche. 'What did you mean by bringing up Winckelmann?'

'I wanted to remind them of what the study of the classics would lead to. To Hellenism as an alternative religion. An alternative to Christianity.'

'That is what I thought. As an alternative for a few aesthetes, a few highly educated products of the European educational system. But surely not as a popular alternative.'

'You miss my point, Elizabeth. Hellenism was an alternative. Poor as it may have been, Hellas was the one alternative to the Christian vision that humanism was able to offer. To Greek society – an utterly idealized picture of Greek society, but how were ordinary folk to know that? – they could point and say, Behold, that is how we should live – not in the hereafter but in the here and now!

Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes. Free minds in free bodies. More than an idealized picture: a dream, a delusion. But how else are we to live but by dreams?

'I do not disagree,' she says. 'But who believes in Hellenism any more? Who even remembers the word?'

'Still you miss the point. Hellenism was the sole vision of the good life that humanism was able to put forward. When Hellenism failed – which was inevitable, since it had nothing whatever to do with the lives of real people – humanism went bankrupt. That man at lunch was arguing for the humanities as a set of techniques, the human sciences. Dry as dust. What young man or woman with blood in their veins would want to spend their life scratching around in the archives or doing explications de texte without end?'

'But Hellenism was surely just a phase in the history of the humanities. Larger, more inclusive visions of what human life can be have emerged since then. The classless society, for instance. Or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised. I am not putting in a plea for either of these visions. I am just pointing out that people cannot live without hope, or perhaps without illusions. If you turned to any of those people we had lunch with and asked them, as humanists or at least as card-carrying practitioners of the humanities, to state the goal of all their efforts, surely they would reply that, however indirectly, they strive to improve the lot of mankind.'

'Yes. And therein they reveal themselves as true followers of their humanist forebears. Who offered a secular vision of salvation. Rebirth without the intervention of Christ. By the workings of man alone. Renaissance. On the example of the Greeks. Or on the example of the American Indians. Or on the example of the Zulus. Well, it cannot be done.'

'It cannot done, you say. Because – though none of them were aware of it – the Greeks were damned, the Indians were damned, the Zulus were damned.'

'I said nothing about damnation. I am talking only about history, about the record of the humanist enterprise. It cannot be done. Extra ecclesiam nulla solvatio.'

She shakes her head. 'Blanche, Blanche, Blanche,' she says. 'Who would have thought you would end up such a hardliner.'

Blanche gives her a wintry smile. The light flashes on her glasses.

It is Saturday, her last full day in Africa. She is spending it at Marianhill, the station which her sister has made her life's work and her home. Tomorrow she will travel to Durban. From Durban she will fly to Bombay and then on to Melbourne. And that will be that. We will not see each other again, Blanche and I, she thinks, not in this life.

It was the graduation ceremony she came for, but what Blanche really wanted her to see, what lay behind the invitation, was the hospital. She knows that, yet she resists. It is not something she wants. She has not the stomach for it. She has seen it all on television, too often, till she cannot bear to look any more: the stick limbs, the bloated bellies, the great impassive eyes of children wasting away, beyond cure, beyond care. Let this cup be taken from me! she pleads inwardly. I am too old to withstand these sights, too old and weak. I will just cry. But in this case she cannot refuse, not when it is her own sister. And, in the event, it proves to be not too bad, not bad enough to break down over. The nursing staff is spick and span, the equipment is new – the fruit of Sister Bridget's fund-raising – and the atmosphere is relaxed, even happy. In the wards, mingling with the staff, are women in native dress. She takes them to be mothers or grandmothers until Blanche explains: they are healers, she says, traditional healers. Then she remembers: this is what Marianhill is famous for, this is Blanche's great innovation, to open the hospital to the people, to have native doctors work beside doctors of Western medicine.

As for the children, perhaps Blanche has tucked the worst cases away out of sight, but she is surprised at how gay even a dying child can be. It is as Blanche said in her book: with love and care and the right drugs, these innocents can be brought to the very gate of death without fear.

Blanche takes her to the chapel too. Entering the unpretentious brick and iron building, she is struck at once by the carved wooden crucifix behind the altar, showing an emaciated Christ with a masklike face crowned with a wreath of real acacia thorns, his hands and feet pierced not by nails but by steel bolts. The figure itself is of near life size; the cross reaches up to the bare rafters; the whole construction dominates the chapel, overbears it.

The Christ was done by a local carver, Blanche tells her. Years ago the station adopted him, providing him with a workshop and paying him a monthly wage. Does she want to meet the man?

Which is why, now, this old man with the stained teeth and the overalls and the uncertain English, introduced to her simply as Joseph, is unlocking, for her benefit, the door of a shed in an outlying corner of the station. The grass is thick around the door, she notices: a long time since anyone was here.

Inside she has to brush away cobwebs. Joseph fumbles for the switch, clicks it up and down fruitlessly. 'Bulb is gone,' he says, but does nothing about it. The only light comes from the open door and from cracks between the roof and the walls. It takes a while for her eyes to adjust.

There is a long, makeshift table down the centre of the shed. Piled on the table, or against it, lie a jumble of wooden carvings. Against the walls, stacked on pallets, are lengths of wood, some with the bark still on, and dusty cardboard boxes.

'Is my workshop,' says Joseph. 'When I am young I work here all day. But now I am too old.'