J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Blanche smiles. 'If they did, I'll ask them to chop it out.' There is a pause between the two of them. She thinks: Perhaps now she will say why she has brought me here.

' Elizabeth,' says Blanche (is there something new in her tone, something softer, or is she just imagining it?), 'remember it is their gospel, their Christ. It is what they have made of him, they, the ordinary people. What they have made of him and what he has let them make of him. Out of love. And not just in Africa. You will see scenes just like that repeated in Brazil, in the Philippines, even in Russia. Ordinary people do not want the Greeks. They do not want the realm of pure forms. They do not want marble statues. They want someone who suffers like them. Like them and for them.'

Jesus. The Greeks. It is not what she expected, not what she wanted, not at this last minute when they are saying goodbye for perhaps the last time. Something unrelenting about Blanche. Unto death. She should have learned her lesson. Sisters never let go of each other. Unlike men, who let go all too easily. Locked to the end in Blanche's embrace.

'So: Thou hast triumphed, O pale Galilean,' she says, not trying to hide the bitterness in her voice. 'Is that what you want to hear me say, Blanche?'

'More or less. You backed a loser, my dear. If you had put your money on a different Greek you might still have stood a chance. Orpheus instead of Apollo. The ecstatic instead of the rational. Someone who changes form, changes colour, according to his. surroundings. Someone who can die but then come back. A chameleon. A phoenix. Someone who appeals to women. Because it is women who live closest to the ground. Someone who moves among the people, whom they can touch – put their hand into the side of, feel the wound, smell the blood. But you didn't, and you lost. You went for the wrong Greeks, Elizabeth.'

A month has passed. She is at home, settled back into her own life, the African venture behind her. Of the reunion with Blanche she has made nothing yet, though the memory of their unsisterly parting nags at her.

'There is a story I want to tell you,' she writes, 'about Mother.'

She is writing to herself, that is, to whoever is with her in the

room when she is the only one there; but the words will not come,

she knows, unless she thinks of this writing as a letter to Blanche.

During her first year at Oakgrove, Mother made friends with a man named Phillips, who was also a resident there. I mentioned him to you, but you probably don't remember. He had a car; they used to go out together, to the theatre, to concerts; they were a couple, in a civilized kind of way. 'Mr Phillips', Mother called him from beginning to end, and I took that as a cue not to assume too much. Then Mr Phillips's health gave in, and that was the end of their gallivanting.

When I first met him, Mr P was still quite a spry old fellow, with his pipe and his blazer and cravat and his David Niven moustache. He had been a lawyer, quite a successful one. He took care of his appearance, had hobbies, read books; there was still life in him, as Mother put it.

One of his hobbies was painting in watercolours. I saw some of his work. His human figures were wooden, but he had a feel for landscape, for the bush, that was genuine, I thought. A feel for light and what distance did to light.

He did a painting of Mother in her blue organdie outfit, with a silk scarf floating behind her. Not wholly successful as a portrait, but I kept it, I still have it somewhere.

I sat for him too. This was after he had had surgery and was confined to his rooms, or at any rate chose not to come out. Sitting for him was Mother's idea. 'See if you can take him out of himself a bit,' she said. 'I can't. He spends all day alone, brooding.'

Mr Phillips kept to himself because he had had an operation, a laryngectomy. It left him with a hole through which he was supposed to speak, with the aid of a prosthesis. But he was ashamed of the unsightly, raw-looking hole in his throat, and therefore withdrew from public sight. He could not speak anyhow, not understandably – he never bothered to learn the correct breathing. At best he could produce a kind of croaking. It must have been deeply humiliating for such a ladies' man.

He and I negotiated by note, and the upshot was that on a series of Saturday afternoons I sat for him. His hand was a little trembly by then, he could only manage an hour at a time, the cancer was getting to him in more ways than one.

He had one of the better apartments at Oakgrove, on the ground floor, with French doors leading on to the garden. For my portrait I sat by the garden door in a stiff-backed, carved chair wearing a wrap I had picked up in Jakarta, hand-stencilled in ochre and maroon. I don't know that it flattered me particularly, but I thought as a painter he would enjoy the colours, they would give him something to play with.

One Saturday – patience, I am getting to the point – a lovely warm day with the pigeons purring in the trees, he put down his brush and shook his head and said something in his croak that I did not catch. 'Didn't hear that, Aidan,' I said. 'Not working,' he repeated. And then he wrote something on his pad and brought it over to me. 'Wish I could paint you in the nude,' he had written. And then, below: 'Would have loved that.'

It must have cost him something to come out with it. Would have loved, past hypothetical. But just what did he mean? Conceivably he meant I would have loved to have painted you when you were still young, but I don't think so. I would have loved to have painted you when I was still a man: that is more like it. As he showed me the words I saw his lip quiver. I know one should not put too much store on trembling lips and watering eyes in old people, but still…

I smiled and tried to reassure him and took up my pose again, and he went back to his easel, and all was as before, except that I could see he was not painting any more, just standing there with the brush drying in his hand. So I thought – at last I come to the point – I thought, What the hell, and I loosened the wrap and shrugged it off my shoulders and took off my brassiere and hung it on the back of the chair and said, 'How's that, Aidan?'

I paint with my penis – didn't Renoir say that, Renoir of the plump, creamy-skinned ladies? Avec ma verge, feminine noun. Well, I thought to myself, let's see if we can wake Mr Phillips's verge out of its deep sleep. And I gave him my profile again, while the pigeons went on in the trees as if nothing were happening.

Whether it worked, whether the spectacle of me in the seminude rekindled anything in him, I cannot say. But I could feel the full weight of his gaze on me, on my breasts, and, frankly, it was good. I was forty then, I had two children behind me, they were not the breasts of a young woman, but it was good nevertheless, I thought so and think so still, in that place of withering away and dying. A blessing.

Then after a while, as the shadows in the garden lengthened and it grew cool, I made myself decent again. 'Goodbye, Aidan, God bless,' I said; and he wrote 'Thank you' on his pad and showed it to me, and that was that. I do not think he expected me to come back the next Saturday, and I did not. Whether he finished the painting by himself I don't know. Perhaps he destroyed it. He certainly did not show it to Mother.

Why am I telling you this story, Blanche? Because I connect it with the conversation you and I had at Marianhill about the Zulus and the Greeks and the true nature of the humanities. I do not want to give up on our dispute yet; I do not want to vacate the field.

The episode I am telling you about, the passage in Mr Phillips's living room, so minor in itself, has puzzled me for years; it is only now, after getting back from Africa, that I think I can explain it.