J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Go back to the experience. The flap of Satan's leathery wing: what was it that convinced her she felt it? And how much longer can she occupy one of the two cubicles in this cramped little women's room before some well-intentioned person decides she has had a collapse and calls in the janitor to break the lock?

The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan's century, is over and done with. Satan's century and her own too. If she happens to have crept over the finish line into the new age, she is certainly not at home in it. In these unfamiliar times Satan is still feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accommodations. He pitches his tent in odd places – for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows, or as good as a man can be who is also a novelist, that is to say, perhaps not good at all, but tending nevertheless to the good, in some ultimate sense, otherwise why write? Takes up residence in women too. Like the liver fluke, like the pinworm: one can live and die ignorant that one has been host to generations of them. In whose liver, in whose gut was Satan, that fateful day last year when again, indubitably, she felt his presence: in West's or in her own?

Old men, brothers, hanging dead with their trousers around their ankles, executed. In Rome it would have been different. In Rome they made a spectacle of executions: hauled their victims through howling mobs to the place of skulls and impaled them or flayed them or coated them with pitch and set them on fire. The Nazis, by comparison, mean, cheap, machine-gunning people in a field, gassing them in a bunker, strangling them in a cellar. So what was too much about death at the hands of the Nazis that was not too much in Rome, when all the striving of Rome was to wring from death as much cruelty, as much pain as possible? Is it just the grubbiness of that cellar in Berlin, a grubbiness that is too much like the real thing, the modern thing, for her to bear?

It is like a wall that she comes up against time and again. She did not want to read but she read; a violence was done to her but she conspired in the violation. He made me do it, she says, yet she makes others do it.

She should never have come. Conferences are for exchanging thoughts, at least that is the idea behind conferences. You cannot exchange thoughts when you do not know what you think.

There is a scratching at the door, a child's voice. 'Mammie, er zit een vrouw erin, ik kan haar schoenen zien!"

Hurriedly she flushes the bowl, unlocks the door, emerges.'Sorry,' she says, evading the eyes of mother and daughter.

What was the child saying? Why is she taking so long? If she spoke the language she could enlighten the child. Because the older you get the longer it takes. Because sometimes you need to be alone. Because there are things we do not do in public, not any more.

Her brothers: did they let them use the toilet one last time, or was shitting themselves part of the punishment? That, at least, Paul West drew a veil over, for which small mercy, thanks.

No one to wash them, afterwards. Women's work since time immemorial. No womanly presence in the cellar business. Admission reserved; men only. But perhaps when it was all over, when dawn's rosy fingers touched the eastern skies, the women arrived, indefatigable German cleaning women out of Brecht, and set to work cleaning up the mess, washing the walls, scrubbing the floor, making everything spick and span, so that you would never guess, by the time they had done, what games the boys had got up to during the night. Would never guess until Mr West came along and threw it all open again.

It is eleven o'clock. The next session, the next lecture, must already be in progress. She has a choice. Either she can go to the hotel and hide in her room and go on with her grieving; or she can tiptoe into the auditorium, take a seat in the back row, and do the second thing they brought her to Amsterdam for: hear what other folk have to say about the problem of evil.

There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.

She met Robert Duncan only once, in 1963, soon after her return from Europe. Duncan and another, less interesting poet named Philip Whalen had been brought out on a tour by the US Information Service: the Cold War was on, there was money for cultural propaganda. Duncan and Whalen gave a reading at the University of Melbourne; after the reading they all went off to a bar, the two poets and the man from the consulate and half a dozen Australian writers of all ages, including herself.

Duncan had read his long 'Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar' that night, and it had impressed her, moved her. She was attracted to Duncan, with his severely handsome Roman profile; she would not have minded having a fling with him, would not even, in the mood she was in in those days, have minded having his love child, like one of those mortal women of myth impregnated by a passing god and left to bring up semi-divine offspring.

She is reminded of Duncan because in a book sent by an American friend she has just come across another telling of the Eros and Psyche story, by one Susan Mitchell, whom she has not read before. Why the interest in Psyche among American poets, she wonders? Do they find something American in her, the girl who, not content with the ecstasies provided night after night by the visitor to her bed, must light a lamp, peel back the darkness, gaze on him naked? In her restlessness, her inability to leave well alone, do they see something of themselves?

She too is not without curiosity about the intercourse of gods and mortals, though she has never written about it, not even in her book about Marion Bloom and her god-haunted husband Leopold. What intrigues her is less the metaphysics than the mechanics, the practicalities of congress across a gap in being. Bad enough to have a full-grown male swan jabbing webbed feet into your backside while he has his way, or a one-ton bull leaning his moaning weight on you; how, when the god does not care to change shape but remains his awesome self, does the human body accommodate itself to the blast of his desire?

Let it be said for Susan Mitchell that she does not shrink from such questions. In her poem, Eros, who seems to have made himself man-sized for the occasion, lies in bed on his back with his wings drooping on either side, the girl (one presumes) on top of him. The seed of gods would seem to gush hugely (this must have been Mary of Nazareth's experience too, waking from her dream still slightly trembly with the issue of the Holy Ghost running down her thighs). When Psyche's lover comes, his wings are left drenched; or perhaps the wings drip seed, perhaps they become organs of consummation themselves. On occasions when he and she reach a climax together, he breaks apart like (Mitchell's words, more or less) a bird shot in flight. (What about the girl, she wants to ask the poet – if you can say what it was like for him, why not tell us how it was for her?)

What she had really wanted to talk about to Robert Duncan, however, that night in Melbourne when he indicated so firmly that whatever she offered did not interest him, was not girls visited by gods but the much rarer phenomenon of men condescended to by goddesses. Anchises, for instance, lover of Aphrodite and father of Aeneas. One would have thought that, after that unforeseen and unforgettable episode in his hut on Mount Ida, Anchises – a good-looking boyo, if one is to believe the Hymn, but otherwise just a cattle herder – would have wanted to talk about nothing else, to whoever would listen: how he had fucked a goddess, the most succulent in the whole stable, fucked her all night long, got her pregnant too.