J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Not a fool. Not a pig in satin robes, porcus magistralis, out of Grandville. Not the Mad Hatter's tea party. For the first time this day she feels tested. Very well: let her see what she can come up with.

'The aboriginal people of Tasmania are today counted among the invisible, the invisible whose secretary I am, one of many such. Every morning I seat myself at my desk and ready myself for the summons of the day. That is a secretary's way of life, and mine. When the old Tasmanians summon me, if they choose to summon me, I will be ready and I will write, to the best of my ability.

'Similarly with children, since you mention violated children. I have yet to be summoned by a child, but again I am ready.

'A word of caution to you, however. I am open to all voices, not just the voices of the murdered and violated.' She tries to keep her own voice even at this point, tries to hit no note that might be called forensic.'If it is their murderers and violators who choose to summon me instead, to use me and speak through me, I will not close my ears to them, I will not judge them.'

'You will speak for murderers?'

'I will.'

'You do not judge between the murderer and his victim? Is that what it is to be a secretary: to write down whatever you are told? To be bankrupt of conscience?'

She is cornered, she knows. But what does it matter, being cornered, if it brings what feels more and more like a contest of rhetoric closer to its end! 'Do you think the guilty do not suffer too?' she says.'Do you think they do not call out from their flames? Do not forget me! – that is what they cry. What kind of conscience is it that will disregard a cry of such moral agony?'

'And these voices that summon you,' says the pudgy man: 'you do not ask where they come from?'

'No. Not as long as they speak the truth.'

'And you – you, consulting only your heart, are judge of that truth?'

She nods impatiently. Like the interrogation of Joan of Arc, she thinks. How do you know where your voices come from? She cannot stand the literariness of it all. Have they not the wit to come up with something new?

A silence has fallen. 'Go on,' the man says encouragingly.

'That is all,' she says. 'You asked, I answered.'

'Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?'

Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists – whatever exists means – should His massive, monarchical slumber be disturbed from below by a clamour of believes and don't believes, like a plebiscite?

'That is too intimate,' she says. 'I have nothing to say.'

'There are only ourselves here. You are free to speak your heart.'

You misunderstand. I mean, I suspect that God would not look kindly on such presumption – presumption to intimacy. I prefer to let God be. As I hope He will let me be.'

There is silence. She has a headache. Too many heady abstractions, she thinks to herself: a warning from nature.

The chairman glances around. 'Further questions?' he asks.

There are none.

He turns to her. You will hear from us. In due course. Through established channels.'

She is back in the dormitory, lying on her bunk. She would prefer to be sitting, but the bunks are built with raised edges like trays, one cannot sit.

She hates this hot, airless room that has been allotted as her home. She hates the smell, revolts at the touch of the greasy mattress. And the hours here seem to be longer than the hours she is used to, particularly in the middle of the day. How long since she arrived in this place? She has lost track of time. It feels like weeks, even months.

There is a band that emerges on to the square in the afternoons once the worst of the heat has passed. From the ornate bandstand the musicians, in starched white uniforms with peaked caps and lots of gold braid, play Souza marches, Strauss waltzes, popular songs:'Il pipistrello',' Sorrento '. The conductor wears the neat pencil moustache of a small-town Lothario; after each piece he smiles and bows to the applause, while the fat tuba player doffs his cap and wipes his forehead with a scarlet handkerchief.

Exactly, she thinks to herself, what one would expect in an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912. Out of a book, just as the bunkhouse with its straw mattresses and forty-watt bulb is out of a book, and the whole courtroom business too, down to the dozy bailiff. Is it all being mounted for her sake, because she is a writer? Is it someone's idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés? Whatever the case, she ought to be out on the square, not here in the bunkhouse. She could be sitting at one of the tables in the shade amid the murmurings of lovers, with a cold drink before her, waiting for the first touch of the breeze on her cheek. A commonplace among commonplaces, no doubt, but what does that matter any longer? What does it matter if the happiness of the young couples on the square is a feigned happiness, the boredom of the sentry a feigned boredom, the false notes that the cornet player hits in the upper register feigned false notes? That is what life has been since she arrived in this place: an elaborate set of dovetailing commonplaces, including the rattletrap bus with the labouring engine and the suitcases strapped on the roof, including the gate itself with its huge bossed nails. Why not go out and play her part, the part of the traveller cast up in a town she is doomed never to leave?

Yet even as she skulks in the bunkhouse, who is to say she is playing no part? Why should she think that she alone has it in her power to hold herself back from the play? And what would true stubbornness, true grit, consist in anyway but going through with the performance, no matter what? Let the band strike up a dance tune, let the couples bow to each other and step on to the floor, and there, among the dancers, let her be, Elizabeth Costello, the old trouper, in her unsuitable dress, circling in her stiff yet not graceless way And if that is a cliché too – being a professional, playing one's part – then let it be a cliché. What entitles her to shudder at clichés when everyone else seems to embrace them, live by them?

It is the same with the business of belief. I believe in the irrepressible human spirit: that is what she should have told her judges. That would have got her past them, and with foot-stamping applause too. I believe that all humankind is one. Everyone else seems to believe it, believe in it. Even she believes in it, now and then, when the mood takes her. Why can she not, just for once, pretend?

When she was young, in a world now lost and gone, one came across people who still believed in art, or at least in the artist, who tried to follow in the footsteps of the great masters. No matter that God had failed, and Socialism: there was still Dostoevsky to guide one, or Rilke, or Van Gogh with the bandaged ear that stood for passion. Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?

Her first inclination would be to say no. Her books certainly evince no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that lifetime labour of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she , and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. If, in the end, she believes in her books themselves more than she believes in that person, it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel. Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is.