J. Coetzee - Slow Man

MARGARET PAYS A second visit, this time unannounced. It is a Sunday, he is alone in the flat. He offers her tea, which she declines. She circles the room, comes up behind him where he sits, strokes his hair. He is still as a stone.

'So is this the end of it, Paul?' she asks.

'The end of what?'

'You know what I mean. Have you decided this is the end of your sexual life? Tell me straight so that I will know how to conduct myself in future.'

Not someone to beat about the bush, Margaret. He has always liked that about her. But how should he respond? Yes, I have come to the end of my sexual life, from now on treat me like a eunuch? How can he say that when it may not even be true? Yet what if it is indeed true? What if the snorting black steed of passion has given up the ghost? The twilight of his manhood. What a let-down; but what a relief too!

'Margaret,' he says, 'give me time.'

'And your day help?' says Margaret, going for the weak spot. 'How are you and your day help getting on?'

'My day help and I get on well, thank you. But for her I might not bother to get out of bed in the mornings. But for her I might end up as one of those cases one reads about, where the neighbours smell a bad smell and call in the police to break down the door.'

'Don't be melodramatic, Paul. Nobody dies of an amputated leg.'

'No, but people do die of indifference to the future.'

'So your day help has saved your life. That's good. She deserves a medal. She deserves a bonus. When am I going to meet her?'

'Don't take it personally, Margaret. You asked me a question, I am trying to give a truthful answer.'

But Margaret does take it personally. 'I'll be on my way now,' she says. 'Don't get up, I'll let myself out. Give me a call when you are ready for human society again.'

In his sessions with the physiotherapist he was warned about the tendency of the severed thigh muscles to retract, pulling the hip and pelvis backward. He props himself on the frame and with a free hand explores his lower back. Can he feel the beginnings of a backward jut? Is this ugly half-limb becoming even uglier?

If he were to give in and accept a prosthesis there would be a stronger reason for exercising the stump. As it is, the stump is of no use to him at all. All he can do with it is carry it around like an unwanted child. No wonder it wants to shrink, retract, withdraw.

But if this fleshly object is repulsive, how much more so a leg moulded out of pink plastic with a hinge at the top and a shoe at the bottom, an apparatus that you strap yourself to in the morning and unstrap yourself from at night and drop on the floor, shoe and all! He shudders at the thought of it; he wants nothing to do with it. Crutches are better. Crutches are at least honest.

Nevertheless, once a week he allows a ferry vehicle to call for him and convey him to George Street in Norwood, to a rehabilitation class run by a woman named Madeleine Martin. There are half a dozen other amputees in the class, all of them on the wrong side of sixty. He is not the only one without a prosthesis, but he is the only one to have refused one.

Madeleine cannot understand what she calls his attitude. 'There are people all around in the street,' she says, 'who you could not even tell they are wearing prostheses, it's so natural the way they walk.'

'I don't want to look natural,' he says. 'I prefer to feel natural.'

She shakes her head in smiling incredulity. 'It's a new chapter in your life,' she says. 'The old chapter is closed, you must say goodbye to it and accept the new one. Accept: that's all you need to do. Then all the doors that you think are closed will open. You'll see.'

He does not reply.

Does he really want to feel natural? Did he feel natural before the occurrence on Magill Road? He has no idea. But perhaps that is what it means to feel natural: to have no idea. Does the Venus of Milo feel natural? Despite having no arms the Venus of Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty. Once she had arms, the story goes, then her arms were broken off; their loss only makes her beauty more poignant. Yet if it were discovered tomorrow that the Venus was in fact modelled on an amputee, she would be removed at once to a basement store. Why? Why can the fragmentary image of a woman be admired but not the image of a fragmentary woman, no matter how neatly sewn up the stumps?

He would give a great deal to be pedalling his bicycle down Magill Road again, with the wind on his face. He would give a great deal for the chapter that is now closed to be opened again. He wishes Wayne Blight had never been born. That is all. Easy enough to say. But he keeps his mouth shut.

Limbs have memories, Madeleine tells the class, and she is right. When he takes a step on his crutches his right side still swings through the arc that the old leg would have swung through; at night his cold foot still seeks its cold ghostly brother.

Her job, Madeleine tells them, is to re-program old and now obsolete memory systems that dictate to us how we balance, how we walk, how we run. 'Of course we want to hold on to our old memory systems,' she says. 'Otherwise we would not be human. But we must not hold on to them when they hinder our progress. Not when they get in our way. Are you with me? Of course you are.'

Like all the health professionals he has met of late, Madeleine treats the old people consigned to her care as if they were children – not very clever, somewhat morose, somewhat sluggish children in need of being bucked up. Madeleine herself is the right side of sixty, the right side of fifty, even the right side of forty-five; she runs no doubt like a gazelle.

To re-program the body's memories, Madeleine uses dance. She shows them videotapes of ice-skaters in skin-tight scarlet or golden suits gliding in loops and circles, first the left foot, then the right; in the background, Delibes. 'Listen, and let the rhythm take charge of you,' says Madeleine. 'Let the music run through your body, let it dance inside you.' Around him those of his team mates who have already acquired their artificial limbs imitate as best they can the movements of the skaters. Since he cannot do that – cannot skate, cannot dance, cannot walk, cannot even stand up straight unaided – he closes his eyes, clings to the rails, and sways in time with the music. Somewhere, in an ideal world, he glides around the ice hand in hand with his attractive instructress. Hypnotism, that's all it is! he thinks to himself. How quaint; how old-fashioned!

His personal programme (they each have a personal programme) consists largely of balancing exercises. 'We will have to learn to balance all over again,' Madeleine explains, 'with our new body.' That is what she calls it: our new body, not our truncated old body.

There is also what in the hospital was called hydrotherapy and what Madeleine calls water-work. In the narrow pool in the back room he grips the rails and walks in the water. 'Keep the legs straight,' says Madeleine. 'Both of them. Like scissors. Snip snip snip.'

In the old days he would have been sceptical of people like Madeleine Martin. But, for the time being, Madeleine Martin is all that is offered him to believe in. So at home, sometimes under the eye of Marijana, sometimes not, he goes through his personal exercise programme, even the swaying-to-music part of it.

'Is good, is good for you,' says Marijana, nodding. 'Is good you get some rhythm.' But she does not bother to hide the note of professional derision in her voice.

Good?, he would like to say to her. Really? I am not so sure it is good for me. How can it be, when I find it humiliating, all of it, the whole business from beginning to end? But he does not speak the words. He holds himself back. He has entered the zone of humiliation; it is his new home; he will never leave it; best to shut up, best to accept.