J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'But what if they ask the parents straight out how they are going to pay those outrageous fees?'

'I will write them a letter. I will lodge guarantees. I will dowhatever is required.'

She is building a little pyramid of fruit – apricots, nectarines, grapes – in the bowl on the coffee table. 'That's admirable,' she says. 'I'm so glad to have this chance to get to know you better. You give me faith.'

'I give you faith? No one has said that to me before.'

'Yes, you give me faith again. You must not take seriously what I said about yourself and Mrs Jokic. One is embarrassed, that is all, to find oneself in the presence of true, old-fashioned love. I bow before you.'

She pauses in what she is doing and offers, not without irony, the lightest of inclinations of the head.

'However,' she continues, 'do remember that there is still the hurdle of Miroslav to overcome. We cannot take it for granted that Miroslav will agree to have his son go off to a fancy boarding school a thousand miles away. Or that he will want his pecuniary obligations to be taken over by the man his wife visits six days a week, the man with the missing leg. Have you thought what you will do about Miroslav?'

'He would be stupid to refuse. It doesn't affect him. It affects his son, his son's future.'

'No, Paul, that is not right,' she says softly. 'From the son to the wife, from the wife to him: that is how the thread runs. You touch his pride, his manly honour. Sooner or later you are going to have to face Miroslav. What will you say when that day comes? "I am just trying to help"? Is that what you will say? That won't be good enough. Only the truth will be good enough. And the truth is that you are not trying to help. On the contrary, you are trying to throw a spanner into the Jokic family works. You are trying to get into Mrs J's pants. Also to seduce Mr J's children away from him and make them your own, one, two and even three. Not what I would call a friendly agenda, all in all. No, you are not Miroslav's friend, not in any way I can see. Miroslav is not going to take kindly to you; and can you blame him? Therefore what are you going to do about Miroslav? You must think. You must think.' With the tip of a finger she taps her forehead. 'And if your thinking leads you where I think it will, namely to a blank wall, I have an alternative to propose.'

'An alternative to what?'

'An alternative to this entire imbroglio of yours with the Jokics. Forget about Mrs Jokic and your fixation on her. Cast your mind back. Do you remember the last time you visited the osteopathy department at the hospital? Do you remember the woman in the lift with the dark glasses? In the company of an older woman? Of course you remember. She made an impression on you. Even I could see that.

'Nothing that happens in our lives is without a meaning, Paul, as any child can tell you. That is one of the lessons stories teach us, one of the many lessons. Have you given up reading stories? A mistake. You shouldn't.

'Let me fill you in on the woman with the dark glasses. She is, alas, blind. She lost her sight a year ago, as the result of a malignancy, a tumour. Lost one whole eye, surgically excised, and the use of the other too. Before the calamity she was beautiful, or at least highly attractive; today, alas, she is unsightly in the way that all blind people are unsightly. One prefers not to look on her face. Or rather, one finds oneself staring and then withdraws one's gaze, repelled. This repulsion is of course invisible to her, but she feels it nevertheless. She is conscious of the gaze of others like fingers groping at her, groping and retreating.

'Being blind is worse than she was warned it would be, worse than she had ever imagined. She is in despair. In a matter of months she has become an object of horror. She cannot bear being in the open, where she can be looked at. She wants to hide herself. She wants to die. And at the same time – she cannot help herself – she is full of unhappy lust. She is in the summer of her womanly life; she moans aloud with lust, day after day, like a cow or a sow in heat.

'What I say surprises you? You think this is just a story I am making up? It is not. The woman exists, you have seen her with your own two eyes, her name is Marianna. This tranquil-seeming world we inhabit contains horrors, Paul, such as you could not dream up for yourself in a month of Sundays. The ocean depths, for instance, the floor of the sea – what goes on there exceeds all imagining.

'What Marianna aches for is not consolation, much less worship, but love in its most physical expression. She wants to be, no matter how briefly, as she was before, as you in your way want to be as you were before. I say to you: Why not see what you can achieve together, you and Marianna, she blind, you halt?

'Let me tell you one more thing about Marianna. Marianna knows you. Yes, she knows you. You and she are acquainted. Are you aware of that?'

It is as if she were reading his diary. It is as if he kept a diary, and this woman crept nightly into the flat and read his secrets. But there is no diary, unless he writes in his sleep.

'You are mistaken, Mrs Costello,' he says. 'The woman you refer to, whom you call Marianna – I saw her only on the one occasion, at the hospital, where she could not have seen me, by definition. So she cannot be acquainted with me, not even in the most trivial sense.'

'Yes, perhaps I am mistaken, that is possible. Or perhaps you are the one who is mistaken. Perhaps Marianna comes out of an earlier part of your life, when both of you were young and whole and good to look at, and you have simply forgotten about it. You were a photographer by profession, were you not? Perhaps once upon a time you took her photograph, and it happened that all your attention was concentrated on the image you were making, not on her, the source of the image.'

'Perhaps. But there is nothing wrong with my memory, and I have no recollection of such an experience.'

'Well, old friends or not, why not see what you can achieve together, you and Marianna? Given the extraordinary circumstances of the case, I will take it on myself to arrange a meeting. You need merely wait and prepare yourself. Be assured, if there is any proposal I will put it to her in a way that will allow her to come without losing self-respect.

'A final word. Let me suggest that, whatever you and she get up to, you get up to it in the dark. As a kindness to her. Think of your bed as a cave. A storm is raging, a maiden huntress enters seeking shelter. She stretches out a hand and meets another hand, yours. And so forth.'

He ought to say something sharp, but he cannot, it is as if he is drugged or bemused.

'Of the episode of which you claim to have no recollection,' Costello goes on, '- the day when you might or might not have taken her photograph – I would only say, be a little less sure of yourself. Stir the memory and you will be surprised at what images rise to the surface. But let me not press you. Let us build your side of the story on the premise that you have had only that single glimpse of her, in the lift. A single glimpse, but enough to ignite desire. From your desire and her need, what will be born? Passion on the grandest of scales? One last great autumnal conflagration? Let us see. The issue is in your hands, yours and hers. Is my proposal acceptable? If so, say yes. Or if you are too abashed, just nod. Yes?

'Her name is Marianna, as I said, with two ns. I cannot help that. It is not in my power to change names. You can give her some interim other name if you wish, some pet name, Darling or Kitten or whatever. She was married, but after the stroke of fate I described her marriage broke up, as all else broke up. Her life is in disarray. For the present she lives with her mother, the woman you saw with her, the crone.