J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Now that his hands are free, he can touch her as she touched him. But is that what he wants to do? Does he want to explore those eyes or anywhere near them? Does he want to be – what is the word? – appalled? The appalling: that which turns one's stomach, unmans one, leaves one pale and shaking. Can one be appalled by what one cannot see but what the fingertips report, even the fingertips of a novice like himself in the land of the blind?

Uncertainly he stretches out a hand. He meets a hard cluster of something or other, bubbles, baubles, berries sewn up in sheaths. Her throat or her bodice, it must be. An inch higher, her chin. The chin firm, pointed; then a short jaw, then the beginning of furze or hair that feels dark to him, just as her skin feels dark; then something hard, an earpiece. She is wearing glasses, glasses that curve back across her cheekbones, perhaps the same dark glasses she wore in the lift.

'Your name is Marianna, Mrs Costello tells me.'

'Marianna.'

He says Marianna, she says Marianna, but it is not the same name. His Marianna is still coloured by Marijana: it is heavier than hers, more solid. Of her Marianna he can say only that it is liquid, silver: not as quick as quicksilver, more like running water, a furling stream. And is this what it is like, being blind: having to weigh each word in one's hand, weigh each tone, rumble for equivalents that sound all too much (a furling stream) like bad poetry?

'Not the French Marianne ?'

'No.'

No. Not French. A pity. France would be something in common, like a blanket to deploy over the pair of them.

The flour-and-water paste does its work surprisingly well. Even though his pupils must have dilated to their fullest, he is in a world of utter blackness. Where did Costello get the idea from? From a book? A recipe handed down from the ancients?

With his fingers still in her somewhat curly hair he draws her towards him, and she comes. Her face is pressed to his, the dark glasses too, though her fists are raised, two knobs keeping her breast apart from him.

'Thank you for your visit,' he says. 'Mrs Costello mentioned your present troubles. I am sorry.'

She says nothing. He can feel a light trembling run through her.

'There is no need,' he goes on, but then does not know what comes next. What is there need of, what is there no need of? Something to do with their being man and woman; something to do with yielding to, to resort to the Costello woman's term, lust. But between where they are, man and woman, and the exercise of lust a veritable chasm yawns. 'There is no need,' he begins again, 'for us to adhere to any script. No need to do anything we do not wish. We are free agents.'

She is still shivering, shivering or trembling like a bird. 'Come to me,' he says, and obediently she sidles closer. It must be difficult for her. He must aid her, they are in this together.

The strings and berries and baubles at her throat turn out to be purely decorative. The dress opens via a zip at the back, which helpfully goes all the way down to the waist. His fingers are slow and clumsy. If she had consented to sit on his hand a while longer his fingers would have warmed up. Animal heat. As for the brassière, it is well constructed, sturdy, the sort of thing he imagines Carmelites would wear. Big breasts, a big bottom, yet slight for the rest. Marianna. Who is here, says the Costello woman, not out of solicitude for him, but for her own sake. Because there is a thirst in her that cannot be slaked. Because of her visage, her devastated face, that he is warned not to look upon and perhaps not even touch, because it would turn him to ice.

'I suggest we don't talk too much,' he says. 'Nevertheless there is one circumstance I should mention, for practical reasons. I have had no experience of this sort of thing since my accident. I may require a little help.'

'I know that. Mrs Costello told me.'

'Mrs Costello does not know everything. She cannot know what I do not know.'

'Yes.'

Yes? What does it mean, yes?

He doubts profoundly that he ever photographed this woman solo. If he had, he would not have forgotten her. Perhaps she was part of a group, in the days when he visited schools to take group photographs, that is possible; but not alone. The image he has of her comes only from the lift and from what his fingers tell him now. To her he must be even more of a jumble of sense-data: the cold of his hands; the roughness of his skin; the rasp of his voice; and an odour probably unpleasing to her supersensitive nostrils. Is that enough for her to construct the image of a man from? Is it an image she would be prepared to give herself to? Why did she agree to come, sight unseen? It is like a primitive experiment in biology – like bringing different species together to see if they will mate, fox and whale, cricket and marmoset.

'Your money,' he says, 'I am putting it on this side table, in an envelope. Four hundred and fifty dollars. Is that acceptable?'

He feels her nod.

A minute passes. Nothing more happens. A one-legged man and a partially disrobed woman waiting for what? For the click of a camera shutter? Australian Gothic. Matilda and her bloke, worn down by a lifetime of waltzing, parts of their bodies falling off or falling out, face the photographer one last time.

The woman's trembling has not ceased. He can swear it has infected him too: a light trilling of the hand that might be put down to age but is in fact something else, fear or anticipation (but which?).

If they are to proceed with the act for which she has been paid, for which she has accepted payment, she must overcome her present embarrassment and move on to the next step. She has been forewarned of his bad leg, of his untrustworthy undercarriage in general. Since he would find it hard to straddle a woman, it would be best if she were to straddle him. While she is negotiating that passage, he will have problems of his own to wrestle with, problems of quite another order. Perhaps, among the blind, there grow up intuitions of beauty based solely on touch. In the realm of the unseen, however, he is still groping his way. Beauty without the sight of beauty is not yet, to him, imaginable. The episode in the lift, during which his attention was held as much by the old woman as by her, has left behind in his memory only the sketchiest of outlines. When to a wide-brimmed hat, dark glasses, the curve of an averted face he tries to add heavy breasts and spreading, unnaturally soft buttocks, like volumes of liquid trapped in silk balloons, he cannot make the parts cohere. How can he even be sure they belong to the same woman?

Gently he tries to draw the woman to him. Though not resisting, she turns her face away, either because she is unwilling to yield her lips or because she does not want to give him a chance to lift off her glasses and explore what lies beneath – does not want it because where mutilation is concerned men are notoriously queasy.

How long since she lost her sight? Can he decently ask? And can he then decently go on to the next question: Has she been loved since it happened? Is it experience that has taught her her devastated eyes will kill off a man's desire?

Eros. Why does the sight of the beautiful call eros into life? Why does the spectacle of the hideous strangle desire? Does intercourse with the beautiful elevate us, make better people of us, or is it by embracing the diseased, the mutilated, the repulsive that we improve ourselves? What questions! Is that why the Costello woman has brought the two of them together: not for the vulgar comedy of a man and a woman with parts of their bodies missing doing their best to interlock, but in order that, once the sexual business has been got out of the way, they can hold a philosophy class, lying in each other's arms discoursing about beauty, love, and goodness?