J. Coetzee - Slow Man

An experiment, that is what it amounts to, an idle, biologico-literary experiment. Cricket and marmoset. And they fell for it, both of them, he in his way, she in hers!

'I must leave,' says the woman, the marmoset. 'The taxi will be waiting.'

'If you say so,' he says. 'How do you know about the taxi?'

'Mrs Costello ordered it.'

'Mrs Costello?'

'Yes, Mrs Costello.'

'How does Mrs Costello know when you will need a taxi?'

She shrugs.

'Well, Mrs Costello takes good care of you. Can I pay for the taxi?'

'No, no, it's all included.'

'Well then, give my greetings to Mrs Costello. And be careful on the way down. The stairs can be slippery.'

He sits still, containing himself, while she dresses. The instant the door closes behind her, however, he whips off the blindfold and claws at his eyes. But the paste has caked and hardened. If he tears at it too hard he will lose his eyelashes. He curses: he will have to soak it off.

'SHE CAME TO me as you came to me,' says Costello. 'A woman of darkness, a woman in darkness. Take up the story of such a one: words in my sleeping ear, spoken by what in the old days we would have called an angel calling me out to a wrestling match. Therefore no, I have no idea where she lives, your Marianna. All my dealings with her have been on the telephone. If you would like her to repeat her visit, I can give you her number.'

A repeat visit. That is not what he wants. Sometime in the future, perhaps, but not now. What he wants right now is an assurance that the story he has been presented with is the true story: that the woman who came to his flat was truly the woman he saw in the lift; that her name is truly Marianna; that she truly lives with her crookbacked mother, her husband having abandoned her because of her affliction; and so forth. What he wants is assurance that he has not been duped.

For there is an alternative story, one that he finds all too easy to make up for himself. In the alternative story the Costello woman would have located big-bottomed Marianna, known otherwise as Natasha, known also as Tanya, and hailing from Moldavia via Dubai and Nicosia, in the Yellow Pages. On the telephone she would have coached her in a charade. 'My brother-in-law, you will need to know,' she would have told her, 'has certain eccentricities. But then, what man does not have his little eccentricities, and what can a woman do, if she wants to get by, but find ways of accommodating them? My brother-in-law's chief eccentricity is that he prefers not to see the woman he is engaged with. He prefers the realm of the imaginary; he prefers to keep his head in the clouds. Once upon a time he was head over heels in love with a woman named Marianna, an actress. What he wants from you, and has in an indirect way asked me to convey to you, is that you should present yourself as Marianna the actress, wearing certain accoutrements or properties which I shall provide. That is to be your role; and for enacting that role he will pay you. Do you understand?' 'Sure,' Natasha or Tanya would have said, 'but outcalls is extra.' 'Outcalls is extra,' Costello would have agreed: 'I'll be sure to remind him of that. One last word. Be nice to him. He lost a leg recently, in a road accident, and is not what he used to be.'

Might that be the real story, give or take a detail here and there, behind the visit of the so-called Marianna? Were the dark glasses worn to hide not the fact that she was blind but the fact that she was not blind? When she trembled, was it less with nervousness than with the effort of holding back her giggles as the man with the stocking around his head fumbled at her underwear? We have crossed the threshold. Now we can proceed to higher and better things. What a solemn fool! She must have laughed in the taxi all the way home.

Was Marianna Marianna or was Marianna Natasha? That is what he must find out in the first instance; that is what he must squeeze out of Costello. Only when he has his answer may he turn to the deeper question: Does it matter who the woman really was; does it matter if he has been duped?

'You treat me like a puppet,' he complains. 'You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you. You should open a puppet theatre, or a zoo. There must be plenty of old zoos for sale, now that they have fallen out of fashion. Buy one, and put us in cages with our names on them. Paul Rayment: canis infelix. Marianna Popova: pseudocaeca (migratory). And so forth. Rows and rows of cages holding the people who have, as you put it, come to you in the course of your career as a liar and fabulator. You could charge admission. You could make a living out of it. Parents could bring their children at weekends to gawp at us and throw peanuts. Easier than writing books that no one reads.'

He pauses, waiting for her to rise to the bait. She is silent.

'What I don't understand,' he goes on – he was not angry when he began this tirade, he is not angry now, but there is certainly a pleasure in letting himself go – 'what I don't understand is, seeing that I am so dull, so unresponsive to your schemes, why you persist with me. Drop me, I beseech you, let me get on with my life. Write about this blind Marianna of yours instead. She has more potential than I will ever have. I am not a hero, Mrs Costello. Losing a leg does not qualify one for a dramatic role. Losing a leg is neither tragic nor comic, just unfortunate.'

'Don't be bitter, Paul. Drop you, take up Marianna: maybe I won't, maybe I will. Who knows what one may not be driven to.'

'I am not bitter.'

'Of course you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are bitter, and who can blame you, after all that has happened to you.'

He gathers his crutches. 'I can do without your sympathy,' he says curtly. 'I am going out now. I don't know when I will be back. When you leave, lock the door behind you.'

'If I do leave I will certainly lock the door. But I don't think that is what I will be doing. I can't tell you how much I have been longing for a hot bath. So that is what I will treat myself to, if you don't mind. Such a luxury these days.'

It is not the first time the Costello woman has refused to explain herself. But her latest evasion both irritates and disturbs him. Maybe I won't, maybe I will. Is it as provisional as that, her interest in him? May Marianna, rather than he, turn out to be the chosen one? Setting aside the shadowy portrait session, of which he can truly remember nothing, were their two encounters, the first in the lift, the second on the sofa, episodes in the life-story not of Paul Rayment but of Marianna Popova? Of course there is a sense in which he is a passing character in the life of this Marianna or of anyone else whose path he crosses, just as Marianna and everyone else are passing characters in his. But is he a passing character in a more fundamental sense too: someone on whom the light falls all too briefly before it passes on? Will what passed between himself and Marianna turn out to be simply one passage among many in Marianna's quest for love? Or might the Costello woman be writing two stories at once, stories about characters who suffer a loss (sight in the one case, ambulation in the other) which they must learn to live with; and, as an experiment or even as a kind of professional joke, might she have arranged for their two life-lines to intersect? He has no experience of novelists and how they go about their business, but it sounds not implausible.

In the public library, under A823.914, he finds a whole row of books by Elizabeth Costello: The Fiery Furnace, The House on Eccles Street in several well-thumbed copies, To the Friendly Isles, Tango with Mr Dunbar, The Roots of Time, Mannerly; also a rather severe dark-blue volume with the title A Constant Flame: Intent and Design in the Novels of Elizabeth Costello. He scans the index. No mention of a Marianna or a Marijana; no entry for blindness.