J. Coetzee - Slow Man

He pages through The House on Eccles Street. Leopold Bloom. Hugh Boylan. Marion Bloom. What is wrong with her? Can she not make up characters of her own?

He replaces the book, takes up The Fiery Furnace, reads at random.

He rolls the plasticine between his palms until it is warm and supple, then pinches it into little animal figures: birds, toads, cats, dogs with pricked-up ears. On the table top he sets the figures in a half-circle, bending their necks back as if howling at the moon, or baying, or croaking.

It is old plasticine, from his last Christmas stocking. The pristine cakes of brick red, leaf green, sky blue have bled into each other by now and become a leaden purple. Why, he wonders – why does the bright grow dull and the dull never bright? What would it need to make the purple fade away and the red and blue and green emerge again, like chicks from a shell?

Why, why? Why does she ask a question and then not give the answer? The answer is simple: the red and the blue and the green will never return because of entropy, which is irreversible and irrevocable and rules the universe. Even a literary person ought to know that, even a lady novelist. From the multifarious to the uniform and never back again. From the perky chick to the old hen dead in the dust.

He flips to the middle of the book. She could not stay with a man who was tired all the time. It was hard enough to hold her own tiredness at bay. She had only to stretch out beside him in the too familiar bed to feel the weariness begin to seep out of him and wash over her in a colourless, odourless, inert tide. She had to escape! Now!

A Marion but no Marianna. No blind folk, as far as he can see, no amputees. He snaps The Fiery Furnace shut. He is not going to expose himself to any more of the colourless, odourless, inert, and depressive gas given off by its pages. How on earth did Elizabeth Costello get to be a popular author, if popular is what she is?

There is a photograph on the jacket: a younger Elizabeth Costello wearing a windbreaker, standing against what appears to be the rigging of a yacht. Her eyes are screwed up against the light, her skin is deeply tanned. A seawoman? Is there such a word, or must a seawoman be a mermaid, as a seahorse, cheval marin, is a fish? Not exactly handsome, but probably better looking in middle age than in youth. Nonetheless, a certain plainness, even blankness, to her. Not his type. Not any man's type, maybe.

Contemporary World Authors, in the reference section of the library, has a brief biography together with the same nautical photograph. Born Melbourne, Australia, 1928. Lengthy residence in Europe. First book 1957. List of awards, prizes. Bibliography but no plot summaries. Twice married. A son and a daughter.

Seventy-two! As old as that! What is she doing, sleeping on park benches? Has her mind begun to ramble? Is she dotty? Might that explain everything? Ought the son and daughter to be brought into the picture? Is it his duty to track them down? Please come at once. Your mother has taken up residence with me, a complete stranger, and refuses to leave. I am at my wits' end. Remove her, commit her, do whatever is called for as long as I am liberated.

He returns to the flat. Costello is not there, but on the coffee table lies her notebook. Quite possibly she has left it out intentionally. If he takes a peek it will be another victory for her. Nevertheless.

She writes in fat black ink, in large free-flowing script, just a few words to a line. He pages to the most recent entry. Dark dark dark, he reads. They all go into the dark, the vacant interlunar spaces.

He leafs back.

Keening over the body, he reads. Davening, the word underlined. Rocking stiffly back and forth at the bedside, her hands over her ears, her eyes wide open, unblinking, as though afraid she might miss the moment when, like a spurt of gas, the soul will leave the body and rise through the layers of air, one after another, to the stratosphere and beyond. Outside the window, sunshine, birdsong, the usual. She is locked into the rhythm of her grief like a long-distance runner. A marathon of grief If no one comes to coax her away she will go on thus all day. Yet not once does she touch him ('him', his body). Why not? The horror of cold flesh? Is horror after all stronger than love? Or perhaps, in among the welter of grief, she has steeled herself not to try to hold him back. She has said her goodbyes, goodbyes are over with. Goodbye: God be with you. And then, over the page: Dark dark dark…

If he reads back far enough, it will no doubt become clearer who the grieving woman is, whose the corpse. But the imp of curiosity seems to be deserting him. He is not sure he wants to know more. Something unseemly about this writing, the fat ink sprawling carelessly over the tramlines; something impious, provocative, uncovering what does not belong in the light of day.

Is the whole notebook like that: a provocation, an affront to decency? He pages cautiously through it from the beginning. For long stretches he cannot stitch the entries together. She writes as if she were hurrying through some story she had overheard, compressing the narrative, cutting the dialogue short, jumping impatiently from one scene to the next. But then a phrase catches his eye: One leg blue, one red. Ljuba? It can only be Ljuba. Harlequin, crazy-coloured. In Germany, brindle cows are the crazy ones, the moonstruck, the ones that jump over the moon. And the little dog laughs. Bring in a dog, a little mutt that wags its tail to all and sundry, yapping, eager to please? PR's reaction: 'I may be doggy, but not to that extent, surely!' Mutt and Jeff.

He snaps the book shut. If his ears are not burning they might as well be. It is as he feared: she knows everything, every jot and tittle. Damn her! All the time he thought he was his own master he has been in a cage like a rat, darting this way and that, yammering to himself, with the infernal woman standing over him, observing, listening, taking notes, recording his progress.

Or is it worse than that, incomparably worse, so much worse that the mind threatens to buckle? Is this what it is like to be translated to what at present he can only call the other side? Is that what has happened to him; is that what happens to everyone?

Gingerly he settles into an armchair. If this does not amount to a big moment, a Copernican moment, then what does? The greatest of all secrets may just have unveiled itself to him. There is a second world that exists side by side with the first, unsuspected. One chugs along in the first for a certain length of time; then the angel of death arrives in the person of Wayne Blight or someone like him. For an instant, for an aeon, time stops; one tumbles down a dark hole. Then, hey presto, one emerges into a second world identical with the first, where time resumes and the action proceeds – flying through the air like a cat, the throng of curious onlookers, the ambulance, the hospital, Dr Hansen, et cetera – except that one now has Elizabeth Costello around one's neck, or someone like her.

Quite a leap to make, from the word D-O-G in a notebook to life after death. A wild surmise. He could be wrong. More than likely he is wrong. But whether he is wrong or right, whether what in the most hesitant of spirits he calls the other side is truth or delusion, the first epithet that occurs to him, typed out letter by letter behind his eyelids by the celestial typewriter, is puny. If dying turns out to be nothing but a trick that might as well be a trick with words, if death is a mere hiccup in time after which life goes on as before, why all the fuss? Is one allowed to refuse it – refuse this deathlessness, this puny fate? I want my old life back, the one that came to an end on Magill Road.