J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'Yes, you could do that. Just as you could get rid of the troublesome, volatile Jokics and sell your flat and move into a well-regulated retreat for old people. But you don't. We are who we are, Paul. This, for the time being, is the life we are given to live, and we must live it. When I am with you I am at home; when I am not with you I am homeless. That is how the dice have fallen. Are you surprised to hear me say so? You should not be. But do not castigate yourself. I have become surprisingly good at this new life. Looking at me, you would not say that I live out of a suitcase, would you? Or that I have not eaten in days. Aside from a grape or two.'

He is silent.

'Anyway, that is enough about me. As I keep telling myself, Have patience, Paul Rayment did not ask you to descend upon his shoulders. Nevertheless, it would be a great help if Paul Rayment would hurry up. As I mentioned, I may be nearing my limit. I can't begin to tell you how tired I am. And not with the kind of tiredness that can be fixed by a good night's sleep in a proper bed. The tiredness I refer to has become part of my being. It is like a dye that has begun to seep into everything I do, everything I say. I feel, to use Homer's word, unstrung. A word with which you are familiar, I seem to remember. No more tensile strength. The bowstring that used to be taut has gone as slack and dry as a strand of cotton. And not just the bodily self. The mind too: slack, ready for easeful sleep.'

He has not looked at Elizabeth Costello in a long while, not properly. In part that is because she comes to him through a haze of irritation, in part because he finds her so colourless, so featureless, just as he finds her clothes so utterly without distinction. But now he gives her his full, deliberate attention, and indeed it is as she says: she has lost weight, the flesh on her arms hangs, her face is pallid, her nose peaked.

'If you had only asked,' he says, 'I would have helped, in practical respects. I am ready to help you now. But for the rest' – he shrugs – 'I am not dithering, at least not in my own eyes. I am acting at a pace that comes naturally to me. I am not an exceptional person, Mrs Costello, and I cannot make myself exceptional just for your sake. I am sorry.'

He will help her. He means it. He will buy her a meal. He will buy her the ticket, go with her to the airport, wave her goodbye.

'You cold man,' she says. She speaks the condemnatory word with lightness, with a smile. 'You poor, cold man. I have tried my best to explain, but you understand nothing. You were sent to me, I was sent to you. Why that should be, God alone knows. Now you must cure yourself as best you can. I will try not to hurry you on any more.'

She gets to her feet, not without difficulty, folds the empty bag. 'Goodbye,' she says.

For a long time after she has left he stays on, squinting out over the river, shaken. The ducks, used to being fed, encouraged by his stillness, come almost to his feet, but he pays them no attention.

Cold: is that really how he seems to outsiders? He wants to protest. He wishes well. His friends will attest to it – people who know him far better than the Costello woman does. Even the woman who used to be his wife will concede it: he wishes well, he wishes the best. How can someone be called cold who from his heart wishes well, who when he acts acts from the heart?

Cold was not a word his wife used. What she said was quite different: I thought you were French, she said, I thought you would have some idea. Some idea of what? For years after she left him he puzzled over her words. What were the French, even if only the French of legend, supposed to have an idea of? Of what will make a woman happy? What will make a woman happy is a riddle as old as the Sphinx. Why should a Frenchman have the power to unknot it, much less such a notional Frenchman as he?

Cold, blind. Breathe in, breathe out. He does not accept the charge; he does not believe in its truth. Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. Love sees what is best in the beloved, even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light. Who is Marijana? A nurse from Dubrovnik with a short waist and yellow teeth and not bad legs. Who except he, with the gaze of love, sees the shy, sloe-eyed gazelle hiding within?

That is what Elizabeth Costello does not understand. Elizabeth Costello thinks of him as a punishment brought down to blight the last days of her life, an incomprehensible penance she is sentenced to speak, to recite, to repeat. She looks on him with distaste, with dismay, with exasperation, with a sinking heart, with everything but love. Well, when he next catches up with her he will give her a lesson. Not cold, he will say, and not French either. A man who sees the world in his own way and who loves in his own way. And a man who not too long ago lost part of his own body: do not forget that. Have a little charity, he will say. Then perhaps you may find it in you to write.

DRAGO. IT CONTINUES to intrigue him, how little aware Drago seems to be of his own good looks. Not a narcissist; not reflective. On the other hand, if he were more self-aware he might lose some of that air of fearless candour, that warrior gaze.

Is there a feminine equivalent to Dragonian candour? Amazonian purity? Blanka, the sister, the unknown quantity: what is she like? Will he ever get to meet her?

Narcissus discovered a twin in the pool from whom he could not tear himself. Every time he smiled, the twin smiled back. Yet every time he bent to kiss those inviting lips, the twin would dissolve in ghostly ripples.

No narcissism in Drago: not yet, perhaps never. No narcissism in Marijana either. An admirable trait, in its way. Curious that he has fallen for Marijana, seeing that in the past he fell always for women who loved themselves.

He himself has never been at ease with mirrors. Long ago he draped a cloth over the mirror in the bathroom and taught himself to shave blind. One of the more irritating things the Costello woman did during her stay was to take down the drape. When she left he at once put it back.

He covers the bathroom mirror not just to save himself from the image of an ageing, ugly self. No: the twin imprisoned behind the glass he finds above all boring. Thank God the day will come, he thinks to himself, when I will not have to see that one again!

Four months have passed since he was released from hospital and allowed to return to his former life. Most of that time he has spent cloistered in this flat, barely seeing the sun. Since Marijana stopped coming he has not eaten properly. He has no appetite, does not bother to take care of himself. The face that threatens to confront him in the mirror is that of a gaunt, unshaven old tramp. In fact, worse than that. At a bookstall on the Seine he once picked up a medical text with photographs of patients from the Salpêtrière: cases of mania, dementia, melancholia, Huntingdon's chorea. Despite the untidy beards, despite the hospital nightshirts, he at once recognised in them soul mates, cousins who had gone ahead down a road he would one day follow.

He is thinking of Drago because, after the one night spent in his flat, Drago has not returned nor sent any word. And he is thinking of mirrors because of Mrs Costello's story of the old man who turned Sinbad into his slave. Mrs Costello wants to subject him to some fiction or other she has in her head. He would like to believe that, since the Marianna episode, he has resisted her schemes, held her at bay. But is he right? He shivers to think what the merest passing glimpse in a mirror might reveal: grinning over his shoulder, gripping his throat, the shape of a wild-haired, bare-breasted hag brandishing a whip.