J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'But then my mother passed on, and there no longer seemed much point to putting on a white coat and peering into a test tube. So I dropped out of university and bought a ticket to Europe. I stayed with my grandmother in Toulouse and found a job in a photo lab. That was how my career in photography began. But don't you know all this? I thought you knew everything about me.'

'It is news to me, Paul, I promise you. You came to me with no history attached. A man with one leg and an unfortunate passion for his nurse, that was all. Your prior life was virgin territory.'

'I stayed with my grandmother and made overtures, as far as I could, to my mother's family, because in the France we came from, peasant France, family is everything. My cousins might be car mechanics and shop assistants and station foremen, but at heart they were still peasants, only one generation away from black bread and cow manure. I am talking about the 1960s, of course, a bygone age. It is different nowadays. All changed.'

'And?'

'I was not successful. I was not, shall we say, embraced. I had missed too much of what should have been my formation: not just a proper French schooling but a French youth, including youthful friendships, which can be as intense as love, and longer-lasting. My cousins and the people I met through them, people of my age, were already settled into their lives. Even before they left school they knew what metier they were going to follow, what boy or girl they were going to marry, where they were going to live. They could not work out what I was doing there, this gangly fellow with the funny accent and the puzzled look; and I could not tell them because I did not know either. I was always the odd one out, the stranger in the corner at family gatherings. Among themselves they called me l'Anglais. It came as a shock, the first time I heard it, since I had no ties to England, had never even been there. But Australia was beyond their ken. In their eyes Australians were simply Englishmen, mackintoshes and boiled cabbage and all, transplanted to the end of the earth, scratching a living among the kangourous.

'I had a friend, Roger, who did deliveries for the studio where I worked. On Saturday afternoons he and I would pack our saddlebags and head off on our bicycles to Saint-Girons or Tarascon; or deeper into the Pyrenees as far as Oust or Aulus-les-Bains. We ate in cafes, spent nights in the open, rode all day, came back late on Sundays exhausted and full of life. We never had much to say to each other, he and I, yet now he seems to me the best friend I ever had, the best copain.

'Those were the days before the French romance with the automobile had taken off properly. The roads were emptier; roaming the countryside on a bicycle was not such an odd thing to be doing.

'Then I got involved with a girl, and suddenly I had other uses for my weekends. She was from Morocco: that really set me apart. The first of my unsuitable passions. She and I might have married if her family had not made it impossible.'

'Struck by the lightning bolt of passion! And for an exotic maiden too! Material for a book in itself! How magnificent! How extravagant! You astonish me, Paul.'

'Don't mock. It was all very decorous, very respectable. She was studying to be a librarian, until she was summoned home.'

'And?'

'That is all. Her father summoned her, she obeyed, that was the end of the affair. I stayed on in Toulouse for another six months, then I gave up.'

'You came home.'

'Home… What does that mean? I told you what I think about home. A pigeon has a home, a bee has a home. An Englishman has a home, perhaps. I have a domicile, a residence. This is my residence. This flat. This city. This country. Home is too mystical for me.'

'But you are Australian. You are not French. Even I can see that.'

'I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the French. That, as far as I am concerned, is all there is to it, to the national-identity business: where one passes and where one does not, where on the contrary one stands out. Like a sore thumb, as the English say; or like a stain, as the French say, a stain on the spotless domestic linen. As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. I am perfectly fluent, as you can hear. But English came to me too late. It did not come with my mother's milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately I have always felt myself to be a kind of ventriloquist's dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur.' He hesitates, checks himself. I am hollow at the core, he was about to say – as I am sure you can hear. 'Don't try to load more onto this conversation than it will bear, Elizabeth,' he says instead. 'It is not significant, it is just biography of a rambling kind.'

'But it is significant, Paul, truly it is! You know, there are those whom I call the chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted in their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there. You claim to be a butterfly, you want to be a butterfly; but then one day you have a fall, a calamitous fall, you come crashing down to earth; and when you pick yourself up you find you can no longer fly like an ethereal being, you cannot even walk, you are nothing but a lump of all too solid flesh. Surely a lesson presents itself, one to which you cannot be blind and deaf

'Really. A lesson. With a little ingenuity, it seems to me, Mrs Costello, one can torture a lesson out of the most haphazard sequence of events. Are you trying to tell me that God had some plan in mind when he struck me down on Magill Road and turned me into a hobbler? What about yourself? You told me you have a heart condition. Interpret your heart condition to me. What lesson did God have in mind when he struck you in the heart?'

'It is true, Paul, I do indeed have a heart condition, I was not telling a fib. But I am not the only one so afflicted. You have a heart condition of your own – do you really not know that? When I came knocking at your door, it was not to find out how a man rides a bicycle with one leg. I came to find out what happens when a man of sixty engages his heart unsuitably. And, if you don't mind my saying so, you have been a sorry let-down thus far.'

He shrugs. 'I was not put on this earth to entertain you. If you want entertainment' – he waves a hand at the runners, the cyclists, the good folk taking their dogs for a walk – 'you have a wide range to explore. Why waste your time on someone who exasperates you with his obtuseness and keeps letting you down? Give me up as a bad job. Visit yourself on some other candidate.'

She turns and bestows on him a smile that lacks, as far as he can see, any malice. 'I may be capricious, Paul,' she says, 'but not as capricious as that. Capricious: goat-like, leaping from one rock to another. I am too old for leaping. You are my rock. I will stay with you, for the time being. As I told you – remember? – love is a fixation.'

He shrugs again. Love is a fixation. One might equally well call love a bolt of lightning that strikes where it wills. If he is an ignorant baby when it comes to the maladies of love, he does not see that the Costello woman is any better. But he is not going to argue with her. He is tired of arguing.

He is also thirsty. A cup of tea would go down very well. They could cross the bridge to the tea-room on the other bank. They could go back to the flat with its noise and disorder. Or they could forget about tea and go on dawdling here by the riverside, letting the afternoon pass, watching the waterfowl disport themselves. Which?