J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'Tell me about your marriage,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'You hardly ever mention your wife.'

'I think not,' he says. 'It would not be proper. My wife would not thank me for offering her up as a minor character in one of your literary efforts. But if it is stories you want, I will tell you a story from the period of my marriage that does not involve my wife. You can use it to illustrate my character, or not, as you wish.'

'All right. Shoot.'

'It comes from the time I was still running the studio in Unley. I had two assistants, and one of them happened to fall in love with me. To be accurate, it was not love but adoration. She had no designs on me. That was why she could be so open about it. A perfectly intelligent girl. Pretty too. A fresh-faced, pretty, twenty-year-old girl in a solid, sturdy body, the body of a rugby player. Nothing she could do about it. No diet was going to save her, transfigure her into a sylph.

'I was teaching an evening course at the time, at what used to be the polytechnic. Principles of photography. Three evenings a week this girl came to my class. Sat in the back row and gazed at me. Took no notes.

' "Don't you think this is becoming excessive, Ellen?" I said to her. "It's my only chance," she replied. No blushes. She never blushed. "Your only chance for what?" "To be alone with you." That was how she defined being alone with me: being free to sit in class and watch and listen.

'I had a rule: never get involved with employees. But in this one case I had a lapse. I broke the rule. I left a note for her: a time, a place, nothing else. She came, and I took her to bed.

'You probably expect me to say it was a humiliating experience, for her and therefore for me. But it wasn't humiliating at all. I would go so far as to call it joyous. And I learned a lesson from it: that love need not be reciprocated as long as there is enough of it in the room. This girl had enough love for two. You are the writer, the heart expert, but did you know that? If you love deeply enough, it is not necessary to be loved back.'

The Costello woman is silent.

'She thanked me. She lay in my arms crying and gasping "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" "It's all right," I said. "No need for anyone to thank anyone."

'The next day there was a note on my desk: "Whenever you have need of me…" But I did not call on her again, did not try to repeat the experience. Once was enough, to absorb that lesson.

'She worked for me for another two years, keeping a correct distance because that was what I seemed to want. No tears, no reproaches. Then she disappeared. Not a word, just stopped coming to work. I spoke to her colleague, my other assistant, but she was in the dark. I telephoned her mother. Didn't I know, the mother said? Ellen had taken a new job and moved to Brisbane as a rep for a pharmaceuticals company. Hadn't she given notice? No, I said, this was the first I heard of it. Oh, said the mother, she told us she had spoken to you and you were quite cut up.'

'And?'

'That's all. End of story. I was quite cut up: aside from the lesson in love, that was the part that interested me most. Because I wasn't cut up, not at all. Did the girl really think I would be cut up because she had left my employ? Or was the story about her boss being cut up just something she told her mother so that she would not seem too abject?'

'Are you asking my opinion? I don't know the answer, Paul. The claim that you, her boss, were cut up may be the part of the story that you find interesting, but it is not what interests me. What interests me is the Thank you, thank you! Is Thank you, thank you! what you plan to say to Marijana if and when she yields herself to you? Why didn't you say Thank you, thank you! to the girl I procured for you, the one you singled out for your attentions because she would not be able to witness you in your sadly reduced state?'

'I did not single her out. You were the one who brought her up.'

'Nonsense. I merely took my cue from you. You singled her out in the hospital lift. You had dreams about her. Why did you not thank her, I repeat? Was it because you paid her, and if you pay you don't need to say thank you? Your rugby player had enough love for two, you say. Do you really think love can be measured? Do you think love comes by volume, like beer? That as long as you bring a case of it, the other party is permitted to come empty-handed – empty-handed, empty-hearted? Thank you, Marijana (Marijana with the j this time), for letting me love you. Thank you for letting me love your children. Thank you for letting me give you my money. Are you really such a dummy?'

He stiffens. 'You asked me for a story, I gave you a story. I am sorry you don't like it. You say you want to hear stories, I offer you stories, and I get back nothing except ridicule and scorn. What kind of exchange is that?'

'What kind of love?, you might have added. I didn't say I didn't like your story. I found it interesting, and well told too, the story of you and your rugby player. Even the interpretation you give is interesting in its own right. But the question that nags me is: Why does he pick on this story to tell me, this above all others?'

'Because it is true.'

'Of course it is true. But what does it matter if it is true? Surely it is not up to me to play God, separating the sheep from the goats, dismissing the false stories, preserving the true. If I have a model, it is not God, it is the Abbe of Cîteaux, the notorious one, the Frenchman, the one who said to the soldiers in his pastoral care, Slay them all – God will know who are His.

'No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.'

She pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. Is it his turn? He has nothing more to say. If truth and lies are the same, then speech and silence may as well be the same too.

'Do you notice, Paul,' she resumes, 'how conversations between you and me keep falling into the same pattern? For a while all goes swimmingly. Then I say something you don't want to hear, and at once you clam up or storm off or ask me to leave. Can't we get beyond such histrionics? We don't have much time left, either of us.'

'Don't we.'

'No. Under the gaze of heaven, in the cold eye of God, we don't.'

'Is that the truth. Go on.'

'Do you think I find this existence any less hard than you? Do you think I want to sleep outdoors, under a bush in the park, among the winos, and do my ablutions in the River Torrens? You are not blind. You can see how I am declining.'

He gives her a hard stare. 'You are making up stories. You are a prosperous professional woman, you are as comfortably off as I am, there is no need for you to sleep under bushes.'

'That may be so, Paul. I may be exaggerating a little, but it is an apt story, apt to my condition. As I try to impress on you, our days are numbered, mine and yours, yet here I am, killing time, being killed by time, waiting – waiting for you.'

He shakes his head helplessly. 'I don't know what you want,' he says.

'Push!' she says.

ON THE HALL table, a scrawled note: 'BYE BYE MR RAYMENT. I'VE LEFT SOME STUFF, I'LL PICK IT UP TOMORROW. THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, DRAGO. PS PHOTOGRAPHS ALL IN ORDER.'

The 'stuff' Drago refers to turns out to be a garbage bag full of clothing, to which he adds a pair of underpants he finds among the bedclothes. Otherwise no trace of the Jokics, mother or son. They come, they go, they do not explain themselves: he had better get used to it.

Yet what a relief to be by himself again! One thing to live with a woman; quite another to share one's home with an untidy and imperfectly considerate young man. Always tension, always unease when two males occupy the same territory.