J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'Would you not concede, Paul' (the woman is still talking), 'that I have kept my humour exceedingly well, from the day I turned up on your doorstep to the present? Not a curse, not a cross word, lots of jokes instead, and a leavening of Irish blarney. Let me ask you: Do you think that is how I am by nature?'

He holds his tongue. His mind is elsewhere. He does not care how Elizabeth Costello is by nature.

'I am a tetchy old creature by nature, Paul, and given to the blackest rages. A bit of a viper, in fact. It is only because I vowed to myself to be good that I have been such a light burden for you to bear. But it has been a battle, believe me. Many is the time I have had to restrain myself from flaring up. Do you think what I have said is the worst that can be said of you – that you are slow as a tortoise and fastidious to a fault? There is much beyond that, believe me. What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection. Where else in the world, at this late stage, are you going to find affection, you ugly old man? Yes, I am familiar with that word too, ugly. We are both of us ugly, Paul, old and ugly, As much as ever would we like to hold in our arms the beauty of all the world. It never wanes in us, that yearning. But the beauty of all the world does not want any of us. So we have to make do with less, a great deal less. In fact, we have to accept what is on offer or else go hungry. So when a kindly godmother offers to whisk us away from our dreary surroundings, from our hopeless, our pathetic, unrealisable dreams, we ought to think twice about spurning her.

'I will give you a day, Paul, twenty-four hours, to rethink. If you refuse, if you insist on holding to your present dilatory course, then I will show you what I am capable of, I will show you how I can spit.'

His watch shows 3.15. Three hours yet to dawn. How on earth will he kill three hours?

There is a light on in the living-room. Elizabeth Costello lies asleep at the table she has annexed, her head cradled in her arms atop a mess of papers.

His inclination is to leave her strictly alone. The last thing he wants to do is wake her and open himself to more of her barbs. He is weary of her barbs. Half the time he feels like a poor old bear in the Colosseum, not knowing which way to turn. The death of a thousand cuts.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, ever so gently, he lifts her and slips a cushion in under her head.

In a fairy story, this would be the moment when the foul hag turns into a fair princess. But this is not a fairy story, evidently. Since the exploratory handclasp when they met, he and Elizabeth Costello have had no physical contact. Her hair has a lifeless feel to it, a lack of spring. And beneath that hair is the skull, within which activities go on that he would prefer not to know about.

If the object of his care were a child – Ljuba, for instance, or even handsome, heart-breaking, treacherous Drago – he might call the act tender. But in the case of this woman it is not tender. It is merely what one old person might do for another old person who is not well. Humane.

Presumably, like everyone else, Elizabeth Costello wants to be loved. And like everyone else faces the end gnawed by a feeling that there is something she has missed. Is that what she is looking for in him: whatever it is she has missed? Is that the answer to his recurring question? If so, how ludicrous. How can he be the missing piece when all his life he has been missing himself? Man overboard! Lost in a choppy sea off a strange coast.

Somewhere in the distance are the two Costello children he read about in the library, children she does not talk about, probably because they do not love her, or do not love her enough. Presumably, like him, they have had enough of Elizabeth Costello's barbs. He does not blame them. If he had a mother like her he would keep his distance too.

All alone in Melbourne in an empty house, entering upon her last days, starved for love, and to whom does she turn for relief but a man in another state, a retired portraitist, an utter stranger, yet one who has suffered a blow of his own and has his own need of love. If there is a human, a humane explanation for her situation, that must be it. Almost at random she has lighted on him, as a bee might alight on a flower or a wasp on a worm; and somehow, in ways so obscure, so labyrinthine that the mind baulks at exploring them, the need to be loved and the storytelling, that is to say the mess of papers on the table, are connected.

He glances at what she is writing. In fat letters: (EC thinks) Australian novelist – what a fate! What does the man have running in his veins? Under the words, a line across the page scored savagely into the paper. Then: After the meal they play a game of cards. Use the game to bring out their differences. Blanka wins. A narrow, intense intelligence. Drago no good at cards – too careless, too confident. Marijana smiling, relaxed, proud of her offspring. PR tries to use the game to make friends with Blanka, but she draws back. Her icy disapproval.

A meal and then a game of cards. PR and Blanka. Are they to be a family together after all, he with the ice-water in his veins and the Jokics, so full of blood? What else is Costello plotting in that busy head of hers?

The scribbler sleeps, the character prowls around looking for things to occupy himself with. A joke, but for the fact that there is no one around to catch it.

The scribbler's busy head lies at rest on the pillow. From her chest, if he listens carefully, a faint rattle as the air pumps in, pumps out. He switches off the lamp. He seems to be turning into the kind of person who falls asleep early and wakes up in the dark hours; she would seem to be the kind who stays up late, spinning her fantasies into the night. How could they possibly set up house together?

'NOT AN UNANNOUNCED visit,' he says. 'I don't like people visiting me unannounced and I don't make unannounced visits myself.'

'Nevertheless,' says Elizabeth Costello, 'break your rule just once. It is so much more spontaneous than writing letters, so much more neighbourly. How else will you get to see your mystical bride on home ground, chez elle?'

His mind goes back to his childhood, to Ballarat in the days before the spread of telephones, when the four of them would get into the Dutchman's blue Renault van on a Sunday afternoon and set off to pay unannounced visits. What tedium! The only visits he remembers with any pleasure were to the smallholding of their stepfather's horticultural friend Andrea Mittiga. It was at the Mittigas', among the spider webs in the cramped space behind the huge water tank, that with Prinny Mittiga he carried out his first breathless explorations into the difference between male and female.

'Come back next Sunday, promise,' Prinny Mittiga would whisper when the visit was over, when, with the raspberry juice drunk and the almond cake eaten, they were getting back into the van, weighed down with tomatoes or plums or oranges from the Mittigas' garden, for the drive back to Wirramunda Avenue. And he would have to shrug. 'Dunno,' he would have to say, his face impassive, though he burned to go on with the lessons.

'Paulie and Prinny were playing doctor again,' announced his sister from their makeshift seat in the back of the van.

'Weren't!' he protested, and dug her in the ribs.

'Allez, les enfants, soyez sages!' admonished his mother. As for the Dutchman, hunched over the wheel, dodging the bumps and holes in the Mittigas' road, he never listened.

The Dutchman drove at bottom speed, in fourth gear. That was his theory of driving, learned in Holland. When they came to hills, the engine of the van would hammer and choke; other cars would queue up behind and hoot. The hooting had no effect on him. 'Toujours pressés, pressés!' he would say in his grating Dutch voice. 'Ils sont fous! Ils gaspillent de l'essence, c'est tout!' He was not going to gaspiller his own essence for anybody. So they would crawl on, into the dark, with no lights, to save the battery.