J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Their image stays with him: the crone leading the hastily clad princess in an enchanted sleepwalk. Not quite young enough for the role of princess, perhaps, but attractive nonetheless: soft-fleshed, petite, big-bosomed, the kind of woman he imagines slumbering till noon and then breakfasting on bonbons served on a silver platter by a little slave-boy in a turban. What can she have done to her face that she needs to hide it?

She is the first woman to provoke his sexual interest since the accident. He has a dream in which she is somehow present though she does not reveal herself. In utter silence a crack in the earth opens and races towards him. Two vast waves of dust rise in the air. He tries to run but his legs will not move. Help! he whispers. With black unseeing eyes the old woman, the crone, stares at him and through him. Over and over she mutters a word that he cannot quite catch, something like Toomderoom. The earth beneath his feet gives way, he plunges.

Margaret McCord telephones. She is sorry she has not been in touch, she has been out of town. Can she take him to lunch, perhaps on Sunday? They could drive out to the Barossa Valley. Unfortunately her husband will not be able to join them: he is overseas.

He would love to come, he replies, but alas, he finds long car rides a bit of a calvary.

'Then shall I just drop by?' she says.

Years ago, after his divorce, he and Margaret had a brief fling. According to Margaret, whom he does not necessarily trust, her husband knows nothing of those intimacies.

'Why not?' he says. 'Come on Sunday. Come to dinner. I have some excellent cannelloni that my house help has prepared.'

They eat on the balcony, on a rather cool evening, amid the valedictory calls of birds, with citronella candles flickering on the table. There is a certain constraint: what once passed between them is by no means forgotten. Margaret does not mention the absent husband.

He tells Margaret about his time under the rule of Sheena; he tells her about Mrs Putts the social worker, who prepared him for the afterlife in all respects save sex, a topic she found herself too modest to broach, or perhaps thought inappropriate to a man of his age.

'And is it inappropriate?' asks Margaret. 'Candidly?'

Candidly, he replies, he cannot yet tell. He is not incapacitated, if that is what she is asking. His spine is unharmed, as are the relevant nerve connections. The as yet unanswered question is whether he would be able to perform the motions required of the active member in a sexual couple. A second and related question is whether embarrassment and shame might not outweigh pleasure.

'I would have thought,' says Margaret, 'that given the circumstances you might be excused from playing the role of active member. As for your second question, how will you ever know until you have tried? But why should you be embarrassed? It's not as though you have leprosy. You are just an amputee. Amputees can be rather romantic. Think of all those war films: men coming home from the front with eye-patches or empty sleeves pinned across their chests or on crutches. Women swooned over them.'

'Just an amputee,' he says.

'Yes. You were the victim of an accident, a crash. Nothing shameful in that, nothing blameworthy. After which you had a leg amputated. Part of a leg. Part of a stupid body-part. That's all. You still have your health. You are still yourself. You are the same handsome, healthy man you always were.' She gives him a smile.

They could test it out in the bedroom right now, the two of them, test whether he is the same man he always was, test whether even with a body-part missing pleasure can outweigh its opposite. Margaret would not be averse, he is sure of that. But the moment passes and they do not grasp it, for which, looking back later, he is thankful. He does not care to become the object of any woman's sexual charity, however good-natured. Nor does he care to expose to the gaze of an outsider, even if she is a friend from the old days, even if she does claim to find amputees romantic, this unlovely new body of his, that is to say, not only the hectically curtailed thigh but the flaccid muscles and the obscene little paunch that has ballooned on his abdomen. If he ever goes to bed with a woman again, he will make sure it is in the dark.

'I have had a visitor,' he tells Marijana the next day.

'Yes?' says Marijana.

'There may be other visitors,' he plunges on grimly. 'I mean women.'

'To live with you?' says Marijana.

To live with him? The thought has never crossed his mind. 'Of course not,' he says. 'Just friends, women friends.'

'That's good,' she says, and switches on the vacuum cleaner.

Marijana, it would appear, could not care less whether he has women in the flat. What he gets up to in his own time is none of her business. And what could he get up to anyway?

Unlike Margaret, Marijana has never seen him as he used to be. To her he is simply her latest client, a pale-skinned, slack-thewed old man on crutches. Even so, he feels shame before Marijana, and before her daughter too, as if the ruddy good health of the mother and the angelic clarity of the child were pronouncing a joint judgment on him. He finds himself avoiding the child's gaze, hiding out in his armchair in a corner of the living-room as if the flat belonged to the two women and he were some pest, some rodent that had found its way in.

Margaret's visit sparks a series of day-dreams about women. All of the dreams are sexually coloured; in some he and the woman get as far as going to bed. In these dreams his new and altered body is not spoken of, is not even seen; all is well, all is as it was before. But the woman he is with is not Margaret. It is, most of the time, the woman he saw in the lift, the one with the dark glasses and the inside-out clothes. Your dress, he says to her: let me help you adjust it. She raises a hand to take off her glasses. All right, she says. Her voice is low, her eyes are dark pools into which he plunges.

ON THE JOB Marijana wears not a nurse's cap but a head-scarf, like any good Balkan housewife. He approves of the scarf, as he approves of any token that she has not wholly cast off the old world in favour of the new.

Aside from assorted war criminals and the tall tennis player with the big serve whose name escapes him (Ilja? Ilic? Roman Ilic?), Croats are an unknown quantity to him. Yugoslavs are another matter. He must have crossed paths with dozens of Yugoslavs in the days when there were still Yugoslavs; but of course it never occurred to him to ask what variety of Yugoslav they were.

Where does Marijana fit into the Yugoslav picture, Marijana and the husband who assembles cars? What were they fleeing when they fled the old country? Or was it simply the case that, growing sick and tired of strife, they packed their goods and crossed the border in quest of a better, more peaceable life? And if a better, more peaceable life is not to be found in Australia, where is it to be found?

Marijana is telling him about her son, whose name is Drago but who is known to his mates as Jag. For his just-passed sixteenth birthday, her husband bought Drago a motorcycle. A big mistake, in Marijana's opinion. Now Drago stays out every evening, neglecting his homework, missing meals. He and his friends hang out on the back roads, racing each other, practising skids and God knows what else. She is afraid he is going to break a limb, or worse.

'Your son is a young man,' he tells Marijana. 'He is testing himself. You cannot stop young men from exploring their limits. They want to be the fastest. They want to be the strongest. They want to be admired.'

He has never met Drago, probably never will. But he enjoys Marijana's performance, enjoys its transparency: too well-mannered to boast about her boy, she complains instead about his unruliness, his recklessness, his joie de vivre, about how he will be her ruin.