J. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus

Mercedes gives a laugh, low and hard, like a dog’s bark. ‘You need to learn to dance, Simón — may I call you Simón? It will cure you of your obtuseness. Or put a stop to your questioning.’

‘I fear I am past cure, Mercedes. To be truthful, I don’t see the question to which dance is the answer.’

‘No, I can see you don’t. But you must have been in love sometime. When you were in love, did you not see the question to which love was the answer, or were you an obtuse lover too?’

He is silent.

‘Were you not perhaps in love with Ana Magdalena, just a little?’ she persists. ‘That seemed to be her effect on most men. And you, Alyosha — what about you? Were you in love with Ana Magdalena too?’

Alyosha colours but does not speak.

‘I ask seriously: What was the question to which Ana Magdalena was in so many cases the answer?’

It is a real question, he can see that. Mercedes is a serious woman, a serious person. But is it one to be debated in front of children?

‘I was not in love with Ana Magdalena,’ he says. ‘I have not been in love for as long as I can remember, not with anyone. But, in the abstract, I acknowledge the force of your question. What is it that we lack when we lack nothing, when we are sufficient unto ourselves? What is it that we miss when we are not in love?’

‘Dmitri was in love with her.’ It is Joaquín who interrupts, in his clear and as yet unbroken child’s voice.

‘Dmitri is the man who killed Ana Magdalena,’ he, Simón, explains.

‘I know about Dmitri. Across the country I doubt there is anyone who does not know his story. Thwarted in love, Dmitri turned on the unattainable object of his desire and killed her. Of course it was a terrible thing he did. Terrible but not hard to understand.’

‘I disagree,’ he says. ‘From the beginning I found his actions incomprehensible. His judges found them incomprehensible too. That is why he is locked up in a psychiatric hospital. Because no sane being could have done what he did.’

Dmitri was no thwarted lover . That is what he cannot say, not openly. That is what is truly incomprehensible, more than incomprehensible. He killed her because he felt like it. He killed her to see what it was like, strangling a woman. He killed her for no reason.

‘I don’t understand Dmitri, nor do I want to,’ he presses on. ‘What happens to him is a matter of indifference to me. He can languish in psychiatric wards until he is old and grey, he can be sent to the salt mines to work himself to death — it is all the same.’

A glance passes between Mercedes and Alyosha. ‘A sore spot, evidently,’ says Mercedes. ‘Forgive me for touching on it.’

‘How about a walk?’ says Alyosha to the boys. ‘We can go to the park. Bring some bread — we can feed the goldfish.’

They leave. He and Mercedes are alone. But he is in no mood for talk; nor evidently is she. Through the open door comes the sound of Arroyo at the keyboard. He closes his eyes, tries to calm himself, to let the music find its way in. Alyosha’s words come back to him: If we listen with attention the soul will begin to dance within us. When did his soul last dance?

From the way the music kept stopping and starting he had assumed that Arroyo was practising. But he was wrong. The pauses last too long for that, and the music itself seems sometimes to lose its way. The man is not practising but composing. He listens with a different kind of attention.

The music is too variable in its rhythm, too complicated in its logic for a ponderous being like him to follow, but it brings to mind the dance of one of those little birds that hover and dart, their wings beating too fast to see. The question is, where is the soul? When will the soul emerge from its hiding place and open its wings?

He is not on close terms with his soul. What he knows about the soul in general, what he has read, is that it flits away when confronted with a mirror and therefore cannot be seen by the one who owns it, the one whom it owns.

Unable to see his soul, he has not questioned what people tell him about it: that it is a dry soul, deficient in passion. His own, obscure intuition — that, far from lacking in passion, his soul aches with longing for it knows not what — he treats sceptically as just the kind of story that someone with a dry, rational, deficient soul will tell himself to maintain his self-respect.

So he tries not to think, to do nothing that might alarm the timid soul within. He gives himself to the music, allowing it to enter and wash through him. And the music, as if aware of what is up, loses its stop — start character, begins to flow. At the very rim of consciousness the soul, which is indeed like a little bird, emerges and shakes its wings and begins its dance.

That is how Alyosha finds him: sitting at the table with his chin propped on his hands, fast asleep. Alyosha gives him a shake. ‘Señor Arroyo will see you now.’

Of the woman with the cane, the sister-in-law Mercedes, there is no sign. How long has he been absent?

He trails behind Alyosha down the corridor.

The room into which he is ushered is pleasantly bright and airy, lit by glass panels in the roof through which sunlight pours. It is bare save for a table with a mess of papers on it and a grand piano. Arroyo rises to greet him.

He had expected a man in mourning, a broken man. But Arroyo, wearing a plum-coloured smoking jacket over pyjamas and slippers, seems as solid and cheerful as ever. He offers him, Simón, a cigarette, which he declines.

‘A pleasure to see you again, señor Simón,’ says Arroyo. ‘I have not forgotten our conversation on the shores of Lake Calderón, concerning the stars. What shall we discuss today?’

After the music and then the slumber his tongue is slow, his mind befuddled. ‘My son Davíd,’ he says. ‘I have come to talk about him. About his future. Davíd has been growing a little wild of late. In the absence of schooling. We have applied for him to enter the Academy of Singing, but our hopes are not high. We are worried about him, his mother particularly so. She has been thinking of hiring a private tutor. But now we hear rumours that you may be opening your doors again. We are wondering. .’

‘You are wondering, if we reopen, who will do the teaching. You are wondering who will take the place of my wife. Who indeed! Because your son was very close to her, as you know. Who can replace her in his heart?’

‘You are correct. He still holds on to the memory of her. Will not let go. But there is more to it than that.’ The fog begins to retreat. ‘Davíd has great respect for you, señor Arroyo. He says you know who he is. Señor Arroyo knows who I am . I, on the other hand — so he says — do not know and have never known. I must ask: What does he mean when he says that you know who he is?’

‘You are his father yet you do not know who he is?’

‘I am not his true father, nor have I ever claimed to be. I think of myself as a kind of stepfather. I met him on the ship coming here. I could see that he was lost, therefore I took charge of him, took care of him. Later I was able to unite him with his mother, Inés. That is our story, in a nutshell.’

‘And now you want me to tell you who he is, this child whom you met on board ship. If I were a philosopher I would reply by saying: It depends on what you mean by who , it depends on what you mean by he , it depends on what you mean by is. Who is he? Who are you? Indeed, who am I? All I can tell you with certainty is that one day a being, a male child, appeared out of nowhere on the doorstep of this Academy. You know that as well as I do because you brought him. Since that day it has been my pleasure to be his musician accompanist. I have accompanied him in his dances, as I accompany all the children in my care. I have also talked with him. We have talked a lot, your Davíd and I. It has been enlightening.’