J. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus

‘We agree to call him Davíd, señor Arroyo, but his true name, if I can use that expression, if it means anything, is of course not Davíd, as you must know if you know who he really is. Davíd is just the name on his card, the name they gave him at the docks. Equally well I could say that Simón is not my true name, just a name given to me at the docks. To me names are not important, not worth making a fuss about. I am aware that you take a different line, that when it comes to names and numbers you and I belong to different schools of thought. But let me say my say. In my school of thought names are simply a convenience, just as numbers are a convenience. There is nothing mysterious about them. The boy we are talking about could equally well have had the name sixty-six attached to him, and I the name ninety-nine. Sixty-six and ninety-nine would have done just as well as Davíd and Simón , once we got used to them. I have never grasped why the boy I am now calling Davíd finds names so significant — his name in particular. Our so-called true names, the names we had before Davíd and Simón , are only substitutes, it seems to me, for the names we had before them, and so on backwards. It is like paging through a book, back and back, looking for page one. But there is no page one. The book has no beginning; or the beginning is lost in the mists of the general forgetting. That, at least, is how I see it. So I repeat my question: What does Davíd mean when he says you know who he is ?’

‘And if I were a philosopher, señor Simón, I would respond by saying: It depends on what you mean by know . Did I meet the boy in a previous life? How can I be sure? The memory is lost, as you say, in the general forgetting. I have my intuitions, as no doubt you have your intuitions, but intuitions are not memories. You remember meeting the boy on board ship and deciding he was lost and taking charge of him. Perhaps he remembers the event differently. Perhaps you were the one who looked lost; perhaps he decided to take charge of you .’

‘You misjudge me. I may have memories but I have no intuitions. Intuitions are not part of my stock-in-trade.’

‘Intuitions are like shooting stars. They flash across the skies, here one moment, gone the next. If you don’t see them, perhaps it is because your eyes are closed.’

‘But what is flashing across the skies? If you know the answer, why don’t you tell me?’

Señor Arroyo grinds his cigarette dead. ‘It depends on what you mean by answer ,’ he says. He rises, grips him, Simón, by the shoulders, stares into his eyes. ‘Courage, my friend,’ he says in his smoky breath. ‘Young Davíd is an exceptional child. The word I use for him is integral . He is integral in a way that other children are not. Nothing can be taken away from him. Nothing can be added. Who or what you or I believe him to be is of no importance. Nonetheless, I take seriously your wish to have your question answered. The answer will come when you least expect it. Or else it will not come. That too happens.’

Irritably he shakes himself loose. ‘I cannot tell you, señor Arroyo,’ he says, ‘how much I dislike these cheap paradoxes and mystifications. Do not misunderstand me. I respect you as I respected your late wife. You are educators, you take your profession seriously, your concern for your students is genuine — I doubt none of that. But regarding your system, el sistema Arroyo , I have the most profound doubts. I say so in all deference to you as a musician. Stars. Meteors. Arcane dances. Numerology. Secret names. Mystical revelations. It may impress young minds but please don’t try to foist it on me.’

On his way out of the Academy, preoccupied, in a bad humour, he stumbles into Arroyo’s sister-in-law, almost knocking her over. Her stick goes clattering down the stairs. He recovers the stick for her, apologizes for his clumsiness.

‘Don’t apologize,’ she says. ‘There ought to be a light on the stairway, I don’t know why the building has to be so dark and gloomy. But since I have you, give me your arm. I need cigarettes, and I don’t want to send one of the boys, it sets a bad example.’

He assists her to the kiosk at the street corner. She is slow, but he is in no hurry. It is a pleasant day. He begins to relax.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he proposes.

They sit at a sidewalk cafe, enjoying the sun on their faces.

‘I hope you weren’t offended by my remarks,’ she says. ‘I mean my remarks about Ana Magdalena and her effect on men. Ana Magdalena was not my type, but in fact I was quite fond of her. And the death she met — no one deserves to die like that.’

He is silent.

‘As I mentioned, I taught her when she was young. She showed promise, she worked hard, she was serious about her career. But the transition from girlhood to womanhood was hard for her to deal with. It is always a difficult time for a dancer, in her case especially so. She wanted to preserve the purity of her lines, the purity that comes easily to us when we are immature, but she failed, the new womanliness of her body kept coming out, kept expressing itself. So in the end she gave up, found other things to do. I lost touch with her. Then after my sister’s death she suddenly re-emerged at Juan Sebastián’s side. I was surprised — I had no idea they were in contact — but I said nothing.

‘She was good for him, I will say that, a good wife. He would have been lost without someone like her. She took over the children — the younger one was just a baby then — and became a mother to them. She extracted Juan Sebastián from the clock-repair business, where he had no future, and got him to open his Academy. He has flourished ever since. So don’t mistake me. She was an admirable person in many ways.’

He is silent.

‘Juan Sebastián is a man of learning. Have you read his book? No? He has written a book on his philosophy of music. You can still find it in the bookshops. My sister helped him. My sister had a musical training. She was an excellent pianist. She and Juan Sebastián used to plays duets together. Whereas Ana Magdalena, while she is or was a perfectly intelligent young woman, was neither a musician nor what I would call a person of intellect. For intellect she substituted enthusiasm. She took over Juan Sebastián’s philosophy holus-bolus and became an enthusiast for it. She applied it to her dance classes. God knows what the little ones made of it. Let me ask, Simón: What did your son make of Ana Magdalena’s teaching?’

What did Davíd make of Ana Magdalena’s teaching? He is about to give his reply, his considered reply, when something comes over him. Whether it is the memory flooding back of his angry outburst to Arroyo, or whether he is simply tired, tired of being reasonable, he cannot say, but he can feel his face crumple, and the voice that issues from his throat he can barely recognise as his own, so cracked and parched is it. ‘My son, Mercedes, was the one who discovered Ana Magdalena. He witnessed her on her deathbed. His memories of her are contaminated by that vision, that horror. Because she had been dead, you know, for some time. Not a sight that any child should be exposed to.

‘My son, to answer your question, is trying to cling to the memory of Ana Magdalena as she was in life and to the stories he heard from her. He would like to believe in a heavenly realm where the numbers dance eternally. He would like to think that, when he dances the dances she taught him, the numbers descend and dance with him. At the end of each school day Ana Magdalena used to gather the children around her and sound what she called her arc — which I later found was just an ordinary tuning fork — and get them to close their eyes and hum together on that tone. It would settle their souls, she told them, bringing them into harmony with the tone that the stars gave out as they wheeled on their axes. Well, that is what my son would like to hold on to: the heavenly tone. By joining in the dance of the stars, he would like to believe, we participate in their heavenly being. But how can he, Mercedes, how can he , after what he saw?’