J. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus

‘We brought Davíd here and found a home for him in your Academy — a temporary home, as it turned out to be. I come to the point. If we enrol Davíd in a public school, we have every reason to expect he will be identified and sent back to Novilla. So we are avoiding the public schools. The census, which is less than a month away, is an added complication. We will have to hide all traces of him from the census-takers.’

‘I will be hiding my sons too. Davíd can join them. There are plenty of dark corners in this building.’

‘Why do you need to hide your sons?’

‘They were not counted in the last census, therefore they have no numbers, therefore they do not exist. They are ghosts. But go on. You were telling me you will be avoiding the public schools.’

‘Yes. Inés is in favour of a private tutor for Davíd. We tried the experiment of a tutor once before. It was not a success. The boy has a forceful personality. He is used to getting his own way. He needs to become more of a social animal. He needs to be in a class with other children, under the guiding hand of a teacher he respects.

‘I am aware that your means are straitened, señor Arroyo. If you can see your way clear to reopening the Academy, and if Davíd can come back, I offer you my assistance without remuneration. I can do janitorial work — sweeping and cleaning and carrying firewood and so forth. I can help with the boarders. I am not shy of physical labour. In Novilla I worked as a stevedore.

‘I may not be Davíd’s father but I am still his guardian and protector. Unfortunately, he seems to be losing the respect for me that he used to have. That is part of the wildness of his present condition. He derides me as the old man who follows him around wagging a finger and admonishing him. But you he respects, señor Arroyo, you and your late wife.

‘If you reopen your doors your old students will come back, I am convinced of that. Davíd will be the first. I don’t pretend to understand your philosophy, but being under your wing does the boy good, I can see that.

‘What do you say?’

Señor Arroyo has listened to him with great earnestness, not interrupting him once. Now he speaks.

‘Señor Simón, since you are frank with me I will be frank with you. You say your son derides you. That is not in fact true. He loves and admires you, even if he does not always obey you. He tells me with pride of how, when you were a stevedore, you used to carry the heaviest loads, heavier than any of your younger comrades. What he does hold against you is that, though you act as his father, you do not know who he is. You are aware of this. We discussed it before.’

‘He does not merely hold it against me, señor Arroyo, he hurls it in my face.’

‘He hurls it in your face and it upsets you, as it should. Let me rephrase what I said to you when last we met, and perhaps offer you some reassurance.

‘We have, each of us, had the experience of arriving in a new land and being allotted a new identity. We live, each of us, under a name that is not our own. But we soon get used to it, to this new, invented life.

‘Your son is an exception. He feels with unusual intensity the falsity of his new life. He has not yielded to the pressure to forget. What he remembers I cannot say, but it includes what he believes to be his true name. What is that name? Again I cannot say. He refuses to reveal it or is unable to reveal it, I do not know which. Perhaps it is best, on the whole, that his secret be kept secret. What difference does it make, as you said the other day, whether he is known to us as Davíd or Tomás, as sixty-six or ninety-nine, as Alpha or Omega? Would the earth tremble under our feet were his true name to be revealed, would the stars fall from the skies? Of course not.

‘So be consoled. You are not the first father to be denied, nor will you be the last.

‘Now to the other matter. You volunteer your services to the Academy. Thank you. My inclination is to accept, with gratitude. My late wife’s sister has also kindly offered to help. She is — I don’t know whether she told you — a distinguished teacher, though of another school. And my desire to reopen the Academy has received support in further quarters too. All of which encourages me to believe we may overcome our present difficulties. However, give me a little more time to come to a decision.’

The discussion ends there. He takes his leave. Our present difficulties : the phrase leaves a bad taste behind. Does Arroyo have any idea of what his difficulties are? How much longer can he be shielded from the truth about Ana Magdalena? The longer Dmitri stays on at the hospital, killing time, the likelier it is he will start boasting to his friends about the maestro’s icy wife who could not keep her hands off him. The story will spread like wildfire. People will snigger behind Arroyo’s back; from being a figure of tragedy he will become a figure of fun. He, Simón, ought by now to have found a way of warning him, so that, when the whispering begins, he will be prepared for it.

And the letters, the incriminating letters! He should have burnt them long ago. Te quiero apasionadamente . For the thousandth time he curses himself for getting involved in Dmitri’s affairs.

It is in this vexed state of mind that he arrives home and finds, sprawled outside his door, none other than Dmitri, dressed in the uniform of a hospital orderly, sopping wet — it has been raining again — yet smiling broadly.

‘Hello, Simón. Terrible weather, isn’t it? Will you let me in?’

‘No, I will not. How did you get here? Is Davíd with you?’

‘Davíd knows nothing about this. I came unaided: caught a bus, then walked. No one gave me a second glance. Brr! It’s cold. What wouldn’t I give for a hot cup of tea!’

‘Why are you here, Dmitri?’

Dmitri chuckles. ‘Quite a surprise, isn’t it? You should see your face. Aiding and abetting : I can see the words passing through your mind. Aiding and abetting a criminal. Don’t worry. I’ll be off soon. You won’t see me again, not in this life. So come on, let me in.’

He unlocks the door. Dmitri enters, sweeps the cover off the bed, wraps himself in it. ‘That’s better!’ he says. ‘You want to know why I am here? I will tell you, so listen carefully. When dawn comes, a few brief hours from now, I will be taking the road to the north, to the salt mines. That is my decision, my final decision. I will consign myself to the salt mines, and who knows what will become of me there. People have always said, “Dmitri, you are like a bear, nothing can kill you.” Well, maybe that was once true, but not any more. The whiplash, the chains, the bread and water — who knows how long I will be able to endure before I fall to my knees and say, “Enough! Dispose of me! Give me the coup de grâce !”

‘There are only two men of intellect in this benighted town, Simón, you and señor Arroyo, and Arroyo is out of the question, it would not be seemly, me being the murderer of his wife and so on. So that leaves you. You I can still talk to. You think I talk too much, I know that, and you are right, in a way, I can be a bit of a bore. But look at it from my point of view. If I don’t talk, if I don’t explain myself, who am I? An ox. A nobody. Maybe a psychopath. Maybe. But certainly a nothing, a zero, with no place in the world. You don’t understand that, do you? Parsimonious with words, that’s you. Each word checked and weighed before you send it out. Well, it takes all kinds.

‘I loved that woman, Simón. The moment I laid eyes on her I knew she was my star, my destiny. A hole opened up in my existence, a hole that she and she alone could ever fill. If the truth be told, I am in love with her still, Ana Magdalena, though she is buried in the ground or else burnt to ash, no one will tell me which. So what? you say — people fall in love every day . But not as I was in love. I was unworthy of her, that is the plain truth. Do you understand? Can you understand what it was like to be with a woman, to be with her in the fullest of senses, I put it delicately, when you forget where you are and time is suspended, that sort of being-with, the rapturous sort, when you are in her and she is in you — to be with her like that and yet be aware in a corner of your mind that there is something wrong about all of it, not morally wrong, I have never had much truck with morality, have always been the independent type, morally independent, but wrong in a cosmological sense, as if the planets in the heavens above our heads were misaligned, were saying to us No, no, no ? Do you understand? No, of course you don’t, and who can blame you. I’m explaining myself badly.