J. Coetzee - Disgrace

As dusk settles he rouses himself and leaves the house. The first stars are out. Through empty streets, through gardens heavy with the scent of verbena and jonquil, he makes his way to the university campus. He still has his keys to the Communications Building. A good hour to come haunting: the corridors are deserted. He takes the lift to his office on the fifth floor. The name-tag on his door has been removed. DR S. OTTO, reads the new tag. From under the door comes a faint light.

He 'mocks. No sound. He unlocks the door and enters.

The room has been transformed. His books and pictures are gone, leaving the walls bare save for a postersize blowup of a comic-book panel: Superman hanging his head as he is berated by Lois Lane. Behind the computer, in the half-light, sits a young man he has not seen before. The young man frowns.

'Who are you?' he asks. 'I'm David Lurie.'

'Yes? And?'

'I've come to pick up my mail. This used to be my office.' In the past, he almost adds.

'Oh, right, David Lurie. Sorry, I wasn't thinking. I put it all in a box. And some other stuff of yours that I found.' He waves. 'Over there.'

'And my books?'

'They are all downstairs in the storage room.'

He picks up the box. 'Thank you,' he says.

'No problem,' says young Dr Otto. 'Can you manage that?'

He takes the heavy box across to the library, intending to sort through his mail. But when he reaches the access barrier the machine will no longer accept his card. He has to do his sorting on a bench in the lobby.

He is too restless to sleep. At dawn he heads for the mountainside and sets off on a long walk. It has rained, the streams are in spate. He breathes in the heady scent of pine. As of today he is a free man, with duties to no one but himself. Time lies before him to spend as he wishes. The feeling is unsettling, but he presumes he will get used to it.

His spell with Lucy has not turned him into a country person. Nonetheless, there are things he misses - the duck family, for instance: Mother Duck tacking about on the surface of the dam, her chest puffed out with pride, while Eenie, Meenie, Minie and Mo paddle busily behind, confident that as long as she is there they are safe from all harm.

As for the dogs, he does not want to think about them. From Monday onward the dogs released from life within the walls of the clinic will be tossed into the fire unmarked, unmourned. For that betrayal, will he ever be forgiven?

He visits the bank, takes a load of washing to the laundry. In the little shop where for years he has bought his coffee the assistant pretends not to recognize him. His neighbour, watering her garden, studiously keeps her back turned.

He thinks of William Wordsworth on his first stay in London, visiting the pantomime, seeing Jack the Giant Killer blithely striding the stage, flourishing his sword, protected by the word Invisible written on his chest.

In the evening he calls Lucy from a public telephone. 'I thought I'd phone in case you were worried about me,' he says. 'I'm fine. I'll take a while to settle down, I suspect. I rattle about in the house like a pea in a bottle. I miss the ducks.'

He does not mention the raid on the house. What is the good of burdening Lucy with his troubles?

'And Petrus?' he asks. 'Has Petrus been looking after you, or is he still wrapped up in his housebuilding?'

'Petrus has been helping out. Everyone has been helpful.'

'Well, I can come back any time you need me. You have only to say the word.'

'Thank you, David. Not at present, perhaps, but one of these days.'

Who would have guessed, when his child was born, that in time he would come crawling to her asking to be taken in?

Shopping at the supermarket, he finds himself in a queue behind Elaine Winter, chair of his onetime department. She has a whole trolleyful of purchases, he a mere handbasket. Nervously she returns his greeting.

'And how is the department getting on without me?' he asks as cheerily as he can. Very well indeed - that would be the frankest answer: We are getting on very well without you. But she is too polite to say the words. 'Oh, struggling along as usual,' she replies vaguely.

'Have you been able to do any hiring?'

'We have taken on one new person, on a contract basis. A young man.'

I have met him, he might respond. A right little prick, he might add. But he too is well brought up. 'What is his specialism?' he inquires instead.

'Applied language studies. He is in language learning.'

So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well. Aliter, to whom he has not listened well.

The woman ahead of them in the queue is taking her time to pay. There is still room for Elaine to ask the next question, which should be, And how are you getting on, David?, and for him to respond, Very well, Elaine, very well.

'Wouldn't you like to go ahead of me?' she suggests instead, gesturing toward his basket. 'You have so little.'

'Wouldn't dream of it, Elaine,' he replies, then takes some pleasure in observing as she unloads her purchases on to the counter: not only the bread and butter items but the little treats that a woman living alone awards herself - full cream ice cream (real almonds, real raisins), imported Italian cookies, chocolate bars - as well as a pack of sanitary napkins.

She pays by credit card. From the far side of the barrier she gives him a farewell wave. Her relief is palpable. 'Goodbye!' he calls over the cashier's head. 'Give my regards to everyone!' She does not look back.

As first conceived, the opera had had at its centre Lord Byron and his mistress the Contessa Guiccioli. Trapped in the Villa Guiccioli in the stifling summer heat of Ravenna, spied on by Teresa's jealous husband, the two would roam through the gloomy drawing-rooms singing of their baulked passion. Teresa feels herself to be a prisoner; she smoulders with resentment and nags Byron to bear her away to another life. As for Byron, he is full of doubts, though too prudent to voice them. Their early ecstasies will, he suspects, never be repeated. His life is becalmed; obscurely he has begun to long for a quiet retirement; failing that, for apotheosis, for death. Teresa's soaring arias ignite no spark in him; his own vocal line, dark, convoluted, goes past, through, over her.

That is how he had conceived it: as a chamber-play about love and death, with a passionate young woman and a once passionate but now less than passionate older man; as an action with a complex, restless music behind it, sung in an English that tugs continually toward an imagined Italian. Formally speaking, the conception is not a bad one. The characters balance one another well: the trapped couple, the discarded mistress hammering at the windows, the jealous husband. The villa too, with Byron's pet monkeys hanging languidly from the chandeliers and peacocks fussing back and forth among the ornate Neapolitan furniture, has the right mix of timelessness and decay. Yet, first on Lucy's farm and now again here, the project has failed to engage the core of him. There is something misconceived about it, something that does not come from the heart. A woman complaining to the stars that the spying of the servants forces her and her lover to relieve their desires in a broom-closet - who cares? He can find words for Byron, but the Teresa that history has bequeathed him - young, greedy, wilful, petulant - does not match up to the music he has dreamed of, music whose harmonies, lushly autumnal yet edged with irony, he hears shadowed in his inner ear.

He tries another track. Abandoning the pages of notes he has written, abandoning the pert, precocious newlywed with her captive English Milord, he tries to pick Teresa up in middle age. The new Teresa is a dumpy little widow installed in the Villa Gamba with her aged father, running the household, holding the purse-strings tight, keeping an eye out that the servants do not steal the sugar. Byron, in the new version, is long dead; Teresa's sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, what she calls her reliquie, which her grandnieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe. Is this the heroine he has been seeking all the time? Will an older Teresa engage his heart as his heart is now?