Slow Man - Coetzee J. M. - Страница 47

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'Please be serious for once. Please answer me: Am I alive or am I dead? Did something happen to me on Magill Road that I have failed to grasp?'

'And am I the shade assigned to welcome you to the afterlife – is that what you are asking? No, rest assured, a poor forked creature, that is all I am, no different from yourself. An old woman who scribbles away, page after page, day after day, damned if she knows why. If there is a presiding spirit – and I don't think there is – then it is me he stands over, with his lash, not you. No slacking, young Elizabeth Costello! he says, and gives me a lick of the whip. Get on with the job now! No, this is a very ordinary story, very ordinary indeed, with just three dimensions, length, breadth and height, the same as ordinary life, and it is a very ordinary proposal I am making to you. Come back with me to Melbourne, to my nice old house in Carlton. You will like it, it has many mansions. Forget about Mrs Jokic, you don't stand a dog's chance with her. Take a chance on me. I'll be your best copine, the copine of your last days. We will share our crusts while we still have teeth. What do you say?'

'What do I say from the word-box I carry around with me or from the heart?'

'Ah, you've got me there, what a quick fellow you are! From the heart, Paul, just for once.'

He has been watching her mouth as she speaks, it is a habit of his: other people watch the eyes, he watches the mouth. No rough pleasures, she said. But right now he cannot help imagining what it would be like to kiss that mouth, with its dry, perhaps even withered lips and the trace of down above. Does companionate marriage include kissing? He drops his eyes; if he were less polite he would shudder.

And she sees it. She is not a higher being, but she sees it. 'I bet that as a little boy you didn't like it when your mother kissed you,' she says softly. 'Am I right? Ducked your head, let her peck you on the forehead, nothing more? And your Dutch stepfather not at all? Wanted to be a little man from the beginning, your own little man, owing nothing to anyone; self-made. Did they disgust you, your mother and her new husband – their breath, their smell, their pawing and fondling? How on earth could you expect someone like Marijana Jokic to love a man with such an aversion to the physical?'

'I have no aversion to the physical,' he protests coldly. What he wants to add, but does not, is: My aversion is to the ugly. 'What do you think life has consisted in ever since Magill Road but being rammed into the physical day after day? It is a testament to my faith in the physical that I have not done away with myself, that I am still here.'

Yet even as he speaks it is clear to him what the woman meant about the box of words. Done away with myself! he thinks. How artificial! How insincere! Like all the confessions she leads me into! And at the very same moment he is thinking: If we had had but five minutes more, that afternoon, if Ljuba had not come prowling like a little watchdog, Marijana would have kissed me. It was coming, I am sure, I felt it in my bones. Would have bent down and ever so lightly touched her lips to my shoulder. Then all would have been well. I would have taken her to me; she and I would have known what it was to lie side by side, breast to breast, in each other's arms, breathing each other's breath. Home country.

'Would you not concede, Paul' (the woman is still talking), 'that I have kept my humour exceedingly well, from the day I turned up on your doorstep to the present? Not a curse, not a cross word, lots of jokes instead, and a leavening of Irish blarney. Let me ask you: Do you think that is how I am by nature?'

He holds his tongue. His mind is elsewhere. He does not care how Elizabeth Costello is by nature.

'I am a tetchy old creature by nature, Paul, and given to the blackest rages. A bit of a viper, in fact. It is only because I vowed to myself to be good that I have been such a light burden for you to bear. But it has been a battle, believe me. Many is the time I have had to restrain myself from flaring up. Do you think what I have said is the worst that can be said of you – that you are slow as a tortoise and fastidious to a fault? There is much beyond that, believe me. What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection. Where else in the world, at this late stage, are you going to find affection, you ugly old man? Yes, I am familiar with that word too, ugly. We are both of us ugly, Paul, old and ugly, As much as ever would we like to hold in our arms the beauty of all the world. It never wanes in us, that yearning. But the beauty of all the world does not want any of us. So we have to make do with less, a great deal less. In fact, we have to accept what is on offer or else go hungry. So when a kindly godmother offers to whisk us away from our dreary surroundings, from our hopeless, our pathetic, unrealisable dreams, we ought to think twice about spurning her.

'I will give you a day, Paul, twenty-four hours, to rethink. If you refuse, if you insist on holding to your present dilatory course, then I will show you what I am capable of, I will show you how I can spit.'

His watch shows 3.15. Three hours yet to dawn. How on earth will he kill three hours?

There is a light on in the living-room. Elizabeth Costello lies asleep at the table she has annexed, her head cradled in her arms atop a mess of papers.

His inclination is to leave her strictly alone. The last thing he wants to do is wake her and open himself to more of her barbs. He is weary of her barbs. Half the time he feels like a poor old bear in the Colosseum, not knowing which way to turn. The death of a thousand cuts.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, ever so gently, he lifts her and slips a cushion in under her head.

In a fairy story, this would be the moment when the foul hag turns into a fair princess. But this is not a fairy story, evidently. Since the exploratory handclasp when they met, he and Elizabeth Costello have had no physical contact. Her hair has a lifeless feel to it, a lack of spring. And beneath that hair is the skull, within which activities go on that he would prefer not to know about.

If the object of his care were a child – Ljuba, for instance, or even handsome, heart-breaking, treacherous Drago – he might call the act tender. But in the case of this woman it is not tender. It is merely what one old person might do for another old person who is not well. Humane.

Presumably, like everyone else, Elizabeth Costello wants to be loved. And like everyone else faces the end gnawed by a feeling that there is something she has missed. Is that what she is looking for in him: whatever it is she has missed? Is that the answer to his recurring question? If so, how ludicrous. How can he be the missing piece when all his life he has been missing himself? Man overboard! Lost in a choppy sea off a strange coast.

Somewhere in the distance are the two Costello children he read about in the library, children she does not talk about, probably because they do not love her, or do not love her enough. Presumably, like him, they have had enough of Elizabeth Costello's barbs. He does not blame them. If he had a mother like her he would keep his distance too.

All alone in Melbourne in an empty house, entering upon her last days, starved for love, and to whom does she turn for relief but a man in another state, a retired portraitist, an utter stranger, yet one who has suffered a blow of his own and has his own need of love. If there is a human, a humane explanation for her situation, that must be it. Almost at random she has lighted on him, as a bee might alight on a flower or a wasp on a worm; and somehow, in ways so obscure, so labyrinthine that the mind baulks at exploring them, the need to be loved and the storytelling, that is to say the mess of papers on the table, are connected.

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