Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [13]
‘Shall I let go?’ he asks his mother.
She nods. He lets it go.
The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountain peaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.
‘What will happen to the paper?’ he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.
That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swartberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.
His mother is full of scorn for men who are ‘useless with their hands’, among whom she numbers his father, but also her own brothers, and principally her eldest brother Roland, who could have kept the farm if he had worked hard enough to pay off its debts, but did not. Of the many uncles on his father’s side (he counts six by blood, another five by marriage), the one she admires most is Joubert Olivier, who on Skipperskloof has installed an electric generator and has even taught himself dentistry. (On one of his visits to the farm he gets toothache. Uncle Joubert seats him on a chair under a tree and, without anaesthetic, drills out the hole and fills it with gutta-percha. Never in his life has he suffered such agony.)
When things break – plates, ornaments, toys – his mother fixes them herself: with string, with glue. The things she ties together come loose, since she does not know about knots. The things she glues together fall apart; she blames the glue.
The kitchen drawers are full of bent nails, lengths of string, balls of tinfoil, old stamps. ‘Why are we saving them?’ he asks. ‘In case,’ she replies.
In her angrier moods his mother denounces all book learning. Children should be sent to trade school, she says, then put to work. Studying is just nonsense. Learning to be a cabinet-maker or a carpenter, learning to work with wood, is best. She is disenchanted with farming: now that farmers have suddenly become rich there is too much idleness among them, too much ostentation.
For the price of wool is rocketing. According to the radio, the Japanese are paying a pound a pound for the best grades. Sheep-farmers are buying new cars and taking seaside holidays. ‘You must give us some of your money, now that you are so rich,’ she tells Uncle Son on one of their visits to Voëlfontein. She smiles as she speaks, pretending it is a joke, but it is not funny. Uncle Son looks embarrassed, murmurs a reply he does not catch.
The farm was not meant to go to Uncle Son alone, his mother tells him: it was bequeathed to all twelve sons and daughters in equal portions. To save it from being auctioned off to some stranger, the sons and daughters agreed to sell their portions to Son; from that sale they came away with IOUs for a few pounds each. Now, because of the Japanese, the farm is worth thousands of pounds. Son ought to share his money.
He is ashamed of his mother for the crudeness with which she talks about money.
‘You must become a doctor or an attorney,’ she tells him. ‘Those are the people who make money.’ However, at other times she tells him that attorneys are all crooks. He does not ask how his father fits into this picture, his father the attorney who did not make money.
Doctors are not interested in their patients, she says. They just give you pills. Afrikaans doctors are the worst, because they are incompetent as well.
She says so many different things at different times that he does not know what she really thinks. He and his brother argue with her, point out the contradictions. If she thinks farmers are better than attorneys, why did she marry an attorney? If she thinks book learning is nonsense, why did she become a teacher? The more they argue with her the more she smiles. She takes so much pleasure in her children’s skill with words that she concedes every point, barely defending herself, willing them to win.
He does not share her