Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [143]
From the moment they arrive in South Africa Breyten and Yolande, he swarthily handsome, she delicately beautiful, are dogged by the press. Zoom lenses capture every intimate moment as they picnic with friends or paddle in a mountain stream.
The Breytenbachs make a public appearance at a literary conference in Cape Town. The hall is packed to the rafters with people come to gape. In his speech Breyten calls Afrikaners a bastard people. It is because they are bastards and ashamed of their bastardy, he says, that they have concocted their cloud-cuckoo scheme of forced separation of the races.
His speech is greeted with huge applause. Soon thereafter he and Yolande fly home to Paris, and the Sunday newspapers return to their menu of naughty nymphets, errant spouses, and state murders.
To be explored: the envy felt by white South Africans (men) for Breytenbach, for his freedom to roam the world and for his unlimited access to a beautiful, exotic sex-companion.
2 September 1973
At the Empire Cinema in Muizenberg last night, an early film of Kurosawa’s, To Live. A stodgy bureaucrat learns that he has cancer and has only months to live. He is stunned, does not know what to do with himself, where to turn.
He takes his secretary, a bubbly but mindless young woman, out to tea. When she tries to leave he holds her back, gripping her arm. ‘I want to be like you!’ he says. ‘But I don’t know how!’ She is repelled by the nakedness of his appeal.
Question: How would he react if his father were to grip his arm like that?
13 September 1973
From an employment bureau where he has left his particulars he receives a call. A client seeks expert advice on language matters, will pay by the hour – is he interested? Language matters of what nature, he inquires? The bureau is unable to say.
He calls the number provided, makes an appointment to come to an address in Sea Point. His client is a woman in her sixties, a widow whose husband has departed this world leaving the bulk of his considerable estate in a trust controlled by his brother. Outraged, the widow has resolved to challenge the will. But all the lawyers she has consulted have counselled her against trying. The will is, they say, watertight. Nevertheless she refuses to give up. The lawyers, she is convinced, have misread the wording of the will. She is therefore giving up on lawyers and instead soliciting expert linguistic advice.
With a cup of tea at his elbow he peruses the last testament of the deceased. Its meaning is perfectly plain. To the widow goes the flat in Sea Point and a sum of money. The remainder of the estate goes into a trust for the benefit of his children by a former marriage.
‘I fear I cannot help you,’ he says. ‘The wording is unambiguous. There is only one way in which it can be read.’
‘What about here?’ she says. She leans over his shoulder and stabs a finger at the text. Her hand is tiny, her skin mottled; on the third finger is a diamond in an extravagant setting. ‘Where it says Notwithstanding the aforesaid.’
‘It says that if you can demonstrate financial distress you are entitled to apply to the trust for support.’
‘What about notwithstanding?’
‘It means that what is stated in this clause is an exception to what has been stated before and takes precedence over it.’
‘But it also means that the trust cannot withstand my claim. What does withstand mean if it doesn’t mean that?’
‘It is not a question of what withstand means. It is a question of what Notwithstanding the aforesaid means. You must take the phrase as a whole.’
She gives an impatient snort. ‘I am paying for your services as an expert on English, not as a lawyer,’ she says. ‘The will is written in English, in English words. What do