Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [15]
His mother guards her breasts carefully in case they are knocked. His very first memory, earlier than the dog, earlier than the scrap of paper, is of her white breasts. He suspects he must have hurt them when he was a baby, beaten them with his fists, otherwise she would not now deny them to him so pointedly, she who denies him nothing else.
Cancer is the great fear of her life. As for him, he has been taught to be wary of pains in his side, to treat each twinge as a sign of appendicitis. Will the ambulance get him to hospital before his appendix bursts? Will he ever wake up from the anaesthetic? He does not like to think of being cut open by a strange doctor. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a scar afterwards to show off to people.
When peanuts and raisins are doled out during break at school, he blows away the papery red skins of the peanuts, which are reputed to collect in the appendix and fester there.
He absorbs himself in his collections. He collects stamps. He collects lead soldiers. He collects cards – cards of Australian cricketers, cards of English footballers, cards of cars of the world. To get cards, one has to buy packets of cigarettes made of nougat and icing-sugar with pink-painted tips. His pockets are full of wilting, sticky cigarettes that he has forgotten to eat.
He spends hours on end with his Meccano set, proving to his mother that he too can be good with his hands. He builds a windmill with sets of coupled pulleys whose blades can be cranked so fast that a breeze wafts across the room.
He trots around the yard tossing a cricket ball in the air and catching it without breaking his stride. What is the true trajectory of the ball: is it going straight up and straight down, as he sees it, or is it rising and falling in loops, as a motionless bystander would see it? When he talks to his mother about this, he sees a desperate look in her eyes: she knows things like this are important to him, and wants to understand why, but cannot. For his part, he wishes she would be interested in things for their own sake, not just because they interest him.
When there is something practical to be done that she cannot do, like fixing a leaking tap, she calls in a Coloured man off the street, any man, any passer-by. Why, he asks in exasperation, does she have such faith in Coloured people? Because they are used to working with their hands, she replies.
It seems a silly thing to believe – that because someone has not been to school he must know how to fix a tap or repair a stove – yet it is so different from what everyone else believes, so eccentric, that despite himself he finds it endearing. He would rather that his mother expected wonders of Coloured people than expected nothing of them at all.
He is always trying to make sense of his mother. Jews are exploiters, she says; yet she prefers Jewish doctors because they know what they are doing. Coloured people are the salt of the earth, she says, yet she and her sisters are always gossiping about pretend-whites with secret Coloured backgrounds. He cannot understand how she can hold so many contradictory beliefs at the same time. Yet at least she has beliefs. Her brothers too. Her brother Norman believes in the monk Nostradamus and his prophecies of the end of the world; he believes in flying saucers that land during the night and take people away. He cannot imagine his father or his father’s family talking about the end of the world. Their sole goal in life is to avoid controversy, to offend no one, to be amiable all the time; by comparison with his mother’s family his father’s family is bland and boring.
He is too close to his mother, his mother is too close to him. That is the reason why, despite the hunting and the other manly things he does during his visits to the farm, his father’s family has never taken him to its bosom. His grandmother may have been harsh in denying the three of them a home during the war, when they were living on a share of