Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [182]
“‘Let me hear no more of peas,” says the king to his daughter. “There is no pea. The pea is just in your imagination.”
‘That night the princess reascends her mountain of feather mattresses. She tries to sleep but cannot, because of the pea, the pea that is either underneath the bottom-most mattress or else in her imagination, it does not matter which, the effect is the same. By daybreak she is so exhausted that she cannot even eat breakfast. “It’s all the pea’s fault!” she laments.
‘Exasperated, the king sends an entire troop of serving-women to hunt for the pea, and when they return, reporting that there is no pea, has them beheaded. “Now are you satisfied?” he bellows at his daughter. “Now will you sleep?”’
She pauses for breath. She has no idea what is going to happen next in this bedtime story, whether the princess will at last manage to fall asleep or not; yet, strangely, she is convinced that, when she opens her lips, the right words will come.
But there is no need for more words. He is asleep. Like a child, this prickly, opinionated, incompetent, ridiculous cousin of hers has fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder. Fast asleep, undoubtedly: she can feel him twitching. No peas under him.
And what of her? Who is going to tell her stories to send her off to the land of nod? Never has she felt more awake. Is this how she is going to have to spend the night: bored, fretting, bearing the weight of a somnolent male?
He claims there is a taboo on whites doing manual labour, but what of the taboo on cousins of opposite sexes spending the night together? What are the Coetzees back on the farm going to say? Truly, she has no feeling towards John that could be called physical, not the faintest quiver of womanly response. Will that be enough to absolve her? Why is there no male aura about him? Does the fault lie with him; or on the contrary does it lie with her, who has so wholeheartedly absorbed the taboo that she cannot think of him as a man? If he has no woman, is that because he has no feeling for women, and therefore women, herself included, respond by having no feeling for him? Is her cousin, if not a moffie, then a eunuch?
The air in the cab is becoming stale. Taking care not to wake him, she opens the window a crack. What presences surround them – bushes or trees or perhaps even animals – she senses on her skin rather than sees. From somewhere comes the chirping of a lone cricket. Stay with me tonight, she whispers to the cricket.
But perhaps there is a type of woman who is attracted to a man like this, who is happy to listen without contradicting while he airs his opinions, and then to take on those opinions as her own, even the self-evidently silly ones. A woman indifferent to male silliness, indifferent even to sex, simply in search of a man to attach to herself and take care of and protect against the world. A woman who will put up with shoddy work around the house because what matters is not that the windows close and the locks work but that her man have the space in which to live out his idea of himself. And who will afterwards quietly call in hired help, someone good with his hands, to fix up the mess.
For a woman like that, marriage might well be passionless but it need not therefore be childless. She could give birth to a whole brood. Then of an evening they could all sit around the table, the lord and master at the head, his helpmeet at the foot, their healthy, well-behaved offspring down the two sides; and over the soup course the master could ex patiate on the sanctity of labour. What a man is