Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [183]
Why is she feeling so bitter towards John, and even bitterer towards this wife she has conjured up for him out of thin air? The simple answer: because due to his vanity and clumsiness she is stranded on the Merweville road. But the night is long, there is plenty of time to unfold a grander hypothesis and inspect that hypothesis to see if it has any virtue. The grander answer: she feels bitter because she had hoped for much from her cousin, and he has failed her.
What had she hoped for from him?
That he would redeem the Coetzee men.
Why did she desire the redemption of the Coetzee men?
Because the Coetzee men are so slapgat.
Why had she placed her hopes in John in particular?
Because of the Coetzee men he was the one blessed with the best chance. He had a chance and he did not make use of it.
Slapgat is a word she and her sister throw around rather easily, perhaps because it was thrown around rather easily in their hearing while they were children. It was only after she left home that she noticed the shocked looks that the word evoked, and began to use it more cautiously. A slap gat: a rectum, an anus, over which one has less than complete control. Hence slapgat: slack, spineless.
Her uncles have turned out slapgat because their parents, her grandparents, brought them up that way. While their father thundered and roared and made them quake in their boots, their mother tiptoed around like a mouse. The result was that they went out into the world lacking all fibre, lacking backbone, lacking belief in themselves, lacking courage. The life-paths they chose for themselves were without exception easy paths, paths of least resistance. Gingerly they tested the tide, then swam with it.
What made the Coetzees so easygoing and therefore so gesellig, such good company, was precisely their preference for the easiest available path; and their geselligheid was precisely what made the Christmas get-togethers such fun. They never quarrelled, never squabbled among themselves, got along famously, all of them. It was the next generation, her generation, who had to pay for their easygoingness, who went out into the world expecting the world to be just another slap, gesellige place, Voëlfontein writ large, and found that, behold, it was not!
She herself has no children. She cannot conceive. But if, blessedly, she had children, she would take it as her first duty to work the Coetzee blood out of them. How you work slap blood out of people she does not know offhand, short of taking them to a hospital and having their blood pumped out and replaced with the blood of some vigorous donor; but perhaps a strict training in self-assertion, starting at the earliest possible age, would do the trick. Because if there is one thing she knows about the world in which the child of the future will have to grow up, it is that there will be no room for the slap.
Even Voëlfontein and the Karoo are no longer Voëlfontein and the Karoo as they used to be. Look at those children in the Apollo Café. Look at cousin Michiel’s work gang, who are certainly not the plaasvolk of yore. In the attitude of Coloured people in general towards whites there is a new and unsettling hardness. The younger ones regard one with a cold eye, refuse to call one Baas or Miesies. Strange men flit across the land from one settlement to another, lokasie to lokasie, and no one will report them to the police as in the old days. The police find it harder and harder to come up with information they can trust. People no longer want to be seen talking to them; sources have dried up. For the farmers, summons for commando duty come more often and for longer. Lukas complains about it all the time. If that is the way things are in the Roggeveld, it must certainly be the way things are here in the Koup.
Business is changing character too. To get on in business it is no longer enough to be friends with all and sundry, to do favours and be owed favours in return. No, nowadays you have to be as hard as nails and