Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [200]
By transport I meant Manuel, the eldest son of Mario’s cousin, who used to give Maria Regina a lift home in the afternoons, in his van, after he had made his deliveries. It would be easy for him to pick up the teacher too.
Mario was your husband.
Mario. My husband, who died.
Please go on. I just wanted to be sure.
Mr Coetzee was the first person who was invited to our flat – the first one outside Mario’s family. He was only a schoolteacher – we met plenty of schoolteachers in Luanda, and before Luanda in São Paulo, I had no special esteem for them – but to Maria Regina and even to Joana schoolteachers were gods and goddesses, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them. The evening before his visit the girls baked a cake and iced it and even wrote on it (they wanted to write ‘Welcome Mr Coetzee’ but I made them write ‘St Bonaventure 1974’). They also baked trayfuls of the little biscuits that in Brazil we call brevidades.
Maria Regina was very excited. Come home early, please, please! I heard her urging her sister. Tell your supervisor you are feeling ill! But Joana wasn’t prepared to do that. It is not so easy to take time off, she said, they dock your pay if you don’t complete your shift.
So Manuel brought Mr Coetzee to our flat, and I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn’t have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me at once, I can’t say why, as célibataire. I mean not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impressions). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step towards civilized manners.
‘How long are you a teacher, Mr Coetzee?’ I asked.
He squirmed in his seat, said something I don’t remember any more about America, about being a teacher in America. Then, after more questions, it emerged that in fact he had never taught in a school before this one, and – what is worse – did not even have a teacher’s certificate. Of course I was surprised. ‘If you don’t have a certificate, how come you are Maria Regina’s teacher?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
The answer, which again took a long time to squeeze out of him, was that, for subjects like music and ballet and foreign languages, schools were permitted to hire persons who had no qualifications, or at least did not have certificates of competence. These unqualified persons would not be paid salaries like proper teachers, they would instead be paid by the school with money collected from parents like me.
‘But you are not English,’ I said. It was not a question this time, it was an accusation. Here he was, hired to teach the English language, paid out of my money and Joana’s money, yet he was not a teacher, and moreover he was an Afrikaner, not an Englishman.
‘I agree I am not of English descent,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless I have spoken English from an early age and have passed university examinations in English, therefore I believe I can teach English. There is nothing special about English. It is just one language among many.’
That is what he said. English is just one language among many. ‘My daughter is not going to be like a parrot that mixes up languages, Mr Coetzee,’ I said. ‘I want her to speak English properly, and with a proper English accent.’
Fortunately for him, this was the moment when Joana arrived home. Joana was already twenty by then, but in the presence of a man she was still bashful. Compared with her sister she was not a beauty – look, here is a snapshot of her with her husband and their little boys, it was taken some time