Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [207]
If we had been Portuguese it would have been different. There were many Portuguese who came to South Africa in those days, from Moçambique and Angola and even Madeira, there were organizations to help the Portuguese. But we were from Brazil, and there were no regulations for Brazilians, no precedents, to the bureaucrats it was as if we arrived in their country from Mars.
And there was the problem of my husband. You cannot sign for this, your husband must come and sign, they would say to me. My husband cannot sign, he is in hospital, I would say. Then take it to him in the hospital and get him to sign it and bring it back, they would say. My husband cannot sign anything, I would say, he is in Stikland, don’t you know Stikland? Then let him make his mark, they would say. He cannot make his mark, sometimes he cannot even breathe, I would say. Then we cannot help you, they would say. Go to such-and-such an office and tell them your story – perhaps they can help you there.
And all of this pleading and petitioning I had to do alone, unaided, with my bad English that I had learned in school out of books. In Brazil it would have been easy, in Brazil we have these people, we call them despachantes, facilitators: they have contacts in the government offices, they know how to steer your papers through the maze, you pay them a fee and they do all the unpleasant business for you one-two-three. That was what I needed in Cape Town: a facilitator, someone to make things easier for me. Mr Coetzee could have offered to be my facilitator. A facilitator for me and a protector for my girls. Then, just for a minute, just for a day, I could have allowed myself to be weak, an ordinary, weak woman. But no, I dared not relax, or what would have become of us, my daughters and me?
Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress.
Let me tell you about my poor husband. When they opened the warehouse the morning after the attack and found him lying there in his blood, they were sure he was dead. They wanted to take him straight to the morgue. But he was not dead. He was a strong man, he fought and fought against death and held death at bay. In the city hospital, I forget its name, the famous one, they did one operation after another on his brain. Then they moved him from there to the hospital I mentioned, the one called Stikland, which was outside the city, an hour by train. Sunday was the only day you were allowed to visit Stikland. So every Sunday morning I would catch the train from Cape Town, and then the train back in the afternoon. That is another thing I remember as if it were yesterday: those sad journeys back and forth.
There was no improvement in my husband, no change. Week after week I would arrive and he would be lying in exactly the same position as before, with his eyes closed and his arms at his sides. They kept his head shaved, so you could see the stitch marks in his scalp. Also for a long time his face was covered with a wire mask where they had done a skin graft.
In all that time in Stikland my husband never opened his eyes, never saw me, never heard me. He was alive, he was breathing, though in a coma so deep he might as well have been dead. Formally I may not have been a widow, yet as far as I was concerned I was already in mourning, for him and for all of us, stranded and helpless in this cruel land.
I asked to bring him back to the flat in Wynberg, so that I could look after him myself, but they would not release him. They had not yet given up, they said. They were hoping that the electric currents they ran through his brain would all of a sudden