Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [210]
The next evening I again called him back. There was nowhere private to go, I had to speak to him in the corridor. ‘This is my work, you are disrupting my work,’ I said. ‘Go away from here. Leave me alone.’
He did not answer, but reached out a hand and touched my cheek. That was the one and only time he ever touched me. The anger inside me boiled over. I knocked his hand aside. ‘This is not a love-game!’ I hissed. ‘Don’t you see I detest you? Leave me alone and leave my child alone too or I will report you to the school!’
It was true: if he had not begun filling my daughter’s head with dangerous nonsense I would never have summoned him to our flat, and his miserable pursuit of me would never have begun. What was a grown man doing in a girls’ school anyway, Saint Bonaventure, that was supposed to be a nuns’ school, only there were no nuns?
And it was true too that I detested him. I was not afraid to say so. He forced me to detest him.
But when I pronounced the word detest he stared back at me in confusion as if he could not believe his ears – that a woman to whom he was offering himself could actually be refusing him. He did not know what to do, just as he did not know what to do with himself on the dance floor. It gave me no pleasure to see such bewilderment, such helplessness. It was as if he was dancing naked before me, this man who did not know how to dance. I wanted to shout at him. I wanted to beat him. I wanted to cry.
[Silence.]
This is not the story you wanted to hear, is it? You wanted a different kind of story for your book. You wanted to hear of the romance between your hero and the beautiful foreign ballerina. Well, I am giving you truth, not romance. Maybe too much truth. Maybe so much truth that there will be no place for it in your book. I don’t know. I don’t care.
Go on. It is not a very dignified picture of Coetzee that emerges from your story, I won’t deny that, but I will change nothing, I promise.
Not dignified, you say. Well, maybe that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.
[Silence.]
Anyway, I went back to Mr Anderson. Get this man out of my class or I will resign, I said. I will see what I can do, said Mr Anderson. We all have difficult students to cope with, you are not the only one. He is not difficult, I said, he is mad.
Was he mad? I don’t know. But he certainly had an idée fixe about me.
The next day I went to my daughter’s school, as I had warned him I would, and asked to see the principal. The principal was busy, I was told. I will wait, I said. For an hour I waited in the secretary’s office. Not one friendly word. No Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Nascimento? Then at last, when it became plain I would not go away, they capitulated and let me see the principal.
‘I have come to speak to you about my daughter’s English lessons,’ I said to her. ‘I would like my daughter to go on with her lessons, but I want her to have a proper English teacher with a proper qualification. If I must pay more I will pay.’
The principal fetched a folder out of a filing cabinet. ‘According to Mr Coetzee, Maria Regina is making good progress in English,’ she said. ‘That is confirmed by her other teachers. So what exactly is the problem?’
‘I cannot tell you what is the problem,’ I said. ‘I just want her to have another teacher.’
This principal was not a fool. When I said I could not tell her what was the problem, she knew at once what was the problem. ‘Mrs Nascimento,’ she said, ‘if I understand what you are saying, you are making a very serious complaint. But I can’t act on such a complaint unless you are prepared to be more specific. Are you complaining about Mr Coetzee’s actions towards your daughter? Are you telling me there has been something untoward in his behaviour?’
She was not a fool, but I am not a fool either. Untoward: what does that mean? Did I want to make an accusation against Mr Coetzee and sign my name to it, and then find myself in a court of law being interrogated by a judge? No. ‘I am not making a complaint against