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If Africans were they, who were us? The Afrikaners?

No. Us was principally the Coloured people. It is a term I use only reluctantly, as shorthand. He – Coetzee – avoided it as far as he could. I mentioned his Utopianism. This avoidance was another aspect of his Utopianism. He longed for the day when everyone in South Africa would call themselves nothing, neither African nor European nor white nor black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable, that is to say – I utter the tainted word again – Coloured. He called that the Brazilian future. He approved of Brazil and the Brazilians. He had of course never been to Brazil.

But he had Brazilian friends.

He had met a few Brazilian refugees in South Africa.

[Silence.]

You mention an intermixed future. Are we talking here about biological mixture? Are we talking about intermarriage?

Don’t ask me. I am just delivering a report.

Then why, instead of contributing to the future by – legitimately or illegitimately – fathering Coloured children – why was he having a liaison with a young white colleague from France?

[Laughs.] Don’t ask me.

What did you and he talk about?

About our teaching. About colleagues and students. In other words, we talked shop. We also talked about ourselves.

Go on.

You want me to tell you if we discussed his writing? The answer is no. He never spoke to me about what he was writing, nor did I press him.

This was around the time when he was writing In the Heart of the Country.

He was just completing In the Heart of the Country.

Did you know that In the Heart of the Country would be about madness and parricide and so forth?

I had absolutely no idea.

Did you read it before it was published?

Yes.

What did you think of it?

[Laughs.] I must tread carefully. I presume you do not mean, what was my considered critical judgment, I presume you mean how did I respond? Frankly, I was at first nervous. I was nervous that I would find myself in the book in some embarrassing guise.

Why did you think that might be so?

Because – so it seemed to me at the time, now I realize how naïve this was – I believed you could not be closely involved with another person and yet exclude her from your imaginative universe.

And did you find yourself in the book?

No.

Were you upset?

What do you mean – was I upset not to find myself in his book?

Were you upset to find yourself excluded from his imaginative universe?

No. I was learning. My exclusion was part of my education. Shall we leave it at that? I think I have given you enough.

Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell widely. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a remote and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.

Now, I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person, not necessarily warmer in temperament but more unsure of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

I wonder if you would be prepared to comment on the human side of him. I value what you have said about his politics, but are there stories of a more personal nature that you would be prepared to share, stories that might shed a better light on his character?

You mean stories that would show him in a more attractive, more endearing light – stories of kindness towards animals, for instance, animals and women? No, stories like that I will be saving for my own memoirs.

[Laughter.]

All right, I will tell you one story. It may not seem all that personal, it may again seem to be political, but you must