Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [231]
But no, there was no indication, not the faintest, that during his absences from the house Tebaldi was being set free to sing. Tebaldi had, it seemed, lost her charms; or else his father was playing a terrible game with him. My life a misery? What makes you think my life has been a misery? What makes you think you have ever had it in your power to make my life a misery?
Intermittently he plays the Tebaldi record for himself; and as he listens the beginnings of some kind of transformation seem to take place inside him. As it must have been with his father in 1944, his heart too begins to throb in time with Mimi’s. As the great rising arc of her voice must have called out his father’s soul, so it now calls out his soul too, urging it to join hers in passionate, soaring flight.
What has been wrong with him all these years? Why has he not been listening to Verdi, to Puccini? Has he been deaf? Or is the truth worse than that: did he, even as a youth, hear and recognize perfectly well the call of Tebaldi, and then with tight-lipped primness (‘I won’t!’) refuse to heed it? Down with Tebaldi, down with Italy, down with the flesh! And if his father must go down too in the general wreck, so be it!
Of what is going on inside his father he has no idea. His father does not talk about himself, does not keep a diary or write letters. Only once, by accident, has the door opened a chink. In the Lifestyle supplement to the weekend Argus he has come upon a Yes-No quiz that his father has filled in and left lying around, a quiz titled ‘Your Personal Satisfaction Index’. Next to the third question – ‘Have you known many members of the opposite sex?’ – his father has ticked the box No. ‘Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you?’ reads the fourth. No, is the answer again.
Out of a possible twenty, his father scores six. A score of fifteen or above, says the creator of the Index, one Ray Schwarz, MD, PhD, author of How to Succeed in Life and Love, a best-selling guide to personal development, means that the respondent has lived a fulfilled life. A score of less than ten, on the other hand, suggests that he or she needs to cultivate a more positive outlook, to which end joining a social club or taking up ballroom dancing might be a first step.
Theme to carry further: his father and why he lives with him. The reaction of the women in his life (bafflement).
Undated fragment
Over the airwaves come denunciations of the communist terrorists, together with their dupes and cronies in the World Council of Churches. The terms of the denunciations may change from day to day, but their hectoring tone does not. It is a tone familiar to him from the Worcester of his schooldays, where once a week all the children, from youngest to oldest, were herded into the school hall to have their brains washed. So familiar is the voice that at its first breath a visceral loathing rises in him and he dives for the off switch.
He is the product of a damaged childhood, that he long ago worked out; what surprises him is that the worst damage was done not in the seclusion of the home but out in the open, at school.
He has been reading here and there in educational theory, and in the writings of the Dutch Calvinist school he begins to recognize what underlay the form of schooling that was administered to him. The purpose of education, say Abraham Kuyper and his disciples, is to form the child as congregant, as citizen, and as parent to be. It is the word form that gives him pause. During his years at school in Worcester, his teachers, themselves formed by followers of Kuyper, had all the time been labouring to form him and the other little boys in their charge – form them as a craftsman forms a clay pot; while he, using what paltry, pathetic, inarticulate means he had at his disposal, had tried to resist them – to resist them then as he resists them now.
But why had he so stubbornly resisted?