Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [32]
He thinks of Eddie in his old blazer, crouching to hide from the rain that is always falling in Ida’s Valley, smoking stompies with the older Coloured boys. He is ten and Eddie, in Ida’s Valley, is ten. For a while Eddie will be eleven while he is still ten; then he will be eleven too. Always he will be pulling level, staying with Eddie for a while, then getting left behind. How long will it go on? Will he ever escape from Eddie? If they passed each other in the street one day, would Eddie, despite all his drinking and dagga-smoking, despite all the jail and all the hardening, recognize him and stop and shout ‘Jou moer!’
At this moment, in the leaky house in Ida’s Valley, curled under a smelly blanket, still wearing his blazer, he knows that Eddie is thinking of him. In the dark Eddie’s eyes are two yellow slits. One thing he knows for sure: Eddie will have no pity on him.
Eleven
Outside their circle of kinfolk they have few social contacts. On the occasions when strangers come to the house, he and his brother scuttle away like wild animals, then sneak back to lurk and eavesdrop. They have pierced spyholes in the ceiling, so that they can climb into the roof-space and peer into the living room from above. Their mother is embarrassed by the scuffling noises. ‘Just the children playing,’ she explains with a strained smile.
He flees polite talk because its formulas – ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you enjoying school?’ – baffle him. Not knowing the right answers, he mumbles and stammers like a fool. Yet finally he is not ashamed of his wildness, his impatience with the tame patter of genteel conversation.
‘Can’t you just be normal?’ asks his mother.
‘I hate normal people,’ he replies hotly.
‘I hate normal people,’ his brother echoes. His brother is seven. He wears a continual tight, nervous smile; at school he sometimes throws up for no good reason and has to be fetched home.
Instead of friends they have family. His mother’s family are the only people in the world who accept him more or less as he is. They accept him – rude, unsocialized, eccentric – not only because unless they accept him they cannot come visiting, but because they too were brought up wild and rude. His father’s family, on the other hand, disapprove of him and of the upbringing he has had at the hands of his mother. In their company he feels constrained; as soon as he can escape he begins to mock the commonplaces of politeness (‘En hoe gaan dit met jou mammie? En met jou broer? Dis goed, dis goed!’ How is your mommy? Your brother? Good!) Yet there is no evading them: without participating in their rituals there is no way of visiting the farm. So, squirming with embarrassment, despising himself for his cravenness, he submits. ‘Dit gaan goed,’ he says. ‘Dit gaan goed met ons almal.’ We’re all fine.
He knows that his father sides with his family against him. This is one of his father’s ways of getting back at his mother. He is chilled by the thought of the life he would face if his father ran the household, a life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else. His mother is the only one who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. So at the same time that he is irritated with her for her slowness and dullness, he clings to her as his only protector. He is her son, not his father’s son. He denies and detests his father. He will not forget the day two years ago when his mother for the one and only time let his father loose on him, like a dog let loose from its chain (‘I’ve reached the limit, I can’t stand it any more!’), and his father’s eyes glared blue and angry as he shook him and cuffed him.
He must go to the farm because there is no place on earth he loves more or can imagine loving more. Everything that is complicated in his love for his mother is uncomplicated in his love for the farm. Yet since as far back as he can remember this love has had an edge of pain. He may