Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [46]
Vic Toweel fights against Manuel Ortiz for the bantamweight title of the world. The fight takes place on a Saturday night; he stays up late with his father to listen to the commentary on the radio. In the last round Toweel, bleeding and exhausted, hurls himself at his opponent. Ortiz reels; the crowd goes wild, the commentator’s voice is hoarse with shouting. The judges announce their decision: South Africa’s Viccie Toweel is the new champion of the world. He and his father shout with elation and embrace each other. He does not know how to express his joy. Impulsively he grips his father’s hair, tugs with all his might. His father starts back, looks at him oddly.
For days the newspapers are full of pictures of the fight. Viccie Toweel is a national hero. As for him, his elation soon dwindles. He is still happy that Toweel has beaten Ortiz, but has begun to wonder why. Who is Toweel to him? Why should he not be free to choose between Toweel and Ortiz in boxing as he is free to choose between Hamiltons and Villagers in rugby? Is he bound to support Toweel, this ugly little man with hunched shoulders and a big nose and tiny blank, black eyes, because Toweel (despite his funny name) is a South African? Do South Africans have to support other South Africans even if they don’t know them?
His father is no help. His father never says anything surprising. Unfailingly he predicts that South Africa is going to win or that Western Province is going to win, whether at rugby or cricket or anything else. ‘Who do you think is going to win?’ he challenges his father the day before Western Province plays Transvaal. ‘Western Province, by a mile,’ responds his father like clockwork. They listen to the match on the radio and Transvaal wins. His father is unshaken. ‘Next year Western Province will win,’ he says. ‘Just watch.’
It seems to him stupid to believe that Western Province will win just because you come from Cape Town. Better to believe that Transvaal will win, and then get a pleasant surprise if they don’t.
In his hand he retains the feel of his father’s hair, coarse, sturdy. The violence of his action still puzzles and disturbs him. He has never been so free with his father’s body before. He would prefer that it did not happen again.
Thirteen
It is late at night. Everyone else is asleep. He is lying in bed, thinking. Across his bed falls a strip of orange from the street lights that burn all night over Reunion Park.
He is remembering what happened that morning during assembly, while the Christians were singing their hymns and the Jews and Catholics were roaming free. Two older boys, Catholics, had penned him in a corner. ‘When are you coming to catechism?’ they had demanded. ‘I can’t come to catechism, I have to do errands for my mother on Friday afternoons,’ he had lied. ‘If you don’t come to catechism you can’t be a Catholic,’ they had said. ‘I am a Catholic,’ he had insisted, lying again.
If the worst were to happen, he thinks now, facing the worst, if the Catholic priest were to visit his mother and ask why he never comes to catechism, or – the other nightmare – if the school principal were to announce that all boys with Afrikaans names were to be transferred to Afrikaans classes – if nightmare were to turn to reality and he were left with no recourse but to retreat into petulant shouting and storming and crying, into the baby behaviour that he knows is still inside him, coiled like a spring – if, after that tempest, he were as a last, desperate step to throw himself upon his mother’s protection, refusing to go back to school, pleading with her to save him – if he were in this way to disgrace himself utterly and finally, revealing what only he in his way and his mother in her way and perhaps his father in his own scornful