Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [5]
He spends three days at home recovering. On the fourth day he returns with a note from his mother, a note whose indignant wording he is aware of and approves. Like a wounded warrior resuming his place in the ranks, he limps down the aisle to his desk.
‘Why were you away from school?’ whisper his classmates.
‘I couldn’t walk, I had blisters on my feet from the tennis,’ he whispers back.
He expects astonishment and sympathy; instead he gets mirth. Even those of his classmates who wear shoes do not take his story seriously. Somehow they too have acquired hardened feet, feet that do not blister. He alone has soft feet, and soft feet, it is emerging, are no claim to distinction. All of a sudden he is isolated – he and, behind him, his mother.
Three
He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all. In a normal household, he is prepared to accept, the father stands at the head: the house belongs to him, the wife and children live under his sway. But in their own case, and in the households of his mother’s two sisters as well, it is the mother and children who make up the core, while the husband is no more than an appendage, a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.
As long as he can remember he has had a sense of himself as prince of the house, and of his mother as his dubious promoter and anxious protector – anxious, dubious because, he knows, a child is not meant to rule the roost. If there is anyone to be jealous of, it is not his father but his younger brother. For his mother promotes his brother too – promotes and even, because his brother is clever but not as clever as he, nor as bold or adventurous, favours him. In fact, his mother seems always to be hovering over his brother, ready to ward off danger; whereas in his own case she is only somewhere in the background, waiting, listening, ready to come if he should call.
He wants her to behave towards him as she does towards his brother. But he wants this as a sign, a proof, no more. He knows that he will fly into a rage if she ever begins to hover over him.
He keeps driving her into corners, demanding that she admit whom she loves more, him or his brother. Always she slips the trap. ‘I love you both the same,’ she maintains, smiling. Even his most ingenious questions – what if the house were to catch fire, for instance, and she had time to rescue only one of them? – fail to snare her. ‘Both of you,’ she says, ‘I will surely save both of you. But the house won’t catch fire.’ Though he mocks her for her literal-mindedness, he respects her dogged constancy.
His rages against his mother are one of the things he has to keep a careful secret from the world outside. Only the four of them know what torrents of scorn he pours upon her, how much like an inferior he treats her. ‘If your teachers and your friends knew how you spoke to your mother …,’ says his father, wagging a finger meaningfully. He hates his father for seeing so clearly the chink in his armour.
He wants his father to beat him and turn him into a normal boy. At the same time he knows that if his father dared to strike him, he would not rest until he had his revenge. If his father were to hit him, he would go mad: he would become possessed, like a rat in a corner, hurtling about, snapping with its poisonous fangs, too dangerous to be touched.
At home he is an irascible despot, at school a lamb, meek and mild, who sits in the second row from the back, the most obscure row, so that he will not be noticed, and goes rigid with fear when the beating starts. By living this double life he has created for himself a burden of imposture. No one else has to bear anything like it, not even his brother, who is at most a nervous, wishy-washy imitation of himself. In fact, he suspects that at heart his brother may be normal. He is on his own. From no quarter can he expect support. It is up to