Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [51]
His parents sleep in separate beds. They have never had a double bed. The only double bed he has seen is on the farm, in the main bedroom, where his grandfather and grandmother used to sleep. He thinks of double beds as old-fashioned, belonging to the days when wives produced a baby a year, like ewes or sows. He is thankful his parents finished with that business before he understood it properly.
He is prepared to believe that, long ago, in Victoria West, before he was born, his parents were in love, since love seems to be a precondition for marriage. There are photographs in the album that seem to prove it: the two of them sitting close together at a picnic, for instance. But all of that must have stopped years ago, and to his mind they are all the better for it.
As for him, what does the fierce and angry emotion he feels for his mother have to do with the deliquescent swooning on the screen in the bioscope? His mother loves him, that he cannot deny; but that is precisely the problem, that is what is wrong, not what is right, in her attitude towards him. Her love emerges above all in her watchfulness, her readiness to pounce and save him should he ever be in danger. Should he choose (but he would never do so), he could relax into her care and for the rest of his life be borne by her. It is because he is so sure of her care that he is on his guard with her, never relaxing, never allowing her a chance.
He yearns to be rid of his mother’s watchful attention. There may come a time when to achieve this he will have to assert himself, refuse her so brutally that with a shock she will have to step back and release him. Yet he has merely to think of that moment, imagine her surprised look, feel her hurt, and he is overtaken with a rush of guilt. Then he will do anything to soften the blow: console her, promise he is not going away.
Feeling her hurt, feeling it as intimately as if he were part of her, she part of him, he knows he is in a trap and cannot get out. Whose fault is it? He blames her, he is cross with her, but he is ashamed of his ingratitude too. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon. What can ignorant, innocent Aunt Annie know about love? He knows a thousand times more about the world than she does, slaving her life away over her father’s crazy manuscript. His heart is old, it is dark and hard, a heart of stone. That is his contemptible secret.
Fifteen
His mother spent a year at university before she had to make way for brothers younger than her. His father is a qualified attorney; he works for Standard Canners only because to open a practice (so his mother tells him) would take more money than they have. Though he blames his parents because they have not brought him up as a normal child, he is proud of their education.
Because they speak English at home, because he always comes first in English at school, he thinks of himself as English. Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without an English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys – of which obscenity is only a part – to which he has no access.
There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too – a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass) – that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. The Afrikaners of Worcester