Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [3]
His speech is greeted with huge applause. Soon thereafter he and Yolande fly home to Paris, and the Sunday newspapers return to their menu of naughty nymphets, errant spouses, and state murders.
To be explored: the envy felt by white South Africans (men) for Breytenbach, for his freedom to roam the world and for his unlimited access to a beautiful, exotic sex-companion.
2 September 1973
At the Empire Cinema in Muizenberg last night, an early film of Kurosawa's, To Live. A stodgy bureaucrat learns that he has cancer and has only months to live. He is stunned, does not know what to do with himself, where to turn.
He takes his secretary, a bubbly but mindless young woman, out to tea. When she tries to leave he holds her back, gripping her arm. 'I want to be like you!' he says. 'But I don't know how!' She is repelled by the nakedness of his appeal.
Question: How would he react if his father were to grip his arm like that?
13 September 1973
From an employment bureau where he has left his particulars he receives a call. A client seeks expert advice on language matters, will pay by the hour – is he interested? Language matters of what nature, he inquires? The bureau is unable to say.
He calls the number provided, makes an appointment to go to an address in Sea Point. His client is a woman in her sixties, a widow whose husband has departed this world leaving the bulk of his considerable estate in a trust controlled by his brother. Outraged, the widow has resolved to challenge the will. But both firms of lawyers she has consulted have counselled her against trying. The will is, they say, watertight. Nevertheless she refuses to give up. The lawyers, she is convinced, have misread the wording of the will. Giving up on lawyers, she is instead seeking expert support of a linguistic kind.
With a cup of tea at his elbow he peruses the will. Its meaning is perfectly plain. To the widow goes the flat in Sea Point and a sum of money. The remainder of the estate goes into a trust for the benefit of his children by a former marriage.
'I fear I cannot help you,' he says. 'The wording is unambiguous. There is only one way in which it can be read.'
'What about here?' she says. She leans over his shoulder and stabs a finger at the text. Her hand is tiny, her skin mottled; on the third finger is a diamond in an extravagant setting. 'Where it says Notwithstanding the aforesaid.'
'It says that if you can demonstrate financial distress you are entitled to apply to the trust for support.'
'What about notwithstanding?'
'It means that what is stated in this clause is an exception to what has been stated before and takes precedence over it.'
'But it also means that the trust cannot withstand my claim. What does withstand mean if it doesn't mean that?'
'It is not a question of what withstand means. It is a question of what Notwithstanding the aforesaid means. You must take the phrase as a whole.'
She gives an impatient snort. 'I am hiring you as an expert on English, not as a lawyer,' she says. 'The will is written in English, in English words. What do the words mean? What does notwithstanding mean?'
A madwoman, he thinks. How am I going to get out of this? But of course she is not mad. She is simply in the grip of rage and greed: rage against the husband who has slipped her grasp, greed for his money.
'The way I understand the clause,' she says, 'if I make a claim then no one, including my brother-in-law, can withstand it. Because that is what not withstand means: he can't withstand me. Otherwise what is the point of using the word? Do you see what I mean?'
'I see what you mean,' he says.
He leaves the house with a cheque for ten rands in his pocket. Once he has delivered his report, his expert report, to which