Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [90]
If old allegiances counted, his father would cheer for Gardens over Union. But the truth is, his father does not care who wins, Gardens or Union or the man in the moon. In fact he finds it hard to detect what his father cares about, in rugby or anything else. If he could solve the mystery of what in the world his father wants, he might perhaps be a better son.
The whole of his father's family is like that – without any passion that he can put a finger on. They do not even seem to care about money. All they want is to get along with everyone and have a bit of a laugh in the process.
In the laughing department he is the last companion his father needs. In laughing he comes bottom of the class. A gloomy fellow: that must be how the world sees him, when it sees him at all. A gloomy fellow; a wet blanket; a stick in the mud.
And then there is the matter of his father's music. After Mussolini capitulated in 1944 and the Germans were driven north, the Allied troops occupying Italy, including the South Africans, were allowed to relax briefly and enjoy themselves. Among the recreations mounted for them were free performances in the big opera houses. Young men from America, Britain, and the far-flung British dominions across the seas, wholly innocent of Italian opera, were plunged into the drama of Tosca or The Barber of Seville or Lucia di Lammermoor. Only a handful took to it, but his father was among that handful. Brought up on sentimental Irish and English ballads, he was entranced by the lush new music and overwhelmed by the spectacle. Day after day he went back for more.
So when Corporal Coetzee returned to South Africa at the end of hostilities, it was with a newfound passion for opera. 'La donna è mobile,' he would sing in the bath. 'Figaro here, Figaro there,' he would sing, 'Figaro, Figaro, Feeegaro!' He went out and bought a gramophone, their family's first; over and over again he would play a 78 rpm recording of Caruso singing 'Your tiny hand is frozen.' When long-playing records were invented he acquired a new and better gramophone, together with an album of Renata Tebaldi singing well-loved arias.
Thus in his adolescent years there were two schools of vocal music at war with each other in the house: an Italian school, his father's, manifested by Tebaldi and Tito Gobbi in full cry; and a German school, his own, founded on Bach. All of Sunday afternoon the household would drown in choruses from the B-minor Mass; then in the evenings, with Bach at last silenced, his father would pour himself a glass of brandy, put on Renata Tebaldi, and sit down to listen to real melodies, real singing.
For its sensuality and decadence – that was how, at the age of sixteen, he saw it – he resolved he would for ever hate and despise Italian opera. That he might despise it simply because his father loved it, that he would have resolved to hate and despise anything in the world that his father loved, was a possibility he would not admit.
One day, while no one was around, he took the Tebaldi record out of its sleeve and with a razor blade drew a deep score across its surface.
On Sunday evening his father put on the record. With each revolution the needle jumped. 'Who has done this?' he demanded. But no one, it seemed, had done it. It had just happened.
Thus ended Tebaldi; now Bach could reign unchallenged.
For that mean and petty deed of his he has for the past twenty years felt the bitterest remorse, remorse that has not receded with the passage of time but on the contrary grown keener. One of his first actions when he returned to the country was to scour the music shops for the Tebaldi record. Though he failed to find it, he did come upon a compilation in which she sang some of the same arias. He brought it home and played it through from beginning to end, hoping to lure his father