Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [95]
'Is she good at her job? Is she efficient?'
'Very good. Very meticulous.'
Again he waits for more. Again, that is the end of it.
The question he cannot ask is: What does it do to the heart of a lonely man like yourself to be sitting side by side, day after day, in a cubicle no larger than many prison cells, with a woman who is not only as good at her job and as meticulous as Mrs Noerdien, but also as feminine?
For that is the chief impression he carries away from his brush with her. He calls her feminine because he has no better word: the feminine, a higher rarefaction of the female, to the point of becoming spirit. With Mrs Noerdien, how would a man, how even would Mr Noerdien, traverse the space from the exalted heights of the feminine to the earthly body of the female? To sleep with a being like that, to embrace such a body, to smell and taste it – what would it do to a man? And to be beside her all day, conscious of her slightest stirring: did his father's sad response to Dr Schwarz's lifestyle quiz – 'Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you?' – 'No' – have something to do with coming face to face, in the wintertime of his life, with beauty such as he has not known before and can never hope to possess?
Query: Why say that his father is in love with Mrs Noerdien when he has so obviously fallen for her himself?
Undated fragment.
Idea for a story.
A man, a writer, keeps a diary. In it he notes down thoughts, ideas, significant occurrences.
Things take a turn for the worse in his life. 'Bad day,' he writes in his diary, without elaboration. 'Bad day,' he writes, day after day.
Tiring of calling each day a bad day, he decides to simply mark bad days with an asterisk, as some people (women) mark with a red cross days when they will bleed, or as other people (men, womanizers) mark with an X days when they have notched up a success.
The bad days pile up; the asterisks multiply like a plague of flies.
Poetry, if he could write poetry, might take him to the root of his malaise, this malaise that blossoms in the form of asterisks.
But the spring of poetry in him seems to have dried up.
There is prose to fall back on. In theory prose can perform the same cleansing trick as poetry. But he has doubts about that. Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.
He plays with thoughts like these – the thought of poetry, the thought of prose – as a way of not writing.
In the back pages of his diary he makes lists. One of them is headed Ways of Doing Away with Oneself. In the left-hand column he lists Methods, in the right-hand column Drawbacks.
Of the ways of doing away with oneself he has listed, the one he favours, on mature consideration, is drowning, that is to say, driving to Fish Hoek at night, parking near the deserted end of the beach, undressing in the car, putting on swimming trunks (why?), crossing the sand and entering the water (it will have to be a moonlit night), breasting the waves, striking out into the dark, swimming to the limit of physical endurance, then letting fate take its course.
All of his intercourse with the world seems to take place through a membrane. Because the membrane is there, fertilization will not take place. It is an interesting metaphor, full of potential, but it does not take him anywhere that he can see.
Undated fragment
His father grew up on a farm in the Karoo drinking artesian water high in fluoride. The fluoride turned the enamel of his teeth brown and hard as stone. His boast used to be that he never needed to see a dentist. Then in mid-life his teeth began to go rotten, one after another, and he had to have them all extracted.