THREE STORIES includes ‘He and His Man’, written as Coetzee’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘A House in Spain’ and ‘Nietverloren’. This is their first appearance as a collection.
J. M. COETZEE was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace, Diary of a Bad Year and The Childhood of Jesus. He lives in Adelaide.
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‘A House in Spain’ © J. M. Coetzee 2000
‘Nietverloren’ © J. M. Coetzee 2002
‘He and His Man’ © The Nobel Foundation 2003
This edition © J. M. Coetzee 2014
The moral right of J. M. Coetzee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
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First published in this edition in Australia by
The Text Publishing Company, 2014.
‘A House in Spain’ first published in
Architectural Digest 57/10, 2000
‘Nietverloren’ first published as ‘The African
Experience’ in Preservation 54/2, 2002
‘He and His Man’ delivered as the Nobel Lecture, 2003
Book design by W. H. Chong
Printed and bound by Everbest Printing Co
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Coetzee, J. M., 1940– author.
Title: Three stories / by J. M. Coetzee.
ISBN: 9781922182562 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781925095500 (ebook)
Subjects: Short stories.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
A HOUSE IN SPAIN
(2000)
NIETVERLOREN
(2002)
HE AND HIS MAN
(2003)
I
A HOUSE IN SPAIN
AS HE GETS OLDER he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. “We fell in love with the house,” friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars.
He would like to dismiss it, this neologism, this novelty, but he cannot. What if something is being revealed to him, some shift in the way people feel? What if the soul, which he had thought was made of timeless substance, is not timeless after all, but is in the process of growing lighter, less serious, accommodating itself to the times? What if falling in love with objects is no oddity any longer, for the soul—child’s play, in fact? What if people around him do indeed feel, with the aid of their new, updated souls, in respect of real estate, the ache that he associates with falling in love? What, furthermore, if his own crabbiness expresses not what he tells himself it does—an old-fashioned fastidiousness about language—but on the contrary (he looks the idea squarely in the face) envy, the envy of a man grown too old, too rigid, to ever fall in love again?
The story of his own involvements with fixed property is easily told. In his lifetime he has owned, serially, two houses and an apartment, plus, for a while, in parallel, a seaside cottage. In all that history he can recollect nothing, by a long chalk, that he would grace with the name of love. In fact he can recollect little feeling at all, either when he took possession or when he moved out. Once he had put a house behind him he became quite incurious about its fate. More than incurious: he wanted never to see it again. Functional from beginning to end, his understanding of the ownership relation. Nothing like love, nothing like marriage.
He thinks about the women in his life, about his two marriages in particular. What does he still bear with him, within him, of those women, those wives? Tangles of emotion, for the most part: regret and sorrow pierced through with flashes of a feeling harder to pin down that may have something to do with shame but may equally have something to do with desire not yet dead.
Questions of love and ownership preoccupy him, and there is a reason for that. A year ago he bought property abroad: in Spain, in Catalonia, on another continent. Property in Spain is not expensive, not off the coastline in Spain’s decaying villages. Foreigners by the thousand, Europeans for the most part, but from elsewhere too, have acquired homes of a kind there, pieds-à-terre. Of whom he is now one.
In his case the move has its practical side. He makes his living as a writer; and in this day and age a writer can live anywhere, linked electronically to agents and editors as smoothly from a small village as from a city. Since his youth he has had a fondness for Spain, the Spain of taciturn pride and old formalities. (Does he love Spain? At least love of a country, a people, a way of life, is not some newfangled notion.) If he is going to spend more and more of his time in Spain, it makes sense to have a place he can call his own, a home where the linen and the kitchenware are familiar and he doesn’t have to clean up other people’s messes.
Of course one does not need to own Spanish property to spend time in Spain. One can work perfectly well out of rented accommodation, even out of hotels. Hotels might seem the expensive option, but not when one has done the arithmetic, added up all the incidentals. Hotels (thoughts of love keep coming back) are like passing affairs. One departs, parts company, and that is the end of it.
Buying a house may not make economic sense, but it makes a deeper kind of sense. He is in his fifties: if not in the final straight, then coming around the turn leading into the final straight. No more time for playing around, for following whims. The house in Catalonia is no impulse of the moment, no casual fling. On the contrary, it is the consequence of an eminently rational decision-making process. If it resembles a marriage at all, it resembles an arranged marriage, bridegroom matched with bride by a broker, a professional.
Yet even in arranged marriages man and wife sometimes fall in love. Is it possible that, late in life, he is going to fall in love with the house he has found for himself in Spain?
The house stands in a short street at the edge of the village of Bellpuig, overlooking fields of sunflower and corn. It comes with a huge fig tree and a patch of garden where he could, if he chose, grow his own beans and tomatoes. There is a rabbit hutch too, should his tastes incline to rabbit flesh. The house was built, if he is to believe the agent, in the thirteenth century. From the reading he has done on the antiquities of Catalonia, that is not impossible. The walls could certainly date back that far: they are a yard
thick in places, meant to keep the cold of winter and the heat of summer out, the chiselled stone held together by crumbling mortar that by now might as well be sand.
In its structure the house will always be odd. The front double door opens on to a space so cavernous that it is fit to be used only as a garage and workshop, or else as an artist’s studio. Up one side a staircase leads, via a hatch, to the living quarters and kitchen. The design makes sense only when one recognises that the core of the house used to be a barn, that the living space was constructed above and around the stabling so that human beings and cattle could share their blood warmth on the cold upland nights.
At the back the house is built into the side of a hill; a drain runs under the floor to bear rainwater away. As for the roof, the tiles are modern, with the stamp of a brickworks in Cervera; but the timbers are so worm-riddled, so powdery with rot, that they might well be centuries old too. Another few decades and the whole roof will probably come crashing down. But by then he will be beyond caring.
The previous owner (the previous husband, as he thinks of him) was a builder from Sant Climens, thirty kilometres away. It was he who fixed up the house, in his spare time, enlarging the windows, plastering the walls, replacing the doorframes, putting in new wiring, installing a bath and bidet, before selling it at a markup. No doubt he has moved on to another house now, some other project in some other village.
The locals have not been welcoming. The Spanish he speaks is of a hesitant, bookish variety that gets him nowhere in rural Catalonia, where Castilian is a foreign tongue. He is branded an outsider as soon as he opens his mouth. That is all right. He has no right to expect a welcome. What he hopes for, and what he gets, is toleration. Even in small villages, by now, people are used to outsiders moving in. Foreigners have been buying property in France, in Spain, in Portugal for years. The Spanish authorities have nothing against it. As long as they do not take jobs, as long as they bring in money, there is a place for foreigners.
It is the same in his own country, where the best seaside properties have passed into the hands of strangers. He does not necessarily like these strangers, with their bird-of-passage habits, but what do his likes and dislikes matter? His Catalan neighbours, he presumes, feel much the same about him: they do not necessarily like him; among themselves they probably complain about him and his kind; shopkeepers cheat him when they can, justifying themselves on the grounds that foreigners have too much money and are stupid anyway. But as to actively plotting harm against him, he doubts they would go that far. They will merely do nothing to make him feel at home, just as, when he is at home, he does nothing to make the Germans or the English feel at home.
During his first months in residence he spent hours every day working on the exterior. He took down the front door, scraped it, painted it, rehung it. He did the same with the wooden shutters. Though his taste was for other colours, a whole other palette, he followed the colour scheme uniform to the village: a pale grey-blue; a deep red, here called Basque.
He took the door lock to pieces. The mechanism itself was primitive to the point of being laughable. A child could have picked it. Nevertheless he did not replace it, merely cleaned it, greased it, put it back. In this world, he told himself, locks are symbolic. A lock is here to make a statement about ownership, not to prevent a break-in, should anyone be so antisocial as to wish to break in.
He has bought the house, the house belongs to him, but only in a certain sense. In another sense it still belongs to the village in which it is embedded. Well, he has no ambition to prise the house loose from the village. He does not want it to be anything but what it is.
His plan, at the beginning, was to spend two seasons of the year here. Summers he would avoid because they were too hot, winters because they were too cold. Plenty of men have marriages like that, he told himself. Sailors, for instance, spend half their lives at sea.
But as the months passed he found something happening to him. He could not put the house from his mind. He lay awake at night, five thousand miles away, floating from room to room across the dark and empty interior. It was as though he were sending his soul across the seas, across the mountains, to the village wrapped in sleep: sending it or being called. Even in the daytime he had visions of involuntary, startling clarity: the rusty horseshoe nailed over the back door; the mould under the pipes in the bathroom; the stain, high up on the living-room wall, where a spider was crushed by a broom blow. There were moments when he was convinced that only by the force of his concentrated attention was the house being saved from inexistence.
So here he is, in midsummer, in Catalonia. In the cool of the morning he climbs on to the roof. On hands and knees, with a trowel, he begins to scratch away the moss that has grown between the tiles. From her balcony two doors down the street an old woman in black watches him. He hopes she approves. A foreigner but a serious man: that is what he hopes she thinks.
He grows geraniums, pink and red, in terracotta pots, and places them on either side of the front door, as the neighbours do. Little attentions, he calls them. Little attentions to the house, like the attentions one pays a woman.
If this is marriage, he tells himself, then it is a widow I am marrying, a mature woman, set in her ways. Just as I cannot be a different man, so I should not want her to become, for my sake, a different woman, younger, flashier, sexier.
By his labours he is, to some extent, breaking his unwritten compact with the village. When an outsider moves in and buys property, the compact says, he should bring profit to the local people: buy from the local merchants, give work to the local artisans. The work he is doing on the house belongs by right to those artisans. But on this point he will not yield. What he is engaged in is more serious than mere upkeep. It is intimate work, work he must do with his own hands. In time, he hopes, the local people will come to understand.
The village, of course, has memories of the house from before his time, and before the time of Sr Torras the jack-of-all-trades from Sant Climens. The villagers know—or if they do not know, then their parents and aunts and uncles knew—the family that used to live here, the family whose children grew up hating the dark, cramped rooms, the damp walls, the old-fashioned plumbing, and as soon as their parents died washed their hands of the place, selling it for a song to Sr Torras, who fixed it up and resold it to a foreigner because foreigners (inexplicably) prefer old houses and are prepared to pay more than they are worth to own them.
When one marries, one cares deeply who one’s wife was married to before, even who she slept with before. With a house, one is not supposed to care who preceded one. That is another of the ways in which the analogy between ownership and marriage, houses and wives, is supposed to break down. But not in this case. Between these walls men and women, generation after generation, lived their intimate lives, talking and quarrelling and making love in a language he barely understands, according to habits that are foreign to him. They have left no ghosts behind, none that he can sense. But that does not matter. He broods on them, insofar as one can brood on people one has never so much as glimpsed. If he had photographs of them he would hang them on the walls: dour couples in their dark Sunday best, with their children crouching at their feet, humble as rabbits.
Why? Why does he want to remember people he never knew? For a good reason. When his own time here has passed, he does not want to be utterly forgotten. If the vi
llage will not remember him (he will die far away; after a decent interval there will appear, without explanation, a new owner, a new face, and that will be that), then he hopes (hoping against hope) that in some sense the house itself will bear the memory of him.
What it comes down to, astonishingly, is that he wants a relationship with this house in a foreign country, a human relationship, however absurd the idea of a human relationship with stone and mortar might be. For the sake of that relationship, with this house and its history and the village as a whole, a village that, from the highway, looks as though it had been conceived by a single mind and built by a single pair of hands—in return for that relationship he is prepared to treat the house as one treats a woman, paying attention to her needs and even her quirks, spending money on her, soothing her through her bad times, treating her with kindness.
Kindness. Fidelity. Devotion. Service. Not love, not yet, but something like it. A form of marriage between a man growing old and a house no longer young.
II
NIETVERLOREN
FOR AS LONG AS HE could remember, from when he was first allowed to roam by himself out in the veld, out of sight of the farmhouse, he was puzzled by it: a circle of bare, flat earth ten paces across, its periphery marked with stones, a circle in which nothing grew, not a blade of grass.
He thought of it as a fairy circle, a circle where fairies came at night to dance by the light of the tiny sparkling rods that they carried in the picturebooks he read, or perhaps by the light of glowworms. But in the picturebooks the fairy circle was always in a clearing in a forest, or else in a glen, whatever that might be. There were no forests in the Karoo, no glens, no glowworms; were there even fairies? What would fairies do with themselves in the daytime, in the stunned heat of summer, when it was too hot to dance, when even the lizards took shelter under stones? Would the fairies have enough sense to hide under stones too, or would they lie panting among the thornbushes, longing for England?