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| J. M. Coetzee [timesunion] |
from J. M.Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus:
‘Very well. You
find me attractive, I can see that. Perhaps you even find me
beautiful. And because you find me beautiful, your appetite, your
impulse, is to embrace me. Do I read the signs correctly, the signs
you give me? Whereas if you did not find me beautiful you would feel
no such impulse.’
He is silent.
‘The more
beautiful you find me, the more urgent becomes your appetite. That is
how these appetites work which you take as your lodestar and blindly
follow. Now reflect. What — pray tell me — has beauty to do with
the embrace you want me to submit to? What is the connection between
the one and the other? Explain.’
He is silent, more
than silent. He is dumbfounded.
‘Go on. You said
you would not mind if your godson heard. You said you wanted him to
learn about life.’
‘Between a man
and a woman,’ he says at last, ‘there sometimes springs up a
natural attraction, unforeseen, unpremeditated. The two find each
other attractive or even, to use the other word, beautiful. The woman
more beautiful than the man, usually. Why the one should follow the
other, the attraction and the desire to embrace from the beauty, is a
mystery which I cannot explain except to say that being drawn to a
woman is the only tribute that I, my physical self, know how to pay
to the woman’s beauty. I call it a tribute because I feel it to be
an offering, not an insult.’
He pauses. ‘Go
on,’ she says.
‘That is all I
want to say.’
‘That is all. And
as a tribute to me — an offering, not an insult — you want to
grip me tight and push part of your body into me. As a tribute, you
claim. I am baffled. To me the whole business seems absurd — absurd
for you to want to perform, and absurd for me to permit.’
‘It is only when
you put it that way that it seems absurd. In itself it is not absurd.
It cannot be absurd, since it is a natural desire of the natural
body. It is nature speaking in us. It is the way things are. The way
things are cannot be absurd.’
‘Really? What if
I were to say that to me it seems not just absurd but ugly too?’
He shakes his head
in disbelief. ‘You cannot mean that. I myself may seem old and
unattractive — I and my desires. But surely you cannot believe that
nature itself is ugly.’
‘Yes, I can.
Nature can partake of the beautiful but nature can partake of the
ugly too. Those parts of our bodies that you modestly do not name,
not in your godson’s hearing: do you find them beautiful?’
‘In themselves?
No, in themselves they are not beautiful. It is the whole that is
beautiful, not the parts.’
‘And these parts
that are not beautiful — you want to push them inside me! What
should I think of that?’
‘I don’t know.
Tell me what you think.’
‘That all your
fine talk of paying tribute to beauty is una tontería. If you
found me to be an incarnation of the good, you would not want to
perform such an act on me. So why wish to do so if I am an
incarnation of the beautiful? Is the beautiful inferior to the good?
Explain.’
‘Una tontería:
what’s that?’
‘Nonsense.
Rubbish.’
He gets to his
feet. ‘I am not going to excuse myself further, Ana. I don’t find
this to be a profitable discussion I don’t believe you know what
you are talking about.’
‘Really? You
think I am some ignorant child?’
‘You may not be a
child but, yes, I do think you are ignorant of life. Come,’ he says
to the boy, taking his hand. ‘We have had our picnic, now it is
time to thank the lady and go off and find ourselves something to
eat.’
Ana reclines,
stretches out her legs, folds her hands in her lap, smiles up at him
mockingly. ‘Too close to the bone, was it?’ she says.
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