I have missed certain words.
But if I am given a moment I will track them back in my memory and find them there still echoing.
“. . . put it down . . .” Put it down. This man wants me to put it down.
This man is still walking towards me. I have lost all heart and left the room and gone to sleep even and missed certain words and come back and here the man is still walking across the carpet towards me. How fortunate. They are indeed right about the word flash.
Holding it like a pencil, I push the knife in. The child kicks and flails. A long, flat ice-sheet of sound takes place.
That is what he was talking about, the thing he wants me to put down. It is the fruit-knife from the bedside table. The ball of my thumb still carries the memory of the skin popping. At first it resists the orthogonal pressure, even this child-skin. Then: pop. Perhaps I even heard the pop through my hand, as in quiet country one hears a faroff locomotive through the soles of one’s feet. Someone else is screaming. That is my wife Marilyn, who is also here (my mind is quite clear now). She need not worry, I am all right. I kneel behind Martin and smile over his shoulder to show that everything is all right, though I am not sure in retrospect that it is the right smile I employ, there being too much tooth in it, and the light flashing too much on that tooth. I am holding Martin very tightly around his chest so that he will not slide down; the fruit-knife is in and will not go much further on account of the haft.
Amazing. I have been hit a terrible blow. How could that happen? I am utterly out of control. The light is looping round my head. The only consistent thing in my experience is the smell of carpet. The smell of carpet: in which I used to lie as a child, of a hot afternoon, thinking. No matter where you are in the world, carpets smell the same, a comfort.
Now I am beginning to be hurt. Now someone is really beginning to hurt me. Amazing.
Five
It has all come down to this (I ease myself in and tell over the clear, functional words): my bed, my window, my door, my walls, my room. These words I love. I sit them on my lap to burnish and fondle. They are beloved to me, each one, and having arrived at them I vow not to lose them. They lie quiet under my hand: they wink back at me, they glow for me, they are placid now that I am here. They are my fruit, my grapes growing for me. They are the stars in my tree. Around them I dance my slow, fat, happy dance of union, around them and around. I live in them and they in me.
This simple place is for men in need of simplicity. There are no women here. This is an all-male institution. Women are allowed in on visiting days, but wanting no visits I have no visitors. I agree with my doctors that I need rest and routine, for the time being, and a chance to work myself out. I agree with my doctors in most matters. They have my welfare at heart, they want me to get better. I do all I can to help them. I believe that I help them by cathecting my love on to my room. It is part of my cure to learn to form stable attachments. When I am set loose in the outside world I will have to transfer my attachments to new objects. I think at present of an apartment, a one-room apartment with a kitchenette for my food and a bathroom for my other needs.
But that is in the future. Before I can be allowed to leave I must come to terms with my crime (a crime is a crime: I am not ashamed to name things by their names). I have discussed the events of last summer endlessly with my doctors, and tend now to the conclusion that when the police broke in I panicked. I am after all not used to dealing with force. Panic is a natural first reaction. That is what happened to me. I no longer knew what I was doing. How else can one explain injuring one’s own child, one’s own flesh and blood? I was not myself. In the profoundest of senses, it was not the real I who stabbed Martin. My doctors, I think, agree with me, or can be brought to agree with me; but their argument is that my treatment ought to start at my beginnings far in the past and work up gradually toward the present. I can see the reasonableness of this argument. All faults of character are faults of upbringing. So for the time being. we are talking about my childhood rather than Martin’s. However, I would like Martin to know that I regret my part in what happened at Dalton. I regret not only what I did but what he and I lost: in Dalton we were, I believe, happy together for the first time in our lives. I look back with pleasurable nostalgia to our walks in the woods. His childish laughter still echoes in my ears. I think he loved me, then. I am sorry for what I did to him. I am sorry but not guilty: because I know that if Martin understood the strain I was under he would forgive me; and also because I believe guilt to be a sterile disposition of the mind unlikely to further my cure.
As for Marilyn (to wrap up the past), we all agree that my health is too precarious to allow me to dwell on her. I wrote her a letter once, a remarkably balanced and temperate letter, an effect of the drugs perhaps, but did not send it. I am glad I do not have to think about Marilyn. Most of the trouble in my life has been caused by women, and Marilyn was certainly my worst mistake.
It is important that I have order in my life, for it is order that is going to make me well again. There was too much uncertainty in the life I was living. My nature is orderly. I tried to bring order with me where I went, but people misconstrued me. In my writings on Vietnam, which I do not think about because I become disturbed and lose ground, I strove too, against great odds, to impose order on an area of chaos, though without success.
My little alarm clock (Benfitte, Paris) is a great help. The orderlies do their round at 6 AM to wash those who won’t, which of course does not include me. I set my clock for 5:40 so that I will be ready and smiling at the door, with teeth brushed and hair neat, when they come. They appreciate a patient like that. I am no trouble. I am a model of friendly co-operation because I know that the regimen here and the help I am getting are going to cure me and enable me to lead a full life again. I have no doubts. I think positively.
I do not eat in the dining-hall. I am entitled to do so, but I have told my doctors that it would not be good for me at this stage, and they agree. I do not relish the thought of chitchat with the other patients. They are people of all kinds who are here for all kinds of reasons. Many do not dress properly or look after their appearance. Institutional life has not done them any good. Some are little but degenerates. I would prefer to have nothing to do with them. Besides, I would not be popular among the patients. I would be resented for what they would think of as my airs. I have explained all this carefully to my doctors, who understand me.
I want the benefits of institutional life but not the disadvantages. A strict routine is good for me. Discipline is good for me. Exercise is good for me. Carpentry is very good for me. It is good for me to have the example of simple, respectable, ordered lives about me. I like to stand at my window and watch the little garden where the off-duty guards gather to smoke and chat. They are big, heavy men with red faces and easy laughs. They wear a dark blue uniform, whereas the orderlies are in light gray. They have belts and buckles which shine nicely. When I was a child I used to dress up in my soldier uniform with a pistol at my hip. I liked soldiers more than cowboys. I dreamed of fighting the Japanese. I never did turn into a soldier with a gun, but I did become a military specialist who made definite contributions to the science of warfare. I feel that if the guards knew this about me they would look at me with different eyes. They are strong, simple men who have served their country in the armed forces. I have a deep respect for them and would like them to respect my kind of martial attainment in return. It grieves me that I should be only a cipher to them. I am a cipher, but I am someone of no mean value as well. In my early days here I tried to strike up a friendship with the guard from my corridor, to let him know who I really was and what I had been; but it is difficult to get through to these people. They are, I suppose, continually being pestered by mental cases, and so have worked out a routine of nods and grunts that allows them not to listen. They have brought it to an art. Perhaps the routine was worked out for them by a specialist. They all have it.
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But I must beware of talking too much. I do not want to become the kind of person compelled to excuse himself to every passing stranger. I have no sense of shame at finding myself in a mental institution, nor do I intend to acquire it. The reason I am not ashamed is of course that I have a better case history than the long-term patients. I had no record of mental illness before my breakdown and I have behaved normally ever since I arrived here. Everyone agrees that I am a classic example of the sudden breakdown, the aberration. I have been sent here so that we can all find out what caused my breakdown, so that it will never happen again. For my part I am sure that I would never allow it to happen again, but I understand that for the general good it is as well to be safe. Besides, I approve of the enterprise of exploring the self. I am deeply interested in my self. I should like to see in black and white an explanation of this disturbed and disturbing act of mine. I shall be disappointed if my advisers can come to no more illuminating conclusion than that it resulted from overwork and emotional stress. A diagnosis of stress tells little. Why should stress have driven me to a nearly fatal assault on a child I love and not to suicide, for example, or to alcohol? We are presently investigating the hypothesis that my breakdown was connected with my background in warfare. I am open to this theory, as I am open to all theorizing, though I do not believe it will turn out to be the true one.
I should have liked my doctors to see my essay on Vietnam. As specialists they might have been able to detect portents or tendencies in it invisible to its author. But in the aftermath of the Dalton cataclysm all the papers in my briefcase, including the 24 photographs, were claimed by Kennedy. I will never see them again. But my memory is good. Perhaps one of these days, when I am feeling better, I will sit down with a block of paper and build for a second time all the sentences, erect with the power of their truth, that constituted my part in the New Life Project, the part that Coetzee dared not submit.
I should have expected treachery from him. One evening during my last week at Kennedy, as I stepped out of my car outside the library, a stranger tried to snatch my briefcase. He brushed past me, hunched, moving fast, and I felt the briefcase tug. But I am not the kind of person who lets things go. “Sorry”, the man murmured (Why should he say that? Was it part of his training?), and slipped out of sight among the parked cars. I glared, aggrieved, but not enough after all to cause a commotion.
I would not mistake the face. I know it well: if not that one, then the genre to which it belongs. It belongs in long-focus crowd photographs, enlarged till the blur of its cropped hair and black eyeholes emerges among the thugs and agents circling the back of the crowd; in the Nuremberg films, scowling, low-browed, longing to be out of the light and back among the cool damp cell-bricks. By such an insect, in black overcoat and flexoleather shoes, was I tailed through the sunny streets of La Jolla in my last days. Imagine.
Toward these doctors whose task it is, with the scantiest of documentation. to explicate me, I feel nothing but sympathy. I do my best to help them; but I do not forget that I am a patient, for whom it is presumptuous to take too active a part in the diagnosis of his condition. So if, as we pick our slow way through the labyrinth of my history, I spy an alley with all the signs of light, life, freedom, and glory at the end of it, I stifle my eager shouts and plod on after the good blind doctors. For who am I to say that my fortunate sunlit alley would not, following perhaps a curvature too slight for the human eye to perceive, lead us all in enormous, wasteful circles? Or that their dogged crawl will not one day bring me to the garden gate?
How is it, they must ask themselves, that a fellow in a not uncreative line of work into which he has poured much of himself should suffer fantasies of being bound in a prison of flesh and lead so wretched a married life that he tries to kill his child? How do such data come to coexist in a single biography? My doctors are puzzled men indeed. I watch the earnest, honest eyes behind their young owl-glasses: they sincerely want to understand me, in the light of the case histories they read at home in their leather armchairs, with a pretty young wife in the kitchen and the kiddies asleep with their bunnies—I know it all, we are class brothers—so that I too may become a case history to be put away on the shelves, and their own dream of death be stilled. I watch their eyes and think: you want to know what makes me tick, and when you discover it you will rip it out and discard me. My secret is what makes me desirable to you, my secret is what makes me strong. But will you ever win it? When I think of the heart that holds my secret I think of something closed and wet and black, like, say, the ball in the toilet cistern. Sealed in my chest of treasures, lapped in dark blood, it tramps its blind round and will not die.
The hypothesis they test is that intimate contact with the design of war made me callous to suffering and created in me a need for violent solutions to problems of living, infecting me at the same time with guilty feelings that showed themselves in nervous symptoms.
When it comes to my turn I point out that I hate war as deeply as the next man. I gave myself to the war on Vietnam only because I wanted to see it end. I wanted an end to strife and rebellion so that I could be happy, so that we could all be happy. If rebellion ceased we could make our peace with America and live happily again. I believe in life. I do not want to see people throw away their lives. Nor do I want to see the children of America poisoned by guilt. Guilt is a black poison. I used to sit in the library in the old days feeling the black guilt chuckling through my veins. I was being taken over. I was not my own man. It was insupportable. Guilt was entering our homes through the TV cables. We ate our meals in the glare of that beast’s glass eye from the darkest corner. Good food was being dropped down our throats into puddles of corrosion. It was unnatural to bear such suffering.
I tell my doctors these things with the flashing glance and ringing tone of hysteria that even I detect. They soothe me. After lunch I take my capsule and sleep.
My photographs are gone. I had photographs of the worst of my tormentors before they were stolen from me. I will not forget them. I will not mistake them. I will identify them before the judgment seat. I will see them in hell. I try to dream them up as I used to in the old days, but I no longer sleep the same kind of sleep, and they will not come. While I am behind these walls with my doctors at hand I am strong as a fortress and they know they cannot penetrate me. They are waiting till I leave home before they attack. Obeying their manuals, they do not expose themselves to a stronger enemy. I am safe here. But what will I do in my rooming-house at dawn, or in my little apartment on a hot ailanthus-ridden afternoon, when they come flashing their black eyes and their serene smiles? I exert myself, I span in all my psychic force to call them up, for I must face them, face them down, exorcize them while they are weak and I am strong. If I had my photographs to remind me I would find it easier. I try the ploy of dreaming at random. I set my alarm clock for the deep hour of 4 AM, for interruption of sleep stimulates dreaming and facilitates recall. This morning I brought up the cool sensation of a thigh against my thigh. I drifted to the surface and found a smile on my lips. I will raise this fragment at this morning’s interview. It is a great help to my doctors that I record my dreams, and dreams about women are I am sure as important to my cure as dreams about Vietnam. Having a background in myth I am able every now and again to surprise them with an insight—a neat condensation here, an odd displacement there. I think they must find me an exceptional patient, one who can talk to them on an equal footing. I am happy to bring this relief to their lives.
I am eager to confront life a second time, but I am not impatient to get out. There is still my entire childhood to work through before I can expect to get to the bottom of my story. My mother (whom I have not hitherto mentioned) is spreading her vampire wings for the night. My father is away being a soldier. In my cell in the heart of America, with my private toilet in the corner, I ponder and ponder. I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am.
1972–3
THE
NARRATIVE OF JACOBUS COETZEE
Edited, with an Afterword, by S. J. Coetzee
Translated by J. M. Coetzee
What is important is the philosophy of history.
Flaubert
Translator’s Preface
Het relaas van Jacobus Coetzee, Janszoon was first published in 1951 in an edition by my father, the late Dr. S. J. Coetzee, for the Van Plettenberg Society. This volume consisted of the text of the Relaas and an Introduction, which was drawn from a course of lectures on the early explorers of South Africa given annually by my father at the University of Stellenbosch between 1934 and 1948.