In the Heart of the Country by J. M. Coetzee
PENGUIN BOOKS
IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
J. M. COETZEE was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Disgrace, Youth, Summertime, and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. He lives in Australia.
BY J. M. COETZEE
FICTION
Dusklands
In the Heart of the Country
Waiting for the Barbarians
Life & Times of Michael K
Foe
Age of Iron
The Master of Petersburg
Boyhood
The Lives of Animals
Disgrace
Youth
Elizabeth Costello
Slow Man
Diary of a Bad Year
Summertime
The Childhood of Jesus
NONFICTION
White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews
Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005
Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (with Paul Auster)
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (with Arabella Kurtz)
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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penguin.com
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1977
First published in the United States of America under the title
From the Heart of the Country by Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977
Published in Penguin Books 1982
Copyright © 1976, 1977 by J. M. Coetzee
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Sections 85–94 have appeared in South Africa in the magazine
Standpunte 124, August 1976.
English version prepared by the author
Ebook ISBN 9781524705527
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Paul Buckley
Cover images: (landscape) Douglas Holder / Getty Images; (prickly branches) Fablok / Shutterstock; (jet plane) ThomasLENNE / Shutterstock
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CONTENTS
About the Author
By J. M. Coetzee
Title Page
Copyright
In the Heart of the Country
1. Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an ostrich-plume waving on its forehead, dusty after the long haul. Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also possible. My father wore his black swallowtail coat and stovepipe hat, his bride a wide-brimmed sunhat and a white dress tight at waist and throat. More detail I cannot give unless I begin to embroider, for I was not watching. I was in my room, in the emerald semi-dark of the shuttered late afternoon, reading a book or, more likely, supine with a damp towel over my eyes fighting a migraine. I am the one who stays in her room reading or writing or fighting migraines. The colonies are full of girls like that, but none, I think, so extreme as I. My father is the one who paces the floorboards back and forth, back and forth in his slow black boots. And then, for a third, there is the new wife, who lies late abed. Those are the antagonists.
2. The new wife. The new wife is a lazy big-boned voluptuous feline woman with a wide slow-smiling mouth. Her eyes are black and shrewd like two berries, two shrewd black berries. She is a big woman with fine wrists and long plump tapering fingers. She eats her food with relish. She sleeps and eats and lazes. She sticks out her long red tongue and licks the sweet mutton-fat from her lips. “Ah, I like that!” she says, and smiles and rolls her eyes. I watch her mouth mesmerized. Then she turns on me the wide smiling mouth and the shrewd black eyes. I cannot easily sustain her smile. We are not a happy family together.
3. She is the new wife, therefore the old one is dead. The old wife was my mother, but died so many years ago that I barely recall her. I must have been very young when she died, perhaps only a newborn babe. From one of the farthest oubliettes of memory I extract a faint grey image, the image of a faint grey frail gentle loving mother huddled on the floor, one such as any girl in my position would be likely to make up for herself.
4. My father’s first wife, my mother, was a frail gentle loving woman who lived and died under her husband’s thumb. Her husband never forgave her for failing to bear him a son. His relentless sexual demands led to her death in childbirth. She was too frail and gentle to give birth to the rough rude boy-heir my father wanted, therefore she died. The doctor came too late. Summoned by a messenger on a bicycle, he had to come trundling along forty miles of farm-track in his donkey-cart. When he arrived my mother already lay composed on her deathbed, patient, bloodless, apologetic.
5. (But why did he not come on horseback? But were there bicycles in those days?)
6. I was not watching my father bear his bride home across the flats because I was in my room in the dark west wing eating my heart out and biding my time. I should have been standing ready to greet them with smiles and offers of tea, but I was not. I was absent. I was not missed. My father pays no attention to my absence. To my father I have been an absence all my life. Therefore instead of being the womanly warmth at the heart of this house I have been a zero, null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence, muffled, grey, like a chill draft eddying through the corridors, neglected, vengeful.
7. Night falls, and my father and his new wife cavort in the bedroom. Hand in hand they stroke her womb, watching for it to flicker and blossom. They twine; she laps him in her flesh; they chuckle and moan. These are fair times for them.
8. In a house shaped by destiny like an H I have lived all my life, in a theatre of stone and sun fenced in with miles of wire, spinning my trail from room to room, looming over the servants, the grim widow-daughter of the dark father. Sundown after sundown we have faced each other over the mutton, the potatoes, the pumpkin, dull food cooked by dull hands. Is it possible that we spoke? No, we could not have spoken, we must have fronted each other in silence and chewed our way through time, our eyes, his black eyes and my black eyes inherited from him, roaming blank across their fields of vision. Then we have retired to sleep, to dream allegories of baulked desire such as we are blessedly unfitted to interpret; and in the mornings vied in icy asceticism to be the earlier afoot, to lay the fire in the cold grate. Life on the farm.
9. In the shadowy hallway the clock ticks away day and night. I am the one who keeps it wound and who weekly, from sun and almanac, corrects it. Time on the farm is the time of the wide world, neither a jot nor a tittle more or less. Resolutely I beat down the blind, subjective time of the heart, with its spurts of excitement and drags of tedium: my pulse wil
10. I live, I suffer, I am here. With cunning and treachery, if necessary, I fight against becoming one of the forgotten ones of history. I am a spinster with a locked diary but I am more than that. I am an uneasy consciousness but I am more than that too. When all the lights are out I smile in the dark. My teeth glint, though no one would believe it.
11. She comes up behind me, a waft of orange-blossom and rut, and takes me by the shoulders. “I do not want you to be angry, I understand that you should feel disturbed and unhappy, but there is no cause for it. I would like us all to be happy together. I will do anything, truly anything, to make that come about. Can you believe me?”
I stare into the chimney-recess; my nose swells and reddens.
“I want to make a happy household,” she croons, circling, “the three of us together. I want you to think of me as a sister, not an enemy.”
I watch the full lips of this glutted woman.
12. There was a time when I imagined that if I talked long enough it would be revealed to me what it means to be an angry spinster in the heart of nowhere. But though I sniff at each anecdote like a dog at its doo, I find none of that heady expansion into the as-if that marks the beginning of a true double life. Aching to form the words that will translate me into the land of myth and hero, here I am still my dowdy self in a dull summer heat that will not transcend itself. What do I lack? I weep and gnash my teeth. Is it mere passion? Is it merely a vision of a second existence passionate enough to carry me from the mundane of being into the doubleness of signification? Do I not quiver at every pore with a passion of vexation? Is it that my passion lacks will? Am I an angry yet somehow after all complacent farmyard spinster, wrapped in the embrace of my furies? Do I truly wish to get beyond myself? The story of my rage and its dire sequel: am I going to climb into this vehicle and close my eyes and be carried downstream over the rapids, through the broken water, to wake refreshed on the quiet estuary? What automatism is this, what liberation is it going to bring me, and without liberation what is the point of my story? Do I feel rich outrage at my spinster fate? Who is behind my oppression? You and you, I say, crouching in the cinders, stabbing my finger at father and stepmother. But why have I not run away from them? As long as an elsewhere exists where I can lead a life, there are heavenly fingers pointing at me too. Or am I, hitherto unbeknown to me, but now alas known, reserved for a more complex fate: to be crucified head downward as a warning to those who love their rage and lack all vision of another tale? But what other tale is there for me? Marriage to the neighbour’s second son? I am not a happy peasant. I am a miserable black virgin, and my story is my story, even if it is a dull black blind stupid miserable story, ignorant of its meaning and of all its many possible untapped happy variants. I am I. Character is fate. History is God. Pique, pique, pique.
13. The Angel, that is how she is sometimes known, The Angel in Black who comes to save the children of the brown folk from their croups and fevers. All her household severity is transformed into an unremitting compassion when it comes to the care of the sick. Night after night she sits up with whimpering children or women in labour, fighting off sleep. “An angel from heaven!” they say, their flatterers’ eyes keen. Her heart sings. In war she would lighten the last hours of the wounded. They would die with smiles on their lips, gazing into her eyes, clasping her hand. Her stores of compassion are boundless. She needs to be needed. With no one to need her she is baffled and bewildered. Does that not explain everything?
14. If my father had been a weaker man he would have had a better daughter. But he has never needed anything. Enthralled by my need to be needed, I circle him like a moon. Such is my sole risible venture into the psychology of our débâcle. To explain is to forgive, to be explained is to be forgiven, but I, I hope and fear, am inexplicable, unforgivable. (Yet what is it in me that shrinks from the light? Do I really have a secret or is this bafflement before myself only a way of mystifying my better, questing half? Do I truly believe that stuffed in a crack between my soft mother and my baby self lies the key to this black bored spinster? Prolong yourself, prolong yourself, that is the whisper I hear in my inmost.)
15. Another aspect of myself, now that I am talking about myself, is my love of nature, particularly of insect life, of the scurrying purposeful life that goes on around each ball of dung and under every stone. When I was a little girl (weave, weave!) in a frilled sunbonnet I would sit all day in the dust, so the story goes, playing with my friends the beetles, the grey ones and the brown ones and the big black ones whose names I forget but could with no effort turn up in an encyclopedia, and my friends the anteaters who made those elegant little conical sandtraps down whose sides I would tumble the common red ant, and, every now and again, secreted beneath a flat stone, a pale dazed flaccid baby scorpion, whom I would crush with a stick, for even then I knew that scorpions were bad. I have no fear of insects. I leave the homestead behind and walk barefoot up the river bed, the hot dark sand crunching beneath my soles and squeezing out between my toes. In the drifts I sit with spread skirts feeling the warmth mould itself to my thighs. I would have no qualm, I am sure, if it came to the pinch, though how it could come to this pinch I do not know, about living in a mud hut, or indeed under a lean-to of branches, out in the veld, eating chickenfeed, talking to the insects. Even through the little girl the lineaments of the crazy old lady must have glimmered, and the brown folk, who hide behind bushes and know everything, must have chuckled.
16. I grew up with the servants’ children. I spoke like one of them before I learned to speak like this. I played their stick and stone games before I knew I could have a dolls’ house with Father and Mother and Peter and Jane asleep in their own beds and clean clothes ready in the chest whose drawers slid in and out while Nan the dog and Felix the cat snoozed before the kitchen coals. With the servants’ children I searched the veld for khamma-roots, fed cowsmilk to the orphaned lambs, hung over the gate to watch the sheep dipped and the Christmas pig shot. I smelled the sour recesses where they slept pell-mell like rabbits, I sat at the feet of their blind old grandfather while he whittled clothes-pegs and told his stories of bygone days when men and beasts migrated from winter grazing to summer grazing and lived together on the trail. At the feet of an old man I have drunk in a myth of a past when beast and man and master lived a common life as innocent as the stars in the sky, and I am far from laughing. How am I to endure the ache of whatever it is that is lost without a dream of a pristine age, tinged perhaps with the violet of melancholy, and a myth of expulsion to interpret my ache to me? And mother, soft scented loving mother who drugged me with milk and slumber in the featherbed and then, to the sound of bells in the night, vanished, leaving me alone among rough hands and hard bodies – where are you? My lost world is a world of men, of cold nights, woodfire, gleaming eyes, and a long tale of dead heroes in a language I have not unlearned.
17. In this house with rival mistresses the servants go about their duties with hunched shoulders, flinching from the dregs of bad temper that will be flung at them. Bored with drudgery, they look forward to the colour and drama of quarrels, though they know that few things are better for them than amity. The day has not yet come when the giants war among themselves and the dwarves slip away in the night. Feeling all their feelings not successively in waves of contraries but simultaneously as a hotchpotch of rage, regret, resen
18. I live neither alone nor in society but as it were among children. I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded. Reading the brown folk I grope, as they grope reading me: for they too hear my words only dully, listening for those overtones of the voice, those subtleties of the eyebrows that tell them my true meaning: “Beware, do not cross me,” “What I say does not come from me.” Across valleys of space and time we strain ourselves to catch the pale smoke of each other’s signals. That is why my words are not words such as men use to men. Alone in my room with my duties behind me and the lamp steadily burning, I creak into rhythms that are my own, stumble over the rocks of words that I have never heard on another tongue. I create myself in the words that create me, I, who living among the downcast have never beheld myself in the equal regard of another’s eye, have never held another in the equal regard of mine. While I am free to be I, nothing is impossible. In the cloister of my room I am the mad hag I am destined to be. My clothes cake with dribble, I hunch and twist, my feet blossom with horny callouses, this prim voice, spinning out sentences without occasion, gaping with boredom because nothing ever happens on the farm, cracks and oozes the peevish loony sentiments that belong to the dead of night when the censor snores, to the crazy hornpipe I dance with myself.
19. What solace are lapidary paradoxes for the loves of the body? I watch the full lips of the glutted widow, hear the creak of floorboards in the muted farmhouse, the warm murmur from the great bed, feel the balm of loving flesh upon me, sleep away into the steaming body smells. But how to let go the real for the deep darkdown desired? A jagged virgin, I stand in the doorway, naked, asking.