Slow Man - Coetzee J. M.. Страница 23

He is just talking, making the best of an uncomfortable situation, trying to cheer up a woman suffering the tristesse that descends after coitus with a stranger. From his envelope of darkness, not yet giving up hope of forming a picture of her, he reaches out again to touch her face; and in the act plunges into a dark gulf of his own. All his larkiness deserts him. Why, why did he put enough trust in the Costello woman to go through with this performance, which seems to him now less rash than simply stupid? And what on earth is this poor blind unlucky woman going to do with herself in these less than welcoming surroundings while she waits for her mentor in her mercy to return and release her? Did Costello really believe that a few minutes of inflamed physical congress could like a gas expand to fill up a whole night? Did she believe she could throw two strangers together, neither of them young, one positively old, old and cold, and expect them to behave like Romeo and Juliet? How naive! And she a noted literary artist too! And this damned paste which, though she swore it was harmless, is beginning to irritate his eyes as it dries out: how could she have imagined that being blinded with flour and water would change his character, make a new man of him? Blindness is a handicap pure and simple. A man without sight is a lesser man, as a man with one leg is a lesser man, not a new man. This poor woman she has sent him is a lesser woman too, less than she must have been before. Two lesser beings, handicapped, diminished: how could she have imagined a spark of the divine would be struck between them, or any spark at all?

As for the woman herself, growing colder minute by minute at his side, what can be running through her mind? What a load of poppycock she must have been told to persuade her to come knocking at the door of a strange man and offering herself to him! Just as in his case there was a long preamble to this lamentable encounter, a preamble stretching far enough back into the past to constitute a book in its own right, beginning with Wayne Blight and Paul Rayment setting off from their respective homes that fatal winter morning, oblivious as yet of each other's existence, so in her case there must be a prelude beginning with the virus or the sunspot or the bad gene or the needle or whatever else is to blame for her blinding, and proceeding step by step to a meeting with a plausible old woman (all the more plausible if you have only the voice to go by) telling you she has the means to quench your burning thirst if only you will take a taxi to a cafe called Alfredo's in North Adelaide, here is the fare, I am putting it in your hand, no need to be nervous, the man in question is quite harmless, merely lonely, he will treat you as a callgirl and pay you for your time, and I will be there anyway, hovering in the background, watching over you – if you have only the voice to go by and cannot see the mad glint in the eye.

An experiment, that is what it amounts to, an idle, biologico-literary experiment. Cricket and marmoset. And they fell for it, both of them, he in his way, she in hers!

'I must leave,' says the woman, the marmoset. 'The taxi will be waiting.'

'If you say so,' he says. 'How do you know about the taxi?'

'Mrs Costello ordered it.'

'Mrs Costello?'

'Yes, Mrs Costello.'

'How does Mrs Costello know when you will need a taxi?'

She shrugs.

'Well, Mrs Costello takes good care of you. Can I pay for the taxi?'

'No, no, it's all included.'

'Well then, give my greetings to Mrs Costello. And be careful on the way down. The stairs can be slippery.'

He sits still, containing himself, while she dresses. The instant the door closes behind her, however, he whips off the blindfold and claws at his eyes. But the paste has caked and hardened. If he tears at it too hard he will lose his eyelashes. He curses: he will have to soak it off.

SIXTEEN

'SHE CAME TO me as you came to me,' says Costello. 'A woman of darkness, a woman in darkness. Take up the story of such a one: words in my sleeping ear, spoken by what in the old days we would have called an angel calling me out to a wrestling match. Therefore no, I have no idea where she lives, your Marianna. All my dealings with her have been on the telephone. If you would like her to repeat her visit, I can give you her number.'

A repeat visit. That is not what he wants. Sometime in the future, perhaps, but not now. What he wants right now is an assurance that the story he has been presented with is the true story: that the woman who came to his flat was truly the woman he saw in the lift; that her name is truly Marianna; that she truly lives with her crookbacked mother, her husband having abandoned her because of her affliction; and so forth. What he wants is assurance that he has not been duped.

For there is an alternative story, one that he finds all too easy to make up for himself. In the alternative story the Costello woman would have located big-bottomed Marianna, known otherwise as Natasha, known also as Tanya, and hailing from Moldavia via Dubai and Nicosia, in the Yellow Pages. On the telephone she would have coached her in a charade. 'My brother-in-law, you will need to know,' she would have told her, 'has certain eccentricities. But then, what man does not have his little eccentricities, and what can a woman do, if she wants to get by, but find ways of accommodating them? My brother-in-law's chief eccentricity is that he prefers not to see the woman he is engaged with. He prefers the realm of the imaginary; he prefers to keep his head in the clouds. Once upon a time he was head over heels in love with a woman named Marianna, an actress. What he wants from you, and has in an indirect way asked me to convey to you, is that you should present yourself as Marianna the actress, wearing certain accoutrements or properties which I shall provide. That is to be your role; and for enacting that role he will pay you. Do you understand?' 'Sure,' Natasha or Tanya would have said, 'but outcalls is extra.' 'Outcalls is extra,' Costello would have agreed: 'I'll be sure to remind him of that. One last word. Be nice to him. He lost a leg recently, in a road accident, and is not what he used to be.'

Might that be the real story, give or take a detail here and there, behind the visit of the so-called Marianna? Were the dark glasses worn to hide not the fact that she was blind but the fact that she was not blind? When she trembled, was it less with nervousness than with the effort of holding back her giggles as the man with the stocking around his head fumbled at her underwear? We have crossed the threshold. Now we can proceed to higher and better things. What a solemn fool! She must have laughed in the taxi all the way home.

Was Marianna Marianna or was Marianna Natasha? That is what he must find out in the first instance; that is what he must squeeze out of Costello. Only when he has his answer may he turn to the deeper question: Does it matter who the woman really was; does it matter if he has been duped?

'You treat me like a puppet,' he complains. 'You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you. You should open a puppet theatre, or a zoo. There must be plenty of old zoos for sale, now that they have fallen out of fashion. Buy one, and put us in cages with our names on them. Paul Rayment: canis infelix. Marianna Popova: pseudocaeca (migratory). And so forth. Rows and rows of cages holding the people who have, as you put it, come to you in the course of your career as a liar and fabulator. You could charge admission. You could make a living out of it. Parents could bring their children at weekends to gawp at us and throw peanuts. Easier than writing books that no one reads.'