Three Stories

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.

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.