Summertime (20 page)

Do you still have that letter?

I don't have any of his letters. I did not keep them. When we left South Africa I did a clean-out of the flat and threw away all the old letters and bills.

And you did not reply?

No.

You did not reply and you did not allow relations to develop any further – relations between yourself and Coetzee?

What is this? Why these questions? You come all the way from England to talk to me, you tell me you are writing a biography of a man who happened many years ago to be my daughter's English teacher, and now suddenly you feel you are permitted to interrogate me about my 'relations'? What kind of biography are you writing? Is it like Hollywood gossip, like secrets of the rich and famous? If I refuse to discuss my so-called relations with this man, will you say I am keeping them secret? No, I did not have, to use your word,
relations
with Mr Coetzee. I will say more. For me it was not natural to have feelings for a man like that, a man who was so soft. Yes, soft.

Are you suggesting he was homosexual?

I am not suggesting anything. But there was a quality he did not have that a woman looks for in a man, a quality of strength, of manliness. My husband had that quality. He always had it, but his time in prison here in Brazil, under the
militares
, brought it out, even though he was not in prison a long time, only six months. After those six months, he used to say, nothing that human beings did to other human beings could come as a surprise to him. Coetzee had no such experience behind him to test his manhood and teach him about life. That is why I say he was soft. He was not a man, he was still a boy.

[Silence.]

As for homosexual, no, I do not say he was homosexual, but he was, as I told you,
célibataire –
I don't know the word for that in English.

A bachelor type? Sexless? Asexual?

No, not sexless. Solitary. Not made for conjugal life. Not made for the company of women.

[Silence.]

You mentioned that there were further letters.

Yes, when I did not reply he wrote again. He wrote many times. Perhaps he thought that if he wrote enough the words would eventually wear me down, like the waves of the sea wear down a rock. I put his letters away in the bureau; some I did not even read. But I thought to myself,
Among the many things
this man lacks, the many many things, one is a tutor to give him
lessons in love.
Because if you have fallen in love with a woman you do not sit down and type her one long letter after another, pages and pages, each one ending 'Yours sincerely'. No, you write a letter in your own hand, a proper love-letter, and have it delivered to her with a bouquet of red roses. But then I thought, perhaps this is how these Dutch Protestants behave when they fall in love: prudently, long-windedly, without fire, without grace. And no doubt that is how his lovemaking would be too, if he ever got a chance.

I put his letters away and said nothing of them to the children. That was a mistake. I could easily have said to Maria Regina,
That Mr Coetzee of yours has written me a note to apologize
for Sunday. He mentions that he is pleased with your progress
in English
. But I was silent, which in the end led to much trouble. Even today, I think, Maria Regina has not forgotten or forgiven.

Do you understand such things,Mr Vincent? Are you married? Do you have children?

Yes, I am married. We have one child, a boy. He will be four next month.

Boys are different. I don't know about boys. But I will tell you one thing,
entre nous
, which you must not repeat in your book. I love both my daughters, but I loved Maria in a different way from Joana. I loved her but I was also very critical of her as she grew up. Joana I was never critical of. Joana was always very simple, very straightforward. But Maria was a charmer. She could – do you use the expression? – twist a man around her finger. If you could have seen her, you would know what I mean.

What has become of her?

She is in her second marriage now. She is living in North America, in Chicago, with her American husband. He is a lawyer in a law firm. I think she is happy with him. I think she has made her peace with the world. Before that she had personal problems, which I will not go into.

Do you have a picture of her that I could perhaps use in the book?

I don't know. I will look. I will see. But it is getting late. Your colleague must be exhausted. Yes, I know how it is, being a translator. It looks easy from the outside, but the truth is you have to pay attention all the time, you cannot relax, the brain gets fatigued. So we stop here. Switch off your machine.

Can we speak again tomorrow?

Tomorrow is not convenient. Wednesday, yes. It is not such a long story, the story of myself and Mr Coetzee. I am sorry if it is a disappointment to you. You come all this way, and now you find there was no grand love affair with a dancer, just a brief infatuation, that is the word I would use, a brief, one-sided infatuation that never grew into anything. Come again on Wednesday at the same hour. I will give you tea.

YOU ASKED, LAST TIME
, about pictures. I searched, but it is as I thought, I have none from those years in Cape Town. However, let me show you this one. It was taken at the airport the day we arrived back in São Paulo, by my sister, who came to meet us. See, there we are, the three of us. That is Maria Regina. The date was 1977, she was eighteen, getting on for nineteen. As you can see, a very pretty girl with a nice figure. And that is Joana, and that is me.

They are quite tall, your daughters. Was their father tall?

Yes, Mario was a big man. The girls are not so tall, it is just that they look tall when they are standing next to me.

Well, thank you for showing me. Can I take it away and have a copy made?

For your book? No, I cannot allow that. If you want Maria Regina in your book you must ask her yourself, I cannot speak for her.

I would like to include it as a picture of the three of you together.

No. If you want pictures of the girls you must ask them. As for me, no, I have decided no. It will be taken the wrong way. People will assume I was one of the women in his life, and it was never so.

Yet you were important to him. He was in love with you.

That is what you say. But the truth is, if he was in love, it was not with me, it was with some fantasy that he dreamed up in his own brain and gave my name to. You think I should feel flattered that you want to put me in your book as his lover?

You are wrong. To me this man was not a famous writer, he was just a schoolteacher, a schoolteacher who didn't even have a diploma. Therefore no. No picture. What else? What else do you want me to tell you?

You were telling me last time about the letters he wrote you. I know you said you did not always read them; nevertheless, do you by any chance recall more of what he said in them?

One letter was about Franz Schubert – you know Schubert, the musician. He said that listening to Schubert had taught him one of the great secrets of love: how we can sublime love as chemists in the old days sublimed base substances. I remember the letter because of the word
sublime
. Sublime base substances: it made no sense to me. I looked up
sublime
in the big English dictionary I bought for the girls. To sublime: to heat something and extract its essence. We have the same word in Portuguese,
sublimar
, though it is not common. But what did it all mean? That he sat with his eyes closed listening to the music of Schubert while in his mind he heated his love for me, his
base substance
, into something higher, something more spiritual? It was nonsense, worse than nonsense. It did not make me love him, on the contrary it made me recoil.

It was from Schubert that he had learned to sublime love, he said. Not until he met me did he understand why in music movements are called movements.
Movement in stillness, stillness in movement
. That was another phrase I puzzled my head over. What did he mean, and why was he writing these things to me?

You have a good memory.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with my memory. My body is another story. I have arthritis of the hips, that is why I use a stick. The dancer's curse, they call it. And the pain – you will not believe the pain! But I remember South Africa very well. I remember the flat where we lived in Wynberg, where Mr Coetzee came to drink tea. I remember the mountain,Table Mountain. The flat was right under the mountain, so it got no sun in the afternoons. I hated Wynberg. I hated the whole time we spent there, first when my husband was in hospital and then after he died. It was very lonely for me, I cannot tell you how lonely. Worse than Luanda, because of the loneliness. If your Mr Coetzee had offered us his friendship I would not have been so hard on him, so cold. But I was not interested in love, I was still too close to my husband, still grieving for him. And he was just a boy, this Mr Coetzee. I was a woman and he was a boy. He was a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man. The sublimation of love! He was offering to teach me about love, yet what could a boy like him teach me, a boy who knew nothing about life? I could have taught him, perhaps, but I was not interested in him. I just wanted him to keep his hands off Maria Regina.

You say, if he had offered you friendship it would have been different. What kind of friendship did you have in mind?

What kind of friendship? I will tell you. For a long time after the disaster that came over us, the disaster I told you about, I had to struggle with the bureaucracy, first over compensation, then over Joana's papers – Joana was born before we were married, so legally she was not my husband's daughter, she was not even his step-daughter, I will not bore you with the details. I know, in every country the bureaucracy is a labyrinth, I am not saying South Africa was the worst in the world, but whole days I would spend waiting in a line to get a rubber stamp – a rubber stamp for this, a rubber stamp for that – and always,
always
it would be the wrong office or the wrong department or the wrong line.

If we had been Portuguese it would have been different. There were many Portuguese who came to South Africa in those days, from Moçambique and Angola and even Madeira, there were organizations to help the Portuguese. But we were from Brazil, and there were no regulations for Brazilians, no precedents, to the bureaucrats it was as if we arrived in their country from Mars.

And there was the problem of my husband. You cannot sign for this, your husband must come and sign, they would say to me. My husband cannot sign, he is in hospital, I would say. Then take it to him in the hospital and get him to sign it and bring it back, they would say. My husband cannot sign anything, I would say, he is in Stikland, don't you know Stikland? Then let him make his mark, they would say. He cannot make his mark, sometimes he cannot even breathe, I would say. Then I cannot help you, they would say: go to such-and-such an office and tell them your story – perhaps they can help you there.

And all of this pleading and petitioning I had to do alone, unaided, with my bad English that I had learned in school out of books. In Brazil it would have been easy, in Brazil we have these people, we call them
despachantes,
facilitators: they have contacts in the government offices, they know how to steer your papers through the maze, you pay them a fee and they do all the unpleasant business for you one-two-three. That was what I needed in Cape Town: a facilitator, someone to make things easier for me. Mr Coetzee could have offered to be my facilitator. A facilitator for me and a protector for my girls. Then, just for a minute, just for a day, I could have allowed myself to be weak, an ordinary, weak woman. But no, I dared not relax, or what would have become of us, my daughters and me?

Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat,
yi-yi-yi
, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress.