El confinamiento y la intimidación de la comunidad

The Smells and Dirty Fingernails of Vercueil

Vercueil enters the narrative as a “derelict. […] Asleep in his box, his legs stretched out like a marionette’s, his jaw agape. […] Unclean.” (4)124 He is described as “tall, thin, with a weathered skin and long, carious fangs, wearing a baggy gray suit and a hat with a sagging brim.” (3) From the very beginning Elizabeth Curren marks him as “unclean,” a line continued in her perception of his smell: “For a while I stood staring down at him, staring and smelling.” (4) The physical body is again foregrounded in the encounter, as opposed to cultural assumptions and prejudices. Curren perceives Vercueil as “[a] presence or a smell.” (13) She makes no effort to hide her disgust at his bodily presence, but not without “a flicker of embarrassment” about her own attitude. (84) The clash of different sets of personal hygiene is obvious. The text invites the reader to overcome this disgust, to sweep it aside in order to allow the encounter to grow into something more, something approximating companionship, however unlikely it may seem. The embarrassment about being repelled is already an advanced level of self-awareness and attests her will to overcome the conventions insidiously imbibed in a lifetime of segregation. When they are out searching the hospitals for Bheki’s friend, she and Vercueil at one point end up waiting for Florence and Bheki: “In silence we waited in the car, Vercueil and I, like a couple married too long, talked out, grumpy. I am even getting used to the smell, I thought.” (70) At one point they are in her kitchen, and Vercueil cuts himself a slice of bread:

His fingernails filthy. Who knows what else he had been touching. And this is the one to whom I speak my heart, whom I trust with last things. Why this crooked path to you? My mind like a pool, which his finger enters and stirs. Without that finger, stillness, stagnation.

A way of indirection. By indirection I find direction out. A crab’s walk. His dirty fingernail entering me. (82)

that Coetzee made a similar connection: “In an essay entitled ‘The Mind of Apartheid: Geoffrey Cronjé (1907-),’ Coetzee traces the development of the association between apartheid and metaphors of disease through the work of Geoffrey Cronjé, who was a founding ‘thinker’ behind the formulation of apartheid.” (Probyn 1998: 221) See also Marais 1998b: 228.

124 _{This potentially invites a discussion of Kleist’s essay on the Marionettentheater and how the} machine/automaton effect of Coetzeean others might support the intellectual distancing mechanism and favour narrative empathy.

143

This passage highlights how overcoming her distaste for his “filthiness” opens up new possibilities for her thinking, and consequently her changed attitude towards Vercueil, whose “dirty fingernails” are stirring the “pool of her mind” – not the domain of the soul, at least not yet. The reader accompanies her from a state of being repelled to a state of actually longing for his touch, in spite of his unclean appearance and the “faint haze of alcohol about him.” (82)

Life Stories, Smiles and Mutual Grinning

Their verbal exchanges are not all recorded in Elizabeth’s letter to her daughter – the text makes us aware of omissions, but over the course of the novel the reader acquires more and more information about the backgrounds of both of them. The name Vercueil is first mentioned when Curren announces his presence to her maid Florence about him: “Vercueil, Verkuil, Verskuil. That’s what he says. I have never come across such a name before. I am letting him stay here for a while. He has a dog […]”(37) The name of Elizabeth Curren is first indicated in a note to Florence signed E.C. (41) Between Curren and Vercueil no introduction takes place, placing their encounter outside of conventional social contact.

Early on, it is Elizabeth Curren who shares stories from her life, such as a childhood story of her mother, or shows him a picture of her daughter, which she then regards “through his eyes” (31), applying her sympathetic imagination and exercising perspective-taking, one of the vital steps on the road towards empathy. Later she also mentions to him the removal of one of her breasts; probably the most intimate detail about her body she could possibly share with him. (166) Sharing all this, she expects Vercueil to equally share his stories in return: “It was time for him to say something now, about hills or cars or bicycles or about himself or his childhood. But he was stubbornly silent.” (17) Similar to Friday in Foe, Vercueil displays a resistance to reveal himself to her; but his resistance is temporary and softens up. When he does reveal facts about himself, such as the fact that he was at sea (84) – later adding that he worked at the SPCA, at their kennels; like David Lurie in Disgrace (187) – Elizabeth Curren is unsure how reliable his narrations are, and we as readers share her doubts. But by the time he relates the story of how his hand was crushed by a pulley when abandoning a ship (186), it is not met primarily with doubt but with curiosity:

I always knew he had a story to tell, and now he begins to tell it, starting with the fingers of one hand. A mariner’s story. Do I believe it? Verily, I do not care. There is no lie that does not have at its core some truth. One must only know how to listen. (187)

144 I pinched his ring finger lightly. “Can’t you feel anything?”

“No. The nerves are dead.” (187)

That he permits her to touch his disfigured finger shows how their intimacy has grown, but the asymmetry of sensation reflects the narrative asymmetry – the sensations occur almost exclusively within Elizabeth Curren, of others we only get to know what she attempts to imagine.

Elizabeth Curren like Susan Barton in Foe cannot help herself but pry for more details, but of course her curiosity is not satisfied when Vercueil offers: “I was at sea.” (84) Curren pries on, claiming her curiosity about her companion to be “quite natural.” To this Vercueil simply shakes his head:

He gave that crooked smile of his in which one canine suddenly reveals itself, long and yellow. You are hiding something, I thought, but what? A tragic love? A prison sentence? And I broke into a smile myself.

So we stood smiling, the two of us, each with our private cause to smile. (84)

In this instance we feel the acceptance of otherness on her side. They can share a smile, even if its cause remains private. They are not yet smiling at each other, but the empathetic approximation is progressive. The distance she keeps in the beginning didn’t stop her from having intimations of the bond existing between them: “Two souls, his and mine, twined together, ravished.” (30) After their separate but synchronous smiles Elizabeth Curren even imagines a shared future for the two of them:

A pity, I thought (my last thought before the pills took me away): we could set up house, the two of us, after a fashion, I upstairs, he downstairs, for this last little while. So that there will be someone at hand in the nights. For that is, after all, what one wants in the end: someone to be there, to call to in the dark. Mother, or whoever is prepared to stand in for mother. (85)

The parent-child relation is evoked repeatedly in the narrative (more instances quoted later in this section), usually with Curren in her capacity as mother. Regarding Vercueil, her projective imagining quoted above inverts the relation, assigning to Vercueil the nurturing and caretaking function. Like a trusting child, Elizabeth holds back little in his presence, as when she cries in the car in front of Vercueil (19) and several times on later occasions, when she exposes her inner states to Vercueil: “But the truth is, I cry more and more easily, with less and less shame. […] A private matter, a disturbance of the pool of the soul, which I take less and less trouble to hide.” (70-71) As the narrative progresses, the reader becomes aware of the growing intimacy between the two.

Their empathetic approximation is mirrored not only in their verbal exchanges, but also in the way their bodies communicate. While Elizabeth Curren repeatedly discourses on

145

her shame,125 both in a larger political context as well as in regard to her body, Vercueil seems immune to any sense of decorum, as is illustrated when she finds him sleeping in the bathroom: “The light in the toilet was on. Sitting on the seat, his trousers around his knees, his hat on his head, fast asleep, was Vercueil. I stared in astonishment.” (108) This would have evoked her disgust before, but now it simply baffles her. The attention they pay each other takes on more and more substance, their roles of child and parents/guardian repeatedly reversed.

Curren comments on the attention she receives from Vercueil when she wonders why she had agreed to his suggestion of going for a drive: “[W]hat won me in the end was the new attention he was paying me. He was like a boy in a state of excitement, and I was his object. I was flattered; in a distant way, despite all, I was even amused.” (117) Interesting is also how she qualifies their outing: “Like lovers revisiting the scenes of their first declarations, we took the mountainside drive above Muizenberg.” (118) And Curren continues to imagine the two of them as a couple, as for example when she suggests buying a new hat for him:

“I would love to buy you a new hat,” I said.

He smiled. I took his arm; slowly we set off along Vrede Street. (167)

While most of their relationship takes place in private, Curren later does not hesitate to state their affiliation to a policeman interrogating her: “Mr. Vercueil takes care of me. Mr. Vercueil is my right-hand man.” (173)

Elizabeth Curren shows a remarkable tolerance for behaviour one would consider her to find unacceptable. It is his otherness which causes her to feel sympathy, sometimes close to pity: “Sometimes he does this: contradicts me, provokes me, chips away at me, watching for signs of irritation. It is his way of teasing, so clumsy, so unappealing that my heart quite goes out to him.” (180) In this scene she had asked him to fix the aerial of her radio, but Vercueil instead brings the TV to her room and switches it on. The “anthem of the Republic” (Die Stem

van Suid-Afrika, words by C. J. Langenhoven, 1918) is playing, and Elizabeth asks him to

switch it off.

He wheeled, took in my angry glare. Then, to my surprise, he began to do a little shuffle. Swaying his hips, holding his hands out, clicking his fingers, he danced, unmistakably

125 _{Her notion of shame (“Ashes in my mouth day after day after day, which never ceased to taste like ashes.”} 165) is of course tied to her feeling of complicity with the Apartheid regime, and the novel shows how she comes to realize its brutality and the atrocities involved, that now ‘invade’ her privacy: “There is a shame to that private knowledge, a shame so warm, so intimate, so comforting that it brings more shame flooding with it. There seems to be no limit to the shame a human being can feel.” (119) This resonates with Elizabeth Costello’s claim that there are no limits to the sympathetic imagination. More generally speaking, Coetzee continuously explores the limits of our emotional capacities in engaging with others and the self, ultimately suggesting a progressive delimitation with no ultimate goal.

146

danced, to music I never thought could be danced to. He was mouthing words too. What were they? Not, certainly, the words I knew.

“Off!” I screamed again.

An old woman, toothless, in a rage: I must have looked a sight. He turned the sound down. (180)

Vercueil gives in, and in an attempt to console her advises her to have patience waiting for the end of “it all” – he might refer to the apartheid regime and/or her life and all her pain. But with a “toothed leer” (note how the more common phrase toothless leer is here inversed) he tells her that she might still have time, an idea she instantly embraces:

For an instant it was as if the heavens opened and light blazed down. […] He nodded. Like two fools we grinned each at the other. He clicked his fingers suggestively; awkward as a gannet, all feathers and bone, he repeated a step of his dance. (181)

The shared subtle smile from earlier has evolved into the mutual grinning of two fools.126

3.2.4 Two Hearts in Harmony