La presencia de la infantería por el río

After having discussed how these two “[u]nlikely companions” (30) have undergone a transformation in their empathetic approximation, mirrored by their physical closeness and in the way they look at each other, I will now analyze the textual discourse on their hearts in relation to music. Early on, we learn that Elizabeth Curren, lecturer on the classics of Ancient Rome, plays the classics on the piano: Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Chopin, Brahms. (23) Having tired from the “sweetness of Brahms,” she closes her eyes and plays chords, searching for what she calls “my chord” (23), “the lost chord, the heart’s chord.” (24) As if to underline the spirituality of this moment, the tune “Jerusalem”127 _{comes to her together with}

sentimental childhood memories; but the moment fades and she returns to playing Bach’s “first fugue from Book One.” (24) She finds Vercueil overhearing her:

I was playing for myself. But at some point a board creaked or a shadow passed across the curtain and I knew he was outside listening.

So I played Bach for him, as well as I could. [...] Has it made its way into the heart too of the man in the sagging trousers eavesdropping at the window? Have our two hearts, our organs of love, been tied for this brief while by a cord of sound? (24)

The music still echoing in her heart, she makes an effort to transpose her perception to the perspective of Vercueil, asking herself whether some communion has taken place through the

126 _{With Coetzee’s essay on Erasmus of Rotterdam in mind, one would concede that there lies much wisdom in} their folly. (Coetzee 1996: 83-103)

127 _{“And did those feet from Ancient Times” by William Blake, 1804-1810. Since 1916 the song version by} Hubert Parry has become part of British heritage, at first serving as the official hymn of the British Women’s Institute, today being performed before international cricket games as well as at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011.

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shared experience of this music. Another time she listens to a recording of Bach’s Goldberg

Variations and knows that Vercueil will hear it as well, being outside the window smoking.

“Perhaps he saw me, perhaps not. Together we listened. / At this moment, I thought, I know how he feels as surely as if he and I were making love.” (30) She expands her imagining, even though “it fill[s] [her] with distaste”, envisioning their bodies pressed together in a crowded touring bus taking them through Sicily – hard to imagine this in segregated South Africa. Curren is not unaware of the incommensurateness of their music experience, and the insect image she chooses to draw on as point of reference indicates this:

Across the courtyard he squatted, smoking, listening. Two souls, his and mine, twined together, ravished. Like insects mating tail to tail, facing away from each other, still except for a pulsing of the thorax that might be mistaken for mere breathing. Stillness and ecstasy. (30)

Being reminded of their real environment of apartheid, she takes refuge to the love-making of insects as an analogy for the only possible kind of sexual relationship between a coloured man and a Caucasian woman – as whites were called under apartheid; nobody must notice (stillness) despite the “ecstasy”. The distance in space (a courtyard apart) contrasts with the assumed interlocking of their souls, the heightened intensity reflected in the love-making of the insects that intimates physical proximity, which then is countered by the perceptive attention being directed away from each other – twice removed this reflects the apartheid experience of being separated spatially but sharing the same fundamental humanity.

Birdsong

After the incident at her house with Bheki’s friend John (see 3.2.5 and 3.2.7) and her subsequent eloping into the streets, Vercueil finds her and carries her to a “dark wooded place” (potentially a locus amoenus), prompting her to say: “‘I am so happy to see you,’ […] the words coming from my heart, heartfelt.” (161) After a drink from his bottle (no hesitation even though she knows the alcohol will not quench her thirst; they are living on his terms at this moment) she falls asleep. She awakes noticing his arm “flung […] across [her] neck”:

I could have freed myself, but preferred not to disturb him. So while by slow degrees the new day broke, I lay face to face with him, not stirring. His eyes opened once, alert, like an animal’s. “I am not gone,” I murmured. The eyes closed.

The thought came: Whom, of all beings on earth, do I know best at this hour? Him. Every hair of his beard, every crease of his forehead known to me. Him, not you. Because he is here, beside me, now. (162)

They are now “face to face” not “tail to tail” (like the insects in previous quote). With open eyes they confirm each other’s presence. They are as close as they could possibly be, both physically and in emotional intimacy. Not surprisingly, this moment is followed by a long

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soliloquy of Elizabeth Curren (She: “Do you mind if I talk?” He: “Talk.” (162)) reflecting on the death of Bheki’s friend John and her own complicity with the apartheid regime, on her responsibilities, giving Vercueil “as full a confession as [she] knows how,” claiming to “withhold no secrets” – a claim Coetzee previously deconstructed in his essay on “Confession and Double Thought: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Rousseau.”128 Again not surprisingly, the confession of complicity is immediately contrasted with her notion of being a “good person”: “I have been a good person, I freely confess to it. I am a good person still. What times these are when to be a good person is not enough!” (165) However empty the clause “good person” might seem, as readers we cannot deny the efforts she makes, if somewhat clumsy at times, to enrich her bond with Vercueil with substantial companionship.

After Curren finishes her confession she discovers that he is asleep, wondering how much of her confession has been heard by him and whether it mattered in the end. Returning to the mundane, she goes “behind a bush”: “Birds were singing all around. […] It was like Arcady.” (166)129 Her renewed awe of nature does not have the character of an epiphany – releasing her bowels counters any such notion –, but might point to an awakening of her faculties of perception, a renewal of her bond with nature, instigated by the bond that has developed between her and Vercueil. Lying down again beside Vercueil on a “flattened-out box in the vacant lot” (166), the “dark wooded place” now turns out to be a profane empty space (i.e. a vacant lot) that might be waiting for something new to be constructed; a fitting place for the construction of their unlikely companionship, for the entwining of their hearts. Elizabeth ponders on how they are exposed to passersby: “That is how we must be in the eyes of angels: people living in houses of glass, our every act naked. Our hearts naked too, beating in chests of glass. Birdsong poured down like rain.” (166) This last wonderful image of “raining birdsong” turns their location into an Arcady of their hearts, which both of them have laid bare to each other; by narrative privilege Curren more so than Vercueil.