By transport I meant Manuel, the eldest son of Mario’s cousin, who used to give Maria Regina a lift home in the afternoons, in his van, after he had made his deliveries. It would be easy for him to pick up the teacher too.
Mario was your husband.
Mario. My husband, who died.
Please go on. I just wanted to be sure.
Mr Coetzee was the first person who was invited to our flat — the first one outside Mario’s family. He was only a schoolteacher — we met plenty of schoolteachers in Luanda, and before Luanda in São Paulo, I had no special esteem for them — but to Maria Regina and even to Joana schoolteachers were gods and goddesses, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them. The evening before his visit the girls baked a cake and iced it and even wrote on it (they wanted to write ‘Welcome Mr Coetzee’ but I made them write ‘St Bonaventure 1974’). They also baked trayfuls of the little biscuits that in Brazil we call brevidades.
Maria Regina was very excited. Come home early, please, please! I heard her urging her sister. Tell your supervisor you are feeling ill! But Joana wasn’t prepared to do that. It is not so easy to take time off, she said, they dock your pay if you don’t complete your shift.
So Manuel brought Mr Coetzee to our flat, and I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn’t have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me at once, I can’t say why, as célibataire. I mean not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impressions). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step towards civilized manners.
‘How long are you a teacher, Mr Coetzee?’ I asked.
He squirmed in his seat, said something I don’t remember any more about America, about being a teacher in America. Then, after more questions, it emerged that in fact he had never taught in a school before this one, and — what is worse — did not even have a teacher’s certificate. Of course I was surprised. ‘If you don’t have a certificate, how come you are Maria Regina’s teacher?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’
The answer, which again took a long time to squeeze out of him, was that, for subjects like music and ballet and foreign languages, schools were permitted to hire persons who had no qualifications, or at least did not have certificates of competence. These unqualified persons would not be paid salaries like proper teachers, they would instead be paid by the school with money collected from parents like me.
‘But you are not English,’ I said. It was not a question this time, it was an accusation. Here he was, hired to teach the English language, paid out of my money and Joana’s money, yet he was not a teacher, and moreover he was an Afrikaner, not an Englishman.
‘I agree I am not of English descent,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless I have spoken English from an early age and have passed university examinations in English, therefore I believe I can teach English. There is nothing special about English. It is just one language among many.’
That is what he said. English is just one language among many. ‘My daughter is not going to be like a parrot that mixes up languages, Mr Coetzee,’ I said. ‘I want her to speak English properly, and with a proper English accent.’
Fortunately for him, this was the moment when Joana arrived home. Joana was already twenty by then, but in the presence of a man she was still bashful. Compared with her sister she was not a beauty — look, here is a snapshot of her with her husband and their little boys, it was taken some time after we moved back to Brazil, you can see, not a beauty, all the beauty went to her sister — but she was a good girl and I always knew she would make a good wife.
Joana came into the room where we were sitting, still wearing her raincoat (I remember that long raincoat of hers). ‘My sister,’ said Maria Regina, as if she was explaining who this new person was rather than introducing her. Joana said nothing, just looked shy, and as for Mr Coetzee the teacher, he almost knocked over the coffee table trying to get to his feet.
Why is Maria Regina besotted with this foolish man? What does she see in him? That was the question I asked myself. It was easy enough to guess what a lonely célibataire might see in my daughter, who was turning into a real dark-eyed beauty though she was still only a child, but what made her learn poems by heart for this man, something she had never done for her other teachers? Had he perhaps been whispering words to her that had turned her head? Was that the explanation? Was there something going on between the two of them that she was keeping secret from me?
Now if this man were to become interested in Joana, I thought to myself, it would be a different story. Joana may not have a head for poetry, but at least she has her feet on the ground.
‘Joana is working this year at Clicks,’ I said. ‘To get experience. Next year she will take a management course. To be a manager.’
Mr Coetzee nodded abstractedly. Joana said nothing at all.
‘Take off your coat, my child,’ I said, ‘and drink some tea.’ We did not normally drink tea, we drank coffee. Joana brought home some tea the day before for this guest of ours, Earl Grey tea it was called, very English but not very nice, I wondered what we were going to do with the rest of the packet.
‘Mr Coetzee is from the school,’ I repeated to Joana, as if she did not know. ‘He is telling us how he is not English but is nevertheless the English teacher.’
‘I am not, properly speaking, the English teacher,’ Mr Coetzee interjected, addressing Joana. ‘I am the Extra English teacher. That means I have been hired by the school to help students who are having difficulty with English. I try to get them through the examinations. So I am a kind of examination coach. That would be a better description of what I do, a better name for me.’
‘Do we have to talk about school?’ said Maria Regina. ‘It is so boring.’
But what we were talking about was not boring at all. Painful, perhaps, for Mr Coetzee, but not boring. ‘Go on,’ I said to him, ignoring her.
‘I do not intend to be an examination coach for the rest of my life,’ he said. ‘It is something I am doing for the present, something I happen to be qualified to do, in order to make a living. But it is not my vocation. It is not what I was called into the world to do.’
Called into the world. More and more strange.
‘If you would like me to explain my philosophy of teaching I can do so,’ he said. ‘It is quite brief, brief and simple.’
‘Go on,’ I said, ‘let us hear your brief philosophy.’
‘What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student’s heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them ascend to a higher realm. So to speak.’