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 we 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?