Slow Man Read online

  Praise for Slow Man

  “Slow Man twists around the idea of care, or caritas, just as his 1999 novel, Disgrace, revolved around eros. But this is love Coetzee-style, cured of any romance with inappropriate liaisons, power struggles, or abuse.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A series of totally satisfying, tricky narrative surprises.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “In this book [Coetzee] has found a new access of warmth and humor, and displays a vivifying fondness for his characters . . . rare will be the reader who will quickly forget Paul Rayment.”

  —John Banville, The New Republic

  “Coetzee may turn out to be one of the last great novelists, exalted by the intensity of his self-awareness and his willingness to make his home in a spiritual and intellectual impasse of which few of his contemporaries were even aware.”

  —Pankaj Mishra, The Nation

  “Yet again, the great South African . . . shows all his mastery of narrative tensions as well as his thinker’s grasp of the ultimate truths and fears. . . . Remorselessly human, it is also funny and touching: Coetzee the artist remains the complete novelist.”

  —The Irish Times

  “Sensational . . . Another exemplary tale of suffering from one of the best writers of our time, who dares to articulate our incomprehensible existence, and manages it with extraordinary and sensitive eloquence.”

  —The Times (London)

  “A tremendous and startling novel . . . Coetzee is a novelist who cares about every word. Slow Man confirms him as among our greatest living authors.”

  —Daily Mail

  “[Slow Man] finds the Nobel laureate in top form. . . . It displays all his expected pitch-perfect restraint, the language diamond-clear, his attention always revealing a great deal more of his characters’ intentions than they know themselves . . . A consummate writer of fiction.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “Coetzee is a unique voice; no novelist explores ideas and the power of literature and the sense of displacement so boldly. Slow Man will add to his immense reputation.”

  —The Independent on Sunday

  “Coetzee’s beautifully spare prose offers many distinct and accessible pleasures . . . A novel of ideas which tests the limits of the genre.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “From the opening chapter . . . Coetzee demonstrates his inimitable, almost religious tone: a spare but rich combination of passion and judgment. . . . A sharply contemplative, philosophical journey . . . The richness of the ideas in this novel is extraordinary.”

  —The Herald (Glasgow)

  “Coetzee is so delicate a writer that it’s impossible not to enjoy the entertaining scenario he has created here.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “Rayment’s decline . . . is done with all Coetzee’s sinuous, sinister elegance.”

  —The Guardian

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SLOW MAN

  J. M. COETZEE was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Disgrace, Youth, Summertime, and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. He lives in Australia.

  BY J. M. COETZEE

  FICTION

  Dusklands

  In the Heart of the Country

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Life & Times of Michael K

  Foe

  Age of Iron

  The Master of Petersburg

  Boyhood

  The Lives of Animals

  Disgrace

  Youth

  Elizabeth Costello

  Slow Man

  Diary of a Bad Year

  Summertime

  The Childhood of Jesus

  NONFICTION

  White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa

  Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews

  Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

  Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999

  The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003

  Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005

  Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (with Paul Auster)

  The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (with Arabella Kurtz)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg, Random House, 2005

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by J. M. Coetzee

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9781524705510

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Paul Buckley

  Cover image: (stockings) Antique Rose at English Wikipedia; (bicycle wheel) plainpicture / Briljans / Stefan Berg

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Slow Man

  About the Author

  By J. M. Coetzee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Author’s Note

  One

  The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

  That is not quite as it turns out, however. Whether because his legs disobey or because he is for a moment stunned (he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow), he does
not spring to his feet at all, but on the contrary slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding.

  He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning. The sun’s touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one’s strength to return. In fact there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent.

  Once, briefly, he comes back. The body that had flown so lightly through the air has grown ponderous, so ponderous that for the life of him he cannot lift a finger. And there is someone looming over him, cutting off his air, a youngster with wiry hair and spots along his hairline. ‘My bicycle,’ he says to the boy, enunciating the difficult word syllable by syllable. He wants to ask what has become of his bicycle, whether it is being taken care of, since, as is well known, a bicycle can disappear in a flash; but before those words will come he is gone again.

  Two

  He is being rocked from side to side, transported. From afar voices reach him, a hubbub rising and falling to a rhythm of its own. What is going on? If he were to open his eyes he would know. But he cannot do that just yet. Something is coming to him. A letter at a time, clack clack clack, a message is being typed on a rose-pink screen that trembles like water each time he blinks and is therefore quite likely his own inner eyelid. E-R-T-Y, say the letters, then F-R-I-V-O-L, then a trembling, then E, then Q-W-E-R-T-Y, on and on.

  Frivole. Something like panic sweeps over him. He writhes; from the cavern within a groan wells up and bursts from his throat.

  ‘Pain bad?’ says a voice. ‘Hold still.’ The prick of a needle. An instant later the pain is washed away, then the panic, then consciousness itself.

  He awakes in a cocoon of dead air. He tries to sit up but cannot; it is as if he were encased in concrete. Around him whiteness unrelieved: white ceiling, white sheets, white light; also a grainy whiteness like old toothpaste in which his mind seems to be coated, so that he cannot think straight and grows quite desperate. ‘What is this?’ he mouths or perhaps even shouts, meaning What is this that is being done to me? or What is this place where I find myself? or even What is this fate that has befallen me?

  From nowhere a young woman in white appears, pauses, regards him watchfully. Out of the muddle in his head he tries to create an interrogative. Too late! With a smile and a reassuring pat on the arm that he seems strangely to hear but not feel, she moves on.

  Is it serious?: if there is time for only one question, then that is what the question ought to be, though what the word serious might mean he prefers not to dwell on. But even more urgent than the question of seriousness, more urgent than the lurking question of what exactly it was that happened on Magill Road to blast him into this dead place, is the need to find his way home, shut the door behind him, sit down in familiar surroundings, recover himself.

  He tries to touch the right leg, the leg that keeps sending obscure signals that it is now the wrong leg, but his hand will not budge, nothing will budge.

  My clothes: perhaps that should be the innocuous preparatory question. Where are my clothes? Where are my clothes, and how serious is my situation?

  The young woman floats back into his field of vision. ‘Clothes,’ he says, with an immense effort, raising his eyebrows as high as he can to signify urgency.

  ‘No worries,’ says the young woman, and blesses him with another of her smiles, her positively angelic smiles. ‘Everything is safe, everything is taken care of. The doctor will be with you in a minute.’ And indeed before a minute has passed a young man who must be the doctor referred to has materialised at her side and is murmuring in her ear.

  ‘Paul?’ says the young doctor. ‘Can you hear me? Do I have the name right, Paul Rayment?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says carefully.

  ‘Good day, Paul. You will be feeling a little fuzzy right now. That’s because you have had a shot of morphine. We will be going into surgery in a short while. You took a whack, I don’t know how much you remember, and it has left your leg a bit of a mess. We are going to have a look and see how much of it we can save.’

  Again he arches his eyebrows. ‘Save?’ he tries to say.

  ‘Save your leg,’ repeats the doctor. ‘We are going to have to amputate, but we will save what we can.’

  Something must happen to his face at this point, because the young man does a surprising thing. He reaches out to touch his cheek, and then lets his hand rest there, cradling his old-man’s head. It is the kind of thing a woman might do, a woman who loved one. The gesture embarrasses him but he cannot decently pull away.

  ‘Will you trust me in this?’ says the doctor.

  Dumbly he blinks his eyes.

  ‘Good.’ He pauses. ‘We don’t have a choice, Paul,’ he says. ‘It is not one of those situations where we have a choice. Do you understand that? Do I have your consent? I am not going to ask you to sign on the dotted line, but do we have your consent to proceed? We will save what we can, but you took quite a blow, there has been a lot of damage, I can’t say right now whether we can save the knee, for example. The knee has been pretty thoroughly mashed, and some of the tibia too.’

  As if it knows it is being spoken of, as if these terrible words have roused it from its troubled sleep, the right leg sends him a shaft of jagged white pain. He hears his own gasp, and then the thudding of blood in his ears.

  ‘Right,’ says the young man, and pats him lightly on the cheek. ‘Time to get moving.’

  He awakes very much more at ease with himself. His head is clear, he is his old self (full of beans! he thinks), though pleasantly drowsy too, he could settle back into a nap at any moment. The leg that took the whack feels enormous, positively elephantine, but there is no pain.

  The door opens and a nurse appears, a new, fresh face. ‘Feeling better?’ she says, and then quickly, ‘Don’t try to talk yet. Dr Hansen will be along in a while to have a chat. In the meantime there is something we need to do. So could I ask you just to relax while . . .’

  What she needs to do while he relaxes is, it transpires, to insert a catheter. It is a nasty thing to have done to one; he is glad it is a stranger who is doing it. This is what it leads to! he berates himself. This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for one moment! And the bicycle: what has become of the bicycle? How am I going to do the shopping now? All my fault for taking Magill Road! And he curses Magill Road, though in fact he has been cycling Magill Road for years without mishap.

  What young Dr Hansen has to present to him, when he arrives, is first a quick overview of his case, to bring him up to speed, and then more specific news about his leg, some of it good, some not so good.

  First, as regards his condition in general, considering what can and does happen to the human body when it is hit by a car going at speed, he can congratulate himself that it is not serious. In fact, it is so much the reverse of serious that he can count himself lucky, fortunate, blessed. The crash left him concussed, yes, but he was saved by the helmet he was wearing. Monitoring will continue, but there is no sign of intracranial bleeding. As for motor functions, the preliminary indication is that they are unimpaired. He lost some blood, but that has been replaced. If he is wondering about the stiffness of his jaw, the jaw is not broken, merely bruised. The abrasions on his back and arm look worse than they are, they will heal in a week or two.

  Turning to the leg now, the leg that took the blow, he (Dr Hansen) and his colleagues were not, it turned out, able to save the knee. They had a thorough discussion, and the decision was unanimous. The impact – he will show him later on the X-ray – was directly to the knee, and there was an added component of rotation, so the joint was shattered and twisted at the same time. In a younger person they might perhaps have gone for a reconstruction, but a reconstruction of the required order would entail a whole series of operations, one after another, extending over a year
, even two years, with a success rate of less than fifty per cent, so all in all, considering his age, it was thought best to take the leg off cleanly above the knee, leaving a good length of bone for a prosthesis. He (Dr Hansen) hopes he (Paul Rayment) will come to accept the wisdom of that decision.

  ‘I am sure you have plenty of questions,’ he concludes, ‘and I will be happy to try to answer them, but perhaps not now, better in the morning, after you have had some sleep.’

  ‘Prosthesis,’ he says, another difficult word, though now that he understands about the jaw that is not broken, merely bruised, he is less embarrassed about difficult words.

  ‘Prosthesis. Artificial limb. Once the surgical wound has healed we will be fitting a prosthesis. Four weeks, maybe even sooner. In no time at all you will be walking again. Riding your bicycle too, if you like. After some training. Other questions?’

  He shakes his head. Why did you not ask me first? he wants to say; but if he utters the words he will lose control, he will start shouting.

  ‘Then I’ll speak to you in the morning,’ says Dr Hansen. ‘Chin up!’

  That is not all, however. That is not the end of it. First the violation, then consent to the violation. There are papers to sign before he will be left alone, and the papers prove surprisingly difficult.

  Family, for instance. Who and where are his family, the papers ask, and how should they be informed? And insurance. Who are his insurers? What cover does his policy provide?

  Insurance is no problem. He is insured to the hilt, there is a card in his wallet to prove it, he is nothing if not prudent (but where is his wallet, where are his clothes?). Family is a less straightforward matter. Who are his family? What is the right answer? He has a sister. She passed on twelve years ago, but she still lives in him or with him, just as he has a mother who, at the times when she is not in or with him, awaits the angels’ clarion from her plot in the cemetery in Ballarat. A father too, doing his waiting farther away, in the cemetery in Pau, from where he rarely pays visits. Are they his family, the three of them? Those into whose lives you are born do not pass away, he would like to inform whoever composed the question. You bear them with you, as you hope to be borne by those who come after you. But there is no space on the form for extended answers.