Free The Childhood of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee Page A

him.’
    â€˜But he must have had a father.’
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Was the father at all like me?’
    â€˜I don’t know. I can’t say.’
    â€˜Would you, just hypothetically, consider someone like me as a husband?’
    â€˜Someone like you? Like you in what respects?’
    â€˜Would you marry someone like me?’
    â€˜If that is your way of asking whether I would marry you, then the answer is yes, I would. It would be good for Fidel and David, both of them. When would you want to do it? Because the registry office is open only on weekdays. Can you get time off?’
    â€˜I am sure I can. Our foreman is very understanding.’
    After this strange offer, and this strange acceptance (about which he does nothing), he begins to feel a certain wariness on Elena’s part, and a new tension in their relations. Yet he does not regret asking. He is finding his way. He is making a new life.
    â€˜How would you feel,’ he asks on another day, ‘if I were to see another woman?’
    â€˜By see do you mean have sex with?’
    â€˜Perhaps.’
    â€˜And whom do you have in mind?’
    â€˜No one in particular. I am simply exploring possibilities.’
    â€˜Exploring? Hasn’t the time come for you to settle down? You are no longer a young man.’
    He is silent.
    â€˜You ask how I would feel. Do you want a short answer or a full answer?’
    â€˜A full answer. The fullest.’
    â€˜Very well. Our friendship has been good for the boys, we can agree on that. They have grown close. They see us as guardian presences, or even as a single guardian presence. So it would not be good for them if our friendship were to come to an end. And I see no reason why it should, just because you are seeing some hypothetical other woman.
    â€˜However, I suspect that with this woman you will want to conduct the same kind of experiment you have been conducting with me, and that in the course of the experiment you will lose touch with Fidel and with me.
    â€˜Therefore I am going to put in words something I was hoping you would come to understand by yourself. You want to see this other woman because I do not provide what you feel you need, namely storms of passion. Friendship by itself is not good enough for you. Without the accompaniment of storms of passion it is somehow deficient.
    â€˜To my ear that is an old way of thinking. In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing. The name you choose to give this something-more that is missing is passion. Yet I am willing to bet that if tomorrow you were offered all the passion you wanted—passion by the bucketful—you would promptly find something new to miss, to lack. This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing . The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.
    â€˜There. You asked for a full answer and I have given you one. Is it enough, or is there yet more that you long for?’
    It is a warm day, this day of the full answer. The radio is playing softly; they are lying on the bed in her apartment, fully clothed.
    â€˜For my part—’ he commences; but Elena interrupts him. ‘Hush,’ she says. ‘No more talk, at least not today.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because next thing we will be bickering, and I don’t want that.’
    So they hush, and lie in silence side by side, listening now to the gulls cawing as they circle the courtyard, now to the boys laughing together in their play, now to the music from the radio, whose unremitting, even-tempered melodiousness used once to soothe him but today simply irritates him.
    What he wants to say, for his part , is that life here is too placid for his taste, too lacking in ups and downs, in drama and tension—is too much, in fact,