Free The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee Page B

performers whispering and giggling behind the curtain drawn across the far end of the studio.
    Wearing a dark evening dress with a shawl over her bare shoulders, señora Arroyo emerges. For a long moment she stands in silence before them. Again he is struck by her poise, her calm beauty.
    She speaks. ‘Welcome, all of you, and thank you for coming out on a cold, wet evening. Tonight I am going to tell you a little about the Academy and what my husband and I hope to achieve for our students. For that it will be necessary to give you a brief outline of the philosophy behind the Academy. Those of you who are familiar with it, please bear with me.
    â€˜As we know, from the day when we arrive in this life we put our former existence behind us. We forget it. But not entirely. Of our former existence certain remnants persist: not memories in the usual sense of the word but what we can call shadows of memories. Then, as we become habituated to our new life, even these shadows fade, until we have forgotten our origins entirelyand accept that what our eyes see is the only life there is.
    â€˜The child, however, the young child, still bears deep impresses of a former life, shadow recollections which he lacks words to express. He lacks words because, along with the world we have lost, we have lost a language fit to evoke it. All that is left of that primal language is a handful of words, what I call transcendental words, among which the names of the numbers, uno, dos, tres, are foremost.
    â€˜ Uno-dos-tres : is this just a chant we learn at school, the mindless chant we call counting ; or is there a way of seeing through the chant to what lies behind and beyond it, namely the realm of the numbers themselves—the noble numbers and their auxiliaries, too many to count, as many as the stars, numbers born out of the unions of noble numbers? We, my husband and I and our helpers, believe there is such a way. Our Academy is dedicated to guiding the souls of our students toward that realm, to bringing them in accord with the great underlying movement of the universe, or, as we prefer to say, the dance of the universe.
    â€˜To bring the numbers down from where they reside, to allow them to manifest themselves in our midst, to give them body, we rely on the dance. Yes, here in the Academy we dance, not in a graceless, carnal, or disorderly way, but body and soul together, so as to bring the numbers to life. As music enters us and moves us in dance, so the numbers cease to be mere ideas, mere phantoms, and become real. The music evokes its dance and the dance evokes its music: neither comes first. That is why we call ourselves an academy of music as much as an academy of dance.
    â€˜If my words this evening seem obscure, dear parents, dearfriends of the Academy, that only goes to show how feeble words are. Words are feeble—that is why we dance. In the dance we call the numbers down from where they live among the aloof stars. We surrender ourselves to them in dance, and while we dance, by their grace, they live among us.
    â€˜Some of you—I can see from your looks—remain sceptical. What are these numbers she talks of that dwell among the stars? you murmur among yourselves. Do I not use numbers every day when I do business or buy groceries? Are numbers not our humble servants?
    â€˜I reply: The numbers you have in mind, the numbers we use when we buy and sell, are not true numbers but simulacra. They are what I call ant numbers. Ants, as we know, have no memory. They are born out of the dust and die into the dust. Tonight, in the second part of the show, you will see our younger students playing the parts of ants, performing the ant operations that we call the lower arithmetic, the arithmetic we use in household accounts and so forth.’
    Ants. The lower arithmetic. He turns to Inés. ‘Can you make sense of this?’ he whispers. But Inés, lips compressed, eyes narrowed, watching Ana Magdalena