Free Three Stories by J. M. Coetzee Page A

not in the final straight, then coming around the turn leading
into the final straight. No more time for playing around, for following whims. The
house in Catalonia is no impulse of the moment, no casual fling. On the contrary,
it is the consequence of an eminently rational decision-making process. If it resembles
a marriage at all, it resembles an arranged marriage, bridegroom matched with bride
by a broker, a professional.
    Yet even in arranged marriages man and wife sometimes fall in love. Is it possible
that, late in life, he is going to fall in love with the house he has found for himself
in Spain?
    The house stands in a short street at the edge of the village of Bellpuig, overlooking fields of sunflower and corn. It comes with a huge fig tree and a patch of garden
where he could, if he chose, grow his own beans and tomatoes. There is a rabbit hutch
too, should his tastes incline to rabbit flesh. The house was built, if he is to
believe the agent, in the thirteenth century. From the reading he has done on the
antiquities of Catalonia, that is not impossible. The walls could certainly date
back that far: they are a yard thick in places, meant to keep the cold of winter
and the heat of summer out, the chiselled stone held together by crumbling mortar
that by now might as well be sand.
    In its structure the house will always be odd. The front double door opens on to
a space so cavernous that it is fit to be used only as a garage and workshop, or
else as an artist’s studio. Up one side a staircase leads, via a hatch, to the living
quarters and kitchen. The design makes sense only when one recognises that the core
of the house used to be a barn, that the living space was constructed above and around
the stabling so that human beings and cattle could share their blood warmth on the
cold upland nights.
    At the back the house is built into the side of a hill; a drain runs under the floor
to bear rainwater away. As for the roof, the tiles are modern, with the stamp of
a brickworks in Cervera; but the timbers are so worm-riddled, so powdery with rot,
that they might well be centuries old too. Another few decades and the whole roof
will probably come crashing down. But by then he will be beyond caring.
    The previous owner ( the previous husband , as he thinks of him) was a builder from
Sant Climens, thirty kilometres away. It was he who fixed up the house, in his spare
time, enlarging the windows, plastering the walls, replacing the doorframes, putting
in new wiring, installing a bath and bidet, before selling it at a markup. No doubt
he has moved on to another house now, some other project in some other village.
    The locals have not been welcoming. The Spanish he speaks is of a hesitant, bookish
variety that gets him nowhere in rural Catalonia, where Castilian is a foreign tongue.
He is branded an outsider as soon as he opens his mouth. That is all right. He has
no right to expect a welcome. What he hopes for, and what he gets, is toleration.
Even in small villages, by now, people are used to outsiders moving in. Foreigners
have been buying property in France, in Spain, in Portugal for years. The Spanish
authorities have nothing against it. As long as they do not take jobs, as long as
they bring in money, there is a place for foreigners.
    It is the same in his own country, where the best seaside properties have passed
into the hands of strangers. He does not necessarily like these strangers, with their
bird-of-passage habits, but what do his likes and dislikes matter? His Catalan neighbours,
he presumes, feel much the same about him: they do not necessarily like him; among
themselves they probably complain about him and his kind; shopkeepers cheat him when
they can, justifying themselves on the grounds that foreigners have too much money
and are stupid anyway. But as to actively plotting harm against him, he doubts they
would go that far. They will merely do nothing to make him feel at home, just as,
when he is at home, he