Free Three Stories by J. M. Coetzee Page B

does nothing to make the Germans or the English feel at home.
    During his first months in residence he spent hours every day working on the exterior. He took down the front door, scraped it, painted it, rehung it. He did the same with
the wooden shutters. Though his taste was for other colours, a whole other palette,
he followed the colour scheme uniform to the village: a pale grey-blue; a deep red,
here called Basque.
    He took the door lock to pieces. The mechanism itself was primitive to the point
of being laughable. A child could have picked it. Nevertheless he did not replace
it, merely cleaned it, greased it, put it back. In this world, he told himself, locks
are symbolic. A lock is here to make a statement about ownership, not to prevent
a break-in, should anyone be so antisocial as to wish to break in.
    He has bought the house, the house belongs to him, but only in a certain sense. In
another sense it still belongs to the village in which it is embedded. Well, he has
no ambition to prise the house loose from the village. He does not want it to be
anything but what it is.
    His plan, at the beginning, was to spend two seasons of the year here. Summers he
would avoid because they were too hot, winters because they were too cold. Plenty
of men have marriages like that, he told himself. Sailors, for instance, spend half
their lives at sea.
    But as the months passed he found something happening to him. He could not put the
house from his mind. He lay awake at night, five thousand miles away, floating from
room to room across the dark and empty interior. It was as though he were sending
his soul across the seas, across the mountains, to the village wrapped in sleep:
sending it or being called. Even in the daytime he had visions of involuntary, startling
clarity: the rusty horseshoe nailed over the back door; the mould under the pipes
in the bathroom; the stain, high up on the living-room wall, where a spider was crushed
by a broom blow. There were moments when he was convinced that only by the force
of his concentrated attention was the house being saved from inexistence.
    So here he is, in midsummer, in Catalonia. In the cool of the morning he climbs
on to the roof. On hands and knees, with a trowel, he begins to scratch away the
moss that has grown between the tiles. From her balcony two doors down the street
an old woman in black watches him. He hopes she approves. A foreigner but a serious
man : that is what he hopes she thinks.
    He grows geraniums, pink and red, in terracotta pots, and places them on either side
of the front door, as the neighbours do. Little attentions , he calls them. Little
attentions to the house, like the attentions one pays a woman.
    If this is marriage, he tells himself, then it is a widow I am marrying, a mature
woman, set in her ways. Just as I cannot be a different man, so I should not want
her to become, for my sake, a different woman, younger, flashier, sexier.
    By his labours he is, to some extent, breaking his unwritten compact with the village.
When an outsider moves in and buys property, the compact says, he should bring profit
to the local people: buy from the local merchants, give work to the local artisans.
The work he is doing on the house belongs by right to those artisans. But on this
point he will not yield. What he is engaged in is more serious than mere upkeep.
It is intimate work, work he must do with his own hands. In time, he hopes, the local
people will come to understand.
    The village, of course, has memories of the house from before his time, and before
the time of Sr Torras the jack-of-all-trades from Sant Climens. The villagers know—or
if they do not know, then their parents and aunts and uncles knew—the family that
used to live here, the family whose children grew up hating the dark, cramped rooms,
the damp walls, the old-fashioned plumbing, and as soon as their parents died washed
their hands of the place, selling it for a song to Sr Torras, who fixed it up