Free Summertime by J. M. Coetzee

bed. Who was the uncle: one of the family or on the contrary a worm eating away at the heart of the family?
     
And Maria – how much did Maria know? I could never be sure. Migrant labour was the norm in South Africa in those days, so Maria must have been all too familiar with the phenomenon of the husband who says goodbye to his wife and children and goes off to the big city to find work. But whether Maria approved of wives fooling around in their husbands' absence was another matter. Maria never actually laid eyes on my night-time visitor, but it was hardly likely that she was deceived. Visitors leave too many traces behind.
     
But what is this? Is it really six o'clock? I had no idea it was so late. We must stop for the day. Can you come back tomorrow?
     
I'm afraid I head home tomorrow. I fly from here to Toronto, from Toronto to London. I'd hate it if . . .
     
Very well, let's press on. There is not much more. I'll be quick.
     
One night John arrived in an unusually excited state. He had with him a little cassette player, and put on a tape, the Schubert string quintet. It was not what I would call sexy music, nor was I particularly in the mood, but he wanted to make love, and specifically – excuse the explicitness – wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement.
     
Well, the slow movement in question may be very beautiful but I found it far from arousing. Added to which I could not shake off the image on the box containing the tape: Franz Schubert looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold.
     
I don't know if you remember the slow movement, but there is a long violin aria with the viola throbbing below, and I could feel John trying to keep time with it. The whole business struck me as forced, ridiculous. Somehow or other my remoteness communicated itself to John. 'Empty your mind!' he hissed at me. 'Feel through the music!'
     
Well, there can be nothing more irritating than being told what you must feel. I turned away from him, and his little erotic experiment collapsed at once.
     
Later on he tried to explain himself. He wanted to prove something to me about the history of feeling, he said. Feelings had natural histories of their own. They came into being within time, flourished for a while or failed to flourish, then died or died out. The kinds of feeling that had flourished in Schubert's day were by now, most of them, dead. The sole way left to us to re-experience them was via the music of the times. Because music was the trace, the inscription, of feeling.
     
Okay, I said, but why do we have to fuck while we listen to the music?
     
Because the slow movement of the quintet happens to be about fucking, he replied. If, instead of resisting, I had let the music flow into me and animate me, I would have experienced glimmerings of something quite unusual: what it had felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria.
     
'What it felt like for post-Bonaparte man or what it felt like for post-Bonaparte woman?' I said. 'For Mr Schubert or for Mrs Schubert?'
     
That really annoyed him. He didn't like his pet theories to be made fun of.
     
'Music isn't about fucking,' I went on. 'Music is about foreplay. It's about courtship. You sing to the maiden before you go to bed with her, not while you are in bed with her. You sing to her to woo her, to win her heart. You sing to her to get her into bed. If you aren't happy with me in bed, maybe it is because you haven't won my heart.'
     
I should have called it a day at that point, but I didn't, I went further. 'The mistake the two of us made,' I said, 'was that we skimped the foreplay. I'm not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless. Sex is better when it is preceded by a good, long courtship. More emotionally satisfying. More erotically satisfying too. If you are trying to improve our sex life, you won't achieve it by making me fuck in time to music.'
     
I was