Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass su- pended in front of his eyes in loops of wire.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.)

But as for me, sustained by the toil of others, lacking civilized vices with which to fill my leisure, I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate that no one sees me!

“The man is ridiculous!” I shout. I storm about the room. One should never disparage officers in front of men, fathers in front of children, but towards this man I discover no loyalty in my heart.

If I lived in the magistrate’s villa on the quietest street in town, holding sittings of the court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activities of this upstart policeman, if I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of the undertow, gives up the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

“Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,” I mumble.

The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal.

Whether I appear to her decked in my robes of office or whether I stand naked before her or whether I tear open my breast for her, I am the same man.

“If you want to do something, you do it,” she says very firmly. She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, “If you had wanted to do it you would have done it.”

I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth.

If there was anything to be envied in a posting to the frontier, my friends told me, it was the easy morals of the oases, the long scented summer evenings, the complaisant sloe-eyed women.

Not only that; there were unsettling occasions when in the middle of the sexual act I felt myself losing my way like a storyteller losing the thread of his story.

Nor could I always see why one part of my body, with its unreasonable cravings and false promises, should be heeded over any other as a channel of desire.

Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach.

Thick-headed and confused, angry too, I try to look into myself but see only a vortex and at the heart of the vortex oblivion.

It seems appropriate that a man who does not know what to do with the woman in his bed should not know what to write.

Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers!

“Or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put.”

All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.

Warrant Officer in the Third Bureau: what does that mean? At a guess, five years of kicking and beating people; contempt for the regular police and for due process of law; a detestation of smooth patrician talk like mine.

I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man.

Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency.

I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.

I should have stayed among the gross and decaying where I belong: fat women with acrid armpits and bad tempers, whores with big slack cunts.

The night is best: sometimes when you have difficulty in falling asleep it is because your ears have been reached by the cries of the dead which, like their writings, are open to many interpretations.

A fool in love is laughed at but in the end always forgiven.

We all know, what old men seek is to recover their youth in the arms of young women.”

I want to be fat again, fatter than ever before. I want a belly that gurgles with contentment when I fold my palms over it, I want to feel my chin sink into the cushion of my throat and my breasts wobble as I walk. I want a life of simple satisfactions. I want (vain hope!) never to know hunger again.

“But we live in a world of laws,” I said to my poor prisoner, “a world of the second-best. There is nothing we can do about that. We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.”

“When some men suffer unjustly,” I said to myself, “it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”

“I don’t want to think about the barbarians,” she says. “Life is too short to spend worrying about the future.”

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.