Coetzee Excerpts

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Andrew Dinn quotes from Coetzee's _Dusklands_ - here is one from 
_In the Heart of the Country_ (32) which evokes several TRP themes, too.

64.       Every sxth day, when our cycles coincide, his cycle of two 
days, my cycle of three, we are driven to the intimacy of relieving 
our bowels in the bucket-latrine behind the fig-trees in the maladour 
of the other's fresh faeces, either he in my stench or I in his. 
Sliding aside the wooden lid I straddle his hellish gust, bloody, 
feral, the kind that flies love best, flecked, I am sure, with 
undigested flesh barely mulled over before pushed through. Whereas my 
own (and here I think of him with his trousers about his knees, screwing 
his nose as high as he can while the blowflies buzz furiously in the 
black space below him) is dark, olive with bile, hard-packed, kept in 
too long, old, tired. We heave and strain, wipe ourselves in our 
different ways with squares of store-bought toilet paper, mark of 
gentility, recompose our clothing, and return to the great outdoors. 
Then it becomes Hendrik's charge to inspect the bucket and, if it 
prove not to be empty, to empty in a hole dug far away from the 
house, and wash it out, and return it to its place. Where exactly the 
bucket is emptied I do not know; but somewhere on the farm there is a 
pit where, looped in each other's coils, the father's red snake and 
the daughter's black embrace and sleep and dissolve.

hg
hag at iafrica.com