Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Drama, South Africa, England/Great Britain, Family & Relationships, 1960s
ISBN: 9780099433620
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2002-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

YEARS AGO, WHEN he was still a child in a family trying its best to be normal, his parents used to go to Saturday night dances. He would watch while they made their preparations; if he stayed up late enough, he could interrogate his mother afterwards. But what actually went on in the ballroom of the Masonic Hotel in the town of Worcester he never got to see: what kind of dances his parents danced, whether they pretended to gaze into each other's eyes while they did it, whether they danced only with each other or whether, as in American films, a stranger was allowed to put a hand on the woman's shoulder and take her away from her partner, so that the partner would have to find another partner for himself or else stand in a corner smoking a cigarette and sulking.

Why people who were already married should go to the trouble of dressing up and going to a hotel to dance when they could have done it just as well in the living room, to music on the radio, he found hard to understand. But to his mother Saturday nights at the Masonic Hotel were apparently important, as important as being free to ride a horse or, when no horse was to be had, a bicycle. Dancing and horseriding stood for the life that had been hers before she married, before, in her version of her life-story, she became a prisoner ('I will not be a prisoner in this house!').

Her adamancy got her nowhere. Whoever it was from his father's office who had given them lifts to the Saturday night dances moved house or stopped going. The shiny blue dress with its silver pin, the white gloves, the funny little hat that sat on the side of the head, vanished into closets and drawers, and that was that.

As for himself, he was glad the dancing had come to an end, though he did not say so. He did not like his mother to go out, did not like the abstracted air that came over her the next day. In dancing itself he saw no sense anyway. Films that promised to have dancing in them he avoided, put off by the goofy, sentimental look that people got on their faces.

'Dancing is good exercise,' insisted his mother. 'It teaches you rhythm and balance.' He was not persuaded. If people needed exercise, they could do calisthenics or swing barbells or run around the block.

In the years that have passed since he left Worcester behind he has not changed his mind about dancing. When as a university student he found it too much of an embarrassment to go to parties and not know how to dance, he enrolled for a package of lessons at a dance school, paying for them out of his own pocket: quickstep, waltz, twist, cha-cha. It did not work: within months he had forgotten everything, in an act of willed forgetting. Why that happened he knows perfectly well. Never for a moment, even during the lessons, was he really giving himself to the dance.

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