Review: Joy Williams on J. M. Coetzee (Part Two)
[Read Part One of this post here]
Simón and the newly recruited “mother” Inés take David with the dog Bolivar to another town, Estrella, where they intend to begin anew, to start a new life. It is in Estrella that David becomes a student at señor Arroyo’s Academy, which is “devoted to the training of the soul through music and dance.” This training of the soul also involves the appreciation and invocation of the sacred numbers, which live in the heavens among the stars and are not the “ant” numbers of addition and subtraction, of buying and selling, lesser numbers which are mere simulacra. David thrives here, his dances, “calling down the true numbers,” are profound, “pure light,” but his transcendent studies are shattered by the violent death of Ana Magdalena, strangled by the grotesque Dmitri who astoundingly, inexplicably, has long been her lover. The Academy is shuttered, and Dmitri is tried before one of Coetzee’s hyper-rational absurdist courts where one of the judges reflects:
You present yourself as being without a conscience. My colleagues and I have every reason to send you away to the salt mines and close the book on you. On the other hand, this is your first transgression. You have been a good worker. You treated the deceased with respect until the day you turned on her …
and Dmitri is sentenced to an institution for the criminally insane where he is rather quickly “rehabilitated.” He reappears to become a haunt and a taunt to Simón and a friend and confidant to David.
David’s final dance with señor Arroyo accompanying him on flute is unanticipated and extraordinary. He dances the number Seven, a noble number, a most difficult number. Simón thinks:
The being who dances before them is neither a child nor a man, boy nor girl, he would even say neither body nor spirit … [he] floats through the steps with such fluid grace that time stands still.
Then:
the flute falls silent. With chest heaving slightly, the boy faces Arroyo. “Do you want me to dance Eleven?”
“Not now,” says Arroyo abstractedly.
