Lacuna Read online

  Lydia Bascombe’s voice is soothing now that she is back in the driver’s seat. Her patience is infinite. “Your capacity for empathy in the midst of your own pain is laudable.”

  I laugh. It comes out as a sob. “But that’s it. I’m not empathetic. Every time I think about those other women, my brain tells me they’re not really like me. They don’t feel as deeply as I do. I’m more sensitive than they are. They’re tougher, shallower. I mean, how can they possibly feel things as acutely as my precious white self? They’re just living the life they’re used to. Their trauma can’t compare to mine.”

  L. Bascombe’s eyes are shifty, darting from side to side. I have made her uncomfortable. She swallows—a dry, clicking sound audible to both of us.

  “How do you feel when it’s a white woman who has been attacked?”

  “The same. I find reasons why it wasn’t as bad for her. She is probably not as bright as I am. Not as sensitive. She’s more of a coper. She’ll get over it.” I draw a breath that shakes so much it sounds like three separate breaths. “There can’t be that much pain in the world. It can’t all be equal to mine. I can’t stand it if it is.”

  She lets out her own breath in a thin stream. Her world has righted itself. I’m not racist after all—just traumatised.

  “Total empathy is impossible to sustain. You must realise that. We cannot feel all the pain in the world all the time without going mad. It’s a natural defence mechanism to find reasons for believing that someone else’s pain is not as bad as ours. This is something we are trained as psychologists to recognise in ourselves.”

  “How do you cope?” I wail. “You specialise in counselling victims of sexual violence. How do you listen to these stories day in and day out without going crazy?”

  “We’re talking about you and your pain.Why do you think you feel the need to deflect the focus onto me?”

  And we’re back on familiar ground again. The classic shrink bait-and-switch.

  Monday, 10.45, 17 May

  Patient: Lucy Lurie

  Diagnosis: bipolar, depression, schizoid delusions, borderline personality disorder, paranoia

  Referred by: Dr. J. Coetzee

  The patient is a twenty-eight-year-old well-nourished woman. She presents with a history of uncontrollable outbursts and delusions. She is trained as an academic and was working in this capacity until recently. She is not working at present.

  She persists in her conviction that she was raped two years ago by a group of men who broke into her father’s farmhouse where she was visiting for dinner. This seems to be loosely based on the celebrated novel Disgrace by John Coetzee.

  Ms. Lurie identifies with the character “Lucy” in the novel and has become convinced that Coetzee based his book on her experiences. Ms. Lurie and John Coetzee worked in the same department at the University of Constantia for a time, and her fixation on him seems to have begun while they were still colleagues.

  When Coetzee wrote his book, which instantly became a massive international success, Ms. Lurie was overcome by jealousy. She has repeatedly stated that she had novelistic ambitions herself.

  There is evidence to suggest that Coetzee based the character of “Lucy” loosely on Ms. Lurie. Aside from sharing the same name, they are of a similar age and physical description. Coetzee appears to have drawn some of the details of his character’s appearance and mannerisms from his observation of Ms. Lurie.

  These few synchronicities persuaded Ms. Lurie that she suffered the same traumatic experience as Coetzee’s character. This morbid eliding of truth and fiction is one of the most common symptoms of the true paranoid delusional personality.

  We have here a classic case of an impressionable young woman who, achieving mediocre results in her own career, fixates on a powerful older man, and persuades herself that he returns her interest. Ms. Lurie has gone so far as to insert herself into the fictional world of Coetzee’s brilliant novel in an effort to occupy the same psychological space as her idol. But, as is also typical in these cases, her love for Coetzee turned sour and may now more accurately be described as obsessive loathing.

  A course of strong anti-hallucinogenic medication will be prescribed for this patient, along with behavioural rehabilitation. Serious consideration should be given to electroconvulsive therapy for its well-known calmative effects. I await your further instructions.

  Kind regards,

  Lydia Bascombe

  That’s not real.

  I wrote it.

  I am untrustworthy. But I’m the only access you have to this story. My lens is the only one through which you are permitted to peek. Does that make you feel unsafe?

  I bet you’d prefer a calm, authoritative, third-person narrator to set the facts out for you. Neutrality is a man’s job, after all. One needs an implied male narrator to cut through the hysteria of the feminine perspective and bring balance to the story. The testimony of women is not to be trusted. They are like children in that regard. And when you bring sexual assault into the mix—well, it makes the uncertainty worse.

  Women regularly accuse men of rapes that never happened. It’s a well-known fact. We used to have a law that took this into account. It was called the “cautionary rule.” It didn’t apply only in South Africa, although we were among the last countries to get rid of it. Most Common Law countries had some version of it. The idea was that judges and juries were required to take into account the fact that sexual complainants were inherently unreliable witnesses. This was particularly so where there were no corroborating witnesses to support the allegation.

  And that’s the pesky thing about sexual assault, isn’t it? There often are no other witnesses besides the victim and the perpetrator. Defenders of the cautionary rule (and there were many) used to say that it wasn’t specifically targeted at women. It applied to children, too. Children who claimed to have been sexually assaulted were assumed to be inherently untruthful. Female complainants could take comfort from the fact that the law regarded them in the same light as children when it came to their reliability and veracity.

  South Africa got rid of the cautionary rule in 1998. Courts are no longer allowed to work from the presumption that sexual complainants are lying, but the legacy of that presumption lingers. “To cry rape” is a phrase that still exists in our lexicon. We feel automatic sympathy for the legions of men falsely accused of rape by their wives, girlfriends, colleagues, and random women on the street.

  The #MeToo movement has caused this to run out of control. How are men expected to defend themselves when a single woman’s testimony is enough to put them in jail? It is terrible the way all the world’s legal and political institutions are skewed in favour of women.

  Enough of that.

  The thing is—I don’t feel believed. Even with all the medical evidence supporting my claim: the photos of my vaginal tearing, the bruises on my thighs, the cervical trauma, the semen, the bites and contusions and saliva all over my body—I don’t feel believed. I am the unreliable witness. I am the inherently untruthful complainant.

  It’s like quantum theory. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it scream? If a woman gets raped in a farmhouse and nobody is there to witness it, did it happen?

  My father witnessed it, but he doesn’t count because he is my father.

  Sometimes I see such scepticism in my therapist’s eyes that I know she doubts my story. Yes, she has read the medical reports. Yes, she followed the media when the story was all over the news. Yes, she knew that Coetzee based his book on my experience. She had heard of me before I was ever referred to her.

  But I was not what she expected. Sometimes I disgust her. Sometimes I irritate her. Sometimes I can see the words “pull yourself together” trembling on her lips.

  And so, I write down my worst fears. My worst fear is not that I will be raped again one night when I am alone in my
flat. My worst fear is that I will not be believed.

  CHAPTER 3

  My friend Moira is a star-fucker. A literary star-fucker. She would walk past Idris Elba in the street without a second glance, but she would follow Jonathan Franzen to the ends of the earth.

  Starfucker (Urban Dictionary)

  A person who is obsessed with and seeks out personal interaction with celebrities. The desired interaction is often, but not necessarily, sexual in nature.

  I don’t like the compound word “starfucker” so I’m keeping it separate as “star-fucker,” but the meaning is the same. Moira has always been in awe of John Coetzee. He was the official Great Man of Letters at the University of Constantia English Department, even before he produced any letters worth noting. After the book appeared and the literary plaudits poured in, her awe changed to worship.

  It took little effort, therefore, to persuade her to accompany me to his house in the Bo-Kaap. Moira is hard at work on a Map of the Stars, showing where the most famous authors in Cape Town live. Coetzee’s house is already on her radar. Number 15, Companie Street, Bo-Kaap.

  Not for Coetzee the bright, Neapolitan-ice-cream colours of many Bo-Kaap houses. Neither cerulean blue nor fuschia pink have the power to tempt him. His house remains resolutely white—a lily among the colour-burst of roses.

  “He bought the house in 1982, the year he got tenure,” says Moira as I park my car pointing nose-first down Signal Hill and pull the handbrake up as far as it will go. We clamber out. I nod at a car guard who promises to keep an eye on my vehicle for me.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “The date he got tenure is on the university website, and the date he bought the house is a matter of public record. I put two and two together and figured that the financial stability of getting tenure enabled him to get a bond to buy the house. It must have been a very different place back then.”

  “You mean when the original residents could still afford to live here?”

  “Well, yes. It was an odd choice for a white man during the height of apartheid. This place was basically a Cape Malay neighbourhood. I wonder how he was even allowed to buy property here.”

  “He was a white man.White men were allowed to do whatever the fuck they liked under apartheid.”

  “True. Mind you, he must be laughing all the way to the bank now. Property up here costs a bomb these days.”

  Coetzee’s house shows no sign of the gentrification that has romped unchecked through the rest of the Bo-Kaap. Flyblown net curtains hang in the windows. The paint is weathered and dirty. Only the metal bars crisscrossing each windowpane and the old-fashioned security gate at the front door bear witness to Coetzee’s days as the only white resident in the neighbourhood.

  “Isn’t it interesting that he bought a house here decades before it became fashionable to do so?” Moira clasps her hands. “Doesn’t that make you feel kindlier towards him?”

  I shrug. In the narrative looping through my head, Coetzee was a slumlord. He bought up dozens of these little houses and rented them out to poor families at punitive rates.

  “Please, professor,” a mother in rags begged him. “My children are dying of cold. Please fix the broken windows and the holes in the door. The rain comes right into the house.”

  “Begone, woman. And don’t darken my doorstep again.”

  “So, what do you want to do? Shall we ring the bell?”

  I’m not sure what I want to do. I want to confront Coetzee. I want to tell him that I’m nobody’s lacuna, and that I won’t be erased from my own story. But I also don’t want to see him at all, and this is the more likely scenario.

  The car guard has seen us looking at the house and wanders over.

  “Is djulle hier ommie prifessa te visit?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Djulle sal hom nie sien nie, merrem. He duzzin’t answer da doorbell. Not for no one, merrem.”

  “We’ve heard that.”

  “Dja! Ou Prifessa Coetzee. Snaakse ou, daai. Djulle wiet hy’t mos ’n boek geskryf, né?”

  We nod. We know he wrote a book.

  “Dja. Hy’t a boek geskryf en alleranne pryse gewen mos . . . en dit was die laaste sien vannie blikkantien.”

  No. I can’t write this in dialect. I feel like a minstrel dressed in blackface and suspenders. This is an act of piracy, and I can’t participate in it. This man doesn’t exist for my amusement or yours. His language is not “colourful” or “vibrant.” I will not use this as an opportunity to demonstrate my facility as a writer of vernacular. I will tell you what he says in my own words.

  It seems John Coetzee was once a well-known and recognisable member of this community. Then his book became famous and he vanished into thin air (spoorloos in die niet in verdwyn).

  At first the locals thought he had merely become a hermit. He retired from his post at the university and from public life entirely. But he was still seen popping in and out of the local shops. He would buy groceries from the Seven-Eleven and coffee beans from the organic coffee roastery (see Bo-Kaap: gentrification of).

  Then all sightings of him dried up. But the lights came on in his house at night and were switched off during the day. His wheelie bin appeared on the sidewalk on garbage collection days and was whisked back in again as soon as it had been emptied.

  Now even those signs of life have stopped. John Coetzee has well and truly disappeared (soos mis voor die môreson). Rumour has it, the car guard informs us, that he has gone to Australia.

  Moira and I exchange glances. This is one of the wildest and most out-there rumours we have heard. Or that she has heard. Moira, after all, is the one who still works in the English Department—the one who still has a job in academia and is in a position to keep her ear to the ground.

  Hearing this repeated here in the rising sea mist—with lights popping on up and down the road, and the throat-catching smell of coriander seeds heating in a dry pan—gives it credence somehow. This is more than the booming of the departmental jungle drums. This might be true.

  “He’s not here?” I ask. “He is definitely not here?”

  The car guard assures me he is not.

  This emboldens me enough to walk up to the house with the peeling white paint, to insert my fist between the bars of the eighties-style Spanish grille, and to knock twice on the wooden door. There is no answer, so I knock again. Three loud raps this time.

  There.

  I will not be ignored. I have come to state my case. I am nobody’s lacuna.

  A scuffling sound next to me makes me jump like a cartoon character. I scrape my wrist on the rusting metal grille. It is only a pigeon scrabbling about in the dry leaves trapped in the gutter. I turn and hurry down the steps. My heart is beating so hard I can see the sides of my vision throbbing.

  Moira is bent double from laughing.

  * * *

  “Australia.” Moira settles in the passenger seat and fastens her seatbelt. “I wonder if that means the Twitter account is genuine.”

  “Twitter account?”

  “There’s a Twitter account in John Coetzee’s name in which he describes himself as ‘an Australian writer.’ We thought it was fake. It might still be fake. It’s not even verified.”

  “How did John Coetzee go from being a technophobic nobody to someone who has to be verified on Twitter?”

  “He wrote a brilliant book.”

  “I don’t think it was brilliant.”

  “That’s because you aren’t thinking clearly. You should try to be more like fiction-Lucy. She is nicer than you are. Fiction-Lucy would admit that the book is brilliant.”

  * * *

  How can you live in a country your whole life and make no effort to learn any of its local languages? Most Swiss people can speak, or at least understand, both German and French. Most Americans who live close to th
e Mexican border have taken the trouble to learn basic Spanish.

  What does it say about English-speaking South Africans that many of us don’t understand a word of any African local languages apart from hello and goodbye? What kind of arrogance expects an entire country to conform to the language we speak? When we travel overseas, we acquaint ourselves with useful phrases, or use Google Translate to help us manage the language for the few weeks we are there. It is courteous to make an effort to speak the local language, even if your interlocutor switches to English immediately.

  Yet in three hundred and fifty years, we have never bothered to learn any indigenous South African languages.

  These were the thoughts that went through my mind as my assailants argued about whether they had time to rape me. At least, I think that is what they were saying. They were speaking isiXhosa. I had to infer what they were saying from the way they grabbed my breasts and mimed thrusting their hips. I didn’t understand the words. I have never wanted to join a conversation more.

  “No,” I wanted to say. “Please don’t. There is no time. You will be interrupted. Flee now while you have the chance.”

  I did say those things, but in English. Would it have made a difference if I had said them in isiXhosa? Would they have fallen back in wonder and declined to rape this woman who spoke their language? I doubt it. But the helplessness of not knowing what was being said, of being unable to take part in the negotiation, has stayed with me. I dream of a babel of voices around me. The only way I can escape the thing they are planning to do to me is by understanding what they are saying.