Three Stories by J. M. Coetzee

I

A HOUSE IN SPAIN
    AS HE GETS OLDER he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about
slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. “We fell in love with
the house,” friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house
cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects,
what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care.
People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars.
    He would like to dismiss it, this neologism, this novelty, but he cannot. What if
something is being revealed to him, some shift in the way people feel? What if the
soul, which he had thought was made of timeless substance, is not timeless after
all, but is in the process of growing lighter, less serious, accommodating itself
to the times? What if falling in love with objects is no oddity any longer, for the
soul—child’s play, in fact? What if people around him do indeed feel, with the aid
of their new, updated souls, in respect of real estate, the ache that he associates
with falling in love? What, furthermore, if his own crabbiness expresses not what
he tells himself it does—an old-fashioned fastidiousness about language—but on the
contrary (he looks the idea squarely in the face) envy, the envy of a man grown too
old, too rigid, to ever fall in love again?
    The story of his own involvements with fixed property is easily told. In his lifetime
he has owned, serially, two houses and an apartment, plus, for a while, in parallel,
a seaside cottage. In all that history he can recollect nothing, by a long chalk,
that he would grace with the name of love. In fact he can recollect little feeling
at all, either when he took possession or when he moved out. Once he had put a house
behind him he became quite incurious about its fate. More than incurious: he wanted
never to see it again. Functional from beginning to end, his understanding of the
ownership relation. Nothing like love, nothing like marriage.
    He thinks about the women in his life, about his two marriages in particular. What does he still bear with him, within him, of those women, those wives? Tangles of
emotion, for the most part: regret and sorrow pierced through with flashes of a feeling
harder to pin down that may have something to do with shame but may equally have
something to do with desire not yet dead.
    Questions of love and ownership preoccupy him, and there is a reason for that. A
year ago he bought property abroad: in Spain, in Catalonia, on another continent.
Property in Spain is not expensive, not off the coastline in Spain’s decaying villages.
Foreigners by the thousand, Europeans for the most part, but from elsewhere too,
have acquired homes of a kind there, pieds-à-terre . Of whom he is now one.
    In his case the move has its practical side. He makes his living as a writer; and
in this day and age a writer can live anywhere, linked electronically to agents and
editors as smoothly from a small village as from a city. Since his youth he has had
a fondness for Spain, the Spain of taciturn pride and old formalities. (Does he love
Spain? At least love of a country, a people, a way of life, is not some newfangled
notion.) If he is going to spend more and more of his time in Spain, it makes sense
to have a place he can call his own, a home where the linen and the kitchenware are
familiar and he doesn’t have to clean up other people’s messes.
    Of course one does not need to own Spanish property to spend time in Spain. One can
work perfectly well out of rented accommodation, even out of hotels. Hotels might
seem the expensive option, but not when one has done the arithmetic, added up all
the incidentals. Hotels (thoughts of love keep coming back) are like passing affairs.
One departs, parts company, and that is the end of it.
    Buying a house may not make economic sense, but it makes a deeper kind of sense.
He is in his fifties: if