`So you are the professor,' he says. 'Professor David. Melanie has told me about you.'
‘Indeed. And what has she told you?'
`That you fuck her.'
There is a long silence. So, he thinks: the chickens come home to roost. I should have guessed it: a girl like that would not come unencumbered.
`Who are you?' he says.
The visitor ignores his question. 'You think you're smart,' he continues. 'A real ladies' man. You think you will still look so smart when your wife hears what you are up to?'
`That's enough. What do you want?'
`Don't you tell me what's enough.' The words come faster now, in a patter of menace. 'And don't think you can just walk into people's lives and walk out again when it suits you.' Light dances on his black eyeballs. He leans forward, sweeps right and left with his hands. The papers on the desk go flying. He rises. 'That's enough! It's time for you to leave!'
‘It's time for you to leave!' the boy repeats, mimicking him.
‘OK.' He gets up, saunters to the door. 'Goodbye, Professor Chips! But just wait and see!' Then he is gone. A bravo, he thinks. She is mixed up with a bravo and now I am mixed up with her bravo too! His stomach churns.
Though he stays up late into the night, waiting for her, Melanie does not come. Instead, his car, parked in the street, is vandalized. The tyres are deflated, glue is injected into the doorlocks, newspaper is pasted over the windscreen, the paintwork is scratched. The locks have to be replaced; the bill comes to six hundred rand.
‘Any idea who did it?' asks the locksmith.
`None at all,' he replies curtly.
After this coup de main Melanie keeps her distance. He is not surprised: if he has been shamed, she is shamed too. But on Monday she reappears in class; and beside her, leaning back in his seat, hands in pockets, with an air of cocky ease, is the boy in black, the boyfriend.
Usually there is a buzz of talk from the students. Today there is a hush. Though he cannot believe they know what is afoot, they are clearly waiting to see what he will do about the intruder. What will he do indeed? What happened to his car was evidently not enough. Evidently there are more instalments to come. What can he do? He must grit his teeth and pay, what else?
`We continue with Byron,' he says, plunging into his notes. 'As we saw last week, notoriety and scandal affected not only Byron's life but the way in which his poems were received by the public. Byron the man found himself conflated with his own poetic creations - with Harold, Manfred, even Don Juan.'
Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise. He steals a glance at Melanie. Usually she is a busy writer.
Today, looking thin and exhausted, she sits huddled over her book. Despite himself, his heart goes out to her. Poor little bird, he thinks, whom I have held against my breast!
He has told them to read 'Lara'. His notes deal with 'Lara'. There is no way in which he can evade the poem. He reads aloud:
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped.
`Who will gloss these lines for me? Who is this 'erring spirit'? Why does he call himself 'a thing'? From what world does he come?'
He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday. So he does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark. But today he is met with silence, a dogged silence that organizes itself palpably around the stranger in their midst. They will not speak, they will not play his game, as long as a stranger is there to listen and judge and mock.
`Lucifer,' he says. 'The angel hurled out of heaven. Of how angels live we know little, but we can assume they do not require oxygen. At home Lucifer, the dark angel, does not need to breathe. All of a sudden he finds himself cast out into this strange 'breathing world' of ours. 'Erring': a being who chooses his own path, who lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself. Let us read further.'
The boy has not looked down once at the text. Instead, with a little smile on his lips, a smile in which there is, just possibly, a touch of bemusement, he takes in his words.
He could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would in tempting time
Mislead his spirit equally to crime.
