We stayed in Sarawak, a small town in Borneo, for forty-two days before returning to New York. We needed the time to arrange for Sandy to be vaccinated in an orangutan rescue center that worked in association with a center in Ohio. I insisted on taking her to the United States because I’d be able to visit her there several times a year, to assure her complete recovery and eventual return to the jungle where she’d been born, though after so many years of confinement, that possibility seemed remote. A return to her natural habitat would be tricky. Though Sandy was still young, nobody could be sure she’d recover enough to be free again. The physical wounds would scar over, but men had humiliated her, they’d sown the seed of slavery in her, which takes root quickly, grows strong and deep and is difficult to weed out. Most slaves never stop being slaves even once they are free.
I met Brigitte in the rescue center. My interest in non-normative sexualities continued long after I’d come to terms with my own. It was a passive kind of interest, though. I mean, I did not seek out sexual minorities, but my wounds had given me a kind of radar that allowed me to intuit things without necessarily looking for them. Things that might go unnoticed by others were obvious to me. Watching Brigitte interact with the orangutans, I immediately picked up on something that few others would have noticed. I should mention there were other female orangutans like Sandy who’d been used as prostitutes by the workers from the palm oil plantations, and also males who were exploited for boxing. The laws of the wild had been twisted in these false combats so that the orangutan’s thumping, which was meant to earn the respect of the weaker ones in their natural habitat, was emptied of meaning and had nothing to do with normal animal behavior, devolving instead into a perverse form of entertainment for humans.
So after I had been introduced to Brigitte and watched her work for a while, I could tell by the way she moved—using a kind of passive scrutiny and intuition—that she felt a particular compassion for the orangutans who had been mutilated in some way. Yes, it was compassion, but there was also something else: pleasure. Brigitte suffered a very uncommon sexual deviation called paraphilia, and I use this term not because I accept the idea of sexual deviancy, but in order to make myself understood. Specifically, she was an acrotomophiliac, someone who gets aroused by amputations. This doesn’t necessarily mean she had or ever wanted to have sexual relations with orangutans. But that’s not the point. She wasn’t, she never would, abuse her position as a caretaker to satisfy a sexual impulse. She shared the information with me because I didn’t hide that I had noticed it, and when these things are dealt with in a natural way, it’s usually a relief for the person who is suffering in silence. Brigitte forced me to reflect on a comment she made about how most pedophiles never actually touch a single child. According to Brigitte, pedophilia, whether you consider it a sickness or not, isn’t something you can really call into question because it unquestionably exists, and in most cases the feeling itself cannot be controlled. What the pedophile can control, though, is acting on that impulse. I thought about how hellish it must be to live that way, in a permanent state of strife with yourself, and it seemed to me like a commendable sacrifice.
Brigitte intuited that she could confide in me. Not long ago, one of those experts in creating labels in the form of Greek words told me that my happiness over the bomb having done a number on my genitals means that I belong to a group of abnormal or psychopathic people. The specialists obviously enjoy classifying people and naming their conditions, creating taxonomies. According to the specialist, I suffered from what is known as apotemnophilia, or body integrity identity disorder. People who suffer from BIID feel incomplete, as if some part of their body were missing, even though they are complete. And the only way to achieve the idealized notion of themselves is by amputating one or more of their limbs. I find it strange that anyone would think that wanting a limb that didn’t belong to me, a surfeit limb, removed means I have a disease. I explained all of this to Brigitte. She said her desire to mutilate herself was the result of a traumatic experience. A wartime love affair. She had been a soldier before working in the reserve, and told me her story.
She had been called up for duty, and could hardly remember when she’d signed up enthusiastically because she’d believed in peace, though she couldn’t remember ever believing in war either. There she was, dressed in the uniform assigned to her, with all those gadgets. A stockpile of arms. More than anything else, she insisted, there were so many arms, but not to defend the homeland, which she could hardly remember anyway, but to defend her head and her heart. She took off running to provide cover for a companion, with all the steel she was carrying. This was her mission. To protect him. He was more important than she was, they said. More important for the war. More important for peace. “And if you feel the fear of battle”—she recalled their warning them before the soldiers headed out—“remember this: you’re already dead.” Death is the military’s home remedy against fear. “We were already dead,” Brigitte said. So she ran crushed by the weight, sweat clouding her vision, never stopping to wonder if the dead could sweat or see, but knowing the person she was covering did. His life before hers. And so over the weeks and months spent protecting him, she fell madly in love with him. So Brigitte fell into the traps set for him on several occasions; he was more valuable than she was for war, for peace. One day she fell into a deep hole full of bayonets. Who knows how she survived that one, she said. Maybe it was for love. Or maybe it was because, as they had said, she wasn’t alive anymore. She preferred to believe it was for love. She lost two fingers. (And when she said that, I glanced at Brigitte’s two hands, intact, no wounds or mutilations: “The loss happened inside me,” she said, and continued her story.)
She looked up from the hole, and for the first time there he was, holding out his hand to her. He dressed the two holes that had been her fingers. Walking tall is important, she said, so she straightened up and cleaned her firearms as best she could, polishing the metal, everything that could be shined with a little grease and some tender loving care. She wondered if he liked her. In the midst of the horror of war, she was an attractive, well-equipped soldier if ever there was one. “I looked damn good in my silver jacket,” she said. So they continued on. When they finally reached the trenches she waited, protecting him until the sandbags and rocks took over for her. During one of these exercises, a hand grenade left her with half an arm. And when I stared perplexed at Brigitte’s two good arms, she responded again: “Loss is on the inside.” That was the last time I interrupted her story, understanding that Brigitte would have forfeited every one of her limbs, bled to death, but she used allegory, as I did, to protect herself against bleeding words that could never explain her feelings.
She went on with her story. He cured her again. She survived again, and who knew why? Must be for love. Or perhaps she wasn’t alive anymore, like they said. But she believed it was love. She walked tall again and smiled at him. The sun reflected her silver jacket. She was an attractive, well-equipped soldier if ever there was one. And they marched on. He followed behind her on the minefields, walking in her footsteps. They crossed many fields, and in one of the last ones, Brigitte lost her leg and half of the other one (allegory, I thought, and let her continue on with her story). Again, he tended to her. Since there wasn’t much farther to go and she had enough body left to continue covering him, she continued onward. She crawled across the few meters separating them from the ramshackle house where their comrades would eventually find them.
“It’s important to stand tall,” he said, but when they arrived, she couldn’t stand on her own. He helped her, propped her against the wall that was also leaning over. Her silver jacket was brown now, sullied with mud and dust. It hurt her to see it, she said. Waiting for relief, she rolled a bandage in the three fingers she had left and cleaned the jacket till it was gleaming again, and all that was metal gleamed, 90 percent of her body. She still had her face, and abundant chestnut hair under her helmet, an arm and half of the other one, a
little bit of leg, and everything was covered in her silvery jacket. Not too bad, and all of it handsome. She smiled and gleamed for three days, at the end of which time, the helicopter arrived. This time she allowed him to go first, since the hands extended were friendly ones. Tied to a harness, she watched him ascend and disappear safely through the door of the mechanical dragonfly. This was the only time she allowed him in front of her, because he was more important than she was, for war and for peace. For her. When it was her turn, the enemy forces broke the copper cable that was pulling her up. She fell, but not more than a few meters. She wasn’t hurt. She moved around, trying to catch an angle for the sun to reflect her jacket again, like a mirror, to bid him farewell. It took a lot of effort for her to create the reflection, which she controlled with her own movements, the little circle of light sliding like a restless little animal over the skin of the helicopter. Seeing it move into the distance, she asked herself if he, her love, had even noticed the gleam (her goodbye) from the window. She wondered if she would become the memory of a flash or of an invisible soldier.
When she finished her story, Brigitte said that though her body was intact when the war ended, those days spent protecting her soldier—real, faithful, absolute protection—were like a process of dismembering. She has felt a strong attraction toward people who have had limbs amputated, though she couldn’t say whether this attraction was connected to the soldier, whom she never saw again, or the things she sacrificed while she was protecting him. I hugged her when she finished, and suddenly felt more complete in our embrace.
* * *
It was a girl. I mean in the fourth month of my pregnancy I knew it was a girl. Not because I had a sonogram, as they do today to ascertain a baby’s gender—still a new technique at that time—or because Jim’s offspring, whom I was obsessed with finding, was a girl. I knew because of my belly’s shape. You, sir, like so many other people, may deny my pregnancy; you may think I’m out of my mind or that I’m writing this under the effect of some medication. A woman born with a faulty womb, with a non-reproductive system that is primarily masculine, a dysfunctional penis, testicles—there’s no way a woman like that can get pregnant. Fine. I can’t deny this biological impossibility, but for now you’ll just have to believe me if you want this story to make any sense. Just consider it a psychological pregnancy: I wanted to be a mother so badly that my belly and breasts engorged, similar to what happens to dogs. So as I said, I knew the sex of my baby in the fourth month, the way grandmothers used to: by the spread of my still-tiny belly, which was filling in more along my waist in contrast with how boys are carried, according to old wives’ tales, showing a more pointy belly in front, making the pregnant woman look further along than she is, especially when seen from the side. I liked to imagine my daughter that way, growing modestly and taking shape, sticking closer to my ribs instead of outward, more mine than anyone else’s, more private than public. I could truly feel her, and since I wasn’t crazy, I didn’t say a word to Jim. What was happening inside me wasn’t connected to the lines of communication that allow us to share things with our significant other, so I knew that trying to offer an explanation would be futile.
We were back in New York, and so physically and morally exhausted that it took us a few months to recuperate. We made a promise to each other that we would give ourselves time to recover, until we got our strength back. Jim had his military pension. It wasn’t much, but we could live modestly, and in order to afford the trips, we scouted out odd jobs that gave us sporadic income without a great amount of effort, work we enjoyed, and a needed stimulation because the trips often evoked feelings of frustration, sorrow, and discouragement. So we obliged ourselves to use these times of rest in New York to bounce back and do what we had to during these brief interludes: forget the past, stop thinking about the future, and live in the present, jettisoning bad thoughts. At least that’s what we tried to do, usually pretty successfully.
I never realized that each month during the gestation period of my baby had a corresponding cycle of months or years in my own life. Time passed more slowly for my baby girl than it did for my body. While I thought I was the one in charge of her on earth, in fact she was journeying through space, traveling more or less at the speed of light. For her, it was a short trip; for me, it was a protracted one, allowing me time to prepare for whatever the future had in store. So sometimes I imagined my little girl that way, in space, connected to me by way of a long, invisible umbilical cord by which she fed me, she sustained me.
These months that made up my fourth month of pregnancy coincided with a letter from S announcing a visit, and I couldn’t have imagined a better time. She stayed for five weeks. Her business had been open for a while now, always operating from underground. She hadn’t yet revealed the template for her genitalia, but she seemed content, full of hope and very beautiful. I discarded the idea of telling S about my pregnancy. I think she would have gone along with me, she would have seen it, but I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I was experiencing a process of metamorphosis and regarded it with an overwhelming feeling of estrangement. My body’s transformation was an ultimate act of freedom, the most significant I’d ever allowed myself because it originated in desire. It astonished me, after spending so much money on plastic surgery that this gratuitous development I imagined was taking place inside me, the life I wanted to germinate, without me or anyone else intervening in how it took shape. I didn’t have the language for it. I liked to think that for once in my life it wasn’t other people who left me speechless, but instead a piece of myself, that breathed only because I did, that grew only because I nourished myself. It was my greatest love, and yet at times I also felt the need to protect myself from that part of me, desire become pregnancy that only I could distinguish, and that kept my tongue in check, which I needed in order to share the news with S.
Though I still lacked the necessary tools to describe my transformation to S, I did let her in on another project, thinking she would be the best companion to accompany me to some classes I had started taking several years before. I had the idea when I underwent breast augmentation, which in my case required a full implant. During the consultation process I met other women who were undergoing mammoplasty. Generally, they had to wait longer than I did, endure more tests, because most of them were cancer survivors who had undergone mastectomies. I could feel their disapproval when they found out I was having the same procedure as they were, but to offset the more visible features of my sexuality. The women considered the right to reconstruct a once-existing breast trumped the right to choose having breasts you had lacked from birth. Though I could understand their way of thinking, I found it completely pedestrian. I knew it wasn’t worth discussing with them, but one day I came up with an idea that could ease the discomfort of the months between having their breasts amputated and the reconstructive surgery. I tried it as a pilot project, and it worked. Before sharing the idea, I ask you to keep one thing in mind—which, I think, proved its usefulness—that the women involved had suffered a great loss of self-esteem. Even today, the scars from a mastectomy are devastating, but they were much worse then. These women had never been exposed to images of these kinds of scars before—not in photos, advertisements, or campaigns against cancer—so the first time they ever saw these kinds of scars was the day they finally removed the bandages in front of the mirror after having tried a few times earlier without being able to, precisely to avoid seeing that hideous naught outlined by a gash. The sight was always such a shock that it took a long time to dare look at themselves again, let alone allow anyone else to.
S carefully listened to the project I had developed a few years earlier. I told her how damaging these types of procedures were for a person’s self-esteem and showed her the practical applications of my plan. I told her to have a seat while I went to look for something. I came back with an oval mass of silicone they’d given me in the hospital and explained that this was one of the temporary prostheses that were worn in t
he bra during the waiting period before the procedure. Thanks to the prosthesis, nobody could tell that a clothed woman was lacking a breast. It was such a relief that many women even slept with the prosthesis, even showered wearing a bra, so as not to have to see the amputated area even for a second. But I was interested in finding a way to make these women feel comfortable with their bodies again. How could I convince them that after surviving cancer, they weren’t any worse off than healthy women with two breasts? Breasts—I used to tell them—end up sagging. Some women think their breasts are too small; others wish they were not so big. I tried to defend what I still think is true, what in fact I can prove after a few years: the body is not a static thing; it changes, it can be transformed. I didn’t see any reason why the burdens of age or saggy breasts were any easier to accept than the effects of cancer. Old age, when it comes down to it, is also an illness. A healthy woman should accept her body with or without scars. I used myself as an example. I was born with a gender that my parents negated. This was a problem because my body wasn’t my body, but someone else’s that others had chosen for me.
Once I was finished explaining to S the nature of the silicone I held in my hands, I put on some dance music, turned the volume up, and started playing with the prosthesis as if it were a piece of equipment used in rhythmic gymnastics. I’ll admit I’ve never been a great dancer, but my body’s flexibility and years of yoga and qigong compensated for my lack of proper dance training. I lay on my back, arched my body to form a circle, and let the silicone roll down to my neck. For a second I asked myself if my bodily transformation, being something in my head, was visible only to me or if S could see the little swelling of my midriff, but it was the effect of the hormones I’d been taking for years, which at times would make certain areas traditionally associated with fertility swell, like my hips, abdomen, and breasts. Within limits, chemistry helped me mimic a woman’s natural cycles. The hormones turned me from a flat piece of limestone into the Venus of Willendorf, a little less full-bodied perhaps, but still with some nice curves. I imagined myself, a fossil become flesh, in some museum somewhere generations into the future, an exemplary contour of the twentieth century, being explained in the voice of some android guide: “This is H, the Hormone-Fed Venus of Hiroshima. Found by X at Site X. Material: organic.” But as I was saying, that day I was with S, dancing to the music with the prosthesis, I was tossing it up in the air and grabbing it with my feet. S was amazed as she watched me move, quick and agile as a cat, focused on that apparatus meant to be hugging my torso but instead making it fly and then slither down different parts of my body. The prosthesis rolled across my belly button, my forehead, my groin, like a breast moving around free of any divine decision or doctor who fixed it one single place. And that’s how the idea came about for dance classes designed for women convalescing from a mastectomy. The prosthesis became a means for strengthening their backs, arms, and glutes. If later they chose to attach it to their chests, then fine, but women needed to raise their self-esteem, and not with a motionless plastic ball but by improving their bodies in ways we are all capable of doing. When I saw that project through for the first time, I was proud to hear some of the patients say they were even more comfortable with their bodies than before the operation. They felt healthier, stronger, more in control of their movements, and as a result, a whole lot sexier.
The Story of H Page 12
