Self

by Yann Martel

  Do children look into mirrors? Do they look at themselves, beyond checking that their unruly hair has that degree of tidiness demanded by a parent? I didn't. Of what interest was a mirror to me? It reflected me, a child -- so what? I was not in the least bit self-conscious. The world was far too vast a playground to waste any time looking at part of it reflected, except perhaps to make funny faces, two fingers pulling down the lower eyelids, one pushing up the nose.

  Childhood, like wisdom, is an emotion. Feelings are what register deeply of one's early years. What the eye catches, the visual aspects of these feelings, is secondary. So it is that I have no memories of mirrors, no memories of clothes, of skin, of limbs, of body, of my own physical self as a child. As if, paradoxically, I were then nothing but a huge eager eye, an emotional eye, looking out, always looking out, unaware of itself.

  It would be impossible to talk of my childhood without mentioning television (religion never played an important role in my life and here, early on, is as good a spot as any to deal with it. I first met the notion of God in a song, a comptine, my parents sang to me. It went:

  Il etait un petit navire There was once a little ship

  Qui n'avait jamais navigue That had never sailed to sea

  Ohe ohe! Ahoy ahoy!

  Il entreprit un long voyage It set sail on a long trip

  Sur la mer Mediterranee On the Mediterranean Sea

  Ahoy ahoy! Ohe ohe!

  Au bout de cinq a six semaines After five or six long weeks

  Les vivres vinrent a manquer There was no food left at all

  Ohe ohe! Ahoy ahoy!

  On tira a la courte paille They decided to draw straws

  Pour savoir qui serait mange To see who they would eat

  Ahoy ahoy! Ohe ohe!

  Le sort tomba sur le plus Jeune Fate fell upon the youngest mate

  C'est donc lui qui sera mange It was he that they would eat

  Ohe ohe! Ahoy ahoy!

  O Sainte Mere, O ma patronne Oh Holy Mother, O my patron

  Empeche-les de me manger Stop them from eating me

  Ohe ohe! Ahoy ahoy!

  Thus ended the song. When I came to understand it, when I actually listened to it, it was not the cheery chorus of cannibal sailors that took me aback, but the inexplicable and suspended plea at the end. To whom was it addressed? Who was this holy patron? And was the plea answered? Was the young sailor savioured or savoured? Before religion came to mean nothing to me, this is what it meant: a possibility of salvation at a crucial moment. When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite. I am a natural atheist); indeed, I think it would be impossible to talk of my generation without mentioning television.

  I met the beast shortly after we moved to Costa Rica. I believe I had just turned five. It was not my parents' set, but one lent to them by the embassy. It was a piece of furniture unto itself: large, heavy, wooden, loud, unavoidable. It took as its lair a full third of the den, a space which had previously been my favourite corner. The first time I saw it, it was awake. I had just strode into the den, unaware of the usurper, and the cur, sensing my presence, turned towards me. I stood frozen, staring at its broad, flat, animated face. I would have run away except that my parents, fresh from installing the thing, were sitting side by side in front of it, passive and unafraid. They looked at me, smiled and said words that were not heard. I took the television to be another sort of four-legged animal. A huge, squat dog with pointy ears and a very long thin tail (it was still my understanding that motion, animation, entailed life. I treated the vacuum cleaner -- a distant cousin of the elephant -- and the washing machine -- a relative of the raccoon -- with the greatest respect. My mother's cold and unceremonious manner with them filled me with private offence. Upon her departure I would pet and kiss them and whisper words of appreciation). But though I liked most animals, I warmed to the beast television only with time and misgiving. There was something about its size and behaviour that did not sit well with me. Unlike the washing machine, I felt the television was selfish and uncaring. With only two exceptions -- at which times it mesmerized me -- it would be years before I felt close to television. I much preferred to rock in the rocking chair, listening to music and day-dreaming. I did this for hours at a stretch, a pet rabbit cradled in my hands.

  THE FIRST TIME TELEVISION MESMERIZED ME AS A CHILD:

  (1) I can't remember when the idea of love came to me, when I first consciously became aware of this force in human affairs. Clearly I received love before I started returning it, and I returned it before I knew it had a name. But at what moment these emotions I felt -- oh, there you are! I am happy; if you smile, I'll smile; I want to touch you, I want to be with you, don't let go -- lost their cloak of anonymity and entered the dictionary of my mind, I don't recall. What I do recall is that it was television that formalized my notions of love, that brought together into a unified theory my disparate ideas about it.

  It was perhaps a month or two after I first became acquainted with television. To watch it was still a decision that I took with deliberation. "I will watch the television," I would say, still using the article. I would gather up my favourite blanket (a towel, actually), I would move the rocking chair into position and I would slowly pull on the plastic button, which resisted until it jumped out at me with a loud click, always surprising me. Instantly there would be sound, sound travelling faster than light; then, in succession on the glass screen, a point of light, a line of light, a shudder of light, and finally an expanding rectangle of colourless reality. I would sit and rock myself and do what I had said I would do: watch the television, watch human beings deal with other human beings, indoors and outdoors, in a language (Spanish) I had not as yet absorbed. It bored me completely. When I realized that I could change the beast's mind with the help of the difficult wheel-like knob, watching became more interesting, a little, but even so I don't think I ever did it for more than two bored-children hours -- that is, ten minutes. Only a full year later, upon discovering the plastic, elastic world of cartoons and having mastered enough Spanish, did I start to watch television regularly.

  But at the moment I am talking about, the first time television mesmerized me as a child, when I still watched it out of a sense of technological obligation, one minute was sufficient. Less. I turned the set on, watched for a few seconds, was marked for life, turned it off.

  I was alone and in a quiet good mood, receptive to new ideas. The first thing I saw was a fixed image: a simple anatomical drawing of the cross-section of an eye. Next came the fluid images of hundreds of silvery fish swimming as a school. They were like bricks in a magic wall, alternately showing me their long sides, blocking my view, then, with an instant turn, their narrow sides, allowing me to see through them.

  I wa s t h u n de rs tr uc k . Ey e s ... t e ar s ... sa lt in es s ... se aw at er ... fi sh .

  I walked to the garden and sat under a tree, my senses bloated, my head racing with the thoughts that come from a sudden understanding of things.

  The clear liquid in our eyes is seawater and therefore there are fish in our eyes, seawater being the natural medium of fish. Since blue and green are the colours of the richest seawater, blue and green eyes are the fishiest. Dark eyes are somewhat less fecund and albino eyes are nearly fishless, sadly so. But the quantity of fish in an eye means nothing. A single tigerfish can be as beautiful, as powerful, as an entire school of seafaring tuna. That science has never observed ocular fish does nothing to refute my theory; on the contrary, it emphasizes the key hypothesis, which is: love is the food of eye fish and only love will bring them out. So to look closely into someone's eyes with cold, empirical interest is like the rude tap-tap of a finger on an aquarium, which only makes the fish flee. In a similar vein, when I took to looking at myself closely in mirrors during the turmoil of adole
scence, the fact that I saw nothing in my eyes, not even the smallest guppy or tadpole, said something about my unhappiness and lack of faith in myself at the time.

  This theory has accompanied me all my life, like a small friend perched on my shoulder, like a pocket-sized god. I expose it at length here, but under that tree in the garden, aged five, after that epiphanous moment of television, I only sensed its rudimentary elements. It developed as I gained insights and knowledge. For example, a joke I overheard one day among teenage boys as I was hurrying by -- I didn't understand the joke, I was afraid of the boys, but it linked girls with the smell of fish -- made me see that the fishiness of love goes beyond the eyes. Over the years the theory became enormously complex, a system, really, with countless ramifications, the sort of scientific arcana likely to be fully understood only by children and Albert Einstein.

  I no longer believe in eye fish in fact, but still do in metaphor. In the passion of an embrace, when breath, the wind, is at its loudest and skin at its saltiest, I still nearly think that I could stop things and hear, feel, the rolling of the sea. I am still nearly convinced that, when my love and I kiss, we will be blessed with the sight of angelfish and sea-horses rising to the surface of our eyes, these fish being the surest proof of our love. In spite of everything, I still profoundly believe that love is something oceanic.

  My time as a rabbit was closely related to that strange condition called sleep. I would lie in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking, "This is ridiculous. I am lying here, wide awake, waiting. But what am I waiting for?" I would look to my left and right. "There's no one here except me! There's nothing to do. I should get up."

  But I wouldn't. There was something inexpressibly comfortable about this lying in horizontal softness, cosily blanketed, in well-lit darkness. I would continue waiting, passively impatient, for it (no antecedent). Then I would casually look down and see that my hand was a furry white paw. "Heavens! I'm asleep," I would realize, and in so doing I would wake up. I remember this nightly transformation in Costa Rica with absolute lucidity. Not the process -- the shrinking in size or the stretching of my ears and legs, although, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can nearly feel the growing of my soft, thick fur -- not the process, but the result: a medium-sized rabbit, brown and white except for the tips of my ears, which were black. I would immediately leap out of bed. I would hop to great heights on my powerful hind legs, jump from my bed to the chest and back. I would stand and do one, two, three somersaults in a row. I would dance, pounding the carpeted floor with gleeful mania. There was nothing I couldn't do, for though I was small and thin my body was (and always has been) faithful to me. It did my bidding. Only the fridge frustrated me, when I attempted to open it to get a carrot, and even this was not for lack of strength, but for lack of height. (Reach was also a problem the time I slipped a carrot beneath my mattress before going to bed. I placed it beyond my bunny grasp and subsequently forgot about it. It was discovered three years later, quite green.)

  We had pet rabbits in the garden, real permanent ones that my parents had bought to my delight. But I never ventured out to play with them when I myself was a rabbit. Once I did go to the glass doors at the back of the living-room to look out into the garden, and Salt, Pepper, Boot and Butterfly came up to the doors and we stood forepaw to glass to forepaw, staring at each other. But I realized then, looking into their dark eyes, that these rabbits were strangers to me, and children do not seek the company of strangers. I was glad for the glass between us.

  My clearest memory of my time as a rabbit is of a gesture I made with my forepaws to scratch my ears. No, not scratch. It was more like a stretching, a stretching of the ears. I would stand them very erect, lower my head and then run my forepaws over them, flattening them against my head, first the right ear, then the left, then both at the same time. It was a quick, round motion which I repeated several times. Afterwards my ears felt alert and tingly. I could twitch and hone them to the smallest, most distant sounds -- a curtain rustling in the dining-room, a floorboard cracking arthritically in the living-room, a sudden respiration from my sleeping father, why, even the stars blinking. There's nothing to make you more aware of the roaring pulse of life than minute, nearly inaudible sounds.

  I started my formal education in 1968 at Jiminy Cricket Kindergarten. It operated in English, but my parents had no choice. At the time it was the only quality kindergarten in San Jose.

  "Tu seras bilingue. Meme trilingue," qu'ils me dirent. "Tres canadien." "You'll be bilingual. Even trilingual," they told me. "Very Canadian."

  So it was that, by a mere whim of geography, I went to school in English, played outside in Spanish and told all about it at home in French. Each tongue came naturally to me and each had its natural interlocutors. I no more thought of addressing my parents in English than I did of doing arithmetic in my head in French. English became the language of my exact expression, but it expressed thoughts that somehow have always remained Latin.

  The earliest incidence of violence in my life occurred at Jiminy Cricket. A maladjusted boy attacked me for no reason. He pulled my hair and bit me on the neck. I was too young then to be a coward and we clashed in a fierce fight. The teacher separated us and I vaguely remember the two of us hanging in mid-air at the end of her arms, swinging like pendulums. We were put to bed for enforced naps. I peed in my sleep and the teacher called the embassy and my father came to get me.

  The boy who attacked me remained not only in the same school as me for the next three years, but in the very same class. We were together the rest of that year at Jiminy Cricket, and in grades 1 and 2 at Abraham Lincoln Academy. But he never got so close to me again. With blond hair that was long and dishevelled one week, crew-cut the next, and staring brown eyes, he was a sullen boy who kept to himself and had no friends. But from the other side of the bars of his imaginary cage he watched me, watched me intently all the time, for three years, especially when I was with Noah. Sometimes our eyes met, but even now I'm not sure I could read those eyes. He would be the first to look down, after a second or two, but only, I know, to look back as soon as I had turned. Perhaps he loved me.

  My parents were early feminists and they did not use the word "opposite" when speaking of the sexes. Indeed, why should they be considered opposite? The word is aggressive, defines by negation, says very little. The sexes are complementary, said my parents -- a more complicated word which they explained to me by analogy. Male and female were like rain and soil. Except that whereas they were speaking of sex, of impersonal details of biology, I understood them to be speaking of love, elaborating on what I already knew. The universe struck me then as amazingly well engineered. Imagine: somewhere out there, totally separate, of independent origin, was a sexual organ tailored to suit mine, to suit me. I set out to find my complementary sexual organ, my true love.

  There is no greater mystery than this, the mystery of cathexis. Why do some people make the fish crowd our eyes, and others leave them utterly fishless? Is love some unique food that will feed only our fish? Or is it whatever food happens to be nearby when our fish get hungry? I have no idea why I fell in love with Noah Rabinovitch. It was too long ago. Memory is sometimes a distant spectator which can name emotions but not convey them, and this is the case here. To be sure, in some way Noah was my complement. When I was alone I was happy and whole, but when we were together the whole was greater. There was an added brightness to things, a greater and deeper perspective. But I could say the same thing, to only a slightly lesser degree, of other people, even of animals and objects. There was more to it than that. Only I don't know what. I think I remember that I liked the way Noah walked. He walked, therefore I loved him.

  One day, as my mother arrived at the kindergarten to pick me up, I informed her that I had found my future wife and I proudly pointed to Noah, who was new at Jiminy Cricket. His father was an Israeli diplomat and they had just arrived in Costa Rica, mid-year. Noah came up to my mother, extended his hand and said he was pleased t
o meet his future mother-in-law. (Noah was sickeningly polite.) But then he had the effrontery to add that I would be his wife, and the two of us started again on the same tiresome argument we had had all morning, which I thought was settled. For some reason, neither of us wanted to be the wife.