Self

by Yann Martel

  My mother interrupted us by asking me why I thought Noah would be my wife. There are some circumstances where one cannot blurt out, "Parce que je l'aime!" "Because I love him!" "!Porque le amo!" I was more concrete: Noah had the sexual organ complementary to mine. Did he, she replied, an uncontrollable smile running across her face, my first clue that I had missed something. She took my hand, said goodbye to Noah in English and we headed for the car. I clearly remember turning as we were walking off and bleating, with infinite sadness in my voice, "Bye, Noah," for in a vague way I realized that I had just lost my husband. Before opening the car door for me, my mother bent down and gave me an unwanted hug and a kiss. On the way home she gave me the first facts of my sexual persona. Things were far more limited than my open mind had imagined. There were in fact only two sexes, not infinite numbers. And those little bums and little fingers that I had seen in the various I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours exercises I had conducted were the complementary sexual organs in question, all two of them, one little bum for one little finger. I was amazed. This question of complementarity referred merely to a vulgar point of biology, an anatomical whim? The menu for ocular fish had only two items on it? And it was decided in advance which they could select, either little bum or little finger, steak or chicken? What kind of a restaurant is that, Mother? I had indeed noticed only little bums and little fingers so far, but I thought this was simply a reflection of the small size of my sample. (In a similar vein, though most of my coevals at Jiminy Cricket were white, on the basis of the skin colour of a few of them, reinforced by things I had seen on television and in magazines, I was quite confident that there existed people who were black, brown, yellow, red, blue, orange, perhaps even striped.) But no, there were only two, my mother insisted. Even more astonishing, she said that little bums were to be found exclusively in girls and little fingers exclusively in boys. Girls, by definition, were females with little bums who could only be wives. Boys, by definition, were males with little fingers who could only be husbands. I should remember these permutations for there were no others. No, husbands could not be girls. No, a wife could not marry another wife. No, no, no.

  In the time of a brief car ride I became an indubitable boy, I discovered one of my defining characteristics and the universe, up till then myriad, broke into two camps. I was grief-stricken.

  "Est-ce que je peux toujours aimer Noah?" je demandai, eclatant en sanglots. "Can I still love Noah?" I asked, bursting into tears.

  "Bien sur," repondit ma mere doucement, me passant la main dans les cheveux. "Aime-le autant que tu veux. Il est important d'avoir des amis." "Of course," my mother replied soothingly, running her hand through my hair. "Love him as much as you want. It's important to have friends."

  Friends? Oh, Mother. I was given permission to love, yet I could sense -- I cannot quite explain how -- that oceans were now trapped in aquariums. She must be mistaken, I thought. I kept at her, convinced that there had been a misunderstanding. But I was so immeasurably confused that I could only approach the matter from the small end, this niggling point of biology.

  "Femelle et male? C'est tout? Meme sur les autres planetes?" "Female and male? Is that all? Even on other planets?"

  "Nous sommes seulement sur cette planete-ci, mon amour, la planete Terre." "We're only on this planet, love. We're only on planet Earth."

  "Pourquoi elle s'appelle Taire? Ca veut dire quoi, Taire?" "Why is it called Erth? What does Erth mean?"

  "Ca veut dire 'ici' en grec et en latin." "It means 'here' in Greek and Latin."

  "Et nous sommes seulement sur cette planete-ci?" je dis, regardant par la fenetre, comme si le bord de la planete etait juste passe le champ. "And we're only on this planet?" I said, looking out the window, as if the edge of the planet were just beyond the field.

  "C'est tres grand, tu verras." "It's a big place, you'll see."

  "Il n'y a personne sur aucune des etoiles?" "There's nobody on any of the stars?"

  "Pas que nous sachions." "Not that we know of."

  "Et il n'y a personne sur la lune?" "And there's nobody on the moon?"

  "Non." "No."

  "Seulement ici?" "Just here?"

  "Seulement ici." "Just here."

  "La Taire?" "Erth?"

  "La Terre." "Earth."

  "Femelle et male?" "Female and male?"

  "Male et femelle." "Male and female."

  "Alors elle est femelle ou male, cette voiture?" "So this car, is it female or male?"

  "Euh ... facon de parler, elle -- non, non. Male et femelle s'appliquent seulement aux etres vivants. Cette voiture est une simple machine. Elle n'a pas de sexe." "Uh ... well we say -- no, no. Male and female apply only to living things. This car is just a machine. It has no sex."

  "Ahhh." "Ohhh."

  Un moment de reflexion. A pregnant pause.

  "Alors il est femelle ou male, cet arbre?" "So that tree, is it female or male?"

  "Non. Seulement les etres vivants -- et qui bougent." "No. Only things that are alive -- and move."

  "Mais il bouge, l'arbre. Et tous les autres. Regarde." "But it is moving. And all the others, too. Look."

  "Oui, mais c'est le vent ca. Ils doivent bouger d'eux-memes. Vivants, et qui bougent d'eux-memes." "Yes, but that's the wind. They have to move on their own. Things that are alive, and move on their own."

  "Il est quoi, le vent? Femelle ou male?" "What's the wind? Female or male?"

  "Non, non, non. Le vent n'est pas un etre vivant." "No, no, no. The wind isn't a living thing."

  "Mais il bouge!" "But it moves!"

  "Oui, je sais. Mais il est invisible. Pour etre male ou femelle, une chose doit etre vivante, bouger d'elle-meme, et etre visible." "Yes, I know. But it's invisible. To be male or female, a thing has to be alive, move on its own, and be visible."

  "Alors c'est pour ca, les microscopes? Pour voir le sexe des petites choses?" "So that's what microscopes are for? To find out the sex of small things?"

  "Tiens, regarde, une vache." "Oh look, a cow."

  "Elle est femelle ou male, cette vache?" "Is that cow female or male?"

  Ma mere regarda. "C'est une vache femelle." My mother looked. "It's a female cow."

  She smiled. She'd got it right, she thought.

  Many biology classes later, when I learned that plants do in fact have a sexuality, when I fully understood the terms pistil, stamen and pollen, I discovered with pleasure the slow, charged sexuality of nature. No wonder spring was such a sensuous time. Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

  As for Noah Rabinovitch and the strange mutilatory practices of the Jews, it would be a while yet before I understood that his clipped foreskin complemented something other than my own penis.

  The next day at recess we hid around the corner and I offered right away, happily, to be his wife.

  "Okay," he said, as casually as if I had just offered him a marble rather than my life. "Here, look what I've got," he added, pulling out of his pocket a brand new Coca-Cola yoyo. "Let's go play with it." And he walked off, his disappointed and disgruntled wife in tow.

  My relationship with Noah was nonetheless deeply satisfying. On the outside we appeared and behaved like no more than the best of friends (her word), but on the inside I felt that wonderful, sizzling feeling, the basis of all love: complicity.

  Noah disappeared from my life as suddenly as he had appeared. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died of a heart attack on February 26, 1969. Golda Meir replaced him. In the long domino-chain of changes that this brought about, a distant, painful one was the recall in the summer of 1970, at the end of grade 1, of diplomat Etan Rabinovitch to Jerusalem after barely a year and a half at his new posting.

  I spent my last year in Costa Rica a widow. For company I had only the beast television, which I watched avidly, expressing my dislike of it by sitting far away, and the boy who had attacke
d me, this savage on the periphery of my playground.

  Though I was interested in the sex of others, I don't recall as a child being very curious about my own penis. It was the organ with which I urinated, a casual part of my identity, c'est tout. By an imperceptible cultural osmosis I gathered that it was a "private" part, but this did not turn it into a source of interest, let alone of shame or embarrassment. It was private in much the same way that a bedroom is: guests are invited to sit and chat in the living-room, and only once they have achieved a sufficient degree of intimacy may they be shown around the house and see the bedroom. At puberty my level of interest would change dramatically and my penis would become the object of dedicated attention, the source of a pleasure so powerful that I might call it extraterrestrial, but even then I never felt that this small member -- for that is what it is -- was an inspiration for architecture or organization charts or anything else.

  I have a black and white photo of me when I was very young, perhaps three. I am outside on a hot sunny day, naked and standing at the top of some wooden steps. I am holding onto my adored, tattered towel. The photographer, my father, is below me and I am looking at him gravely. I am not yet inhibited by modesty -- the way I stand then, every square inch of my skin is equally presentable. My sex seems very large for the size of me. Perhaps sexual organs have their own rate of growth, or get started earlier. Yet it's tiny: a scrotum like half a walnut shell and a penis attached to it that is no more than a stubby cylinder of skin. But what really surprises me is the way the two float on the surface of my body. Atop my layer of baby fat, they seem unconnected and unimportant. They are there, but they could be elsewhere, like a large mole -- and could seemingly be excised like a large mole by a simple operation should they become malignant. There is no hint of how deeply rooted in me they are, how, in a way, they are half of me, and how the point at which they join my body is a fulcrum.

  A short time after that momentous car ride with my mother, I showed her a thick, juicy worm I had captured in the garden.

  "Il est femelle ou male, ce ver de terre?" "Is this earthworm female or male?"

  My mother, a cool woman, a woman who always displayed grace under pressure, hardly squirmed. She carefully gathered up the papers she was working on from beneath my dangling worm, and she looked at it and at me.

  "En fait, les deux. Le ver de terre est a la fois male et femelle. C'est une exception a la regle." "Well, as a matter of fact it's both. The worm is both male and female. It's an exception to the rule."

  Both male and female! I looked closely at this supreme brown creature as it twisted limply in my fingers. Both! How extraordinary.

  "Ou sont ses organes sexuels?" "Where are its sex organs?"

  "Je ne suis pas sure. Ils sont tres petits. Tu ne peux pas les voir." "I'm not sure. They're very small. You can't see them."

  "Eh bien, son nom est Jesus-Christ et elle est ma meilleure amie!" "Well, his name is Jesus Christ and she's my best friend."

  "Et aucun des deux ne reste pas dans la maison. Ils seront plus heureux dans le jardin." "And neither one of them is staying in the house. They'll be happier in the garden."

  I carried away this miracle of the universe. Every time the words occurred to me -- "Both male and female!" -- I was amazed anew. Surely if God existed -- ? -- He, She, It must have the wriggly blunt head of a worm. I looked up at the sky. I could see it very well: an enormous, beautiful worm circling the earth, gracefully moving around and through the white clouds. I played with Jesus Christ for a few minutes and then cut them up into very small pieces with a sharp knife, trying to find their sex organs. Both female and male. Incredible.

  I am puzzled now by this knack for torture that I had as a child. For long before the beautiful, forsaken worm, I martyred a snail. Our house in Costa Rica had an enclosed garden that teemed with life. One day, while exploring this, my dominion, behind a fringe of leaves, I came upon the largest snail I had ever seen. It was making its way up the wall. I dislodged it with my finger and it tumbled to the ground. I picked it up. Seconds later the discombobulated creature oozed out of its shell, eyes sallying forth to assess the situation. What extraordinary eyes! Translucent white tentacles with ocular black dots at the end, like others I had seen, but never of this magnitude. I was seduced by these eyes. That there could be fish so minuscule as to swim freely in them astounded me. I fetched a pair of scissors. But try as I might, the black dot retreated into the grey-green flesh before I could cut it off and release the seawater. By then the small animal was as fully extended out of its shell as it could be, slowly twisting this way and that, obviously trying to apprehend what was holding it so fixedly. On one of its contortions it came into contact with a blade of the scissors. It held onto it and began to pull itself along the cutting edge, its sticky pad overflowing the sides, its strange harelip mouth leading the way. After a centimetre or two I closed the scissors, catching the creature between the eyes and slicing its head in two. It gave a spastic shudder and retreated into its shell. A liquid started to drip. I tossed the shell; I considered crushing it, but did not. Torturing the soft is one thing; torturing the hard, another.

  I burned ants with a magnifying glass. I starved two small turtles to death. I asphyxiated lizards in jars. I exploded spiders with firecrackers. I poured salt on slugs. I attempted to drown frogs and, when they would not drown, I threw them against the wall of a boathouse and watched them float upside down in the water. I killed a huge toad by throwing broken roof tiles at it (the creature never moved, only slumped and ceased to live. I don't mean to anthropomorphize it, but I do wonder what it was thinking, and in what terms. Not anger or bitterness, though a toad's aspect conveys these, but surely that universal emotion of the organic: fear. "I'm going to die, I don't want to die. I'm going to die, I don't want to die. I'm going to die, I don't want to die. I'm --"). I committed these atrocities in solitude, without glee, deliberately. Each cruelty, each final spasm of life, resonated in me like a drop of water falling in a silent cave.

  SIX MORNING DELINQUENT ACTS I PARTICIPATED IN:

  (1) From the doorstep of a house, took a bottle of freshly delivered milk, carefully removed the cardboard top with the tip of a knife, drank a sip and then urinated in the bottle just enough to bring the level of liquid back to what it had been. Replacing the top, returned the bottle to the doorstep. Seven or eight times, until Eckhardt dropped a bottle and it shattered and we fled in terror.

  (2) Put toothpaste in car locks. Numerous times.

  (3) Deflated tires. Numerous times.

  (4) Poured sugar in a car's gas tank. Once.

  (5) Drilled a hole at the base of a magnificent cactus as tall as a house, introduced a firecracker into the hole and lit it, the cactus falling over like a tree, its arms breaking off to reveal strange, sweaty green flesh. Once.

  (6) Set a long L-shaped hedgerow on fire. Once.

  The emotional nadir of my life as a child came during a walk on a beach in Guatemala. I was seven, perhaps just eight. It was a desolate Third World beach hugged by low, ugly buildings. To my right was plastic refuse thrown up by the sea. To my left was plastic refuse thrown down by humanity. A heavy, grey sky. Not a single being within sight. I could have been drowning, no one to save me. I walked along, already in a fragile mood. Up ahead, an indeterminate object lay on the beach. It slowly materialized. It was a large sea turtle, over a metre long, lying on its back, dead -- oh, very dead. Its head hung back, the leathery neck exposed, the sharp lipless mouth open, the black eyes staring. Who would do this to such a beautiful creature? Who would deliberately overturn it to let it die thus slowly? For no purpose, for this was no soup in the making. While these questions dragged me down, I heard a yelp behind me. I turned. A small three-legged dog was running up to me. Its left foreleg was gone, the stump messy and gnarled. The animal yelped at me but carefully made a circle around me, sniffing the turtle only, secure in the knowledge that the dead can give no blows, no kicks. There was a sinking in me, a collapsing such
as I had never felt before. It was at this moment, long before I learned the words, that I first felt it, blowing through me like a frigid prairie gust: nothingness, nullity, vacuity, the void -- life, consciousness, as being something as superfluous as a television left on in an empty room. I felt that if I made a wiping motion in front of my eyes, a swath of black would appear in the air, and in my hand the torn, bunched-up surface of reality, the wrinkled picture of a maimed dog sniffing a dead turtle. I couldn't take my eyes off the turtle's belly. What struck me was not its apparent hardness, or its colour (banana black and yellow) or the patterns (curious, softly delineated rectangles that I would recognize years later in the Inca stone walls of Peru), but its slight inward curve. I felt very strongly that this curve fitted exactly the curve of the earth. In my mind I could see the round earth, and on this round earth a bump of a turtle hugging it. And it was good, it was the order of things. This inversion here, baby curve facing away from mother curve, facing the great emptiness of the universe, was a barbarity.

  But was there not an element of necessity to this killing? This was the question that cracked through the wall of my happiness, through my security. What I had here, I sensed, was nihilism, the deliberate wrecking of being to assert being in the face of non-being. To insult, otherwise not to exist. To strike, even if in vain, at this sterile abundance of stupid life.

  The final thought emerged: "This turtle -- good thing it was overturned before my arrival, for I couldn't have managed it on my own." I backed away and returned to our hotel, the dog following me a little way before vanishing. Two days later I cried for hours in bed before falling asleep. And again some months later.