Self

by Yann Martel

  I was staying at Jonathan's. It was a house with a garden, so it must have been somewhere outside of Paris. We found a condom. It was soft and yellow and it smelled disgusting. Jonathan's sister, Louise, was coming. He hid the condom. She was wearing her bathing-suit and sunglasses. Without saying a word to us, with only a look of exasperation, she lay on the deck chair. Jonathan looked at me and then at her significantly. It came from her. I stared at her, awed. We both stared. She turned to us. "Get lost," she hissed. We left.

  "She had a fight with her boyfriend," said Jonathan. He was lucky to have a sister. He was spying on her all the time. We went upstairs and from the back window we looked down on her, hoping she would do something, don't know what. She lay very still, mostly brown (it was high summer) except for two circles and a triangle of blue bikini. We looked for a long time, off and on, and she never seemed to move. Then, when I was looking but not Jonathan, I saw two shiny rivers of tears appear from under her sunglasses and trickle down her cheeks, and I didn't want to look any more. I felt a sudden tightness in my throat. I thought of Mary Ann. Jonathan was taking down his BB gun to show it to me. We'll shoot things, he said. I got a pigeon yesterday, he said. But I didn't want to look at his BB gun or shoot anything. I proposed television.

  This pain, the pain of unrequited love, occurred at such regular intervals during my childhood and adolescence that I don't care to write about it. It was a terrible and continuous pain and there was no deflecting it, only bearing it. When my parents prepared spaghetti, I always noticed the one noodle left behind in the strainer, forsaken, forgotten, while its companions lay intertwined in each others' arms, hot and steaming, in the large bowl at the centre of the table. When love was pain, I felt like that noodle. I never ate pasta without beforehand going to the strainer in the sink. I would look upon this bereft noodle, curled upon itself in search of comfort, and I would bring it love by eating it tenderly.

  I do not want to discuss the subject of unrequited love. If love is the sea, then let us journey inland for a while.

  THE SECOND TIME TELEVISION MESMERIZED ME AS A CHILD:

  (2) I knew something forbidden was coming because the television screen had a little white rectangle in the bottom right-hand corner, a signal at the time that the program was "for adults only". In the absence of my parents and my babysitter -- they out for the evening, she in another room reading -- I hesitated only a little. I turned the volume down to make the immorality of my act quieter. A picture emerged from darkness.

  An empty arena.

  People walking in.

  Lights coming on.

  At first I hardly paid any attention, for it was the white rectangle itself that gripped me. I stared at it much as Eve must have stared at the apple. Then the movie started in earnest. It was set in a future where there were no longer any wars, since countries no longer existed, only multinationals, and where global frustrations were contained within the arena of a violent team game played on roller-skates and motorcycles on a circular track. The camera caught it all: the blows and the pain, the accidents and the bodies. We lingered on the dazed, sweaty face of a dying player, then zoomed to blood-thirsty spectators throwing themselves against the plastic barrier shouting for more, more, more. I watched in shock. I noticed anew the white rectangle. I thought of plunging forward and clicking the television off, but I did not. I kept watching. I remember this movie for the way my emotions teeter-tottered between recoil and attraction in a shifting balance. I could feel how fascination was pushing back the bounds of horror.

  ON THE CURRENCY OF THE WORDS "NIGGER" AND "FUCK":

  My school in Paris was attended mostly by children of diplomats and foreign business executives. Consequently, there was a large contingent of dark blacks, middle blacks, pale blacks, dark browns, milk-chocolate browns, pale browns, yellows and olives among the freckled whites, the English transparent veiny whites, the Australian tanned whites and the just plain boring whites. We even had a No Colour, an albino, and an Irish cripple. I was fascinated by the colour of a fat girl named Gora. She was Indian or Trinidadian. Her skin was a shimmering soft brown that seemed to have depth. I could imagine dipping a finger into her skin and seeing it disappear into her brownness. At home I used to take milk and carefully add chocolate powder to it, trying to get precisely the colour of Gora's skin but never managing it because there is a quality of yellow-reddishness that Nestle's just doesn't have. "Nigger" was the only racist slur I, we, knew at my school and we were very fair in our use of it; anybody who wasn't black was exposed to it. Our most consistent nigger was Beatrice's brother, a British pasty white by the name of Anthony. He was a touch mentally retarded, and we called him nigger with such regularity that we practically forgot his real name. Then one day Mr. Templey overheard Tristan calling him that and he got hell for it. It was then that I first heard about Martin Luther King, the American Deep South and the Civil Rights Movement. Nigger fell out of fashion and we called Anthony a moron instead. Another reason racism didn't stick was that it was limiting and impractical. Gora was snooty and it was with delight that I told her once that she was shit-coloured, but Tony, the Nigerian ambassador's son, was great. He was really funny and he had sticks of firecrackers that blew up like dynamite. He was also a leader. His words and his actions carried weight.

  We wondered how the word "fuck" was spelled. Was it fuk or fuke or fuck. I don't think any of us really knew what it meant, the biological or emotional details. The word was an explosive mix of the mysterious, the forbidden and the obscene. It was a word we revelled in. It was a power word. To roll a "Fuck off" or a "It's a fucking nice day" off the tongue was the mark of someone to be reckoned with. Only vandalism and thievery had a greater cachet. It was also a word that I don't recall using against or with or about girls. Whereas vulgarity among boys was fun, among girls it generally felt ugly and unnecessarily abrasive. Girls managed to be mean and nasty -- Beatrice, for instance -- without being rude, an elegant feat. "Fuck" was a boy's word.

  Jonathan, Ali and I took to exploring the garages and sheds of the school. It was like exploring a far planet of the galaxy. We came across a Solex. Solexes are antique marvels of French engineering. They are motorized bicycles -- painted black, always -- with fat little engines incongruously perched over their front wheels. We unscrewed the gas cap and poured sawdust into the tank. We explored this particular garage for several days running. It was large and full of mechanical things. On our last time there we found a moped, which delighted us since a moped's tank is much bigger than a Solex's. We were about to fill this tank chock-full with sawdust when, from behind a lawn-mowing tractor, in a moment of heart-stopping horror, one of the school's French workers appeared. He had been hiding, waiting for us. He was a hairy, thick-wristed, muscular man. Instantly we were running away, scared out of our wits. He lumbered after us. But he knew us, we saw him every day, so it was crazy trying to escape him even if we were faster. Jonathan and I stopped and stood against the wall. We were quaking with fear. He had enormous brown hands with skin that looked like hide. He came up to us and wagged his index finger, a finger that with one tap would have crushed our little Anglophone skulls.

  "C'est mechant faire ca, c'est pas gentil," il dit, sans crier, tout simplement. "It's mean to do that, it's not nice," he said, not shouting it, just stating it.

  Then he turned around and walked away. That was it. And it did the trick. Jonathan and I looked at each other, amazed. It was not nice, it was mechant. When we saw Ali, who was waiting for us beyond, we resented him, as if he had been unfairly spared the worst beating of his life.

  When I saw the worker the next day I went to him and apologized. He smiled and ran his hand over the back of my head and neck. It felt rough and very warm.

  It was at ski camp during Christmas. After a day of skiing we had gone swimming. We were in the showers, all of us weary to our bones and lingering under the steaming hot water. Jean-Luc, our group leader, turned to me and without a word started washing and rubb
ing my back. Perhaps he was motivated by more than genial camaraderie, I don't know; he was always nice to me. I felt no little pride that it was I who was the privileged recipient of his attention and not someone else. I knew everyone was watching us, envious. And it felt good, this vigorous back massage, very good -- there was that simple pleasure, too. The curious happened: first one boy, then another, then all of us. In no time we were a circle of boys washing and rubbing each others' backs. Though we never talked about it, this shower was one of the high points of our skiing holiday. It resulted in a raucousness of laughter that I remember to this day. High-pitched squeals of mirth. Faces contorted with guffawing.

  We were leaving Paris for Ottawa after a stay of nearly four years. As I climbed the steps of the plane and turned and looked at the people on the open terrace of the airport, I didn't know that it was not only Europe that was waving its hand goodbye to me, but my childhood. I was twelve years old.

  It is difficult to describe the metamorphosis that begins at puberty. There are so many different strands. At first, puberty was a physical phenomenon for me. It was a new hairiness, an awkward physical growth, a skin disease, the discovery of a secret pleasure. Only dimly did I realize that it was also a mental phenomenon. I barely noticed that a new universe slipped itself in front of my eyes. One where the most paralysing anxiety could run alongside the greatest elation. One where the idea of choice, real, personal choice, was introduced. One where knowledge and confusion increased exponentially. One where notions such as success and failure, will and sloth, appearance and reality, freedom and responsibility, the public and the private, the moral and the immoral, the mental and the physical, replaced the simpler guiding notion of fun. At the centre of these changes was a new ache, that of sexual need, and a new loneliness -- deep, bottomless it seemed, pure torture. Puberty for me was a path unmarked by signposts or sudden illuminations. I thought I was the same as always, absolutely the same, until I realized that I no longer enjoyed playing with toys quite so much, or being with my parents all the time.

  I wonder, for example, when I took my last shower with my father. When was that precise last time that we alternated being beneath the showerhead? That we passed each other the soap and the shampoo? That we stepped out together and dried ourselves? All without thinking about it. The progression from nudity to nakedness was slow and imperceptible -- but there must have been that last shower, that border that would not be crossed again.

  The direction of my gaze changed. Questions no longer sprung from me like arrows from a bow -- Why is the sky blue? Who wrote the Bible? Why do elephants have long noses? There were mysteries on the inside, too. I began to look into mirrors. At first I would busy myself with the unavoidable externals: the clogged pores of my nose, the pustules on my forehead, the curls and waves of my hair. Then I would truly look at myself; that is, I would look at my eyes, those repositories of the soul. Behind those little black holes -- who? So much flux. Was it like this for everyone?

  I discovered my body. Till then my mental and physical selves had been in such harmony that I had never considered them separately, or as separable. The two were as integrated as they are in Rodin's The Thinker or in Roger Bannister and John Landy's Miracle Mile. But now my mind's vessel began to show signs of waywardness, to reveal that it could deliver unexpected pains and pleasures of its own making. The result was a more complicated, multifaceted "I", with more mouths to feed, more needs to tend to.

  Solitude became a pleasure. There are certain moments of adolescence that are beyond the grasp of words. You are quiet, you are looking at a field, say, or a row of books in a library, when suddenly things appear sharp and precise, and there is a tinkle. That's not the right word. What I mean is, because of your youth and overarching vitality you have tricked life into overlooking you, and you have crept up on it from behind and you are near its heart and you can hear its heartbeat. It's not a roaring throb you hear but something very quiet, a gentle quiver to the field, to the row of books, something so quiet that it is more visual than aural, the merest shimmer. This heartbeat brings no words to your mind, but you feel an expansion; doors open in your head onto immense empty rooms and your mind exclaims, "Heavens, this place is bigger than I realized!" So while the furniture is the same as the moment before, the house of your mind has suddenly expanded fourfold. This is what I mean by tinkle, by shimmer, by heartbeat: a vague awareness during adolescence that vitality is outstripping comprehension.

  I monitored the growth of my body hair. These tokens of maturity first appeared on my lower legs, anklets of manhood on a child's body. It seemed that the hormones triggering this growth had to battle gravity, for it was only after these dark shoots had crept some distance up my legs that they appeared on my pubis. Then they sprouted on my chest, three, four hairs in the centre of my sternum. Next, the benign blond hairs that I had in my armpits were supplanted. Only after this did my cheeks join in. Lastly, the hormonal elixir touched the top of my head. Throughout my childhood my hair had been thick but easy enough to manage. I have memories of my father working me over with a comb, with tugs that eventually overcame knots, one "Ow!" for every jerk. The jerks weren't really painful; it was just another way to bug my father. But with puberty, by slow degrees, my hair began to curl and wave and kink. It became an unruly mess.

  I took pleasure in my developing hirsuteness. Hairiness was beautiful, it would suit me. The hair on my chest delighted me the most. I wanted my chest to be thick with hair, so thick that I had to comb it. I remember an ad I saw in comic books, next to the mail-order sea-horses, for a soap that was claimed to promote hair growth. I dreamed of sending for it, and never did only because I didn't know how to pay for it through the mail and I was afraid my parents would catch me. In time my chest did grow hairy, though it never achieved the thickness I yearned for. But my stomach, at least, gave me satisfaction.

  Starting at age fourteen, I began to shave. It was more preemptive than necessary; the hair growth on my face has never been spectacular. Not for me the flowing beard of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx, or the magnificent moustache of the mad Friedrich Nietzsche. My upper lip and my cheeks produced many trees but never a forest, and I needed to change my axe only every few months. But I enjoyed shaving -- this manly ritual of splashing warm water on the face, lathering the shaving cream to a frothy white sea and then scraping it off in short, clean strokes with a gingerly held razor. It was a form of recollection, and had a soothing effect on me. I shaved one to four times a week, depending on my mood.

  Acne. The word belongs to adolescence. Like the anxiety of virginity, it is something most adults hardly remember.

  I remember.

  Acne was the lowest circle of hell that I visited during my adolescence. Large, flaky pustules that were at first no more than external curiosities -- a little mould on the surface of a fresh cheese -- persisted, and then multiplied like hydras till they invaded me on the inside, like gangrene in the body of a young soldier, like bubonic plague in a sunny town. The horror of acne was what it did to my image of myself. It was a rot of ugliness that attacked a boy who had till then thought himself beautiful.

  The disease seemed to have favourite areas. My cheeks were nearly always spared, my forehead not. The rot seemed to prefer my right temple over my left. My nose suffered. My chin. The edge of my upper lip. The area below my jawline was a real battlefield. To add further humiliation, my skin was terribly oily, with a glowing film. Throughout my adolescence, two, three times a day, I cleaned, rubbed, scrubbed my face with a pumiceous, highly abrasive soap product. Away oil, away dead skin, away acne! I would pat my face dry with a towel. For a brief hour or so, until my skin began to ooze oil again, my face would feel dry, expressive, presentable. This cleanser -- the version marketed for adults is for washing motor oil and the like from one's hands -- is an excellent product, and I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to erase his or her face, as I wished.

  Dermatologists -- when I finally allowed my condition to
be acknowledged and discussed -- were consulted and I religiously applied their expensive creams and swallowed their expensive pills, to no effect. I treated myself. Clogged pores were quickly dispatched, their corks of blackness squeezed out. Large yellow pimples I relished, for they were easy to remedy; with my fingers wrapped in toilet paper for a better grip, I would nudge and squeeze each offender until it broke with that minute tearing sound of exploding pus. Pus, clear liquid and blood would be wiped away; all that was left was a tiny crater, a little red around the rim, nothing more. Soon it would disappear (not soon enough!) But not all my pimples were this easy. Many were red, not yellow, their lava of putrefaction not yet ready to erupt. They would simmer on my face, angry, lumpy, disfiguring. I would squeeze them anyway, hoping to accelerate the volcanic process, which would only make them angrier and redder.

  It was not uncommon that this disease reduced me to tears. I informed myself about acne vulgaris, but talk of hormonal imbalances and dietary co-factors did nothing to appease me. The humiliation and ugliness were too great to be explained away by biology.

  But there was splendour, too. At a time when many of my classmates were losing interest in their studies, I awoke to them. I was lucky to have several good teachers at my high school, who kindled my intellectual interests. Because I had a good geography teacher, I became interested in geography. The same with Latin, history, biology and mathematics. I began to read voraciously. I blossomed in the regimental order of organized education. In slots of forty-five minutes, without effort, I consumed centuries of accumulated knowledge in the sciences and the humanities. Mesopotamia struggled to fertility, the Roman Empire grew and shone, the Dark Ages blew the candle out, the Middle Ages flickered, the Renaissance blazed, the Industrial Revolution roared, the world fought twice, the Germans killed six million Jews, the United Nations was set up, the moon was trodden upon, and onwards, onwards -- it was all there in my notes. Artesian wells, plate tectonics, Caesar's invasion of tripartite Gaul, the Treaty of Westminster, Krebs' cycle, Vasco da Gama, quadratic equations, the Domesday Book, Huckleberry Finn, Edward the Confessor, Tycho Brahe, the Neolithic period -- none hid their secrets from me.