Self

by Yann Martel

  These were the years of two seasons: summer and the sacred September to June school year. Everything fitted into this cycle. Jesus Christ carefully had himself born and crucified during the holidays. Queen Victoria chose another such day for her birthday. Surely Alexander the Great stampeded across Asia on weekends only. Nothing disturbed the grand march of the school year -- or only the occasional dental or medical appointment, when I would stare with incomprehension from the taxi at all the people in the streets. What were they doing out like this? How could they stand the loitering? I would hurry back to dissecting frogs and Shakespeare, back to doctors Banting and Zhivago. I saw my life as a straight, upwards staircase, with education as my handrail. After the usual academic landings -- B.A, M.A, Ph.D; Toronto, Oxford, Harvard -- I would start my climb for the ultimate landing: the prime-ministership of Canada.

  I wasn't settled on which constituency I would represent -- my sentimental favourite was Jack London's Yukon, but it was so far away; I liked the word "Algoma" and it was Pearson's old riding -- but my address was certain: 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa. While waiting to move in, I honed my political skills by reading anything relevant, usually biographies and autobiographies, but also Hansard, parliamentary committee reports, Royal Commission reports and the like.

  Question Period, which I attended as often as I could, was the highlight of my apprenticeship. I revelled in this theatre of power, this heady mix of principle and posture. I never sat in the Public Gallery, at one end of the House of Commons above the Speaker and the parliamentary reporters; the view was not very good and it was noisy with groups coming in and out. Instead I obtained passes from my Member of Parliament, borrowed a tie and jacket from my father and sat in one of the members' galleries, which are on the sides of the House -- one side reserved for the governing party, the other shared among Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition and the other parties. Since the MP for my constituency was Progressive Conservative, I always sat above the Liberal government benches, facing the Conservative opposition. I was therefore more familiar with the performances of those without power than those with it. An arrogance of Prime Minister Trudeau's I would witness only from the back of his head, but the convulsions of indignation, the shouts, the pounding of desks, the gibes, heckles and taunts that were barely within the bounds of parliamentary decorum (and sometimes not) that it provoked I would get full front. I loved these men without power, whether official opposition, New Democrat or Social Credit. I was as fast as the Speaker himself in identifying So-and-so standing up for attention as "The Honourable Member for Winnipeg North Centre", or Esquimalt-Saanich-The-Islands or Missisquoi-Brome.

  Of these hours perched in the Members' Gallery during Question Period, what struck me most forcefully about the opposition -- which had legitimacy but no power, or only the power of words -- what has stayed with me to this day is that no matter the pitch of emotion in the House, the din of howling, the cries of fury and resentment, the shaking of fists -- and sometimes it was no pretence, sometimes the smugness of men of long-standing power is enough to leave one bereft of articulate expression; once I saw a book flying through the air, hurled by a red-faced member overcongested with his impotence -- no matter the decibels or the state of near insurrection, except for the words of the one member who had the official attention of the House, this overflow would all go down in Hansard as:

  Some hon. members: Oh! Oh!

  These shorthand compressions of emotion jumped out at me whenever I came upon them. They conjured up in my mind all the rage and hurt of disenfranchised men. I modelled myself after these members of the opposition. Their rage became mine. Everything would be different, I vowed, when I got to power.

  So you see, when you are a good student and a future prime minister, you can be happy at times despite your acne and your adolescent gawkiness.

  TEN WHO SEIZED MY IMAGINATION:

  (1) Sir Edmund Hillary, to name only one of the many mountaineers who awed me with their devotion to the beautifully useless, despite the price in fingers, toes, eyesight, even lives -- a New Zealand beekeeper who was the first man to reach the summit of etc.

  (2) Neil Armstrong, who etc.

  (3) The Second World War and her brood of heroes and villains, all there in black and white photos and colour movies to fascinate every boy of my etc.

  (4) John Dillinger, dashing gangster of my fancy, who despite sensing his doom and breaking into a run from the woman in red who had accompanied him, betrayed him, was gunned down coming out of a movie house by agents of the etc.

  (5) J.F.K., who lived in my mind the day he was etc.

  (6) Linus Pauling, the only man to win two whole Nobel etc.

  (7) Bobby Fischer, victor of Reykjavik, who though awkward, inarticulate and of uncertain intelligence, nonetheless had a wizardry about him that etc.

  (8) Yukio Mishima, who terminated his life in a most spectacular way (seppuku, the traditional samurai suicide of self-disembowelment), after taking over an army base with his own private army and addressing the soldiers about the decay of Japan, having finished that very morning his last etc.

  (9) Sacco and Vanzetti, who, despite world-wide appeals for clemency, were etc.

  (10) Miguel Hidalgo, whose impassioned call in 1810 for Mexican independence is considered the starting-point of his country's struggle to break away from Spain. This call has become known at El Grito--The Shout -- and Hidalgo is always portrayed in paintings and sculptures with a clenched fist, fiery eyes and his mouth wide open. It is this vision that struck me -- that strikes me still -- that of a man at the centre of his country, far away from any sea, who has had enough, more than enough, and who tosses his head back and lets out a shout so long and so loud that it rolls across every plain and down every valley of his country, and in all the towns and villages people hear this strange cry and turn their heads to listen to it. Miguel Hidalgo was arrested by the authorities and summarily etc.

  There is another strand, intertwining with the physical change strand, the acne strand, the prime minister strand. Perhaps it started earlier, but I wasn't aware of it. For me, it started on my first day of school in North America.

  I'm not sure whether it was more the fashion of the time, the mid-seventies, or my parents' personal liking, but at that age I had rather long hair, nearly down to my shoulders. Had I been a trailblazer I could have flaunted a ponytail. I didn't think anything of my long hair; nor did my classmates in France. I recall no more than occasionally being mistaken from behind for a girl by Parisian shopkeepers.

  But in North America, I discovered quickly and brutally, girls could have their hair short or long, though most had it long, but boys, boys I say, could only have it short. The first day of school, within the first minutes, just as I sat down, the class clown came up to me and asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I said flatly that I was a boy, but my response didn't register, or even matter, since he was not really asking a question so much as making a comment which elicited the desired chuckles and snickers from the class. The teacher called us to order. As the boy turned away, he spat out a word. "Faggot!" At recess I heard it again, and another, "Fag." When I learned the North American meaning of the epithets, I was dumbfounded by the hostility behind them.

  If a friend of mine in Paris had confessed that he was in love with a Simon or a Peter, I would have compared notes with him on my love for Mary Ann. Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice-cream. I imagine the absence of religion in my upbringing was one factor that had allowed this belief to survive. Perhaps, too, I had a natural openness in the matter. At any rate, it was completely unwittingly that I had disregarded this fundamental polarity of North American society.

  In the years that followed I began to get my hair cut shorter and shorter. I didn't do it in one dramatic operation, which might have instantly salvaged my emerging manhood in the eyes of others, because I was too young and self-conscious to be so daring and -- isn't life a series of difficult choices? -- be
cause my unmanly long hair helped hide my acne. Despite the social cost, without hesitation, I chose homosexuality over acne.

  From that first day of school onwards, fear and misery were a routine part of my existence. With them came a feeling of confusion. It was not over this bigoted division of desire; that was easy enough to deal with. With a monstrous coldness I could have thought, "The Nazis didn't like Jews, the KKK don't like blacks, North Americans don't like homosexuals," and that would have been the end of it. A socio-political observation and a consequent adjustment in dress and deportment. A tidy act of conformism. What prevented me from fitting in so nicely was that none of the symbols or attributes of this loathsome bent seemed original. They all derived from a single source. Long hair, gentleness, an eye for beauty, a longing for boys -- these were plainly terms that described girls. So except for the fact that they were female, girls looked and behaved far more homosexual than I. Yet they were not condemned for it, seemingly, while I was. He -- Jim -- would taunt me, shove me, terrify me over my long hair and putative desire for boys -- "You faggot! You faggot!" he would hiss -- while next to me sat one who had long hair and would soon desire a boy. She -- Sonya -- would always come to my rescue, hurling shrieks and taunts at Jim.

  I sought guidance where I could. At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine -- and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When I walked the corridors of Parliament Hill, passing the portraits of my future predecessors, I would say to myself, "C'est le parlement, masculine. Power, it's le pouvoir." I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine. As I entered it I would put on a disdainful expression and say to myself,

  "Les femmes font la cuisine ici, mais pour moi, une cuisine, c'est un endroit ou Robert Kennedy se fait tuer." "Women cook here, but a kitchen, to me, is a place where Robert Kennedy gets killed."

  But this is nonsense. I write it to be truthful to the moment, but it is nonsense. Not far from my house in Ottawa there was a large field, a vast, rolling expanse of grass. Often I would go there alone and lie down, angel-like. I would look up at the male yellow sun and the male blue sky. I would turn and smell and feel the female green grass. Then I would roll over and over and over down the incline till I was dizzy, mixing up the colours and the genders. I felt neither masculinity nor femininity, I only felt desire, I only felt humid with life. Sometimes -- no, more often than that -- often, I would crawl to the edge of the field, not like a soldier at war but because I liked the feel of the grass rubbing against my body, and I would lie on my side and masturbate onto the bushes, delighting in the shooting arc of my sperm and the way it splattered against the dark green leaves and dripped heavily while I wiped myself ineffectively with soft green shoots.

  A word about Jim. Adults are so confident in the authority of the law and the power of its enforcers that they tend to forget that criminal jurisprudence does not apply to children. Such legal niceties as "libel", "theft", "assault and battery" are no comfort to a thirteen-year-old boy scared witless of another thirteen-year-old boy.

  I doubt I can fully convey the degree of fear that Jim inspired in me. No one made my heart stop and then beat at triple speed, no one made my blood freeze, the way he did. I avoided him at all costs. If that meant eating lunch in hiding, if that meant running home -- running, I say -- right after school, so be it. I realize now that one shocking punch would have tilted the balance of power, but I was a physical coward. It wasn't anything reasonable that made me so afraid, fear of a broken tooth or a bleeding nose. It was fear of confrontation itself that paralysed me.

  Sonya told me that girls could be cruel too, and she looked at me meaningfully. As an example, after I had prodded her one time, she confessed that once she and some friends had been in the school bathroom when a girl from a younger grade had come in to pee. They noticed that in her cubicle she had let her skirt drop to her feet instead of lifting it around her waist, something, apparently, that only little girls did, not mature girls like them. So they started laughing about it and mocking the girl, and knocking on her cubicle door. The girl wouldn't come out. They stayed the whole lunch hour, until a minute before class. Cruel indeed, I thought. Poor little girl. Surely the last time in her life she ever dropped her skirt to her feet. But another voice in me was saying, "Where are the animal noises? Where's the water thrown into the cubicle? Where's the spitting? Where's the attempt to get at her skirt and rip it to shreds? Where is the assault on the person?" I told Sonya that once a boy was yawning and another boy who was passing by, for fun, spat into his etc.; that once a group of boys were attempting, for fun, to stuff a boy into a locker and had nearly managed it except for his left foot and gave up only because they were afraid his hysterical shrieks might attract the attention of etc.; that once a boy was standing in the school corridor and another boy who was passing by, for fun, kneed him in the groin and continued walking without a break, laughing at the fluid grace of his gesture while the other bent over in pain and loudly burst into etc.; that once a boy came back to his locker to find that another boy had poured urine into it through the etc.; that once a boy didn't eat lunch for an entire week because every day another boy terrorized him into giving him his lunch bag, which he would go through, eating the brownies, throwing out the rest, until he tired of this fun and etc. I told these and other stories to Sonya, pretending that they had all taken place in the third person. She frowned.

  I never saw a boy strike a girl. An unspoken rule against it. Certainly not any rule of not picking on one weaker than oneself; that was the norm among boys. Perhaps it was a logical consequence of desire -- one doesn't beat what one wants. Not at that age, anyway.

  Once at the McDonald's near the school, at an unhappy moment of tension, I stood in front of the washrooms with Sonya, sweet Sonya. MEN said one door, WOMEN said the other. I thought, "No, no, this isn't right. It shouldn't be this way, not MEN, not WOMEN. It should be FRIENDS and ENEMIES. That should be the natural division of things, one that would better reflect reality. That way Sonya and I could go together through one door, and the others through the other."

  Let us return to the sea. Though for girls it seemed considerably less than a thrill, and certainly never an aesthetic or transcendental experience, I was always fascinated by the female menstrual cycle. I don't recall when I first learned of its elements. I think they entered my mind in odd, disconnected bits and it was only after I had acquired a fair knowledge that I suddenly realized the beauty of this monthly blood-letting. It struck me that there was nothing in the human drama so patently fertile as this ability to bleed vitally. I saw it in vivid contrasts of colour. Red from white, red from black, red from brown. That the menses of women who lived together, of the same generation or not, in the same bedroom or not, two or a boarding-schoolful, should become synchronized, like musicians who strike up the Jupiter symphony once they have finished tuning their instruments, was a source of deep wonder to me. I felt there was a latent unity among women, a unity for which I could find no equivalent among boys, try as I might. We were orphans among sisters. A girl could fight and be nasty, mock and degrade, pour forth pure venom from her mouth, cut herself off from everyone -- yet still be connected by that melody of blood. Whereas if I cut myself off, I was truly alone. With nothing to tie me to the rest of life except my stubborn stupid metronome of a heart. The controlled randomness of the cycle -- that periods could vary in lengt
h, in flow, could stop, even, depending on a myriad of factors; that ovaries worked together yet idiosyncratically, one ovulating three times in a row while the other remained idle -- reminded me of the physics I was learning: the Big Bang Theory, Newton's laws, the Theory of Relativity, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Science teachers explained these as referring to the vast cosmos beyond, as if they could so easily disguise what was plain to me: the principles of the female cycle were those of the universe. The cosmos was out there, and next to me. Sadly, I was beyond this universe, outside it, in the vacuum of vacuums, at most able to contribute a few white comets of sperm.

  Sonya's cycle became an affair between the two of us. We went through the entire female hygiene section of a drugstore once, the only time in my life that I can remember looking at commercial products labelled in English without understanding what they were for. When she had cramps and wanted to go home to bed right after school, I would go with her and lie beside her until her father came home. I thought that if only I could understand the menstrual cycle, this slow, balancing ballet of hormones, this one mystery, I would understand everything. My curiosity became a starvation. I asked question after question of Sonya. In the calm, thoughtful way that was hers, she tried to oblige me with answers. Menstrual cramps in particular baffled me. I knew of cramps from swimming, in the calves, but there, in the lower abdomen -- I could not comprehend it. In my body that area was a dull crossroads of organs: legs joined trunk, my intestines sat in the bowl of my pelvis, the bladder filled and emptied and on the edge hung my scrotum and penis. About as unknowable as a suburb. Certainly not the temperamental cornucopia of independent personality that Sonya lived with. I would ask her to describe her cramps to me. Her hands on her belly, looking up at the ceiling, her eyebrows knit, sometimes suffering from a touch of fever, she would try. "Well, it's like ... um ... a pulling. Or a tearing. It tears. It's like a ... um ... a cramp. It's a cramp." We always came back to that word, precisely accurate to her, utterly meaningless to me. I could only observe, making sure that the wet hand-towel on her forehead was fresh.