by Yann Martel
Roetown's Ellis University is one of the smallest universities in Canada, with fewer than 2,500 full-time students when I started. At the time, its reputation was somewhat lacklustre. "Easy to get into," was said of the place. "C+ is all you need." It was known for welcoming the huddled masses of poor, mediocre high-school graduates, those who hadn't made the grade of the more illustrious, career-track universities. It was precisely this lack of elitism that attracted me to Ellis. After Mount Athos, I was ready for the Open Air University of Albania. But easy as it was to get into the place, it wasn't easy to get out -- with a piece of paper, at any rate -- as I would find out through personal experience. Ellis turned out to be a firstrate liberal arts university.
It was arranged on the college system, with three of the colleges on the modern main campus a few miles out of town, and the other two in Roetown itself, two separate mini-campuses in an old (by Canadian standards -- 1850) central Ontarian town of sixty thousand.
It was on the doorstep, so to speak, of one of these downtown colleges that I presented myself, tanned and Portuguese-swept, in the fall of 1981. I had chosen Strathcona-Milne (S-M to everyone) because it was the smallest of Ellis's colleges and seemed the most informal and alternative (and perhaps the closest to a family that I could find), which turned out to mean that it was a tossed salad of lit-crit types, theatre types, poet types, budding artist types, earth-lover types, gays and lesbians, and would-be revolutionaries of one colour or another, with a light vinaigrette of marijuana and late nights. The place was a haven of tolerance, exploration and intellectual obfuscation. I loved it.
The college was a mix of constructions ranging from the main building, a stately nineteenth-century mansion that housed the small library, the dining-hall and various offices and classrooms, to five or six 1920s houses that retained the cosy feel of homes despite being converted into classrooms and professors' offices, to a few modernish buildings, mainly residences, including an insignificant, squat yellow thing, a sad tribute to 1950s architecture, that turned out to be my residence -- but no matter. Whether I was amidst the flights of concrete of the main campus, in the quaint, oldish, bourgeois constructs of S-M, in the wordless mediocrity of my room, or somewhere in between -- on the shuttle bus looking out at the Wade River, for example -- I was happy to be here. The constraints of Mount Athos were gone. I was free to be myself, to be what I wanted. I believe this was a common feeling among us zeros, this exhilaration at discovering that we could now be somebodies.
And let me not forget Roetown, to which I hadn't given a thought when I applied to Ellis. It was an unexpected gem, a diamond I stumbled upon on my way to higher learning. With trees, lots of trees, houses built around trees, not over their uprooted stumps; and rolling hills for the sake of vistas; and a river which opened up to a beautiful lake while still within the confines of the town; and clear, broad streets; and gabled stone and wood houses, and red-brick factories -- architectures varied in purpose and style but always pleasing to the eye, and without the cosmetic fakery of too much money; and weather -- crazy to celebrate a town for its weather, but weather that fully participated in the life of the town, like a prominent citizen, like a councillor with visions of civic grandeur, sometimes so savage and cold that you only wanted to peer out at it from the warm side of windows, sometimes so crisp and clear that you felt the landscape was made of glass, sometimes so hot, green and humid, so Babylonian, that you wanted to be naked -- weather in which, for every degree Celsius, there was a light, a colour, a wind, a cloud, a scent, an emotion.
Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times -- that is, hard -- had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.
I decided to major in anthropology. I enrolled in the department's first-year course and in a second-year introduction to archaeology that was open to first-years.
Psychology's appeal was immediate. Of course I was interested in the workings of the mind.
English literature (The modern period and its roots: Browning, Hopkins, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Pound, Eliot) was a natural choice also.
For my fifth and last course, I hesitated. I went to several introductory lectures during intro week. It came down to philosophy, history or political studies. Curiously, for one who thought herself so political, I struck the politics course from my list first. I listened to the professor attentively, I leafed through the heavy textbook at the Ellis bookstore -- but it didn't grab me. Not the macro approach, not the word "system". I preferred staying with the individual.
It was the memory of my mother's hammer that brought me to philosophy (Introduction to: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Nietzsche).
All these courses, except for the archaeology course, had the same number, nearly proverbial, the starting-point of all knowledge, it seemed: 101.
Residence fees included a complete meal plan -- three meals a day for six days and a Sunday brunch, every week.
Ancillary fees covered a pass to use not only the Ellis shuttle bus but the entire Roetown bus system, and open access to the excellent sports centre.
My room was one of the largest in the Yellow Squat Thing Building. One window, one door, one closet, one chest of drawers, one desk and chair, one bed -- it was nearly Portuguese. There was a sweet housekeeper, Mrs. Pokrovski, who changed our sheets once a week.
I had pocket money to spare (but remember where it came from. Every movie ticket, every little extravagance, was a reminder of this blood money).
Roetown had a thriving cultural scene, animated not only by the university but by the citizens of the town. Between the two, there was always something happening -- a lecture on American cultural imperialism or an American movie at the Imperial, modern dance at Artspace or a minor-league hockey game, Reverend Ken and the Lost Followers or Handel's Messiah, Peter Handke or Noel Coward, a Take Back the Night march or a Walking Tour of Historical Roetown, etc. or etc. I say "or"; in most cases I tried to make it "and".
That was the setting, those were the courses, those were the distractions -- my student life could begin. I threw myself into it. It was like that of most students, I suppose, only in some ways more active, in some ways more isolated. I usually got up fairly early, by student standards at any rate, and rarely missed breakfast. I never missed lectures or seminars, even morning ones after late nights, for I was a serious student, which didn't mean that I was a good student (I wasn't; I was an intelligent not-good student) or that I started my essays any earlier than the night before they were due, but meant that what I considered, I considered seriously. I quickly became involved in student politics: I was elected first-year representative to the S-M student cabinet and in second year I was elected to the university senate. I joined the swim team and the cross-country ski team, though I was neither a fast swimmer nor a fast skier; I was a slow, graceful swimmer and a slow, graceless skier. I joined more for the fun of being part of a team, and the satisfaction of being fit (the one enduring legacy of my university years is probably my discovery of the most pleasurable part of exercise: the deep breath. To be swimming length after length, non-stop, sometimes not even counting how many, only aware of the incantation of my breathing and the splashing rhythm of motion, was a kinetic form of meditation). And I had many friends. They were mostly friends of circumstance, true -- I haven't kept up with many of them -- but the circumstances were good.
Despite this activity, I often felt lonely, more so as time went by. My life was a busy kind of solitude, much motion with little emotion. Elena played a major part in this feeling, but there was more: the beginning of a certain mal-de-vivre. Hardly had my university career started than it began to go awry. "Existential crisis" would be the name of the syndrome, but I will not dwell on it. Angst is not much of a peg to hang things on. We all go through it, we all cope with it, or try, so why talk about it? I say this though I think my case was bad enough, a
befuddlement such that no degree of reasonableness could assuage it; or no more than whispering reassurances would calm a freshly captured, terrified monkey. I saw a documentary at Ellis once in which scientists -- I believe that's what they were called -- played the recorded sounds of a fire burning and then of river water rising to a caged monkey, to test its instinctive fear of both. The recordings started very low, barely audible (but already the monkey was looking alarmed), and ended at full volume. It struck me as fairly self-evident that turning down options like being burned to a crisp or having only water to breathe didn't require much more than a slug's intellect let alone the nimble wits of a monkey. Indeed, when the sounds were at their loudest -- a roaring forest fire, a roaring torrent of water -- I have never seen such an incarnation of pure fear. It was not the cowering in a corner, the trembling paralysis, the rapid panting, the sudden release of urine and excrement -- it was the look on the animal's face, its silent, open mouth, the rolling of its eyes. When my academic career was derailed, when my nebulous but ambitious future dissolved, when I clutched for any sense of meaning in my life, I thought of this monkey. But it doesn't make for interesting reading, I'll be the first to admit it.
I quickly lost interest in anthropology. I found pre-Columbian New Mexican pueblos magic in my imagination but dull in reality. Their study was like a reverse form of undertaking, where the bliss of death is shattered by a reanimation leading to a paltry, diminished life. Civilizations were reduced to monographs with precise drawings of floor plans and cross-sections of pits indicating where each artifact, each pot shard, each bone was found, with dry academic paragraphs surmising the tribe, the linguistic grouping, the level of artistic achievement. Like saying "My grandmother -- she was an extraordinary woman," and pointing for proof to a tattered dress and shoes of a long-ago style. I suppose these tatters are better than nothing, but they were not for me. (Though later, in Turkey, in Mexico, in Peru, I would stand in the troglodyte churches of Cappadocia, climb the pyramid of Uxmal, run along the lines of Nazca, and I would feel the magic again.)
I became interested in philosophy. In fact, were it not for the study of wisdom I doubt I would have lasted more than a year at university. I found philosophy genuinely stimulating. I still remember the trepidation I felt upon entering Plato's Republic. Even more astonishing to me was Descartes's radical doubt and Berkeley's esse est percipi. I readily admit that Plato's Republic is hopelessly hierarchical and undemocratic, that Descartes's starting-point of we-are-perhaps-but-puppets-in-the-hands-of-a-mean-puppeteer is the very definition of paranoia, and that closing one's eyes and refusing to perceive has never saved anyone from an oncoming truck -- but it was not the products of these ruminations that struck me so much as the process. I was taken by the careful, open think-through of things that characterizes the philosophical method. It was both simple and very difficult. I rose to the challenge. I too would be reasonable, I said to myself.
It was several months before I had my first period. The exalted view I held of the menstrual cycle dimmed considerably the morning I awoke in bloody sheets after a night disturbed by fever, headache and nausea -- I thought I was coming down with the flu. My reaction was horror and shock. I jumped out of bed. There was blood on the sheets, on the mattress, it was trickling down my legs, now there were several drops on the carpet. And the pain -- this was serious, I felt awful, down there and in my head. So this was what Sonya was talking about! This ache, like having a rubber band wrapped around your testicles. I could nearly vomit for it.
I knew that it was coming, that it had to come, but to me it was like death: the oldest story in the world, yet still a surprise. You will tell me, "Oh, that's nothing. You were eighteen. An adult. Intelligent and resilient. Imagine having it when you're twelve. A child. I remember I was at my friend Stephanie's ..." and you will tell me your story. Perhaps. No doubt. Thank you. But that's no help to me. I whispered to myself whatever a person can come up with to make the unbelievable believable: that it was normal, that I should be proud for I was now a woman, that it was only once a month and all I needed was (and I reviewed all the pharmacies I had visited with Sonya), and things like that. But at the same time I was thinking, "This messiness, this filth, this stench, this pain -- once every month! THIS IS UNFAIR, COSMICALLY UNFAIR! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO! I want out. I want to be sterile. To hell with reproduction. I want to be reincarnated as a mule, the last of my line."
I tried to get my act together. I believe I was whimpering. I opened the door to my room, bloodied sheets in hand, off to attempt cleaning them in the sink -- and who should be in the hallway at that moment but Mrs. Pokrovski. Who always greeted us with a smile. Who treated us as her own children, perhaps missing hers, but without judgement or intrusion. Who had the warmest hands I have ever touched.
She turned. I didn't move. That day was not the day for clean sheets.
"Is something wrong, dear?"
Some words you can only say looking away into mid-air, and you're conscious of every hollow syllable. "I--just--got--my--period--and--I--made--a--mess." I could feel my face going red. The awareness only increased the rush of blood. I was this close to bursting into tears.
"Oh, that's no problem." She came up to me. "Here, give them to me." I let her take the bedding, though I hardly unclenched my hands. I was mortified at the thought that she might see the blood, which I had buried at the centre of the ball of sheets. "Come along, I'll give you some clean ones."
I was wearing my bathrobe and in my underwear I had stuffed about sixty-five tissues, but still I walked gingerly, as if I were the last brick securing the Aswan Dam.
She unlocked the closet. It had a full-size door but it wasn't a walk-in, though the shelves were cut away just enough to allow someone to step in and close the door. Which is exactly what I felt like doing. There was something about that closet, so cosy, so orderly, that I found comforting. One shelf was stacked with perfectly folded bed-sheets and pillowcases; another was the domain of toilet-paper rolls; a third sheltered cleaning products, each for a precise purpose; and on the floor lived a sturdy vacuum cleaner with its long nostril and attendant parts. From a clothes hook at the back of the door hung Mrs. Pokrovski's street coat. And lastly -- what drew my attention most -- there was a shelf of odds and ends.
A bottle of Aspirin.
Alka-Seltzer.
A thermometer.
Batteries (AA and 9-volt).
Two boxes of Bic pens, blue and black.
Disposable razors, blue and pink.
A can of shaving cream.
Needles, threads and other notions.
Laundry detergent in small sandwich bags.
Bars of Ivory soap.
Snickers chocolate bars.
Lined writing paper, for notes and for letters.
Envelopes.
Stamps.
A bottle of White-Out.
Scotch tape.
A stapler.
A box of paperclips.
A big box of tampons.
A big box of sanitary napkins.
Everything in a perfect little order. It was like looking at a city from high above, with its buildings and streets.
None of it for sale. All for giving.
She gave me two sheets and one sanitary napkin, which she neatly laid on the sheets. I looked at it blankly.
"Um, thank you very much, Mrs. Pokrovski. Um, how much do I owe you?"
"Oh, don't be silly." With a smile.
She closed and locked the closet.
On her part-time salary as a housekeeper she stocked things to handle student emergencies. Or so-called emergencies. For example, this immature eighteen-year-old who was overwhelmed by her first period.
Except for a quick trip to the drugstore, I spent the rest of that day in bed.
When I got tired of feeling that I was wearing diapers, and wet and mobile ones at that, and my mind had worked itself up to confronting the logistics of menses, I took to using tampons.
That Christmas I went around the house and had everyone sign a big card for Mrs. Pokrovski.
I imagine this is atypical, but in time I came to enjoy my periods. No singing and dancing about them -- but quiet satisfaction, yes. It's not that I felt linked to my body because of this blood. I didn't. Sex linked me to my body; exercise; extremes of temperature; hunger; sun in my face. My menstrual cycle had the opposite effect. I felt it happened to me, not with me. It emphasized to me how foreign and separate my body and I could be.
But what it did make me feel was linked to other people. Every month this non-arrival of future humanity reminded me that I was part of a species, of something larger than just myself, whether I liked it or not. It was as if I lived in complete isolation in the country, never seeing a soul, except once every twenty-eight days, when on the road not far from my house a bus full of noisy people roared by. My period was like that bus -- baffling, interesting, annoying, marvellous.
When a friend pointed out to me that the lunar month and the menstrual cycle are of the same length, I thought it was astronomy's gift to flaky women. Then I remembered the charismatic role the moon plays in ocean tides; how the earth is round, but its waters are oval. Now when I see a full moon I imagine that it too has tides that ripple across its surface. I can nearly see them. They are red.
Back on earth, the tantrums of this small wilful being called the uterus can be a real burden. The bloody mess I produced on a night bus in Turkey -- I still can't believe I didn't wake up -- comes to mind as a perfect example of this, the unmitigated hassle of it, the maddening exasperation (and of course my backpack, with its salvation of tampons, clothes and towel, was deep within the bowels of the bus, and I was wearing pale-coloured pants). Mercifully, my cramps were never so bad that I couldn't go about my normal day (though I certainly didn't forget about them; my uterus made damn sure of that), and my cycle was as regular as Kant on his walks in Konigsberg, and my flow manageable and of predictable duration -- but I had friends who were nearly incapacitated by their periods. Cramps that made them wince. A touch of fever. A day or two at home in bed. A seemingly endless blood flow. This preluded by PMS so bad they circled at least one day a month when they would "disconnect from reality". This is an arduous feminine normality. It would push anyone to worship the goddess Anaprox. But even in these cases, I feel that the burden remains a meaningful burden. It's like a large suitcase you have to carry on a long trip. You hate it, it slows you down, but at the end of the trip you open it and it's full of things, some of which glitter. Or imagine hearing a sound only through its echo, how you would turn your head, searching for its source. Or imagine having a small oboe within you that once a month begins to play, but only a few notes, never giving you the full melody. Oh, I don't know, something like that.
