Self

by Yann Martel

  (Another reason I came to like my periods was that I grew tired of disliking them. I was pulling a tampon out, glancing at it to check how much I had been bleeding, about to toss it into watery oblivion, when this distaste wearied me. I decided to make my periods beautiful. "This dull ache, it's a sign of good health." I looked at the red tampon again. "My system works. I work. Good." My cycle was like the German language. When you travel you meet Germans, countless Germans; the Americans export their culture but not their tourists; the Germans, the contrary. In the depths of West Sepik, Papua New Guinea, you will meet Germans. Behind their backs -- and sometimes not -- in a conversation among non-Germanophones, will come the almost universal conviction that "German is an ugly language," as harsh as sandpaper and mostly barked (the usual winner in this Miss Universe beauty pageant of the languages, tears streaking down her face for joy, waving her white handkerchief at her adoring fans, is Italian). Well, I heard this dumb drivel once too often. With a will, I decided the opposite. With its words as long as novellas, its syntax like a medieval cathedral and its grammar like Einstein's science, German became my favourite foreign language. In Montreal I took a series of Goethe Institute courses and for years my bedside book was Heinrich Heine. Every night I read a few pearly pages. I've also read some Nietzsche in the original, stuff of incendiary lightness and wit.)

  I met Elena on my first day at Ellis. She was American, one of a number who came to study in Canada because university was cheaper here than in the States. We were both at Strathcona-Milne. I can't remember who introduced us. My memory starts when I am already in front of her. The weather was warm and she was wearing a new dress, a light summery thing. She was standing barefoot in the grass of the Quad, the communal area between the college townhouses, feeling the fabric and appraising the pattern and lifting the dress and letting it fall. I noticed her tanned legs with their few shiny blonde hairs. She looked right at me. "Hi, I'm Elena," she said. The words went straight to my heart. She was not very tall, her voice was slightly raspy, she often wore her sandy blonde hair in French braids and she was a true beauty. She was very young -- I don't think she was eighteen yet -- but she had an intelligent self-possession, I might even say a dignity, that made her seem much older. We fell into easy conversation. We were friends right away. And right away I was in love with her. I spent the better part of two years studying wisdom while my heart thumped with pain. To maximize my misery, I used to go swimming with her, beholding a body that I could love only in dreams, and I stayed in Roetown with her the summer between my first and second year. I took a course in ancient philosophy (Parmenides and the Eleatics, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle) while Elena took one on medieval romance (she did her major essay on courtly love. It was a painful irony: she told me all about the subject while I, her courtly lover, listened attentively).

  She lived at S-M in a townhouse with five other students, a heterogeneous group thrown together by the college office. One of her housemates was a Hong Kong Chinese named George. He always wore a cap. For some reason -- a free act of generosity -- he took it upon himself to be my romantic manager. Over the course of two years I spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours with Elena; we saw movies, plays and lectures together, we went on long walks, we took a few weekend trips to Toronto, yet I don't think she ever realized that I loved her, and how much it consumed me. (It's true that I hid my love well, followed a practised pattern.) Within two weeks, however, George was greeting me at the door of their townhouse with "Hi. You are looking very nice. That dress suits you. Elena will like it," in his clipped, smiley, Hong Kong Chinese English voice, and at the end of visits, when I was feeling hurt and lonely and hungry, he would walk out with me and encourage me, or try to, with "Don't give up. Give her time." He was sweet.

  But Elena was soon in love with Jonathan, who was nice, I had to admit, who was a struggling actor, who was older, who played the saxophone. My love was something useless.

  It poisoned my life. Once, late at night, leaving the college library, I was so overcome with misery that I stamped the ground and the words "I am so unhappy!" burst out of me. They were said in such a strange voice, with so little restraint or modulation, that I was astonished. I stood still. For the duration of a few seconds expressing the emotion seemed to deal with it. The pain was out of me, floating in the air, catching onto the branches, infiltrating the bark of trees, seeping into the grass. But then I thought of Elena -- saw her, felt her -- and the pain rushed back in.

  There is no pain so hard to imagine when you're free of it, yet so real, so overwhelming, when it afflicts you, as that of unrequited love. It's simply unbearable. Elena's person, Elena's bed, Elena's room, Elena's house, Elena's street, Elena's park -- all were charged with a meaning that nothing else had. Anywhere but near her was nowhere. All reality beside her was a thin surface hiding a vacuum, a hollowness. Hollow tree. Hollow cat. Hollow me. I was sick with love, truly sick with it.

  I was in her room one day. This was in second year, and she was living in a large, ramshackle house with other students. A week or so before, she and Jonathan had painted her room a lovely cerulean blue. The furniture was typically student: there was none. Only a futon. The hardwood floor was seat, cupboard and bookshelf all in one, and Elena's lap was her table. There were clothes and books strewn about. I noticed One Hundred Years of Solitude, another of the heavy ironies that jumped out at me. She had just woken up from a nap, her hair a dishevelled mess, and she was in a dreamy mood. Our talk was mostly silence. I couldn't take my eyes off her bed. The rumpled sheets exuded such intimacy. Oh, to crawl over and lie in them! (To kiss her, to sleep with her -- that was well-nigh inconceivable.) But I could not lie in her bed. She probably wouldn't have objected, she would have laughed, but she would have thought me strange. So I just sat there on the floor, a few feet away from her, burning in hell, my eyes congested with fish, while we talked about nothing in particular. She thought One Hundred Years was amazing.

  Towards the end of my second year I came to the conclusion that in all my life -- I was nineteen at the time -- I had had only two original ideas (discounting my early theory on love). I don't know why I was thinking in those terms, perhaps it was the study of philosophy, but that was the conclusion: only two. Every other idea I had had was a hand-me-down from someone or somewhere. Except for these two ideas, my mind was a mishmash the flavour of pap.

  My first original idea was an insight into the nature of questions. Any utterance will fall into one of two categories: either it's a statement or it's a question. There is nothing else. There are myriad kinds of statements, but declarative or imperative, simple or complex, understood or nonsensical, they all share one feature: they stand on their own. For example, the statement "Elena sleeps with Jonathan" is magnificently autarkic. It just doesn't give a damn about anything else. Questions, on the other hand, do not stand on their own. By their very nature, they imply the existence of something else: namely, answers. Questions are tango dancers in search of partners. My insight was that a question is a question only if it has an answer. By which I don't mean that this answer must be known, merely that it must be known to exist. For example, the proof to Fermat's Last Theorem, that there are no nonzero numbers x, y and z such that xn + yn = zn in which n is greater than 2, is an enigma that has baffled mathematicians for over 350 years. Yet it still remains a valid question, a tango dancer (if lonely), because a definitive answer exists at least in theory. It doesn't matter whether the answer is two hundred pages of mathematical arcana or the simple statement "There is no proof to Fermat's Last Theorem" -- either way question and answer could dance to Django Reinhardt.

  But there are questions, or so-called questions, that will remain for ever on the edge of the dance floor, against the wall. They may look like questions, they may sound like questions, one can go about them as one might with real questions -- but they are not real questions for they have no answers. This is where my insight was useful, for if there was a way of picking out fals
e questions, then one would be spared the useless effort of searching for the impossible: the answer to a non-question.

  A question is a question only if there is something outside it, separate, that can function as an answer. A pseudo-question, on the other hand, gobbles up all possible answers by becoming a bigger and bigger pseudo-question, until at last it has swallowed up the entire universe and there is nothing outside it that can act as an answer. Sometimes the very same words will be both a question and a pseudo-question, depending on the context. If a doctor asks, "Why did Georgie die?" referring to seven-year-old Georgie, the doctor is asking a valid question to which "infantile leukemia" is a valid final answer.

  But let's say Georgie's mother is asking the same question. "Why did Georgie die?" Listen to her tone of voice. Is she really asking a question? Is "infantile leukemia" what she's looking for? It isn't. If you gave her that answer, she would ask, "Why is there infantile leukemia?" Would she want to hear detailed explanations of the malfunctioning of bone marrow? Of course not. Every possible answer you could give her she would swallow up in a greater question, each one more bloated than the last: "Why is there pain?" "Why is there existence?" "Why is there God?" "Why is there anything?" Are these questions? Can one tango successfully with them? No. Georgie's mother's questions are really statements in disguise. In asking "Why did Georgie die?" she is saying, "I cannot accept this loss." In asking "Why is there pain?" she is saying, "It hurts so much." The statements behind pseudo-questions are usually of fear, pain or bewilderment.

  We sometimes spend a lot of time searching for answers that can't exist. Better to realize how we feel and proceed from there, no false questions asked.

  This was my first original idea. I owed it to no one but myself.

  My second original idea was to fall in love with Elena. It came from within me, like a deep swell. I saw her in ways that no one else did, loved her in ways that no one else did. My emotion was -- sadly for me, for the pain it gave me -- original to me.

  Those were my two original ideas. Huff and puff like the big bad wolf and blow a chill wind through me: at age nineteen they were the only two things that would have remained standing in me. A point about questions and love for a girl.

  The problem was, these two ideas cancelled each other out. My first idea told me to decide how I felt, and only then ask questions. My second idea told me exactly how I felt, but led me to such questions as "Why doesn't she love me?" Which, I am the first to admit, is a question that cannot bear an answer. It is plainly a pseudo-question, yet one that I tried to answer for weeks and months.

  Amidst the bustle of my student life, things started to go wrong. It wasn't only Elena -- there were other muttering questions at the back of my mind (that existential monkey I mentioned earlier. It seems so melodramatic to say this, so undergraduate, but I could find no meaning to my life, no purpose, no direction). I began finding academic success increasingly difficult. My choice of courses for second year was a disaster to my spirits. I became the great defender of relativism in moral philosophy (Hobbes, Pascal, Cudworth, Locke, Price, Hume, J.S. Mill, Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, Rawls). There was a rakish appeal in wiping away every notion of inherent goodness, in tearing down every signpost at the fork between good and evil. I remember lively discussions about the hypothetical innocuousness of throwing babies into bonfires. Worse still, irony of ironies, was a course on existential philosophy. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger -- I thought for sure that they would speak to me, but they did not. As for nineteenth-century philosophy (Fichte, Hegel, William James, J.S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, C.S. Peirce, Schopenhauer), I sat through it in a dumb, uncomprehending stupor. One of the most depressing things I suffered at this time was the breakdown of my ability to read. I had essays to produce, thinkers' thoughts to digest and chronicle, but I became incapable of reading these thinkers, let alone writing about them. I spent hour after dismal hour in the S-M library staring at the same paragraph of Sartre or Hegel. Even the ability to read literature nearly abandoned me. I limped through a course on early twentieth-century authors (Conrad, Ford, Forster, Lawrence, Gide, Mann, First World War poets), my interest aroused only by the grim poems of Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Blok and Graves. My marks in second year were a mix of charitable passes and miserable failures. I thought of dropping out (but where would I go?)

  I went to swim practice morning and evening, three hours a day, every day, seeking solace in the amnesia of the body. I wasted hours on New York Times crossword puzzles. I went on endless walks.

  I resigned from the university senate, not halfway through my two-year term, and renounced my prime-ministerial ambitions ("I choose not to run," said Calvin Coolidge. "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve," said William Tecumseh Sherman). Politics is not for the tortured at heart. Once you're tortured, you're no longer good at it, you're on your way out. The responsible exercise of power requires a dull-headed certainty about things, a limited linear quality called "vision". To knock on strangers' doors and canvass, to stand up and make partisan speeches, to set priorities and make decisions -- in short, to peddle conviction in a daily way -- you need vision. I had, have, none.

  In the winter of my second year, I wrote a play. I had had an idea and I had drawn an awkward but detailed sketch of the set and stage. In considering these two things, the wordy idea in my head and the plotless sketch, I felt impelled to write the thing out, to people that stage. The result was dreadful, a truly awful one-act play. About a young woman who falls in love with a door, who commits suicide when that door, her Romeo, is unhinged and tossed out to sea by an arrogantly well-meaning friend. I showed the play to three older people whose opinions I respected. From two, my heart-wrenching drama elicited bursts of laughter. They thought it was a parody on tragedies. "I hope this isn't autobiographical," remarked one. I was profoundly mortified, though I chuckled along. My third reader, a writer-in-residence at Ellis from Scotland, sent me a tactful note in which he complimented me on some of the writing and said my play was "an intellectually sensed melodrama". The critical edge in that phrase was sufficiently ambiguous for me to feel a guarded sense of satisfaction. It helped me recover from my first two readers and I was able to destroy all four copies of the play with passable equanimity. But there had been pleasure in its making, that's what I retained. Before and after I was restless; but during, my mind was focused. One sign of how taken I was by the work of creation was the importance the play had in my mind. My room could burn down, the college, the whole city -- I would be all right so long as I saved my pen-scrawled sheets of paper. The play, while I worked on it, was my most precious possession in the world.

  After this first effort, heeding the well-known adage, I tried to limit myself to what I knew best, which was very little. My first finished story was about an event that had taken place at a lecture in my first-year psychology course. We -- meaning three hundred students -- were waiting for the lecture to begin. There was a heavy noise in the air, each component no more than a quiet exchange or a rustle or a cough, but adding up to a dissonant yet strangely uniform mass of sound, seemingly weighing hundreds of kilos. Into this heaviness were thrown a few grams of music. A student had detached himself from the group, sat down at the upright piano and begun to play. The piano was always there, a piece of furniture, a carcass. At the first note, silence blew over us like a wind. The air was clear except for those notes. He played for a minute or two what I could only describe as something limpid and in a higher range. Then he stopped, there was a ripple of applause, the professor happened to appear at that moment, and before the weight of noise could return the lecture started. At the next lecture he played again, but with less success. We were expecting him. There was silence, and therefore tension, as he stepped up to the piano. He delivered his notes with less confidence. At the lecture after that, he did not play. I watched him. He looked towards the piano, surely thought of trying again, but remained in his seat. It had worked best when
it was spontaneous.

  I wrote the story as an interior monologue in three parts, one for each lecture. The thoughts ranged in emotion from whim and insouciance to arrogance and vanity to defeat. It began with the words "I will play" and ended with "I will listen." It was of no great interest, and hardly had I finished it than I read it over, thought "Hmmm" and tore it up. But I remember thinking that I had captured the modulation of emotions nicely.

  The majority of my plays and stories were aborted after a few pages. In my head, airborne, my ideas were full of grace and power, like a soaring albatross. When they landed on the page -- quite aside from the fact that they seemed to have the commensurate awkwardness of a big bird on foot -- I could no longer enjoy their company. For what was written was over. I had to move on. I might have to endure thoughts of Elena, might have to suffer my loneliness until I could think of another fiction. This is as close as I can come to an explanation of why I started to write: not for the sake of writing, but for the sake of company.

  I decided to spend the summer between my second and third year in Greece, for an airfare equivalent in actuarial terms to one of my parents' fingers. I'd heard the country was cheap and beautiful, and Elena wasn't going to be in Roetown. She was heading home. Things were going so-so with Jonathan and she was confused as to what she was doing at university. She wasn't sure she would return to Ellis. We said goodbye on the street. We hugged -- the first and only time I felt her breasts against mine -- and I kissed her on both cheeks, the way the French and aspiring lovers do. She gave me her mother's address. (It used to jump out at me when I flipped through my address book. Now it's an overgrown tombstone at the back of a garden.)