by Yann Martel
My novel was a dream -- and it had the value of a dream. It was a form of rehearsal.
As planned over the course of three or four phone calls (each time a shock at hearing her voice, which triggered a tumble of memories), I spent Christmas and New Year's in Philadelphia with Ruth and her family. I met the famous Tuesday, Sandra and Danny (but not Graham). Of each I had formed a precise mental picture, having transformed Ruth's descriptions into photographs. But Ruth's testimony proved to be as accurate in describing her small tribe as the shape of clouds would be in describing a landscape. Her children neither looked nor behaved anything close to what I had expected. Colour of hair, expression, height, weight, dress, tone of voice -- I had created pure fictions. Having heard strictly the maternal angle of things, I had imagined them child-like. Having only heard of them second-hand, I had made them passive, spirits that would disappear as soon as we weren't talking about them, as they had for me in Turkey. But Tuesday and Sandra certainly weren't children, and Danny wasn't passive. In that house -- which wasn't actually in Philadelphia, but in a suburb -- there were unmistakably four live human beings. Tuesday was a year older and a year ahead of me, an economics/sociology major seemingly untouched by the existential monkey. Sandra was in grade 12, friendly but restless and testy at times. Danny was a ten-year-old American kid, graceless, loud and whiny; on several occasions I wanted to kill him. And I was the "friend" their mother had met in Greece and travelled with in "Turkey!"
The dynamics were a little odd. It was with Tuesday that I should have had the most in common. We talked about Ellis and Simon Fraser universities, about our different majors, about Roetown and Burnaby, about movies -- we traded in all the aspects that made up our common student culture. Yet it was clear that it was with her mother that I truly connected. Before Tuesday's eyes the twenty-odd years, that chasm that separated Ruth and me, would vanish, and her mother would appear to her as a stranger. It would be during the telling of an anecdote. We would become animated, we would laugh, we would interrupt each other either to refute a little jab with humorous indignation, set the record straight, or the contrary, to exaggerate a point for dramatic effect. The sheets were so dirty they were as rigid as plywood! The ice-cream was like chewing gum, you just couldn't finish it, you had to spit it out! The bus trip lasted forty-eight hours! Cost forty-eight cents! That we knew each other very, very well, our foibles, our strengths, our sore spots, our funny-bones, was evident. Suddenly Tuesday was a child, and Ruth and I would set the agenda of conversation, direct it, apt to shoo the child away if she became too obstreperous a spectator. Then she would comment apropos, with a touch of sarcasm, usually, as miffed adults are prone to do, and Ruth would reply and landscapes would indefinably shift, currents would change, winds would turn -- an earthquake just beyond the range of the senses -- and Ruth would become a stranger to me; she would play that role, source of joy and exasperation, through which she by and large defined herself. I would think, "She could be my mother too. She is double my age and some," and I would notice her wrinkles, her mature hands, her manners, the chasm between us.
There was Christmas and the litter of bright gift-wrap paper -- Ruth gave me a book on how to work one's way around the world, from vendanging in France to teaching English in Czechoslovakia to kibbutzing in Israel to modelling in Japan to sheep-shearing in Australia; I gave her Kazantzakis's Zorba the Greek -- and there was the great dinner with the hullabaloo of its communal cooking -- I made the mashed potatoes, extra-garlicky -- and there were a few visits to Philadelphia between Christmas and New Year's. My tourist preparation for Philadelphia was to read a lengthy essay by Octavio Paz on Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. I saw the Bride at the Museum of Art, with her chocolate grinder and the cracks in her glass, accidental but oh so appropriate, and I might even have got a sense of the Bachelors, of their intents, but for Tuesday, who wanted to get going, I could tell. I take for ever in museums. Her mother used to get impatient with me too. We saw a movie in a cinema the size of a shoebox in a mall the size of a city, with parking lots that had horizons (but the movie was unexpectedly good and funny, Splash by Ron Howard, and I laughed my head off). We played games, canasta among adults, Monopoly with Danny, who won every time, wouldn't you know, even when I had hotels on Atlantic, Ventnor and Marvin Gardens, Pacific, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Park Place and Boardwalk and I controlled all four railways. Ruth told me that Danny didn't like losing.
All the while I was feeling that some dial within me, having nothing to do with the year reaching its end, was rolling towards 999, about to turn over.
My room was directly opposite Ruth's. This might have been meaningful, but it was just where the guest bedroom was. It was a small room whose bare beige walls felt slightly oppressive, as the only window was so high up one needed a stepladder to look out. I shared this bottom of a well with the sewing machine. I mention this because I find these machines intriguing, and I remember Ruth's clearly. At night, after I had clicked off the bedside lamp, light would seep in from the window and dilute the darkness enough that I could make out the sewing machine. I would consider it. What a curious, unmistakable outline. A mechanical woodpecker. I had read that sewing machines were highly intricate pieces of engineering that had required great ingenuity in their development. I imagined that the Singer who had made millions was the semi-worthless grandson of the humble, hardworking inventor whose device would free nineteenth-century middle-class women from household drudgery and enslave nineteenth-century working-class people in factories, but I have no idea, I'm just saying that. Then, after other, less determined thoughts in which I was uncertain what words to match with what emotions, I would fall soundly asleep. Having no home of my own, I always sleep well in other people's homes.
For several days after my arrival Ruth and I communicated through glances and slight smiles at moments when they would go unnoticed by the others. The few times we were alone together our glances were steadier, but our talk was still vague. If these glances could have spoken, I'm not sure what they would have expressed. Longing? Lust? Anticipation? Farewell? Finally, late one night when everyone was safely asleep, our two doors quietly opened at the same time, like two eyes, and we stood in our doorframes and looked at each other. I was wearing a T-shirt, Ruth a nightgown. I can't really say what happened then. There was desire -- if she had beckoned me, I would have gone; when I retreated backwards into my room it was partly in the hope of drawing her in -- and there were memories of ache and release and salty skin and there was resistance -- I am forty-seven, a mother, I have a family, it cannot be; I am twenty, a student, I am a foreigner, it cannot be -- but amidst that complex swirl there was still something else, a surprise, a small but harbinger emotion that whispered in me: ambivalence. At that moment I could see Ruth whole, not as a Turkish lover or as a Philadelphia mother, but whole. And I did not want.
We looked at each other for a minute or so. We spoke not a word. In part it was out of fear that the least syllable would awaken Tuesday. But what was there to say anyway? After our eyes greeted each other, they floated for some seconds before we returned to our gaze of old, eye to eye, smile to smile, memory to memory. Then, with serene, goodbye smiles, we backed into our rooms and into our roles, she to her wide heterosexual bed, I to my uncertain single bed. It was over. We must let things pass. I slipped into the sheets. I felt a flash of regret, a sudden push towards tears. What have you done? What have you thrown away? Go to her now. Crawl up, curl up. Bring out your right hand and let it glide down naturally. Kiss. No. Stop. I fell back in bed. My eyes on the sewing machine, I sifted through my confusion.
My dial had turned over. I was at 001.
When Ruth drove me to the bus station on a cold sunny day in the new year, we kissed on the lips softly and said farewell with a sense of peace. I will always remember Ruth with great tenderness, and I wish her and her family nothing but happiness and good fortune. Graham, whom I never met -- that poor ten-year-old boy who st
ruggled to shore with the high-pitched words "Go, Graham, go!" ringing in his ears, while his mother sank -- has haunted my imagination for years.
I slept once more with a woman -- she came on to me and I went along on the spur of the moment -- but it's nothing worth the telling; all I remember is a yawning sense of boredom. Ruth and Elena retained their aura of carnal allure, but in the museum part of my memory, where they elicited smiles and a glow of fondness rather than a move of my hand to between my legs.
I'm not sure why, as a woman, I began to desire men. After a moment of surprise it became a matter of feeling -- and I acted upon that feeling, without reflection. It's an odd thing to question desire.
On the outside my life didn't change much. I worked a little harder at my studies, pinpricked by the possibility of rustication. I read Moby-Dick in sixteen hours, put my exhausted B-range thoughts in a C-range essay and got a D for it because it had been due before Christmas (but my first-term enthusiasm for Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne saved me from failing). Philosophy of religion I enjoyed, though with ups and downs. Berkeley and Hume helped me survive early modern. But even when my studies interested me intellectually, I had difficulty sticking to them. Somehow they always missed the point. My need was elsewhere.
I pursued work on my mural, which continued to give me satisfaction with only fits of torment. My walls were now so thick with index cards that I'm certain they insulated me from the surrounding world more than Proust's cork walls did. I was no closer to producing a viable piece of fiction, but this was an observation I never cared to make, though I did spend more time gazing out my window.
In my first year, timid virgins used to hang around my room for hours on end, willing neither to leave nor to make a move on me, which was for the good since I was not at all inclined to sleep with a boy then, though I did enjoy their company, distractions from Elena that they were. The bolder, older ones, who made clearer their intent, I sent packing with outbursts of laughter and witty retorts, which, repeated a few times, put an end to their persistence. I suppose I acquired a reputation as hard to get.
Now I wished that some of them would come back, would think of walking up the street where the municipal jail was to pay me a visit. Unfortunately most of my friends were female, and those who weren't were irrevocably gay. I once asked Joe if he had ever slept with a woman.
"Yuck! What a revolting thought."
"What about a pig, Joe? Ever fucked a pig?"
"No. But I tried to sodomize a Norwegian elkhound once. At camp in the shower-room. At the first yelp I let it go. It was terrible being a virgin."
My lack of romantic involvement began to frustrate me. Independence -- from what? Freedom -- for what? What stupidity To be on intimate terms with someone struck me as the only meaningful source of happiness. The mawkish, gluco-romantic aspects of my roommates' relationships no longer repelled me. My way of going about it would be different, that was all. More like Joe's and his boyfriend Egon's, free of predetermined roles.
Never having desired men before, I went about finding out what exactly I found desirable in them. It was all very strange, this. I had gone through a process of induction where I had reached the general -- men -- without any reference to the particular. I began to look for the particular. I became vividly aware of male physique and symmetry, of manner, smile, walk, hair. I scrutinized my memories, examining the men in them in a new light. I started paying attention to men's glances, those pestering glances that men give to women. I considered each one, if only for a fraction of a second, to see what it had to offer.
In most circumstances my imagination nourished my vision, acted as a close counsellor to its testimony. But in this case my fancy was nearly empty and needed stoking before it could be fired up. The only advice it could give my eyes concerned a Turkish farmer met once on a bus, a body strong and hairy yet pliant, with a handsome head and a full erection rising from hair, something vague in outline but precise in its effect on me. This one ember glowed vermilion in my mind.
I was at the library on the main campus, nestled in a comfortable chair, an open but idle book on my lap. I noticed a student, ill-shaven and dishevelled, who was looking at books in the stacks. He had small gold-rimmed glasses and was wearing an array of clothes that seemed to have come to him by storm rather than by intent. It was a little past two in the afternoon and my day had started over six hours ago; he looked as if he had got up a minute ago, and awakened forty-five seconds later. He was rocking back and forth on his feet, eyeing the book titles. From his expression, it looked as if the books were all shouting at him. He was slim and handsome, his sandy blond hair a mess. Perhaps sensing my gaze, he turned his head a quarter and gave me a smile. I smiled back. In nearly a whisper he said, "It's easier in a church. Only one book."
I replied, "You should try a swimming-pool. No books at all."
He chuckled and turned back to his search. After a few minutes he picked off three books. As he left: "Bye." With another smile.
I realized how far I had gone when the thought of kissing him, and being kissed in return, was not only conceivable but acutely desirable. To kiss him -- no man in the abstract, but specifically, particularly, him. To see him naked, and wanting me and plainly showing me his lust. My heart began to pound. I brought my legs together.
Thus did my imagination take possession of men.
One of the signs of spring in Roetown -- or one that I was quick to pick out, sooner than the buds in the trees -- was the appearance of posters and leaflets announcing "Canadian Images". Those brightly emblazoned words, usually with a loop of celluloid making out the year, told me that soon the cold of winter would end.
Canadian Images was a one-week outbreak of cinematic culture that took over every available venue at the university and in town. It came and went like a springtime shower. For the duration of a week the clouds were made of celluloid and, to the furious clickety-click of projectors, they pelted the town with movies.
Every year I bought a program and went through it carefully, trying to guess on the basis of words what the images would be like. It was a process of elimination that was sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. The end result would be a large piece of paper with a tight schedule on it, a feat of diplomacy that reconciled the imperatives of interest, transportation and hunger. Festival pass in hand, excusing myself from school and even from writing and swimming, I would disappear. Though the days were getting longer and brighter at that time of year, for me there would be darkness at noon -- on some days, in fact, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It mattered not a jot what it was about or how long it was. What flickered on the screen went from the staidly documentary to the weirdly arty, from the realistic to the surrealistic, from one minute to feature length, everything and anything that was made in the Canadian shadow of America. There were in fact few feature-length movies, such orchestral productions being beyond the capacity of most Canadian filmmakers. Those that were shown were usually awful -- pale, cash-strapped imitations of American formulas. The majority of the fare was short-length and medium-length movies -- solos and chamber pieces, one might say -- fuelled by originality and passion rather than dollars. And bound for limbo. For besides a festival or two there was nowhere else they would be screened.
Which was a true pity. At Canadian Images I saw obscure feats of creativity that have radiated in my memory ever since.
A man leaned over and whispered to me, "This is my movie coming up."
It was called Snowflakes. There was no plot, no narrative, no music. The man beside me had taken hundreds of close-up shots of snowflakes and strung them together. Three or four flashed by every second. How he had managed to magnify his starlets without them melting under the heat of the attention, I don't know. But he had done it, there it was, in a sequence: five hundred mugshots of snowflakes. Each one pure, s
harp and delicate, yet powerful enough to break up light so that pinpoints of spectral colour sparkled here and there. Every crystal was the same size and had six points, but at that the similarities ended. The configurative variations -- in the barbs, in the flying buttresses, in the concentric hexagons -- were all perfectly geometric and seemingly endless. I wondered about that, endless. Is it true that snowflakes are unique individuals, with none like any other? After three minutes, when it was over, I asked the production team beside me if this was so.
"I don't know," he replied. "There were too many."
He was still looking at the screen, now blank. He was clearly enthralled by his own work. There was applause -- not quite enough to make a ripple, but a few good sonorous drops, I'd say. He didn't seem to notice. I found this touching. He was the only spectator he needed. He had done something, found it beautiful, was happy. A perfectly circumscribed creative act. As the lights were going down for the next movie, he got up to go. I leaned forward and said, "That was very good. I enjoyed it."
"Oh. Thank you."
He stood for a second.
"I'm working on sand now," he revealed. And then he was madly running up the steps before it got dark. I would like to say that he had a good daytime job, that he was a dentist, but I don't know.
Another jewel under ten minutes was A Study into the Damage Done to Dictionaries by Firearms. It was shot in black and white, with that excruciating visual sharpness that the absence of colour seems to confer upon objects. A string piece, gentle and introspective, played very quietly throughout. It wasn't overlaid -- every crack and thunder of firearm silenced it -- yet it always came back, as quiet as a whisper, and with a similar magnetic insistence.
The movie was what its title promised. On a pedestal in a field, The Shorter Oxford Dictionary of the English Language stood like a soldier at attention. A man dressed in a lab coat holding a shotgun in his hands stepped into our view and blasted the lexicon from a distance of about four feet. The noise was a fierce, compressed roar, an angry lion given only a second to express itself. The book, a good ten pounds, sailed through the air and crashed to the ground. A flutter of paper butterflies danced about. The blast was shown again, only this time in slow motion, that cinematic elixir of life that allows a second to live for twenty. Everything was clear: the shotgun's rebound, the tensing of the man's face and the involuntary closing of his eyes, the blurry vomit emerging from the gun's mouth and reaching for the dictionary, the crash of the pellets and the pulverizing of the front cover, the jolting departure of the book along a horizontal line, the explosion of paper, the heavy, awkward crash to the ground, which would break bones in a human. And always that string piece coming back.
