Self

by Yann Martel

  "Yes."

  "With hot mustard on the side?"

  "No."

  "Oh. I think he's the one who always asks for hot mustard."

  Which quirk engraved itself in my memory.

  Alain asked me how I felt. At that moment I felt 99 per cent frazzled, 1 per cent exhilarated. "Fine," I said, dismissing nearly two hours of blitzkrieg with the wave of a hand.

  "Good. You were lucky. It was a fairly quiet lunch hour today. Government people had the day off."

  I looked at him. "You're joking."

  "No. You should have seen it yesterday. It was crazy."

  My level of frazzlement went up to 99.5 per cent. Had it not been for Tito, my waitressing career would have ended that minute. But because of him, when Alain offered me regular shifts, I accepted. I blotted out the hundreds of finicky, complaining, leering, hurried, cheap, rude customers and dwelt on one who had a warm smile.

  I thought of this stranger, caressed the thought of him, for the next several days. As I worked on my novel, immersed in illness and departure, he would emerge in my mind like a whale surfacing with its spray of water and my head would become full of blue sea and bright fish. Until I would force myself to get back to work. "You don't even know his name," I would chide myself.

  When I saw him again, my heart skipped and three platters nearly crashed to the ground. He was so good-looking! By which I don't just mean the way he looked to me, but the way he felt to me. It was as if I were in a distant outpost of a body, a border big toe, say, and Tito's arrival was the sudden, nearly incredible fulfilment of a promise from the metropolis, the heart, that has been pending so long that by now it's no more than a persistent rumour; namely, that fresh blood is on its way. Just catching sight of him as he came in -- with his heavy winter coat, his foot-stamping, his looking around, his red face -- I felt invigorated, recharged. Instantly, serving carrion to the snippy, snappy maggots -- when I laid food on the tables I saw the eaters as blind, soft-bodied, legless grubs, their form defined by their function, nothing but digestive tracts with one orifice hovering above the table, waiting to ingest, and the other, below, waiting to excrete -- serving grub to the grubs was manageable and I displayed a grace under pressure that would have dazzled Hemingway. Without looking at him, because I was nervous, I let him sit at a table, hoping, praying, that he would sit in my area.

  He didn't. I felt like shouting to him across the restaurant, "EXCUSE ME, MISTER, BUT YOU CAN'T SIT THERE, NOT IF YOU WANT US TO GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER." But he was only one table out of my area. I said to Danny, "I'll take Crazy Hair, okay? He's one table into your area." She glanced over. "Sure." When he was settled I got close to him, but without looking at him, pretending to be busy with another table; then I turned, looked him straight in the eyes and smiled, said "Hi!" and delivered a menu and a clear glass of water with beads of freshness on it. Then I was off, his "Hi" trailing behind me and a surprised someone else getting my spill-over smile (and I a great tip). I was happy with the world at that moment, with its noise and rush.

  "A raw Louisiana again?" I said to him next time by.

  "Sure," he replied, and again that smile.

  We were for ever Mary-Lou and Luigi to each other now, so I said to Luigi, "Luigi, make that Louisiana extra special, would ya? It's for a friend," and he replied, "Coming up, Mary-Lou, coming up!"

  When I had in front of me a Louisiana Super Supreme, I was pleased with myself for remembering a small detail: "Luigi, could you give me a dollop of hot mustard in a paper cup, please?"

  "Here you go, Mary-Lou."

  "Thanks."

  I made sure his Belgian flag was upright. Crazy, I thought to myself, you don't even know the guy. He could be married with kids for the last ten years.

  After that, once again, not much. But it was all right. Our greetings and smiles were like busy diplomats on shuttle missions, and what they brought back from negotiations bode well.

  It was perhaps four days, what seemed like a long time, before I saw him again. It was mid-afternoon. I had been working for several hours -- real work, my novel -- and was out for a walk. The sky was a shattering blue, the air in a deep, clear freeze. I had an hour and a half till work -- money work, slavery -- and I was walking up Rachel Street, heading for Mount Royal for my usual walk up to the belvedere. My mood was upbeat. Perhaps he would come to the restaurant during my shift.

  At that very thought, who should turn the corner a block ahead of me but the man himself. We saw each other some distance away. As we got closer, our darting eyes and the half-smiles on our lips acknowledged that we would meet. We stopped.

  "Hello," he said.

  "Hi."

  A pause. What an awkward, delicious moment. But we must talk of something. I thought of the weather. He beat me to it.

  "A beautiful day, isn't it?" he said.

  "Mmmmm, yes, gorgeous." I looked about. "I'm off on a walk to enjoy it before work."

  "Up the mountain?"

  "Yes." Should I invite him? Of course I wanted to, but wouldn't it be too forward? He was a stranger, after all. Didn't even know his name. Better if he asked to come along, wouldn't that be great, although not very likely, very bold on his part. But if he did, we could talk and talk and talk all the way up the mountain. I liked his voice. He had an accent, an unusual timbre derived from I don't know what native tongue, though his English was flawless, and he spoke in a measured way. His words didn't come out in a hurried, jumbled pile the way mine did, but one at a time, each with its own dignity and heraldic right, a sort of aural pageant. I registered every word he said, even the vassal words, the thes and ands. Listening to him, I was aware not only of what he said, but of the language we spoke, as if I were on the outside, hearing English for the first time. His coat wasn't buttoned correctly. All his buttons were one too high. It looked funny. I felt like bringing my hands out and putting things right. Excuse me, mister, your coat looks like a geological fault line. You must be a funny, distracted mister. All of this in a quarter of a second. "I go up to the belvedere everyday. It's my way of psyching myself up for the hell of waitressing."

  He was looking towards Mount Royal, but turned to me and laughed when I said the line about waitressing.

  "It gets hectic, doesn't it?"

  "You wouldn't believe it."

  "Well, I'll see you later then. I was thinking of dropping by for a coffee this evening."

  "That'd be great." Ouch, too bold.

  We began to pull away. It was over. Then:

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  That's when I found out his was Tito. As I scurried up through Jeanne Mance park towards the mountain, I was practically giddy with pleasure at knowing his name. Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito. What a funny name. Like Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, but as a first name. Instantly the country was fascinating to me, propped as it was between Soviet hegemony and Western sprawl. I tried to remember its constituent republics. Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito. Dubrovnik and Split were supposed to be jewels. I had read a jolly little book by Lawrence Durrell that took place in Zagreb, in diplomatic circles. And I'd heard of a novel called Bridge on the--well, some river -- by Ivo Andric, which was supposed to be great. Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito, Tito.

  But Tito was of Hungarian origin, not Yugoslav. He was a Magyar, he said.

  He did come by for coffee. Around seven o'clock. The place was reasonably calm, the customers less hurried than at lunch-time. Plenty of opportunities for capsules of conversation, especially since he sat at the counter, where I had to return all the time to get deserts and to make coffees, teas and hot chocolates. I offered him pecan pie, the best of the pies, and left it off his bill, one of the great, illegal powers of a waitress. We exchanged bits of biography. I kept saying his name; already it was my favourite Hungarian word, the jewel of my tongue. A few times when he said my name I acted like a dog: I nearly dropped whatever I was handling and looked up, as if I had been called.

  He was of Hungarian origin, but not fro
m Hungary. He was from the minority that lives in Czechoslovakia, in south-western Slovakia. He and his mother had come over in 1968, right after the Soviet invasion, when he was fifteen. They had settled in Toronto. (Father not mentioned. I found out later that he stayed behind, was a liberal apparatchik, hoped, fared miserably, died of cancer. Memories, a few letters, a few photos -- all that Tito had left of him.) Quick math told me that he was thirty-three, eleven years my elder.

  I was the daughter of diplomats so I carried my roots in a suitcase, but the suitcase was originally put together in Quebec, though I didn't feel strongly about that. I had studied philosophy at Ellis University, in Roetown (he nodded his head, knew where it was), and I'd moved to Montreal after that. I -- long hesitation, but I wanted to put my best foot forward -- I wrote, had had a lengthy short story published in Best Canadian Short Stories (I hadn't heard yet about my Norwegian story).

  "What's your short story about?" he asked.

  "It's about dentures and love."

  "Dentures?"

  "Yes. You know, artificial teeth."

  "Artificial teeth and love?"

  "Yes. You'll have to read it. What do you do?"

  There was a dreamy, reflective edge to him. I was curious to know how he accounted for his daylight hours. Between the question and the answer came several orders and deliveries.

  "I make my living," he said, in his carefully enunciated, slightly metronomic speech, "by being an invisible man."

  I looked at him with a puzzled, amused expression. "But I see you now, Tito."

  "Thank you!" He smiled and brought out his arms, as if he'd just performed a magic trick.

  What a clown, I thought, as I dispensed cappuccinos and odd comestibles.

  "I always get up early," he said, when I was behind the counter again. "I don't know why. I must have an early alarm clock in my system. I remember when we got to Canada -- it was maybe a month or so after we'd arrived -- I went out walking one morning. It must have been around six, six-thirty. I still couldn't get over the place, how rich it was. There were more things in a Sears store than in all of Bratislava. Anyway, I was walking and I saw this Canadian boy" -- but someone at a table was looking my way, trying to catch my eye.

  "I'm sorry, I'm bothering you," he said when I got back to him.

  "Don't be silly, Tito. Not at all. Keep going."

  "This boy was doing something very strange. I followed him. I wanted to know what he was doing, but I didn't want to ask. You know how there are tales of immigrants who come to America with twenty dollars in their pockets. Well, my mother and I had more than that, but together we had maybe twenty words of English in our heads. In Bratislava I spoke Hungarian at home and Slovak at school, and the only foreign languages I was taught there were Russian and later, because my father worked for the Party, German. But finally I came up to this boy and I managed to ask him what he was doing. He looked at me funny and said what he was plainly doing: delivering newspapers. They didn't have that in Czechoslovakia. I said to myself, "I can do that. You don't need English to deliver newspapers." The boy gave me a phone number and I had my uncle Istvan call. I got a paper route. I began delivering the Toronto Star. That was my first job as an invisible man."

  I had to do this, that and the other.

  "Yes, continue."

  "My uncle Istvan drove a taxi. When I turned eighteen I started driving shifts after school. I wasn't supposed to, legally, but I was a careful driver. My English was pretty good by then. Driving a taxi was my second job as an invisible man."

  When Tito left that evening, I still didn't know what his present invisibility was. He told me taxi stories, about times when fares spoke to him and he slipped into existence. They were people who entered his taxi as they might a confessional. A man who tried to account for his troubles with his wife. A boy who was on his way to the dentist and was terrified and talkative at the prospect. A middle-aged man whose sense of failure with his job, his family, his life, became shatteringly clear to him the moment he was in Tito's taxi and who sobbed for the whole ride, his face in his hands. An old woman who said to Tito, "You're so young," with a mixture of envy and haughtiness, and who, when he asked her what life was about, replied, "Life? Life is about getting food from the supermarket." But such people were few and far between. Mostly, very little was said and Tito was but a ghost in a machine, egy szellem egy gepben in Hungarian, with eyes that occasionally glanced at his fares through the rearview mirror, wondering what they were like, they and their lives.

  In the following weeks of that cold, blessed winter, I got to know Tito. He started coming to the restaurant nearly every day, sometimes to eat, sometimes for coffee, usually in the mid-afternoon when things were calm. We had no hesitation in talking to each other any more, Don't sit there, I would tell him, sit here.

  "I drove Istvan's taxi for a few years. When I finished high school I went to the University of Toronto. I did a B.A. in Hungarian studies. It was a small department. In fact, it fit in the front of my taxi beside me, Professor Arpad Ferenczi. I liked him. He used to come to our place for supper."

  It occurred to me that I didn't know boo about Hungary. A few newspaper facts, Bartok, Kodaly, Liszt -- that was about it; and that Hungarian was a weird language, related to no other in the area, only to Finnish. I looked it up in the encyclopedia: Hungarian is in the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric subfamily of the Uralic languages. The only other languages in the Ugric branch are Ostyak and Vogul, both spoken exclusively in the Ob valley of north-western Siberia. The article on Hungary was a list of names and events that were as familiar to me as Ostyak and Vogul.

  "A Bachelor's degree in Hungarian studies is not very useful in Canada so after that I settled down to reading in the taxi."

  Now that I knew him, I thought of him all the time. When I remembered him, in other words, when I thought of him anew as I was working on my novel or waiting tables or grocery shopping or taking a bath, it amazed me that I should have forgotten him even momentarily -- and it could only be momentarily, for the simple idea of him, the word "Tito", would trigger in me a pulse of happiness, a rippling wave that flooded my system. I went about in a day-dreamy haze in which nothing upset me, not a rude customer at the restaurant, not a stalled queue at the bank, not an impatient librarian, not a transit strike, not dropping and shattering a jar of pickles at the supermarket, nothing. A line-up of shivering prostitutes along an ugly street made me think of the sensuality of human contact. An unshaven beggar wrapped in a blanket with plastic bags for winter boots reminded me of the lightness of being. A staggering drunk was Bacchus in all his glory. In everything I saw happiness or impending happiness. It was the natural, immanent state of the world. Outright tragedy -- my neighbour's death, the old Polish woman, who slipped and broke her hip and died in her bathroom an estimated three days later; a seven-year-old girl's death in Saskatchewan after losing herself while taking a shortcut back home despite the determined, frantic efforts to find her by elements of the Canadian army and hundreds of volunteers, who would not give up until a bog produced her decomposing body; pictures of an African famine, personified by a skeletal, sexless child in its mother's weak arms, both as desiccated as the landscape around them; an airplane crash, something which should have seared me -- puzzled me, and then faded from my mind. Only in my novel did I acknowledge pain and misery, precisely contained. For being in such a bright mood, stable and confident, I worked on it all the better.

  "One day I saw an accident," Tito told me. "Nobody hurt, only material damage. A truck hit another. It was a mail truck. Bags of letters spilled onto the street. It was a windy day. Suddenly I was driving through a tornado of letters. I didn't stop -- I had a fare. Hours later it rained. I turned my windshield wipers on. What should appear in front of me, caught in the wiper, but a letter. I looked at it as it swung to and fro. The handwritten address began to blur because of the rain. I stopped the car and picked off the letter. I dried it on the air vents. You could still read the ad
dress, but barely. I carefully wrote it over. Then I stopped by a post office and explained what happened. The man at the counter took the letter and tossed it into a letter bin. For the next few days I thought about that letter, about the strange route it had taken to its destination. Shortly after that, I enquired about jobs at the post office."

  "You work at the post office."

  "Yes."

  "You're a mailman."

  "A letter carrier. Yes. My third job as an invisible man."

  "Do you like it?"

  "Oh yes. Less so sometimes in winter, but I like being outside and it's very quiet in the early morning. And usually I'm finished by two in the afternoon."

  Tito had a broad build and a peculiar way of walking, with a tilt forward, always battling an imaginary head wind, and he moved with a firm tread, as if with each footstep he were Columbus claiming new territory. He had a large, blunt nose, genetically unkempt hair, eyes of a bright rich brown, clear skin that had no great talent for beards or moustaches, perfect white teeth; and a spirit that animated these features so that his face exuded vital intelligence, an alertness that was warm, engaged, alive. Yet he was reserved, my Tito. He was not one for company. That is one trait that I'm not sure I can convey in words, his way of being that so little suited being with others. It was not that he was socially clumsy. Not at all. But his careful way of conversing did not lend itself to the machine-gun rat-tat-tat of a group interacting. It wasn't only his way of speaking; it was his very personality, his aura, a grace that demanded individual meeting. Even his gestures seemed to be only for you. My Tito was a one-seat theatre (and my one-voter constituency). Only among Hungarians did he approach gregariousness.

  "Have you heard of this play that's on tomorrow night, called Handlet?"

  "You mean Hamlet? By the famous Hungarian playwright Witgom Szakespori?"

  "Yes, by the famous Hungarian playwright Witgom Szakespori, but adapted. It's a puppet show. It sounded interesting. Would you like to go?"

  "Yes."

  If I had to choose a single word to describe my time with Tito, it would be that: yes.

  The night of Handlet, of our first date, I discovered the delight and agony of dressing for a man.