Self

by Yann Martel

  "But at the same time I'm thinking dicks are so pathetic and deficient, there's something endearing about them. You can't help but feel tenderness for them. You see what I mean? So I'm thinking all that when" -- I'm starting to laugh again -- "when this dog appears and that was it, it was perfect. A walking dick. With its masses of foreskin."

  I'm bent over laughing. Tito has his mock deeply offended look.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 193: Joe tells me in a letter that he and Egon are HIV-positive. They're "all right", he says. I don't know if he means it emotionally or medically. I drench the front of Tito's shirt with tears.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 125: My Christmas present.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 242: Hot day's cycling in the country. In the shade of a tree, in solitude, Tito cups my breasts under my T-shirt and finds them as cool as yoghurts, as he puts it. "What's it like having breasts?" he asks.

  "It's like having two small warm companions," I reply.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 1: "I can't imagine sleeping with a man." We've just seen a movie at a repertoire cinema. It's not in the movie -- it's a couple in front of us. As the lights are dimming, a young man turns and kisses his boyfriend on the mouth. It's quick and quiet but passionate, with heads that move and eyes that are closed. Just as he turns back into his seat, his eyes and mine meet. He is happy. He is in love. Tito says it without judgement.

  "Really?" I say, smiling. "You can't imagine fucking a man? Sucking him? You can't imagine kissing a man?"

  "No. I don't think I've had a homosexual thought in my life."

  I laugh and take hold of his arm. We walk away.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 186: We make a day-trip to Ottawa in Tito's lawnmower Lada for our first visit to the new National Gallery. It's a beautiful museum, both the building and the collections. We have a wonderful day.

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 54: "What do you mean, you don't like hot mustard?"

  "I'm just not that crazy about it."

  "I thought you loved hot mustard."

  "No, I don't."

  "Why do you keep eating it?"

  "Because you keep buying it."

  "But Danny said you loved hot mustard."

  "How would she know?"

  "Are you telling me you don't like hot mustard?"

  "I am."

  FILM LOOP NUMBER 118: Yet again the man has buttoned up his coat wrong. Sometimes I do wonder where he has his head. I come up to him and undo the buttons and do them up right. "There you go."

  He looks at me, the beginning of a smile on his lips. "You treat me sometimes as if I were ten years old."

  "Ten? You flatter yourself. Seven is more like it."

  There are countless such film loops in the archives of my memory. They break me into pieces inside.

  We moved in together our first summer, the summer of 1986. On July first, to be exact, that fateful date in the majority of Montreal residential leases, the day when most love affairs and roommateships officially start or end and the whole city seems to be on the move. I vacated my squalid hole that I had liked so much and moved into Tito's place in colourful, undeveloped, vaguely disreputable Park Extension, a neighbourhood which I came to love, where the neighbours were friendly and talked to each other from balconies, where Greeks, Indians, Sri Lankans, Italians, Africans, West Indians and, let us not forget them, a few Hungarians, rubbed shoulders with other Canadians and struggled without pretence towards respectability.

  I kept a room in my old apartment building as an office. I wanted a space separate from home where I could work, where I could do nothing but work. The building was not far from both the restaurant and Tito's route, so it was a convenient place to meet Tito and to work before and after my waitressing shifts.

  Leo, the caretaker cum accident-prone taxi driver, showed me a studio he always had difficulty renting. It had been vacant for a year and a half. It was a box with a window that gave onto the fire exit -- a cage to live in, but just the right place to let my imagination run free. It was a floor up from my old apartment, but at the other end of the building. The kitchen was more concept than reality and there was no fridge, but there was a gas stove and the bathroom had a small bathtub. I bargained the rent down to 125 dollars a month and Tito and I repainted the place with paint that the landlord paid for. I chose not to install a phone, for perfect peace, and I heated the place with the gas oven rather than with the more expensive electrical floorboard heater. It was the cheapest office space next to working on a park bench. And it was a room of my own, which I entered, after the symbolic effort of a small journey, for the sole purpose of writing.

  At first, out of a purist work ethic, I decided not to have my futon in the room, but making love on my desk was uncomfortable, besides messing up my papers, and a floor is an impossible place to have a nap. So I relented and it became both my workroom and our nap room.

  In winter I would often turn the oven up to full blast, for there is nothing less conducive to creativity than cold temperatures. We repainted the walls and ceiling a shimmering golden yellow. However bitterly cold it was outside, my office always felt like the inside of the sun.

  I finished my novel. It was a bad novel. It didn't work. I sent it off anyway, to a small and therefore select, not "commercial", publishing house, hoping that they would see genius where I saw none. I never got a reply. I tried another publishing house, equally small. Within five weeks I got my novel back with a letter thanking me for letting them read it, which they had done "with pleasure", but their fiction list was full for the next two years. The thick elastic band that held my manuscript together still covered the same line of text as when I had mailed it, and the tiny scrap of pink paper I had put between pages 20 and 21, like a rose petal added to a love letter, was still there.

  I let go of it progressively, at first promising myself that I would return to it; then that I would salvage parts and incorporate them into my next novel; next that I would tear off pieces and turn them into short stories. Finally I told myself that it belonged in the proverbial bottom of a drawer.

  Tito cautiously pried into my novel, like a goldfish peering over the edge into the deep, where I was doing shark's work. I didn't tell him what it was about while I was working on it, and when it was finished I wouldn't let him have it. I was afraid that, once he had read it, I would have no more secrets; I would be painfully transparent to him; worse still, what was revealed would turn out to be mediocre and he wouldn't love me any more. I let him read it eventually, and he said all the right things: that indeed it wasn't so excellent as my dentures story or my Norwegian story, though parts were; that the idea was bold and brilliant; that I was young, twenty-three, which didn't mean immature, he quickly added, but simply that I was in the infancy of my art -- what writers started so young? Rimbaud, Mailer and a few others, yes, but they dimmed quickly or completely; that this novel wasn't my only idea, I was now free to start something new; and that of course he still loved me, what a question.

  I burst into tears once in his arms, a few times on my own. Then it was over.

  As in any relationship, there were moments of withdrawal, of a slight pulling away. But it was in the normal course of things. It did not indicate doubt or fatigue. It was like the painter who steps back from her painting to see it as a whole and then moves close again to continue work.

  Sometimes I would get to bed tired and empty and glad not to be touched. Tito would be quiet, maybe even asleep, our good-nights said. I would soak up the solitude around me. When I had had enough, when I was bloated with solitude, I would sometimes move down and gently take hold of Tito's warm and dormant penis. It would grow slightly swollen while his face remained impassive and his breathing deep and easy. I would fall asleep holding onto it, as if it were a paintbrush and I were working on a detail between his legs.

  My Christmas present came in a box with holes in it. The box grunted. A puppy bulldog. Spotted brown and white, and hideous in its beauty. I shrieked. "I got it from a breeder in Sherbrooke," said Tito. "The ugliest one i
n the litter, I assure you. Uglier than this and you're in the realm of science fiction." The alien hopped towards me, grunting like a mezzo-soprano pig. I couldn't stop smiling. Its name came to me right away. "Fig Leaf. We'll call him Fig Leaf."

  "Fig Leaf?"

  "Yes, Fig Leaf. Come here, Fig Leaf."

  Fig Leaf piddled on the floor.

  The first time we walked Fig Leaf, a couple stopped by us. "What an adorable dog!" said the woman. She bent down. So did I. Fig Leaf went wild. The man looked unimpressed. "It's in fact quite a nice dog. You'd be surprised how much you get to like it, especially when it gets bigger," said Tito.

  "Oh, I'm sure," replied the man, politely.

  He was a big hit with the Hungarian community too. An explosion of gibberish. He even distracted Imre from his usual focus of attention.

  Fig Leaf was so inarticulate, by which I mean that he seemed to have so few articulations, that I suspect his skeleton was composed of a single bone. I worried when he went down stairs. He rarely went down two legs on one step, two legs on the next, like most dogs. His usual way, on steps that were deep enough, was to set himself parallel to the first step, with a crab's sense of direction, and then hop sideways, a motion which had the slight amplitude and dramatic ease of a suicide jump. Having landed safely on all fours on the step below, he would bounce off to the next one without a moment's delay, suicide-jumping the whole way down. He did it incredibly quickly, even down staircases that curved. He never had an accident, but I was always afraid that he would miscalculate his hop or bounce too self-confidently and that I would see him somersault out of control and fracture his undivided bone structure into three or four pieces.

  Unfortunately, his Evel Knievel approach to going down stairs was not matched by his approach to coming up stairs. Fig Leaf didn't come up stairs. It was obviously an effort for him, but the universe has stairs in it and you can't always be going down them and that's life. But Tito and I made the mistake, when Fig Leaf was small and cute, of wafting him up in our arms whenever he was confronted by even a single step. This early conditioning took for life, no matter what counter-conditioning we attempted when he was big and cute: verbal encouragement, tender morsels of food just three steps up, threats, you name it. More than once I flew into a rage and shouted, "WELL THEN STAY DOWN THERE AND STARVE, YOU PORKER!" and promised myself that I wouldn't fetch him under any circumstances. Which would set him off on his guerrilla-warfare grunting. It wasn't loud or furious, though it did go on non-stop; it was a single porcine grunt emitted precisely every six seconds -- I measured it once -- that could be heard everywhere in the apartment, even in the closet. The fainter it was, the more maddening. "We'll have that dog for dinner tonight, with applesauce," I would mutter to myself. And I would apply myself with even deafer determination to what I was doing.

  But he would wear me down, like any good guerrilla. I would think of my late Polish neighbour, who also used to wait at the bottom of stairs. And what can you do if you were born without joints? I would peer down the staircase, my anger wavering. There he would be, looking up at me, still and quiet, probably very cold, probably very hungry. Guilt would overcome me. I would go down and pick him up and bring him upstairs. He would eat noisily, for the sole purpose of making me feel worse, I'm sure, and then he would settle at my feet, happy to be reunited with me, as I was with him.

  For all his eccentricities about vertical movement, Fig Leaf had none where horizontal movement was concerned. He was a great walker. Montrealers who lived in the Plateau west of St-Denis between Roy and Rachel at the time may recall a letter carrier who stepped out of invisibility by always going around with a bulldog. When a dog had the effrontery to bark at his master, Fig Leaf would burst into an indignant grunting rage worthy of Our Lord of the Flies.

  I started work on a new novel. One day I spilled a cup of tea on my thesaurus, my New Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, in Dictionary Form, Revised Edition, over six million copies sold -- a cheap paperback I had bought at the beginning of my first year at Ellis which was much the worse for wear by the time I doused it with Irish Breakfast. Oh well, I thought, the book was falling apart anyway. An occasion to buy a new one.

  A few days later I was standing in a second-hand bookshop looking at two thesauri. One, for seventy-five cents, was the exact edition I had had. The other was a fat hardcover. I flipped through it. It was a different sort of thesaurus, unfamiliar to me. Instead of the words and their synonyms being listed in alphabetical order, as would seem logical, in this thesaurus they were divided into numbered categories, each category ending with a list of numerical cross-references. The categories weren't in alphabetical order either. There was an order of a kind page by page; curiously, for a book of synonyms, it was an antonymous order: Elevation was followed by Depression, Hearing by Deafness, Hope by Hopelessness. But there was no perceptible order on a grander scale, or none that I could grasp at a glance. At the back of the book, taking up over four hundred pages, was an index, clearly the entry point into the maze.

  I asked the man who ran the bookshop about this thesaurus. "It's an older edition. The original format. The words are grouped into categories; you look in the index to see which category you want. It's a bit cumbersome to consult but it's more complete."

  I bought it, so I can say that the genesis of my novel cost me eight dollars.

  I read the introduction to my new old Roget's Thesaurus, in Cumbersome Form, Older Edition, surely not many copies sold. It was the reprinted introduction to the original edition of 1852, written by one Peter Mark Roget in an English cheerful, exquisite and oh so Victorian, with sentences that go on like rivers, at length and with meanders, with commas like sluice-gates, semicolons like dams, and a confidence similar to a river's, secure that it is irrigating a needy world -- why, here comes a fisherman on his skiff, there some labourers are tilling a field, isn't the future bright? Roget ends his introduction with the hope that his endeavour will assist in bringing about that greatest good of communication: a universal language -- and thence world peace, "a golden age of union and harmony among the several nations and races," as he puts it in his farewell sentence.

  Until then I had never given much thought to the thesaurus. It was a reference book frowned upon by some, who swore only by their dictionaries, but which I occasionally found useful. On the whole, a minor tool of the trade, an eager-to-please list of synonyms, that's all. The hope that it would be of help in bringing about world confraternity struck me as quixotic even by the high-octane rosy standards of the day.

  I flipped to the biographical note on Peter Mark Roget, to see who this fantastical pedant had been.

  He was one of those Victorians with an impossibly full life. Born in 1779, died in 1869. A medical doctor. Founder of a charity clinic in London to which he contributed his services gratis for eighteen years. One of the founders of the University of London, where he was professor of physiology. An eminent lecturer on medical and other subjects. Head of a commission on London's water supply, which denounced the simultaneous use of the Thames as sewer and source of drinking water. Fellow of the Royal Society, of which he was secretary for over twenty years, and of the Medical and Chirurgical Society. Contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, Ree's Cyclopaedia and the Cyclopaedia of Popular Medicine. Co-founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Author of a definitive On Animal and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to Natural Theology, of a two-volume work on phrenology, of articles published here, there, everywhere. Inventor of a special kind of slide-rule. An avid chess-player who published chess problems in The Illustrated London News and designed the first pocket chessboard.

  And -- as if that weren't enough -- author of his thesaurus, a word which till then simply meant a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, and therefore included in its purview dictionaries and encyclopedias, but to which Roget securely anchored his name, thus assuring his English-language immortality. He started
the task at the ripe age of seventy-one, and he was ninety-one when he died. John Lewis Roget took charge of subsequent editions of his father's thesaurus, as did in time Peter's grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget.

  Roget & Family, Do-Gooders Inc.

  I put the volume down, chuckling to myself.

  A week later, Peter Mark Roget -- even his name is bright and untragic -- was still in my mind. His Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge reminded me, antonymously, of Kurtz and his scrawled "Exterminate the brutes!"

  I returned to the thesaurus and considered it carefully. Though Roget states it clearly in his introduction, it was only then that I was struck by the obvious: that his book was a list of words and phrases grouped not by their spelling, as in a dictionary, but according to the ideas they express. To list by spelling you merely need an alphabet, but to list by meaning you must find the equivalent of an alphabet for ideas -- which feat Roget had pulled off. In just over a thousand categories, from (1) Existence to (1042) Religious Buildings, he had mapped out the verbal universe, the totality of concepts expressible by the human mind. No matter what the entity, solid or intangible, Sausage or Sadness, it fitted into one of his categories. Language was a village of a thousand extended families, each family peopled by siblings, true synonyms, and cousins and in-laws of one degree or another.

  I was astonished. I suddenly marvelled at this book, previously so lacklustre to me. Roget's accomplishment struck me as equal to God's at Babel, but in reverse. Where He had divided and confused, he had classified and harmonized. Nor were his efforts confined to one language. In his proposed "Polyglot Lexicon", a multilingual super-thesaurus (with English and French as the first two languages, "the columns of each being placed in parallel juxtaposition"), he wanted to show how each language was not only itself a weave of kith and kin, but a twin, a synonym, of the language next to it. From this twinship of languages could emerge that international tongue which would conduce, he hoped, to the aforementioned world peace.