The Character of Rain

by Amélie Nothomb

  Actually, that part of it was sort of fun. The awful part was that these creatures rose to the surface to eat.

  The vision of three disembodied mouths emerging from the water was unbearably revolting.

  My parents, always full of good ideas, suggested we give the fish names.

  "Your brother, your sister, and you—there are three of you, just like the carp,” said my mother. “You could call the orange one Andre, the green one Juliette, and give the silver one your name.”

  "But that would make Hugo sad.”

  "Yes, that’s true. Maybe we should buy you another carp.”

  Quick, I thought, think of something. Anything!

  "But I’ve already given them names.”

  "Oh, I see. What do you call them?"

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? Aren’t those funny names for fish?"

  "No.”

  "Which is which?"

  "The orange one is Joseph, the green one is Mary, and the silver one is Jesus.”

  My mother laughed at the idea of a carp named “Joseph.” My baptism was approved.

  SO BEGAN THE DAILY ROUTINE. When the sun was directly overhead, I turned into the priestess of the fish. I blessed the rice cake, tore it into pieces, and cast them upon the water, saying, “This is my body that I give to you.”

  The gaping maws of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph appeared immediately, and in a great frenzy and thrashing threw themselves at the miserable stuff, fighting with each other over the last piece.

  I wondered whether causing such a riot was really a good thing. I bit into one of the rice cakes. It tasted like wood pulp.

  But these plump saucisses went crazy over this manna, which, when it became waterlogged, must have been truly horrible.

  I tried not to look at their mouths. Watching people eat was bad enough, but nothing like how Jesus, Mary, and Joseph went at their food. A sewer pipe would have seemed a delicacy in comparison. The diameter of their mouths equaled that of their bodies. They looked like segments of tube except for those puffy fishy lips, which opened and closed with an obscene smacking noise—mouths shaped like life preservers that wanted to drown food and me with it.

  I started feeding them with my eyes closed; otherwise I didn’t think I could go through with it. I threw the pieces out into the water, and waited for the sucking and gurgling sounds to tell me that the trio had arrived, like a ravenous mob, having followed the alimentary trail. If I could have I would have put my hands over my ears.

  In all my three years of life I had seen nothing as nauseating as this. I had looked intently at squashed frogs in the street, made pottery shapes out of my poop, examined closely the contents of my sister’s handkerchief when she had a cold, and fearlessly poked my finger into a piece of raw veal—all motivated by genuine scientific curiosity—and felt not the slightest revulsion.

  Why, then, did the mouths of carp cause me to break out in a cold sweat?

  I had begun to think that our individuality lay in the following: tell me what disgusts you and I will tell you who you are. Our personalities mean nothing; our inclinations are mostly ordinary. What disgusts us expresses who we really are.

  YEARS LATER, when I was learning Latin, I came across the phrase, carpe diem. As if by instinct I translated this into “a carp a day.” This repugnant adage, if that’s what it was, took me straight back to those days of torture at the side of the pool.

  "Seize the day” is, of course, the right translation. Seize the day? What a joke. How could you enjoy anything before noon when all you thought about was the approaching session with these grotesque creatures, and then, after it was over, shuddered at the memory of it for the entire afternoon?

  Not thinking about it was impossible. It would have been like telling a Christian about to enter the Coliseum, “All you have to do is not think about the Hon.”

  With each feeding, I got the growing feeling that it was my flesh the carp wanted. I began losing weight. After the fish had gobbled their lunch, I couldn’t touch a bite of mine.

  At night, in my bed, the darkness around me was filled with gaping mouths. I put my head under the pillow in terror and cried. I could feel their obese, scaly, writhing bodies under the covers with me, suffocating me—their cold, smacking lips moving all over me.

  Jonah at least was lucky enough to be safely tucked away in the whale’s stomach. Being swallowed by the carp wouldn’t have been so bad. It wasn’t their stomachs that terrified me, it was their mouths—the glottal vibrating of their mandibles sucking at me, night after interminable night. My nighttime visions were not of fairies and castles but of creatures from Hieronymus Bosch.

  Related to this was the paralyzing fear that if I endured too many of their loathsome kisses I would turn into one of them. I would become cylindrical. My hands explored my body, expecting to find telltale signs of this dreaded metamorphosis.

  TURNING THREE BROUGHT absolutely nothing good with it. The Japanese are right to see it as the end of the divine state. Something is lost, something more precious than anything and yet beyond recapture: belief in the goodness of the world.

  I had heard my parents say that soon I would be going to a Japanese nursery school. I couldn’t believe it. Leave my garden? Join a group of other children? What a ridiculous idea.

  There would be worse. Something was amiss in the garden itself. Nature seemed to have reached a saturation point. The trees were too green, too leafy, the grass too lush, the flowers exploding as if they were engorged. By the middle of August, the plants began to look hungover. The vital force that I had sensed in the beginning had given way to an overripe heaviness.

  Without knowing it, I was being shown one of the most terrifying laws of the universe: what doesn’t advance retreats. First comes growth and then decay, and between the two is a void. There is no such thing as an apogee—it’s an illusion—and therefore there is no real summer. Instead, there’s a long spring, a spectacular leap of sap and yearning, and, once this is over, fall has begun.

  After August 15, death seized the day. Though the leaves showed no sign of turning, the trees were full as ever, the vegetation no less profuse, and the garden beds prospered, nature was entering a golden age, even if there really isn’t such a thing as a golden age because there is no stasis.

  At the age of three I knew nothing of all this. I was still living the glory years of the king who, on his deathbed, cries, “That which must end has already ended.” I would have been incapable of formulating the terms of my pain, but O how keenly I sensed the impending doom. Nature was trying too hard, and that meant it was hiding something.

  Had I asked anyone they might have explained the cycle of seasons to me. At the age of three you don’t remember the year before, so you don’t have any sense of the eternal return. Every new season seems irreversible.

  At the age of two, you don’t notice these changes and you don’t care. At four, you notice them but the memory of the year before takes the drama out of them. But at three, the anxiety you feel is overwhelming, because you see everything and understand nothing. There is no legal precedent to consult. You don’t automatically ask adults questions, for you’re not yet convinced that they have more wisdom. Perhaps that’s not wrong.

  At three, you’re like an alien, equally fascinated and terrified by what you find. Everything is opaque and new. You must invent laws based upon your own observation. You have to be little Aristotle twenty-four hours a day, and this is particularly exhausting because you’ve never even heard of Aristotle.

  One robin does not make it spring. At three, you would love to know how many robins it takes to mean anything. One dying flower does not make it fall, nor do two. Nonetheless, a feeling of unease sets in. How many wilting flowers does it take before an alarm goes off in your head, signaling that death is coming?

  Aware that life was changing, I took refuge in my spinning top, as if it had critical information to impart. If only I could understand what i
t said.

  THE END OF AUGUST. Noon. Time for my martyrdom.

  Don’t be afraid, I told myself. You have done it before and survived. You can get through this.

  I took the rice cakes from the pantry and went to out to the pool. The sun made the water sparkle like aluminum foil. I knew this brilliant, smooth surface would soon be spoiled by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Joseph had jumped, which was their way of calling each other for lunch.

  When they had finished pretending to be flying fish (which, given their girth, was particularly obscene), they opened their mouths wide on the surface of the water and waited.

  I threw the pieces of rice cake. They lunged for the pieces, sucking them down their tubes. Once they had eaten they clamored for more, opening their jaws so wide that I could see all the way down to their stomachs. While I dispensed their pitiful allotment I became more and more obsessed by what these carp were revealing to me. Normally, creatures concealed the interiors of their bodies. What would it be like, I wondered, if people displayed their insides?

  The carp were breaking a primordial taboo: exposing their digestive tracts to the world.

  You find that repugnant? That’s what your stomach is like, too. If this obsesses you so much maybe it’s because you see your reflection. Don’t you know that this is what people are like? They may eat less greedily, but they eat, and the insides of your mother and your sister are exactly the same.

  You think you’re different? You’re a tube who emerged from a tube. Lately you’ve had some grand sense of being different, of having greater thoughts. Fool. You’re a tube and a tube is all you will ever be.

  I silenced this voice telling me such horrors. Each day at noon for two long weeks I had faced these fish and their mouths, and rather than getting used to it I had become more and more depressed. What if feeding them was more than just some gross thing I had to do, but a divine message? Were that the case, to understand what it meant I had to let the voice speak.

  Open your eyes. Life is what you see: the membrane, the guts, the bottomless hole that demands to be filled. Life is a tube that swallows and remains empty.

  My feet were poised at the edge of the pool. I regarded them suspiciously, as if suddenly they weren’t to be trusted. My eyes looked around at the garden. No longer was it my shield from the outside world, my perfect little paradise. It harbored death.

  Which are you going to choose? Life—the gobbling, slabbering mouths of carp—or death—slow vegetal putrefaction? What makes you least nauseous?

  I couldn’t think any longer. I shivered. My eyes looked down at the gaping mouths. I was cold. I retched. My legs couldn’t support me. I stopped fighting and, hypnotized, collapsed into the pool.

  My head struck the stone edge. The pain vanished almost as soon as I felt it. Independent of my commands, my body rolled over, stretched out horizontally, then sank halfway to the bottom, coming to a floating halt three feet down. Everything became calm again.

  How strange it seemed. The last time I had drowned I had been enraged. I had felt an overwhelming desire to get back to the surface. Not this time. This time I had made a choice. I didn’t even miss the air.

  Feeling deliciously serene, I looked at the sky. Again the sunlight had never seemed so beautiful as it did from under water.

  I felt at home. I had never felt better. Seen from this liquid perspective the world was quite wonderful. So completely had the water absorbed me that I didn’t make a ripple. Upset by my intrusion, the carp had scampered to the far side of the pool and remained motionless. The water grew still, allowing me to observe clearly the trees in the garden, as if through a gigantic monocle. I chose to look only at the bamboo near the water’s edge; nothing in this universe so deserved to be admired as bamboo. The three feet of water that separated me from them intensified their beauty.

  I smiled with happiness.

  Suddenly something came between the bamboo and me—the silhouette of someone leaning over the water. I thought with irritation that this person would want to take me out.

  The prism of the water gradually revealed the person’s features. It was Kashima-san. I was no longer afraid. She wouldn’t intervene. She was a true Japanese. Moreover, she hated me.

  I was right. Kashima-san’s elegant face remained impassive. She looked me in the eyes. Could she see that I was happy? I don’t know. No one can know what goes on in the mind of a Japanese from the old days.

  One thing was certain. This woman would let me die.

  I knew that one day we would understand one another, Kashima-san. Everything is fine now. When I was drowning in the sea and I was watching the people on the beach watching me it made me sick. But now because of you I understand them. They were as calm as you are. They didn’t want to disturb the law of the universe, which

  is demanding that I drown. They had known that saving me served no purpose. She who must drown will drown. My mother took me out of the water and here I am back in it.

  It seemed to me that Kashima-san was smiling.

  You’re right to smile. When one’s destiny is fulfilled, one should smile. I’m happy to know that I will never have to feed the carp again. And that I will never leave Japan.

  Now I saw it clearly: Kashima-san was smiling. At long last she had smiled at me! Then she moved slowly away.

  Dying takes time. It felt as if I had been floating between the waters for an eternity. I thought again about Kashima-san. There is nothing more fascinating than the facial expression of someone watching you die. She could easily have lifted a little girl out of a pool. But had she done that, she would not have been Kashima-san.

  What a relief it was that I would never again have to be afraid of death.

  IN 1945, ON OKINAWA, an island off the south coast of Japan, something—I don’t know what word to use—happened.

  It took place shortly after the surrender. The island’s inhabitants knew that the war was over and that the Americans, who had already landed, would soon take over. They also knew that the latest orders were to stop resisting.

  That was all they knew. Earlier their leaders had assured them that the Americans would kill every last Japanese. The inhabitants of Okinawa still believed this. As the white soldiers advanced, the Japanese retreated. Eventually they reached the end of the island, where steep cliffs plunged into the sea. Persuaded that they were going to be killed anyway, most of them leaped to their death.

  The cliffs are very high, and below them the shore is covered with sharp rocks. Not one of those who jumped survived. When the Americans arrived, they were horrified by what they discovered.

  I went to see these cliffs in 1989, and there was nothing, not even a tiny sign, to indicate what had happened there. Within a matter of hours thousands of people had committed suicide in this place, and it was unchanged. The sea had swallowed up the bodies broken on the rocks and left behind no trace of them. In Japan, suicide by drowning is more common than seppuku.

  You can’t visit this spot on Okinawa without trying to put yourself in the place of those who leaped. Some may have been afraid of being tortured. The beauty of the setting may have encouraged others to commit an act that, to them, was the highest expression of patriotism.

  Nonetheless, one truth about this hecatomb seems inescapable: from the top of these great cliffs thousands killed themselves to avoid being killed; thousands died because they were afraid of death. The paradox staggers the mind.

  It isn’t really a matter of approving or disapproving, as if that would do the dead any good. But I can’t help thinking that the true reason for committing suicide is fear of dying.

  AT THREE, ONCE AGAIN, I knew nothing of all that. I knew only that I wanted to the in the carp pool. The great moment was coming because I could see my life unraveling. I couldn’t manage to see the details. It was like being on an express train going so fast that you can’t read the names of the little stations whizzing past. It didn’t matter. I was enveloped by a delightful absence of pain.

&nb
sp; "It” was beginning to overwhelm the “I” that had been serving me for the previous six months. It felt itself turning back into the tube that perhaps it had never stopped being in the first place. At long last, disencumbered of all its other useless functions, it was open to water—and to nothing else.

  A HAND SEIZED the dying thing by the nape of the neck and shook “it” brutally back to “I.”

  Air entered my lungs, taking back command of the bronchial tubes. The pain was intense. I screamed. I was alive. I could see. Nishio-san.

  She screamed for help. She was alive, too. She ran into the house with me in her arms and found my mother, who took one look at me and screamed as well.

  “We’re going to Kobe Hospital!"

  Nishio-san accompanied us, running, all the way to the car. In a combination of Japanese, French, English, and loud groans, she was babbling to my mother about how she had found me.

  My mother threw me onto the back seat and sped off, driving like a madwoman, which truly is an absurd thing to do when you’re trying to save someone’s life. She started telling me what must have happened.

  “You were feeding the fish and you slipped. You fell into the water. Normally that would have been okay because you can swim, but when you fell you hit your head on the rocks at the bottom and you knocked yourself out.”

  I was perplexed. I knew perfectly well what had happened.

  "Do you understand?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  I understood that I must not tell her the truth. I understood that it was better to hold to this official version. Besides, I didn’t know what words to use to tell her what had happened. I didn’t know the word “suicide.”

  There was something, however, that I did wish to say.

  "I don’t want to feed the carp again!"

  "Of course—yes—I understand. You’re afraid you’ll fall in the water again. I promise you. You’ll never have to feed them again.”

  Well, at least I had that. My action hadn’t been in vain.