Self (5 page)

(2) Put toothpaste in car locks. Numerous times.

(3) Deflated tires. Numerous times.

(4) Poured sugar in a car’s gas tank. Once.

(5) Drilled a hole at the base of a magnificent cactus as tall as a house, introduced a firecracker into the hole and lit it, the cactus falling over like a tree, its arms breaking off to reveal strange, sweaty green flesh. Once.

(6) Set a long L-shaped hedgerow on fire. Once.

The emotional nadir of my life as a child came during a walk on a beach in Guatemala. I was seven, perhaps just eight. It
was a desolate Third World beach hugged by low, ugly buildings. To my right was plastic refuse thrown up by the sea. To my left was plastic refuse thrown down by humanity. A heavy, grey sky. Not a single being within sight. I could have been drowning, no one to save me. I walked along, already in a fragile mood. Up ahead, an indeterminate object lay on the beach. It slowly materialized. It was a large sea turtle, over a metre long, lying on its back, dead — oh, very dead. Its head hung back, the leathery neck exposed, the sharp lipless mouth open, the black eyes staring. Who would do this to such a beautiful creature? Who would deliberately overturn it to let it die thus slowly? For no purpose, for this was no soup in the making. While these questions dragged me down, I heard a yelp behind me. I turned. A small three-legged dog was running up to me. Its left foreleg was gone, the stump messy and gnarled. The animal yelped at me but carefully made a circle around me, sniffing the turtle only, secure in the knowledge that the dead can give no blows, no kicks. There was a sinking in me, a collapsing such as I had never felt before. It was at this moment, long before I learned the words, that I first felt it, blowing through me like a frigid prairie gust: nothingness, nullity, vacuity, the void — life, consciousness, as being something as superfluous as a television left on in an empty room. I felt that if I made a wiping motion in front of my eyes, a swath of black would appear in the air, and in my hand the torn, bunched-up surface of reality, the wrinkled picture of a maimed dog sniffing a dead turtle. I couldn’t take my eyes off the turtle’s belly. What struck me was not its apparent hardness, or its colour (banana black and yellow) or the patterns (curious, softly delineated rectangles that I would recognize years later in the Inca stone
walls of Peru), but its slight inward curve. I felt very strongly that this curve fitted exactly the curve of the earth. In my mind I could see the round earth, and on this round earth a bump of a turtle hugging it. And it was good, it was the order of things. This inversion here, baby curve facing away from mother curve, facing the great emptiness of the universe, was a barbarity.

But was there not an element of necessity to this killing? This was the question that cracked through the wall of my happiness, through my security. What I had here, I sensed, was nihilism, the deliberate wrecking of being to assert being in the face of non-being. To insult, otherwise not to exist. To strike, even if in vain, at this sterile abundance of stupid life.

The final thought emerged: “This turtle — good thing it was overturned before my arrival, for I couldn’t have managed it on my own.” I backed away and returned to our hotel, the dog following me a little way before vanishing. Two days later I cried for hours in bed before falling asleep. And again some months later.

We moved to Paris. We were staying in a hotel before moving into our repainted apartment, but on the second day a French painter and his Canadian wife came to see us. Philippe and Sharon were friends of friends paying us a courtesy visit, but they and my parents hit it off so instantly and famously that spontaneously, sincerely, they invited us to stay with them, an invitation my parents accepted with delight.

Two days later, in the early evening, the doorbell rang and it was a man. He was the very portrait of misery: tense, tired, embarrassed, clearly distraught. Not in French but in halting
English, which Philippe understood only a little, he introduced himself: a friend of mutual German acquaintances. They had given him Philippe’s name and address in Paris. The man held up the paper on which the information was written. Stammering, with the difficulty of one not used to asking for help, he asked for help, which Philippe, without hesitation, extended. He invited the man in. He offered him a seat and a glass of wine and the man began to explain himself. It came out that he was Czech, a lawyer, that his brother had just been killed in circumstances that I did not understand, that he and his family had fled Czechoslovakia in catastrophe, leaving behind their belongings, their lives, everything, that they were now lost and confused, that — that they were now lost and confused, he said once again. And sat there, lost and confused. And shaking.

Everything that could be done on the outside to try to make the inside happy was done. While Philippe, my father and the Czech, Pavel, went to get his wife and his daughter, who were waiting at a café, the table was set, food was prepared, the corks from red wine bottles were drawn and bed-sheets were brought out.

I suppose that in reality she entered the house exhausted and unhappy, sticking close to her mother, dressed in a slightly dirty white dress with embroidery of bright red and purple, her hair tied in a fraying French braid. But to me she was an apparition of sudden, extravagant beauty. I neither saw nor heard Eva’s contrite apologies and thank-yous in her approximate French, or Pavel’s echoes of the same in his English or Sharon and Philippe’s assurances that neither apologies nor thank-yous were necessary. I only paid attention to Marisa, who looked about and sensed the warmth. I don’t know if I
was part of that warmth, but she looked at me, then away and around, then back at me, and smiled. My chest tightened.

She gave off sunshine. She had thick, crinkly blonde hair, skin that was honey-coloured, very dark eyes and a face so clear and open that years later, when Tito and I were hiking in the Himalayas and there was a change of wind and suddenly, in an explosion of clarity that cut my breath short, we beheld the mountain Nanga Parbat in its massive, microscopically accurate entirety, the first word, the only word, that came to my lips was her long-forgotten name. She was my age, eight, and she spoke, as far as I could tell, no language known to humanity beyond the Esperanto of our first names. We looked at each other, mutually surprised at the gibberish the other was speaking. But she smiled again.

After a quick clean-up, all of us, the French, the Canadians and the Czechs, sat down to eat. The Czechs ate hungrily; I, who was beside Marisa, hardly at all.

Pavel and Eva were beginning to relax and they and my parents and Philippe and Sharon started on one of those endless conversations that adults specialize in. I don’t recall any of this blah-blah-blah-blah on art, politics and life. How could I, when Marisa was next to me? After she had finished stuffing into her mouth all the food her body could possibly take, she sat back. She watched her parents for a few seconds, then shot me a side glance that transfixed me. We began — in spite of not sharing a common tongue — to communicate, although I’m not sure what. She whispered to me in her sweet East European Chinese and I whispered back in a French that I thought painfully clear and boring, but she seemed happy enough, for she replied right away each time, hardly letting
me finish. The only word she spoke that I understood, the most powerful word in her language, was my name, which she said four or five times, each time dazing me for a few seconds.

Though we were the ones whispering and the adults the ones talking, quite energetically sometimes, to my ears it was the reverse: their intercourse was a distant muttering, near silence, while Marisa’s unintelligibility came through loud and clear.

A strangled cry from Pavel abruptly ended our intimacy. His face was congested, he was biting one of his index fingers and he was staring at the table. His eyes were watery. Marisa’s face lost its good cheer. In a voice several notes higher than normal, she asked a question of her father. There followed a brief exchange of Czech between father, mother and daughter. Marisa seemed on the verge of tears. I felt I had lost her.

This display of adult emotion was taken to signal that it was time we children went to bed. Then fate took one of those turns that change a life for ever. Philippe and Sharon’s house, while generous in its open spaces, was not especially large, and accommodating six adults and two children was a challenge. It was decided expeditiously that Marisa and I would sleep in the same bed.

Just like that, with the casualness of an afterthought — thanks perhaps to the wine — passion was thrust into my life.

I was ready long before her. In a minute flat, teeth and hair were brushed, clothes were etc., and I lay in bed, eagerly patient. Meanwhile, she was bathed and dried. I don’t remember what I was thinking, but most probably, like adults about to make love, I was deeply content with the here and now, and
not going much beyond the rapid and circular thoughts that constitute anticipation.

Looking serious and composed, she appeared at the doorstep of the bedroom, a beauty in a white nightgown at the centre of an explosion of frizz. From the foot of the bed she crawled on all fours, like a lion, to her assigned spot, and she entered the den of our sheets next to an excited, expectant gazelle — me. Her hair overflowed her pillow. We were good-nighted and kissed by the crowd of parents. Normally I couldn’t fall asleep without this ceremony, but that night I wanted it to go as fast as a baton passing in a relay sprint. Instead, it lasted like a scene in a Noh drama.

What did that mean,
ne dérange pas Marisa
, don’t bother Marisa? I narrowed my eyes. If my parents had died that second I would have been delighted.

Finally, with the clicking of a light-switch and the snapping of a latch, they left.

I could smell her. She smelt wonderful, and I took this not as an artifice — some soap, some shampoo — but as a natural emanation. The fragrance of beauty. It is amazing how smells can pull one back into the past. I think that if I smelled that shampoo again today I could practically materialize Marisa in front of me.

We lay side by side, pyjamaed from head to toe, looking up at the ceiling, the darkness made limpid by the moonlight coming in from the window, and she quiet, and me, me?
me!
— thrilled to my core. And quiet too, just soaking in the thrill, deliciously swept away, deliciously passive. To be this close to Marisa, within inches of certain adventurous strands of her hair — I asked for nothing more. If we had fallen asleep at that moment, I would still have remembered that night for ever.

She rustled a little, adjusting her nightgown. She turned to me and spoke.

German? Not that I spoke a word of the language, but in Costa Rica, two houses down from us, I had had a friend, Eckhardt, whose parents were German immigrants.

I replied in the language which, by virtue of being my third and last, was the most foreign to me and therefore, surely, the closest to Czech.

I said this nervously, amazed at my boldness. I would ask my father to get her a double, one scoop of honey vanilla with
nuts and another of white chocolate. She was on her side with her head propped up. A few strands of hair fell across her face. She tossed them back.

She sat up and to my amazement began to gather up her nightgown in her hands, and then pulled it off over her head. Her hair cascaded down.