Self (6 page)

Her hands reached for my pyjama top. I sat up and she helped me take it off. We remained sitting for a few moments, looking at each other. I suppose she had a chest very much like mine: flat, with two pale round nipples. Except that hers was a touch golden. She smiled.

We lay down and she turned me around so that I had my back to her. Her arm came up and around me. She held me plainly and openly, our bodies tightly fitted to each other, our skins touching, hers very warm, my head resting in her soft, rebellious hair. My eyes were open, but I was more aware of smell and touch than of vision. I felt dizzy.

Her hands made her meaning clear. I turned slowly, ever so slowly, like the planet Earth turning towards daylight. When she spoke, when she breathed, I could feel it against my face. We continued to whisper sweet Hispano-Teutonic nothings.

At a pause, she closed her eyes, covered three inches of space and kissed me on the lips.

It has only happened to me twice in my life: I could hardly see her for the fish in my eyes. At that moment I wanted time to stop, I wanted the night never to end, I wanted the sun to be gutted.

I was so blissfully happy, so wide-eyed and glowing with it, that I fell asleep. I awoke in the morning with the conviction that love is an insomnia that wakes us from the sleep of life. I had been asleep before, but never again. I vowed to be awake like this for the rest of my life, a full awakeness, a clear one-litre glass bottle with one litre of water in it.

My mother entered and right away I asked the question.

The answer echoed in my head.
Non, ils veulent s’établir en Australie. Non, ils veulent s’établir en Australie. Non, non, non
. I was at the end of the bed, mostly dressed. She was bringing me a clean shirt.

Will I be understood when I say that sometimes numbness can hurt? That you don’t want to feel because what you feel will be pain, so you try not to feel, and just sit there, immobile, numb, in pain?

That day, we, the three nations, visited Notre-Dame, a big, cold place except when Marisa and I stood on the hot air vents. I stuck close to her. She made me feel much the way the cathedral did: draughts of warmth amidst draughts of cold. I kept thinking, “She’s here — but not for long, she’s here — but not for long, she’s here — but not for long.”

We returned to the hotel for one night, and then moved into our new apartment. I saw Marisa many times after that, but never in the same circumstances. She was becoming happy, reconciling herself with fate, thinking of Australia, already speaking her first words of English — “boat”, “bed”, “dictionary”. The last time I saw her, for the good-byes, she came up to me and publicly kissed me on the left cheek, on the right cheek, on the left cheek, and then, once, on the lips. I felt my life was over.

She was a new teacher at my new school, the English School of Paris. It was my first day. A boy sitting at the back was making things difficult for her. He was being very insolent. At a climax of tension between him and her, she lost control and slapped the first boy within reach — which happened to be me. Did I make a comment? A wisecrack? Something that would have been a specious excuse? If I did, any memory of it was instantly erased by this full slap in the face. I did not cry — pride — only stared down, red in the face. But as soon as I got off the school bus and was greeted by my parents, hours later, I burst into great, choking tears. My schoolmates surrounded us and in their shrill voices, one over the other, they recounted what had happened. In truth, the teacher had not really meant to slap me, and even before the school principal received an irate and flushed visit the next morning from two young Canadian diplomats, who meant to get to the bottom of why their much-loved little boy was being physically abused — something never,
ever
done by them, they emphasized — and unjustly abused on top of it, even before this, she received a visit from the young woman (with her boyfriend), who, immediately after the class, had gone to the bathroom to cry and had
spent a sleepless night and whose eyes were still red and who was obviously remorseful about the incident. The rest of the year she was extra nice to me, and I received a final mark of 94, though I can’t even remember what the subject was. This slap was one of my few direct contacts with violence during my early childhood. The others came through art.

I would like to move quickly through this episode. It is a mistake from my childhood, regret for which still nags me. What I would give to undo it! I see it as one of the forks in the river of my early life, one of those moments that begin the tracing of a pattern. The details annoy me and bore me, I have gone over them so often, but still I must relate them. What comes through loud and clear to me is the fact that I learned nothing from Marisa.

Ten years old, same school, same class, a little shorter than I, a smile like — no metaphors, quickly: I was in love with Mary Ann. I would set eyes on her — and what a difference one person can make! I would look at all the other people in my life — my parents, my classmates, my teachers, strangers in the street — and nothing would happen, so many bottles moving along in a bottle factory. But I could never get enough of looking at Mary Ann. There was something about her that was beyond my understanding. I would gaze at her in circles, from her hair to her forehead to her eyes to her nose to her smile to her whole face and then back again to the details, circle after circle. Mary Ann and I were friends. We played together all the time, and on the bus I sat beside her, or near her, regularly. And she came to my home at least once. It’s engraved in my memory.

Kelly was there, Mary Ann’s younger sister. We were playing submarine in the modular furniture of my bedroom.
Kelly, who was running the engines and operating the missile silos, was below, at the desk, while above her on the bed, out of sight, lay Mary Ann and I, commanders of the sub. We talked, we whispered, we gave orders, we laughed, we looked into each other’s eyes — it was there in the air, to be had. I only needed to lean forward and do it. Instead I fell back as if exhausted, and gave Kelly her final order, “Surface,” and the spell was broken.

One day I will be old and if you push me, if you prod me, I’ll spill this trivial incident of a ten-year-old boy who failed to kiss a ten-year-old girl. I will be bitter about it.

It was after the submarine, on the bus on the way back from school. Mary Ann was sitting with Diane in the seat in front of me. They had placed their coats over their heads and were whispering secrets to each other. But I could hear them. Through the cleft between their seats, I could hear them. Mary Ann asked Diane whom she liked, what boy, and there was giggling and some answer and I didn’t care. Then Diane asked Mary Ann whom she liked, what boy, and immediately, without a pause, there was an answer, some Paul, some Henry, that I so little wanted to hear that I momentarily went deaf. I sat back in my seat and looked out the window and managed not to cry until I was in the bathroom at home.

That summer I spent two weeks in Canada with my paternal grandmother. She lived in a small village on the St. Lawrence and I spent most of my time fishing off a pier. It amused the city boy I was to be doing that, to be capturing wild fish from the wild, wild seaway — thirty-five kilometres wide at the level of my grandmother’s village — and it meant that I could be alone, for she never came with me; alone with the wind, the seaway and the sun. But something had to be
done with my catch. It was a fish called the loach, whose taste my grandmother did not like. The garden, she said. So it was that for two early summer weeks I fished alone every day off a pier and returned to my grandmother’s small house to fertilize her garden with fresh fish. I dug small trenches and into these I laid my loaches, one by one, head touching tail, quickly burying them before they could flip-flop out of position. Some nonetheless swam up to the surface of the garden and I had to dig a deeper trench and step on the soil over them to make it compact. I wouldn’t have tolerated this nonsense except that television and the rest of my upbringing had taught me the many ways in which a man or a woman can be killed, but not a loach. As I buried the fish, I said to myself over and over, to the point of stupefaction, “There is no love, there is no love, there is no love, there is no love.” With a vengeance, in the cool, dark soil, I meant to bury the fish in my eyes.

I was staying at Jonathan’s. It was a house with a garden, so it must have been somewhere outside of Paris. We found a condom. It was soft and yellow and it smelled disgusting. Jonathan’s sister, Louise, was coming. He hid the condom. She was wearing her bathing-suit and sunglasses. Without saying a word to us, with only a look of exasperation, she lay on the deck chair. Jonathan looked at me and then at her significantly.
It came from her
. I stared at her, awed. We both stared. She turned to us. “Get lost,” she hissed. We left.

“She had a fight with her boyfriend,” said Jonathan. He was lucky to have a sister. He was spying on her all the time. We went upstairs and from the back window we looked down on her, hoping she would do something, don’t know what. She lay very still, mostly brown (it was high summer) except
for two circles and a triangle of blue bikini. We looked for a long time, off and on, and she never seemed to move. Then, when I was looking but not Jonathan, I saw two shiny rivers of tears appear from under her sunglasses and trickle down her cheeks, and I didn’t want to look any more. I felt a sudden tightness in my throat. I thought of Mary Ann. Jonathan was taking down his BB gun to show it to me. We’ll shoot things, he said. I got a pigeon yesterday, he said. But I didn’t want to look at his BB gun or shoot anything. I proposed television.

This pain, the pain of unrequited love, occurred at such regular intervals during my childhood and adolescence that I don’t care to write about it. It was a terrible and continuous pain and there was no deflecting it, only bearing it. When my parents prepared spaghetti, I always noticed the one noodle left behind in the strainer, forsaken, forgotten, while its companions lay intertwined in each others’ arms, hot and steaming, in the large bowl at the centre of the table. When love was pain, I felt like that noodle. I never ate pasta without beforehand going to the strainer in the sink. I would look upon this bereft noodle, curled upon itself in search of comfort, and I would bring it love by eating it tenderly.

I do not want to discuss the subject of unrequited love. If love is the sea, then let us journey inland for a while.

THE SECOND TIME TELEVISION MESMERIZED ME AS A CHILD:

(2) I knew something forbidden was coming because the television screen had a little white rectangle in the bottom right-hand corner, a signal at the time that the program was
“for adults only”. In the absence of my parents and my babysitter — they out for the evening, she in another room reading — I hesitated only a little. I turned the volume down to make the immorality of my act quieter. A picture emerged from darkness.

An empty arena.

People walking in.

Lights coming on.

At first I hardly paid any attention, for it was the white rectangle itself that gripped me. I stared at it much as Eve must have stared at the apple. Then the movie started in earnest. It was set in a future where there were no longer any wars, since countries no longer existed, only multinationals, and where global frustrations were contained within the arena of a violent team game played on roller-skates and motorcycles on a circular track. The camera caught it all: the blows and the pain, the accidents and the bodies. We lingered on the dazed, sweaty face of a dying player, then zoomed to blood-thirsty spectators throwing themselves against the plastic barrier shouting for more, more, more. I watched in shock. I noticed anew the white rectangle. I thought of plunging forward and clicking the television off, but I did not. I kept watching. I remember this movie for the way my emotions teeter-tottered between recoil and attraction in a shifting balance. I could feel how fascination was pushing back the bounds of horror.

ON THE CURRENCY OF THE WORDS “NIGGER” AND “FUCK”:

My school in Paris was attended mostly by children of diplomats and foreign business executives. Consequently,
there was a large contingent of dark blacks, middle blacks, pale blacks, dark browns, milk-chocolate browns, pale browns, yellows and olives among the freckled whites, the English transparent veiny whites, the Australian tanned whites and the just plain boring whites. We even had a No Colour, an albino, and an Irish cripple. I was fascinated by the colour of a fat girl named Gora. She was Indian or Trinidadian. Her skin was a shimmering soft brown that seemed to have depth. I could imagine dipping a finger into her skin and seeing it disappear into her brownness. At home I used to take milk and carefully add chocolate powder to it, trying to get precisely the colour of Gora’s skin but never managing it because there is a quality of yellow-reddishness that Nestlé’s just doesn’t have. “Nigger” was the only racist slur I, we, knew at my school and we were very fair in our use of it; anybody who wasn’t black was exposed to it. Our most consistent nigger was Beatrice’s brother, a British pasty white by the name of Anthony. He was a touch mentally retarded, and we called him nigger with such regularity that we practically forgot his real name. Then one day Mr. Templey overheard Tristan calling him that and he got hell for it. It was then that I first heard about Martin Luther King, the American Deep South and the Civil Rights Movement. Nigger fell out of fashion and we called Anthony a moron instead. Another reason racism didn’t stick was that it was limiting and impractical. Gora was snooty and it was with delight that I told her once that she was shit-coloured, but Tony, the Nigerian ambassador’s son, was great. He was really funny and he had sticks of firecrackers that blew up like dynamite. He was also a leader. His words and his actions carried weight.