Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (6 page)

By disciplining this youth who was violating school regulations so blatantly at the beginning of the first term, the leader of the gang probably hoped to create the
impression among the freshman that he and his friends were not merely ruffians disliked in and out of school but vigilantes upholding justice on campus. Although he forbade the freshmen to enter the auditorium during the disciplining, he required them to gather at all the windows outside. Betraying no sign they felt the slightest affiliation with their lone classmate about to be chastised, idiotic expressions on their faces one and all as they struggled to maintain a balance between cowed curiosity and dull fear, the freshmen gathered around the windows to observe the drama of one-sided violence about to begin inside.

And in the beginning it was one-sided. Seating himself on top of the parallel bars, the prosecutor began by pointing out that his feet inside his torn tennis shoes were bare, in violation of school regulations. Next he charged that beneath his jacket, which was not even a proper high school jacket, he was wearing the most strictly forbidden of all things, a black shirt (he had sewn it himself out of a large black flag, he had no idea what it stood for, which he had pulled from a box full of his brother’s personal effects). When the gang leader had admonished him for these and other specific offenses, all of which doubtless had been whispered into his ear by informers among the freshmen, he climbed slowly down from the parallel bars and punched him in the temples, leaving the ground with each blow though he was the taller of the two. Encouraged by the total nonresistance he encountered he then became even more highhanded:

____Your eyes don’t show you’re truly ashamed even after having been disciplined by an upperclassman, and, sighing theatrically,

____It’s really tough to have underclassmen like this; we’re the ones who get blamed in the end, right! and fell to
punching him again. At this point, the defendant judged it would not do to have his temples beaten further. It was Saturday, and because that afternoon the new students had been assigned the chore of weeding the playing field he had a small sickle wrapped up with his books and notebooks. He stooped and took it out; then he looked the gang leader straight in the eyes and dug the blade with damp earth still clinging to it into the skin between the thumb and first finger of his left hand. Blood gushed, but he did not move an eyebrow. To the leader of the gang glaring at him in confusion the eyes staring back through a mucous film must have seemed incomprehensibly calm. But the effect was that of seeming motionlessness that occurs at the peak of high-speed revolutions: inside he was fighting for consciousness in a frenzy. Submerging then into the quiet revery at the extreme limits of duress he faced
a certain party
and screamed, in a voice so high it could only have registered on a canine ear,
Please drink the blood; it is for you!
and all of a sudden was waiting once again, with those soldiers who had left the army, on the road along the moat that led into the provincial city and the bank, armed with his own bayonet, sweat that was unmistakably from the heat of that midsummer day beading his grimy forehead.

Outwardly, he was confronting the leader of the juvenile gang, lowering the arm that gripped the sickle and extending his wounded, bleeding hand in an ambiguous movement that might have been an attempt to strike back or an overture to shaking hands; internally, he was composed of a lucid part at the clear surface of his consciousness and a murky part that had precipitated down close to the dark bottom yet remained distinct from his subconscious. In the swift wounding of his own flesh
on a bewildering impulse from the hot, pitch-black core of himself he had felt a deep joy which was not only unperceived by the hoodlums surrounding him but which he himself was not even conscious of as joy. At the same time, however, his head cleared by the blood that had been let as if the sickle were a medieval surgeon’s knife, he made the fully conscious, practical calculation that it would not do to let things stand if he hoped to finish off this opponent from whom he had managed to wrest the advantage, that, in fact, if he allowed time to pass without altering his strategy he would find himself in a position more dangerous than before. To be sure, he had managed to shock the hoodlums by wounding himself, producing a queasiness perhaps in each of their stomachs, but none of them had grasped the lasting significance of that shock. Consequently, as soon as the momentary physical uneasiness had passed, given their stolidity and forgetfulness, they could be expected to recover themselves and resume hostilities. It was therefore essential that he contrive a means of indicating a way out so simple it would be understood by the leader of the gang even in his somewhat dazed condition. Once he had the solution in mind he was merely playacting, an irrecoverable distance now from that hot, black something that had surged in him a minute earlier.

He stared at the bloodstained sickle, then thrust it under his opponent’s nose and screamed, as wildly as he could sound,

____Shall I cut your hand too? I’ll fight with this sickle
even though you don’t have one!
And if I start to lose I’ll cut my own throat! With that he deliberately lifted the sickle and held it against his throat, whereupon his opponent, with a swift shrewdness more than worthy of someone esteemed
as a leader, even by a gang of hoodlums, solved the riddle he had concealed in his screaming. Turning to his comrades he signaled an end to the formal disciplining.

____He says he’s going to fight with that sickle even though I’m empty-handed! And he threatens to cut his own throat if we knock him down. Let’s get out of here! There’s no use talking to a dirty, wild kid like this. He’s a crazy dog,
no rules!
If you hit him too hard you’ll catch germs!

With these words, the gang leader had presented him with a passport to his own violence, and now in order to validate it with his signature he ran around the room slashing with his sickle the stuffed mats covering the jumping platforms piled against the wall. The gym teacher, who was almost certainly a man of violence to the marrow of his bones, and who besides had been immediately informed of the identity of the criminal, made no accusations at the faculty meeting. One day when he was breaking another regulation by washing his hands at the drinking fountain, this teacher, a smallish man with a head like a shriveled pear and a beet-red face and a perfectly flat, fatless stomach of which he was very proud, bounded up like a long-distance runner and said, coquettishly, in a gentle voice but with exaggerated gestures that might have looked to an observer in the distance as if he were scolding the boy,

____I want you to think of me as a friend, OK? How about if I teach you some killer holds and throws so you won’t have to use a knife the next time you fight those punks?

Assuming animals can be called violent, he was spoken of with distaste in and out of school as animally violent; only the leader of the juvenile gang had glimpsed, just behind the roughness he had displayed on the surface,
a baffling internal passion by turns turbulent and still. And it appeared that he was instinctively wary of the weird energy he could sense arcing between those poles: in his instructions to his henchmen he put it plainly: watch out for him, he don’t care what happens to him; he’s like a
kamikaze
pilot that didn’t get to die! And so a precariously balanced peace was maintained between himself and the juvenile gang. Had he been judged remarkable for his violence only, the time would have come when the enemy shrewdly sensed they had regained the advantage where violence was concerned, and at that instant his own violence, in direct proportion to its absolute value, would have become a weight around his neck that dragged him gasping to the ground. However, the gang leader had seen in him something his hoodlum friends could never better no matter how they fought to compete, something incomprehensible. And so the gang adopted a compromise policy of considering him a creature beneath themselves, loathsome as the spirit of the plague, and pretended not to see him when he passed.

The day he slashed his hand with a sickle it wasn’t long before the pain was hard to bear without crying out. When he wiped the blood away he could see bits of muddy dirt and whitish fat welling out of the wound, and no matter how often he wiped it the blood continued to flow. The bicycle he rode to school, a number 8 which people in the valley called simply “old eight” (he had no idea what the number measured), was the very same bicycle he had been riding since he was a child, on which he had had at least one accident that had very nearly cost him his life, and which even now that he had entered high school was too large for him. When he went to the back of the equipment room where he parked the bike he was so
dizzy from loss of blood he couldn’t even stand, let alone straddle the high seat. Having gripped the handlebars once, he now stoically released them, so the bicycle would not fall, and then fell himself to the damp, clay floor patched, in just the way that blood vessel tumors would patch his chest when he got to be thirty-five and his liver sickened, with moss of a too brilliant, painful green to his dilated pupils. Struggling somehow to lift himself he grasped some thick weed stumps with his wounded hand, uttered a long, piteous moan, and went limp where he lay. As he watched, with one eye suspended three centimeters above the ground, the blood continue to flow from his hand and seep into the weeds, an extraordinary calm descended upon him and he felt ashamed of the innate violence that had surfaced shortly before with the violence he had consciously created. Shrinking not only with pain but also shame he spoke to
a certain party
again:
Please drink the blood; it is for you!
Surrounding him where he lay on the ground the other first-year students who also came to school on bikes looked on with unconcerned curiosity and disgust plain to see on their faces, as if they were observing a dog die of hunger. No one among them ran to the nurse’s office for his sake.

____There’s medicine in that weed, that’s why he’s pushing the hand he cut with the sickle in among the roots like that. Wild animals that have been wounded always do that way. One time there was even a deer that mended a broken bone by wading in a hot springs! The explanation came from the son of the doctor in his village, a freshman like himself who was certain to end up at the head of his class; when he struggled to his feet a minute later and the group fled in confusion the doctor’s son was in the lead.

Thus it was that he created a unique lifestyle in the
new institution known as the postwar high school. In fact, he had discovered a lifestyle suited to the real world wherever other people were not hampered by psychological scars relating to
a certain party,
everywhere, in other words, but the valley deep in the forest. It was a decisive discovery: not once in all the intervening years until at thirty-five he had been caught by the demon of liver cancer had he found it necessary to shift to any other lifestyle. And this made him think there must be a certain significance in the resemblance between the tumors now appearing on his chest and the pattern of the moss on that damp ground upon which he had fallen and rested while blood ran from his small body. Could it be that he had fallen bleeding onto his own chest covered with tumors now as he was about to die of cancer?

[[I think the doctor had something else in mind, something more direct, the scribe interposes, deferentially to be sure, fatigued by his endless reminiscence. What do you mean, “direct”? I can’t say anything definite until I’ve checked with the doctor, she replies, sidestepping. The way you’re acting, “he” says with chagrin, challenging her, I have no confidence you’re accurately recording the hundredth part of what I say. I don’t abbreviate a single syllable, but the more passionately you speak the harder it is for me to know where your passion is coming from. If I said otherwise I really would be lying, so I want to make that clear to you.]]

[[I’ve just been talking with the doctor, says the “acting executor of the will.” Since “he” is meant to be the only speaker in his reality “he” is disconcerted and annoyed
that his scribe’s mind has been alive and active while his own was at rest. Just what did you discuss? As long as it wasn’t discontinuing my “morphine.” The doctor inquired about those scars all over your body because he wanted to find out whether you might be suicidal. If it turned out you were, we’d naturally have to arrange for night nurses. Released from one piercing instant of tension “he” begins to laugh, Ha! Ha! Ha! is how it sounds to his own ears, a variety of laughter “he” is aware has never issued from him in all his thirty-five years but which recalls unmistakably a friend of his, a young American Jew from Harvard who had become deeply embedded in his life and who burst into nearly hysterical, self-derisive laughter whenever he was caught in an embarrassing situation he could not explain away. Suicide? Ha! Ha! Ha! This bed I’m sharing with my cancer is as far away as it’s possible to be from the need for suicide, “he” says, gradually accustoming himself to this new style of laughter like a stinging in the core of his brain, though clearly the “acting executor of the will” is suspicious. Not that “he” is able to sustain interest in the reactions of those who actually surround his bed. Presently, to regain the breath “he” needs to continue his narration, “he” tries to bring an end to the laughter. But for a time alphabet letters no bigger than ants continue to spill from his lips as faint sounds,
ha!-ha!-ha!]]

When he pictured himself facing his mother and informing her gravely that suicide’s objective was about to be attained though he was not even considering suicide, a life force opposite in direction from the
life force of cancer
that was rapidly destroying him but equally alive with motor energy welled up, particularly from the vicinity of his feverish, itching liver. Mother! I have no need for suicide anymore, now I can sail right past you without
having to make that kind of special effort and die legally and morally in every sense! The words were like a musical passage that persisted in moving the performer no matter how often he repeated it. In fact, he had enjoyed this private music of his own words countless times.