As I told you, I always begin with the left foot when cutting my toe-nails. It’s a custom. I always lean towards the left. Even my body leans to the left. Like the Tower of Pisa. Too bad I had to become right-handed, I could have been such a straight-up guy. But because of the bad break of my left wrist when I fell off a cherry tree, I became right-handed. That does not mean I can do everything with my right hand. There are certain things I can do, and do better, with my left hand. But I’m digressing. I think I was eight years old when I broke my left wrist. It happened in Le Poitou where my sisters and I were sent on colonies de vacances.
[Concerning les colonies de vacances consult The Farm.]
You may not believe this, but the doctor who fixed my arm was Michel Foucault’s father. Foucault himself confirmed this to me when I told him how and where I broke my left wrist when I was on vacation in Le Poitou. He confirmed this during a dinner at my house in his honor when he was a visiting professor at the university where I was writer-in-residence.
During the dinner someone remarked that I seem to be ambidextrous in the way I used my fork and knife to cut the meat on my plate. So I told the story of how I fell off a cherry tree and broke my left wrist during vacation in Le Poitou, and when I specified the place, Foucault exclaimed, The only doctor in the region who could fix your arm was my father. I know exactly where you broke your arm. Foucault didn’t say that in English. I am translating here for the commodity of the story. But Foucault said it in such an assured and positive way that everyone present was convinced, as I was too, that my broken arm had definitely been repaired by Michel Foucault’s father, so that indirectly, Michel Foucault was responsible for my having become right-handed in spite of myself. Thus betraying my mother’s decision to make me left-handed.
I apologize for this detour. I didn’t mean to digress into the politics of my toes. It’s just that I thought it would be appropriate to mention at this time that I was born left-handed, and that the accident that caused me to become right-handed may be the reason for the difference of character and personality between my left toes and my right toes.
One could say that my left toes are congenial, even though they often argue with one another. Whereas the right toes are more independent one from the other. They act like strangers towards each other. But they each have certain qualities, and certain deficiencies.
The little one on the right is always playful. He bounces. He wanders. He even laughs when I cut its nail. But his laughter is full of sadness because of his shape. He’s like a little hill. A mound. A rounded monticule. Une colline. In other words, it’s all crooked. The nail seems happy on this little crooked toe. Though I think it fakes it. Actually, there is barely a nail on that toe. The nail is almost non-existent. I have to search for it when I have to cut it. The toe itself never touches the ground. He is permanently elevated.
Suspended above the other toes.
Yes, I know, what you’re going to tell me, I can see it coming, Federman you’re not going to tell us again why your little toes are atrophied. We heard that story so many times before.
Your claim that you are a mutant simply because both your left and right little toes have only one phalange each, and are so curled up and crooked, that they don’t even touch the ground any more when you walk. And the reason for that, according to you, is because we humans walk less and less, therefore our feet are in the process of evolving towards total flatness, and eventually toes will disappear. Soon our feet will become toeless. And of course, nails will become obsolete. Unless one single large nail covers the entire front flatness of the foot. But one cannot speculate at this point. Feet evolution can take decades.
That’s why you believe yourself to be a mutant. Because your little toes have only one phalange, and never touch the ground.
Well, if you don’t believe me, all you have to do is examine my little toes, and you’ll be convinced that I am absolutely correct with this theory.
On with my toes. The next one, the second on the right, he’s always leaning to one side. He’s sort of oblique. I think of him as being pensive. Not melancholic, but romantically self-reflexive. Self-absorbed. He is so independent. It’s the most distant of my toes. When I approach him to cut its nail, he seems to be absent between my fingers. Or rather, my fingers feel as though they hold nothing. He is agonizingly indifferent.
I know, you’re going to say, Federman, sometimes you make us laugh with your decadent lyricism. So what!
The next one, the third from the right, is the scholar. Pedantic like you wouldn’t believe. You should hear him bullshit me about intellectual matters when I clip his nail. He talks to me about structuralism and deconstruction and the Russian Formalists. He quotes Plato and Aristotle, Kant & Hegel, St. Augustine, Descartes, Geulincx, Bergson, and all kinds of other thinkers like that. Even Jean-Paul Sartre.
I don’t know where he got all that stuff, but he’s so boring and so endless when he lectures me that I usually try to spend as little time as possible cutting his nail. A couple of clippings, and I move on to the next toe. But he shouts at me to come back because he was not finished.
Last night, that toe talked to me about Freud and Hitler. He was trying to make a rapprochement, as he put it, between the hypocrisy of psychoanalysis and the idiocy of Nazism. I told him that I was not interested, that all this is old stuff. Dépassé. Forgotten. So he got pissed, he twitched and twitched, and didn’t even let me finish cutting his nail.
But revenons à nos moutons, or rather à nos onglons, to play on an old French saying. I was talking about the third one. The pseudo-intellectual. I always try to cut his nail as quickly as possible so as not to listen to what he has to say. It’s as though he spends his life in an ivory tower.
Now the next one is special. He is the poet. I adore that one, even if it belongs to the wrong clan. I wish he were on my left foot. He would get along well with my left pinkie. One of these days you must come and listen to him recite his poetry. Des vers onglons.
Last night, it sounded just like Rimbaud’s poetry. He recited an autobiographical poem.
Here, I’ll quote it for you.
[turn the page]
Once, oh do I remember it well,
my life was a banquet
and all the nails grew freely.
But one evening, I sat beauty
on my toe
and I found her bitter
and I cursed her
and now that I am old
and have suffered much
from not suffering enough
I yearn to become a fabulous opera.
So you see how pleased I am to be able to give pleasure to my toes by cutting their nails, even if some of them do not enjoy it as much as I do.
But, let’s not forget the last one. The one that obsessed me the most. The big toe of my right foot. That one is terribly neurotic. He makes me sad every time I have to cut his nail. It’s the nail that causes the toe to be neurotic and me to be sad when I have to cut it. There is a good reason for this condition. That big toe had a traumatic accident when I was working on a farm. That goes way back when I was a boy. A displaced person. During the great war. No need to go into that sordid story again. Enough to say that somehow I found myself working on a farm at the age of 13, and on that farm my feet hurt all the time, even more than the rest of my body.
One day, while working in the barn, fixing the wheel of a cart, an anvil fell on the big toe of my right foot. Right on the nail. It was the heavy anvil we used to fix tools and other agricultural instruments. The nail of my big toe was totally smashed. Pulverized. And the toe bled and ached for weeks. He got all infected, and there was puss oozing from under the debris of that crushed nail. That poor toe never recovered from that blow. Even today he suffers from it. And he reminds me of that accident every time I cut his nail. Blames me for being what it is today. The ruins of a glorious nail.
Bon, I know what you’re going to say, Federman, stop bugging us with your pathetic past and
your suffering on the farm. Especially since there is no way to verify what you say happened. Maybe your toe-nail got like that because you stuck it into some polluted place.
Believe what you want, but if you were to examine the nail of my big right toe you would understand that this toe and its nail underwent a rather traumatic experience.
But let me get to the end of this unfortunate toe. Since that catastrophic day on the farm, the nail has things growing underneath that stick to it. I say things because I don’t know what else to call that hard calcareous matter that grows under the nail like some alien matter. It feels like cement when I try to cut it, or rather try to extricate it from underneath the nail with a little tweezer, with a knife, with a scraper. That stuff sticks to the nail obstinately. So that cutting the nail of that toe becomes a real battle. Afterwards, I’m exhausted. And my leg is all stiff from having stayed up that long off the ground on the edge of the sink in the bathroom.
Well, that’s the discovery I made last night about my toes which I wanted to share with you. If you wish, next time, I can tell you about my fingers and their nails. They too have very interesting original personalities.
MY VOICE
What one hears in a work of art [whether literature, music, or painting, because music and painting speak to us as much as literature] is a voice – always a voice – and this voice that speaks our origin [the nothingness whence we came before we uttered our first word], speaks at the same time our end [the nothingness towards which we are crawling].
In this sense, the voice is at the same time birth [or resurrection] and death [or transfiguration]. The voice is what resists the nothingness that precedes us and the nothingness that confronts us. Or to put it more poetically: The breath whose domestication in the throat of the human animal created the voice that engendered the conscious and moral [or immoral] mystical beast that we are tells the whole human adventure.
Therefore, my voice, in this sense, is my human adventure. I don’t remember how and when it was domesticated, but it was. Perhaps, as an error of nature.
When I speak, whether I say something true or false, or something intelligent or stupid, I am telling myself.
That’s about all I can say about my voice. Except that when I speak English I have a pronounced French accent. An accent, I confess, carefully cultivated for social and sentimental reasons. I have domesticated my French accent.
Bilingual as I am, I have often been told that when I speak French it sounds English, and when I speak English it sounds French. Especially in the way I construct my sentences. My syntax seems foreign in both languages. I suppose it’s because of the uneven rhythm I give to the words and the phrases I articulate. And it is true that I have a rather unorthodox way of arranging the invisible words that come out of my mouth, and the visible words I scribble on paper.
The somewhat incoherent cadence of my voice certainly corresponds to the cadence of my life, since my voice speaks my life. And to make it worse, I often speak myself in two languages at the same time without making any distinction between the two. Except that, I think my English voice is deeper, graver than my French voice. More serious also. Whereas my French voice, I’ve been told, sounds joyful, playful, more free, typically Parisian.
To conclude, all I can say: I speak therefore I am. But one day, as my old friend Sam used to say, I’ll manage to shut up, barring an accident.
No, maybe I should say more about my voice. After all without my voice I’d be nothing. I would have no story.
I have often been told, by those who read me, that what they hear when they read my books, is my voice, even if they read me silently. Go explain that. And the people who have read me and then meet me in person, are amazed to discover that the fictitious voice they heard in my writing was exactly the same as my real voice. Your books, they say to me, sound exactly like you.
So, when someone tells me that, I ask: When you read me in English, did you hear my French accent? And if you read me in French, did you detect an English accent?
Recently, this was in Cannes, of all places, I gave a reading in the splendid garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby’s mansion. Don’t ask me how I got invited to such a swanky and elite place, I don’t even remember myself, but was it swanky and elitist. About hundred literati gathered in the garden for my reading. The entire literary aristocracy of Cannes. It was quite an affair.
I was reading from the new revised expanded post-modernized edition of Amer Eldorado [originally published in 1974, by les éditions Stock, but now retitled Amer Eldorado 200/1, to indicate that this edition had been totally rewritten, totally reinvented].
AE2, as friends call this book, was published in 2001 by Les Éditions Al Dante, so it must have been during the summer of 2001, that I read in the garden of La Comtesse Remy Kirby in Cannes. Now I remember. It was in July.
Anyway. After the reading, while we were all sipping le champagne and munching les petits fours de La Comtesse Remy Kirby, a poet, that’s how he introduced himself, I am a poet, my name is Jean-Louis Laplume, he even said it in English to prove to me that he knew English, told me that he loved my reading, he just adored it, especially the risqué passages, but noticed that I speak French with a slight English accent. What an asshole. What a miserable minor poet. I could bury him with my genuine proletarian Parisian accent. Quel petit con! Qu’il aille se faire cuire un oeuf au lieu de faire de la poez. I should have told him.
I may have a thick French accent when I speak English, an incurable accent, but I definitely not have an English accent when I speak French. And even if I do, I cannot hear it. On the contrary, when I listen to my voice speak French in the interior monologue that mumbles in me incessantly, I hear pure French, classical French uncorrupted by my Anglo-Saxon voice.
Well, I wanted to clarify this about my voice.
MY SEXUAL ORGAN
I could, of course, tell you much about this part of my body. But that might shock those who claim it is in bad taste to talk openly about one’s sexual organ.
Therefore, I think it is preferable in this case not to speak of it directly, but to let you, indirectly imagine the adventures and misadventures of this rather private part of my body, commonly called by the French, Le Sexe.
Concerning my sex, it would be indecent to relate what it did and endured since I first discovered it, at a young age, as an integral part of my body.
I can, however, tell you this: I have always treated it kindly, gently, even when it was in a bad mood, or when it withdrew into itself, and became depressed.
I can also tell you, hoping not to embarrass you, that it gave me much pleasure in my life. And let’s hope it will continue to do so.
Micturating has never been a problem for my sexual organ. He takes that function very calmly. Always there ready to piss. He enjoys it fully. Except when I have an attack of kidney stones. Then he suffers for me.
My sexual organ found pleasure in many strange places and unusual situations. Situations that sometimes required a certain acrobatic dexterity.
No, don’t ask me for details. Don’t ask me for a list. I have already said too much. But let me just add that some of these acrobatic situations where not always in beds, or on tables or even on floors.
It seems that my sexual organ during our relationship, how else can I say that, our commerce, got us into some very awkward situations.
But do not conclude immediately that he is perverse or vicious or anything like that. He just likes good fun.
He’s not obsessed with himself. No, my sexual organ sometimes even goes dormant for long periods of time. But it does not take much to awaken him. The scent of feminine perfume. A smile on a beautiful face. A pair of long svelte legs in silk. A lovely derrière.
Of course when I was younger, I mean before matrimony, I admit that I sometimes let him lead me into wild places. Especially in Tokyo, when I was a soldier serving with the occupying forces. We had a great time over there in Shimbashi my sexual organ and I. He amazed me with h
is endurance, though he was always careful not to cause any accidents.
Then came the middle-age crisis, and for a while he was literally on strike against my desires. He refused to perform. He even embarrassed me at very tempting moments. Try as I would, all was lost for a time. But then slowly, kindly, gradually he became more responsive again. And now we have this understanding which allows us a certain freedom and ease, without too much coaching.
But to describe him physically, in person, would be, it seems to me, in bad taste. The French would say, de mauvais séant.
Therefore, again I can only leave it to you to imagine the adventures and misadventures of my sexual organ, to imagine that part of my body, which is as essential to me as the other parts whose story I have already told.
MY BROKEN MOLAR
Today I went to the dentist because of my broken molar. The one that broke last week when I was biting on a piece of chocolate. Hard chocolate.
It’s one of the upper molars on the left. The third one counting from the back of my jaw. How can I make this clear so that you will know which one I’m talking about.
←Yes, that one. The third one on the left, counting from the back. I think it’s a molar. To make sure, maybe I should consult the dictionary to see what it says about molars.
Molar tooth: a tooth adapted for grinding by having a broad wounded or flattened though often ridged or tuberculated surface.
Specif: one of the cheek teeth in mammals behind the incisors and canines.
That describes exactly the tooth that broke. So it’s definitely a molar.
Those guys who write dictionaries are so good with words. They must have a certain intimate experience of what they describe.
My Body in Nine Parts Page 4