Self

by Yann Martel

  She once showed me a tampon she had just pulled out of herself. From its white string it dangled in the air between us, like a mouse held by its tail. Her face bore an expression of total disgust. I looked on quietly at this compact cylinder bright with blood. I brought my nose to it. Sonya's expression went up another notch of disgust. A smell of iron! I was amazed. I had no idea. The earth itself. Pure Promethean rust. I stuck my tongue out, but Sonya gasped and pulled the tampon away. She turned and tossed it into the toilet bowl and flushed, and I watched it disappear in the vortex of water.

  I took to sports and exercise at puberty in tandem with my discovery of masturbation. If my body could deliver such pleasure, it was worth cultivating. Over the years, in addition to the simple activity of walking, I have practised swimming, judo, cycling, squash, tennis, running, cross-country skiing, climbing, hiking and canoeing. But the exertion that gave me the greatest satisfaction during my teen years was weight training. Even before I saw my first weight room, I used to lock the door to my bedroom and place two volumes of encyclopedia on my back and strain my fourteen-year-old body to five push-ups. When I saw the muscle room at the YMCA I knew instantly that these machines would assure me a body much better than Britannica could. I eyed with envy the men who were in this room. They had such smooth, bulging muscles. I watched their power pushes and their power grunts. In the showers I spied on their beautiful bodies.

  I began to venture into weight rooms, at first waiting till a machine was free, absolutely free, before daring to use it. If a man happened to come up unexpectedly, I would finish quickly and scurry away. He would move the weight pin from the one or two lead bricks I managed to push to the twenty or thirty he could handle.

  But I persisted and my confidence increased. I learned the proper ritual, never failed to do my twelve to fifteen minutes of stationary bicycle, did the number of repetitions that would build muscles of a spongy bulk, always exhaling on the exertion. I became familiar with weight-room etiquette, with my rights and responsibilities. There was never a machine that I didn't carefully wipe with my towel after I had finished with it.

  My ambition was large: I wanted a body, and especially a chest, like the ones I saw in the showers. I worked all round, devoting particular attention to my pectorals, deltoids and abdominals. The result was a chest that pleased me -- not large, but well proportioned and nicely shaped. Only my legs seemed irretrievably thin, however much I exerted my quadriceps and calves.

  I never saw girls in the weight rooms that I frequented, and rarely women, but this didn't surprise me. It was only boys who had to create their bodies through strenuous efforts. Girls, it seemed, acquired theirs naturally. Only later, at university, would I see women pushing weights.

  I must say that I have never regretted these hours of slow sweaty exertion. I forgot my acne and my other woes and I looked down on a body that felt to me lean and nimble, strong and supple. There's a tightness of frame, a lightness of foot, that you feel when you are fit -- it's wonderful. Every pound I lifted, mile I ran, hour I skied, lap I swam, every limit of my physical capacity I pushed, I felt that I was reaching for life, that it was all expanding not just my lungs or this or that muscle, but my very vitality. A feeling much less powerful than, but still akin to, what I felt when I gushed sperm into tissue paper.

  My discovery of the sin of onanism was fortuitous. I was alone in my room, a volume from a series on sexuality in my lap, my penis in my hand. The volume was the fourth and last in a series and was intended "For Late Adolescents". I suppose the authors strove to be didactic and clinical. Nothing doing. My imagination turned the book into racy erotica. Every significant word -- penis, erection, vagina, breasts, penetration -- danced in my mind like an obscene stripper. My favourite cross-sectional diagram was of The Man and The Woman doing it. They were reduced to their relevant essential parts, the rest being mere outline, and I loved the snug fit of those parts; not only were the vagina and uterus in cross-section, but the penis and testicles also, so the connection between the testes and the ovaries was direct, clear and leakproof, something that pleased the plumber in me. I also gazed at length at the cross-section of The Erect Penis, magnificent in its size and intent. My favourite frontal diagram was of the female internal parts, that unmistakable triangle of uterus with flourish of fallopian tubes and ovaries, a soothing shape I still see in vases with wilting flowers, or beasts and their horns. When I read of the Voyager space probe, which would drift off into the infinity of space after exploring Jupiter and Saturn and which bore a plaque for the possible perusal of alien eyes, I thought that, in addition to the greetings in a hundred and fifty languages, including whale language, and the various scientific data, NASA should have added this anatomical Golden Mean, perhaps a little simplified, to say, "We are the people of this shape."

  I am straying from my point. At the age of which I am speaking, I went through this volume with wide open eyes and a beating heart and not a thought about the befriending of space aliens. I mention words and various diagrams that jumped out at me; these were only a prelude. What opened my eyes the widest, made my heart beat the hardest, were the photos. Black and white, headless, artless, bodies that could only be called ordinary -- these photos couldn't have been more clinical had they been of corpses in a morgue. Still, the nudity of these boys and girls, men and women, excited me deeply. To this day I remember the Adult Woman; I only wished I could see her face. I was sorry there wasn't a single shot of an erect penis, adolescent or adult. I longed to see this pure expression of male desire, still couldn't quite believe that such an extraordinary thing could be.

  My pleasure at this stage was visual. Occasionally I brought my penis into the show, pressing its softness against a picture that I particularly liked, but usually it was a simple bystander, no more. If, of late, I had involved it more in my enjoyment of the book, it was only because its new, slow growth of dark hairs made it more interesting to me. There was still no real connection between it and the pictures.

  But one day my hand happened to start a to-and-fro motion with my foreskin. I don't know where the idea for this came from. I was not searching for anything, and I had certainly not received any advice. It was a common act of genius.

  The motion was distinctly pleasurable. I continued it, somewhat increasing the speed. Rapidly I had a taut erection, a new state of affairs. But I didn't stop to consider it. A strange physical tension, a compelling ache, drew me on. "This is quite something," I thought, breathlessly, not knowing what I was doing, where it would lead.

  I lay back on the bed. I half-closed my eyes. "Oh, this is really quite something."

  Faster still.

  Then, in a spasm of physical tension, a response both fresh and ancestral was triggered by my body for the first time. A sort of convulsive exaltation overcame me, a rapture that pulsed through me in five waves, each one cresting in an explosive white gush from my penis.

  When it was over, I stared, drop-jawed and astounded. The stuff was all over my hand, my shirt, the book, my face, my hair, the wall behind me. It had a smell, a colour, a stickiness like nothing I had ever seen.

  I had no idea such pleasure was possible. My God, how could it be a secret?

  For a fraction of a second I wondered if this was normal. Quickly the thought vanished. If this was abnormal, then I was joyfully bound for the nether depths of abnormality. I looked again at the sperm-splattered book. Its authors suddenly became great, winking jokesters, going on so seriously about human reproduction. I laughed. So this was part of it. What a truly wondrous thing! Positively unearthly. A revelation. No wonder the earth was overpopulated.

  I cleaned up meticulously, though I could do nothing about the wrinkled spots on the page where the sperm had had time to seep in. I put the book back in exactly, precisely the position I had found it. I went to take a shower. This matter would have to be researched further, investigated, pursued. Why, right now, in the shower.

  Upon my discovery of masturbation the unive
rse once again split into two. There was the human and there was the ecstatic. The task was simple: to accommodate the two. All my life I have sought to do this. Mostly I have failed.

  I met Sonya at a time when I was still hugging the walls of the school corridors, hoping to be invisible. Classes were just over and I was nervously on my way to being happy away from school. My hand was reaching for the bar of the double metal doors, for freedom, when I heard a breathless question behind my back.

  "You speak French, don't you?"

  She was a girl in my grade but in a different class. She had short brown hair and brown eyes and a very slight down moustache. She was a little out of breath. She must have been running to find me.

  "Yes, I do."

  She smiled and diverted her eyes. "Gem le frawnsay. Say la ploo bel long doo monde."

  Amidst the Anglophone intolerance that reigned in the capital of my country during the years I lived there, where those who spoke two languages were despised by those who spoke only one (and poorly at that), she was the only person my age I met who saw French as an oral alchemy, able to gild instantly the most ordinary, leaden communication. That I spoke the language fluently turned me in her eyes into a magician of the highest order. Upon her request, commenting on the weather, I would say, "Le temps est tres froid," and through this alternative way of saying things I would transform the reality of the nasty cold weather and she would warm up to it. Her own French, beyond her simple declaration of love for ir, was aatrocious, mired as it was in a quagmire of tortured syntax, criminal grammar and non-Gallic vocabulary. But I am thankful Sonya didn't have better teachers or more practice, for if she had she might have been less enamoured of the language and we might never have met.

  "Oui, c'est vrai, elle est belle," je repondis. "Yes, it's a beautiful language," I replied.

  I don't recall what else we said that day, but we must have said more for I left the school happier than I had been in weeks and months, knowing her name and knowing she was my friend.

  One of the happiest moments of my adolescence was the first time Sonya called me. I had called her earlier but she wasn't home. I nervously left a message with her father, who didn't seem pleased at the notion of a boy calling his daughter. I was convinced she wouldn't call me back. When the phone rang a little later in the evening and my mother said, "It's for you," my heart jumped. "Hi, it's Sonya," came a voice from the receiver. I barricaded myself in my room and we talked for two hours.

  We went on long walks, weekend peregrinations through Ottawa, often to Parliament Hill, where we would examine the statues, or look over the river from behind the Parliamentary Library, or try, as we did once, to get into the Langevin Building, where Prime Minister Trudeau had his offices; or along the Rideau Canal and then Sussex Drive, past the War Museum and the Royal Mint, into that windswept, wide-open space just after the curve in the road, where one catches from a height the dazzling sweep of the Ottawa River, and beyond, past the Department of External Affairs, past City Hall, to reach 24 Sussex Drive, where we would peer between the metal fence-posts, trying to see the house, hoping to see movement in spite of the vegetation; or in Rockliffe, neighbourhood of the rich and diplomatic; or on the grounds of Rideau Hall, official residence of the governor-general, which grounds were at the time still open to the public; or to various museums, the one I remember best being the Museum of Science and Technology, especially the room built at a 30-degree angle from the horizontal with the furniture all out of proportion -- the point being to jar our notions of perspective -- where Sonya and I laughed and laughed and laughed. And all the while, during all this walking, we talked.

  After she was gone I went on these same walks on my own, but I had not realized how much of their pleasure lay not in the historical sights or in the exposition of a great future political career, but in the company. I missed Sonya terribly. The statue of D'Arcy McGee, one of the few Canadian politicians to suffer the apotheosis of assassination, now left me indifferent. I wandered through Laurier House, home of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, without looking at a single photo. Though I did not catch it at the time, this was my first hint that I was not suited for public affairs, that my interest in politics would never extend beyond a constituency of one.

  Sonya's mother had died when she was little. Her father, a tall, balding, bearded man who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, was strange and Catholic, Catholic and strange. He had promised his only daughter five thousand dollars if she never kissed before getting married. As older teenagers we might have laughed at this lucrative interdict and disregarded it, or our hormones might have overwhelmed us; in either case, we might have done something and then lied about it, but as obedient young teenagers she took it seriously and therefore so did I. We shared our every thought, we held hands in secret, when we lay in bed we lay very close to each other, feeling each other's heat -- but kissing was out of the question. And since the touching of lips and the greeting of tongues are the doorway to the house of passion, we sat meekly on the threshold.

  I felt no frustration over this since I still did not make the connection between the human and the ecstatic. They ran parallel. I loved Sonya, as she loved me, and it came out in our words and in our closeness -- and then at home I indulged in my secret pleasure. Only once she was gone did I start to dream of linking one with the other.

  Things came to an abrupt end. An unexpected offer of a promotion for her father, but not here, far away, and right now -- an alacritous response in the affirmative -- and suddenly Sonya was moving to British Columbia. School had just ended and we had thought we had the summer. The last time we saw each other in private, we cried openly in each other's arms. She kissed me on the side of the mouth, coming perilously close to giving up five thousand dollars and her lease on a wisp of cloud. We made plans for the future, desperate definite plans. Then she was gone.

  I cried in my room. I became snappy and aggressive with my parents and isolated myself from them. I wandered about the house, the neighbourhood, the city, but found nothing to make me happy.

  Salvation, if it can be called that, came through an eating disorder of sorts. It was in early August. The weather complemented my mood: it was hot and heavy and I was bored and listless. I had embarked upon one of my regular exploratory forages through the house, hoping to discover something new, something forbidden, something exciting. My parents, having moved so often in their lives, didn't tend to accumulate things, and my expeditions usually yielded nothing either new or exciting. But this time I was richly rewarded. In a cluttered corner of the basement, in three stacks, I came upon forty or so old Playboy magazines. Catching sight of these magazines made my heart stop. I had never gone through one, but I knew well enough what Playboy was about. My father had been a reader in the late sixties, when the magazine seemed to be in the spirit of the times, a time of great music and stormy politics, sunshine and Vietnam. The magazine was full of polemical articles on this or that, interviews with the likes of Fidel Castro, Barry Goldwater, the leader of the American Nazi Party (interviewed, deliberately, by a black reporter), opinions by U.S. senators, profiles of various personalities, short stories by incredible writers -- Nabokov, Updike, Boll -- round tables on various subjects, photo essays, and of course pictures of young women whose nudity seemed to symbolize the Age of Aquarius. A few years later, when times changed and Playboy's claims to be at the forefront of sexual liberation and other good things appeared dubious and it began to acquire an unsavoury reputation, my father stopped reading the magazine. But he had never thrown out his old copies, and so they lay dormant until they exploded into my life. For this was exactly the impact they had on me -- an explosion. As I reached for the closest one, feeling like Ali Baba as he entered the den of the forty thieves, Sonya faded from my memory. By the time I caught sight of the first picture, with a thrill that whistled through my mind, she was forgotten. These pictures, these magazines, would be my companions.

  Thus was I introduced to tha
t poisonous Western concept: the beautiful female body. Thus did I start my ingestion of naked paper women. I was always in mortal fear of being found out by my parents, so it was a secret, paranoid activity, performed with my ears cocked for the least signal of their unexpected early return from work. In direct contrast to the headless, colourless bodies from the volume on sexuality, which gave my imagination the minimum fuel with which it could fly, the pictures in Playboy sent me sky high. These disrobed young women displayed a beauty that was truly incredible to me, yet there they were, smiling, laughing, prancing, looking pensive, speaking of themselves and their families, of where they lived and what they did, of their favourite books, singers and movies. That these monthly beauties were from the American sixties, from an era that seemed so colourful and momentous, gave them an added degree of attraction. I ogled not only their breasts, but their hippyish ways and dress, their lingo, their politics. Masturbating while looking at these young women was far and away the most powerful, sensuous experience of my adolescence. I remember how one time, after a particularly intense moment of gratification, I came up from the basement and stumbled outside. I was in a daze. I lay on the grass, looking up at the sky. It began to rain, at first gently, then with the unfurling waves of a storm. I didn't move, but stayed there till I was soaked through and through and my teeth were chattering.