Self

by Yann Martel

  I was the first to move in. The place was an empty mess and I spent several hours at odd times in haphazard, frenzied cleaning. For a while I slept on an old mattress I found, stained by past people's incontinence, menstruation and love-making. This didn't disgust me. The stains were dry, ancient history. It was the mattress's lack of comfort that pushed me to buy a white, virgin futon. I took two small rooms on the second floor: one, facing the street, as my office; another, even smaller, as my bedroom.

  I went on long walks. I was amazed at how inconspicuous I was; by Turkish standards I was invisible. This played a good part in my high spirits. It was refreshing and liberating to walk down a street unnoticed, left alone with my day-dreams; to speak and be understood right away; to look around and feel a part of things. This is my street, my park, my house, my country. These are my people, my wide acres.

  My roommates trickled in. We were not close friends, but the house didn't require that of us -- it was spacious enough to accommodate distance -- and the routine of organized education kept us busy. But, just in case, we built those good fences that make good neighbours that Robert Frost so deplored. We divided the fridge into five parts (five chunks of variously aged cheddar cheese, five separate litres of homotwopercentskim milk, five etc.) and we divided the cupboards in five parts (five packages of pasta, five cans of tuna, five etc.). I believe the only victuals we shared were salt and pepper. In the bathroom there were five bars of soap and a profusion of hair products (but divisible by five). We shared the toilet paper. In our relations with each other, things were also generally divided by five. Five sets of joys and pains behind five closed doors. I say "generally" because there was a living-room, a common area, and we did lie about and talk and listen to music and watch Sarah's clunky TV together; and over the course of the year we did form a few duets of intimacies. There was open friction only over the matter of dishes. Someone else's dirty plate or two in the sink was exasperation enough to cause a huge pile-up of dirty dishes.

  There was Daniel, exceptionally bright, always getting A+'s in his history papers and later pulling off a major international scholarship, but emotionally fragile, the sort of fragility that would eventually require the glue of lithium to hold him together; Karen, cheery and independent, who in the course of the two years I knew her blossomed from a nice, small-town hick into an actor who amazed me with her Ophelia; Martha, despondent, withdrawn and witty, who spent most of her time at her boyfriend's place; and Sarah, with whom I was the closest, beautiful, bright, easygoing and funny, and just about as lost and confused as I was, who half-way through the year eased herself out of the world of academia into the world of waitressing; and Spanakopita, who, despite his great name and great looks (brown and orange, and fat), was a surly cat who never reciprocated my affections.

  The only thing the five of us had in common, I realize now, was lostness and confusion, in varying degrees -- Karen, who seemed to have a natural ability to be happy, the least, while we others slip-slided along whatever scale measures happiness, sometimes joyful, often miserable. This was, perhaps, a normal lostness, typical of our age -- maybe even salutary. I certainly didn't envy the dead certainty in things that some commerce students displayed, being in a rush to graduate and set themselves up at age twenty-three the way they would be living at age sixty-three. But it was not easy to take, not in my case at least. Better remembered or imagined than lived through. I believe it was this lostness that prevented us from getting closer to each other. We were each jealously possessive of our wilderness.

  The school year, the cafeteria-style getting of wisdom, started. I decided to take only three courses, two less than a full meal. I became a part-time nibbler of philosophy of religion, early modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant) and English literature, in this case the American Renaissance (de Tocqueville, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman). With the extra time I had, I started the frustrating, blissful task of writing a novel, and I enjoyed the pleasures of idleness.

  Many people envied my travels. "Turkey! Wow! I spent the summer in boring (pick one: Belleville, London, Ottawa, Burlington, Oshawa, Mississauga) doing nothing/working as a (pick one: lifeguard, house-painter, waitress, library worker, filing clerk, gas-pump attendant)." Though it's true that I'd rather spend the summer in Turkey than in Belleville, nonetheless I thought, "Kill your parents. Wire their car's ignition directly to the gas tank so it blows up and they become charred, crusty and black on the outside, but red and liquid on the inside. Like solidifying lava. Like my parents before the salt water and the sharks. Then collect the money and run."

  One important difference between my roommates and me was that they were all attached. Daniel had Isabella, Karen had James, Martha had Lawrence, and Sarah had a few. But I was firmly unenvious of these romantic relationships. Martha's Lawrence was a pretentious twerp. Once or twice I saw Karen transform herself into a whining, cloying kitten when James wasn't doing what she wanted, something mortifying to watch, but which he revelled in, playing it for all it was worth. And I was struck by something Sarah said to me once: that she had never been without a boyfriend since the age of twelve. She had broken up that summer with a boyfriend of a few years and she was clearly unhappy and out of balance over it. I wondered if she was capable of being alone and happy at the same time. At night, lying on my futon in my tiny bedroom, I could occasionally hear love-making -- Daniel and Isabella's to my left, very quiet, hardly more than an intense sigh or two, or Sarah and whoever's to my right, slightly raunchier. It only made me happy that I was independent and unfettered. A few thoughts of Ruth, a little ecstatic masturbation, many thoughts about my novel -- and I would fall soundly asleep, free the next morning to be free.

  I painted my office entirely in white -- the walls, the floor, the window frame, the door, my small desk, my chair. It felt like the inside of a cloud, especially when I looked out my window upon the world. It was from inside this cumulus that I set myself the task of being a small goddess.

  I wanted a corporeal novel, full of foul smells and crude sensations. Three months of Greco-Turkish toilets lingered in my nose from the time when I was discovering my own body, the full pleasures it could give, the fair amidst the foul. There was also a fart; it too was one of those quiz-puzzle links between fact and fiction that academics so love to explore. I was in a toilet on the main campus, peeing -- an innocent pee -- when along came the urge to fart. So be it. A discreet breaking of wind, no more. My stomach was still adjusting to the change of diet from Turkey to Canada. But it boomed like a cannon going off, the sort of sound that has so much ego as to demand the applause of echo. "What was that!?" came a voice beyond my stall, alarmed. A second or two of silence passed, during which I am sure my stall's door was pointed out. I heard several repressed giggles. I was annoyed. In Turkey, Ruth and I talked of our shits as a matter of course. They were not mere fecal matter; they were communiques, they were precis. Which is why we looked at them before washing them down the hole with the pitcher of water -- so that we could read them and be told about ourselves. Colour, consistency, quantity, smell -- so many chapters in an autobiography. In Turkey, after this atomic flatulence, I would have gone to Ruth and said, "Ruth, I just farted like a cannon going off, the sort of sound that has so much ego as to demand the applause of echo." "Really!" she would have replied, paying me her full attention, placing a hand on her belly. "But I feel fine. I haven't farted in hours. Did you shit too? What was it like? How do you feel? Have you been burping? Didn't we eat the same thing this afternoon?" And we would have talked about it for several minutes. But in Canada it was a source of embarrassment. This observation juxtaposed itself upon another, from a minute before: when I entered the washroom, as the euphemism goes, it struck me that the first smell my nose identified was neither piss not shit but hairspray. Three girls, three Christmas trees, were touching themselves up in front of the mirror, each the sole actor and spectator of her vanity. "This place is supposed
to smell bad, not chemical," I thought. "It ought to smell like shit." I vowed that my novel would brim with shit.

  I also wanted to address this matter of God. In quiet moments I had sometimes noticed how, having dismissed God, we -- you and I -- were left not with the plenitude of life, as I expected, since a false being cannot take space, but a vacuum, a sucking emptiness. Could this false being be occupying a necessary space, one that demanded filling? It wasn't often that I felt this, usually when I was thinking of my parents, but at such times life seemed little more than a meaningless shuffle over a short distance for a brief time. It lacked the spirit that would have turned each step into a dance step, with its proper measure, rhythm and grace. I had no real regrets over this -- my life seemed a greater challenge for its spiritual orphanhood -- but occasionally I could intuit how much grander the march of life would be if God were. At such moments the truth or falsity of God's being seemed irrelevant. It was a fiction of such magnitude, why not believe it? What was gained by a truth that left one with an empty feeling? I could get by without God in the illusory infinity of my daily hours, but if I were in a plane about to crash, would I not miss Him? Would I not create Him? And if I survived, would I want to dismiss Him a second time? I wanted to approach religious spirituality in my novel not with the intent of proving anything, but simply to see what it would be like to have faith, regardless of proof.

  My novel, to which I gave the working title Crazy Jane, was a first-person religious allegory set in 1939 in a small Portuguese village some days away from Fatima. To suit my needs I gave the country high, savage mountains. There were a number of characters, but the three protagonists were Corto, a shepherd to whom I gave a club-foot; a magnificent wooden Christ on the Cross, the pride of the village, by the sixteenth-century Portuguese master Joao Ribera do Nova ("Renaissance in its anatomically precise depiction of the suffering body of Christ, a great bulk of tortured wood it is, nailed to a cross and hanging -- see the tension in His hands! see the contorted stretch of His magnificent chest! -- yet truly divine in the grace of His expression"); and the narrator, whom we would meet on the first page, as she is sitting in the middle of the main street of the village, calmly looking out of the novel, so to speak, waiting for us: Corto's dog, a friendly, loquacious, religiously devout mongrel. The bulk of the novel would be narrated by this dog. She would greet us ("Hello!" would be the first word of my first novel), would shit in the middle of the street ("Ohjustonemorepiece! Ahhhhhhhhh such rapture. Amen!") and then she would take us aside to introduce us to the village and its denizens, pissing here and there to demarcate the territory of our fiction. A dog both scatological and religious ("I've always felt that I belonged to a religious order. To have my days marked by the call of prayer, from the early morning adoration of matins, fresh and scintillating like the dew, to the gentle, weary exaltation of complines, as comforting as sleep, would be my summum bonum") struck me as the balance between body and spirit that I was seeking.

  The story would turn on a pilgrimage that the villagers undertake to have their Christ on the Cross blessed by the Archbishop of Fatima. With food and water, and taking turns carrying the cross, they would set off, with Corto's dog in tag to bring us words. The going would be easy. Time for talking and laughing and praying and tea at sunset. But the pilgrims would get lost in the high, savage mountains. There would be terrible snowstorms. They would run out of food and firewood. Out of desperation, and each time throwing themselves onto their knees supplicating God for forgiveness, they would start to eat those villagers who had died of hunger and exposure, roasting them -- and keeping themselves warm in the process -- by burning the Christ on the Cross, first the cross ("They gently brought down Our Saviour from His cross") but then Christ as well. But they would run out of bodies, as they would of Body. As a last act, mad with hunger and the desire to continue living, they would eat the dog, Corto himself doing the killing ("weeping like Abraham"). But this would not mean the loss of our narrator. She would have her head smashed with a rock and she would be skewered and roasted over Christ's burning head, but still we would hear her. Only when she was dismembered and shared among the twelve remaining survivors would we hear her differently: at that moment her voice would split into the twelve voices of the survivors. The novel would end with these voices. The dog's last word, at the bottom of a page, would be that all-embracing word "and" ("For what is it to give up one's life when Christ is so close? He has turned His head. He is looking at me. He smiles! Oh! There is so much light! Take me and"); the next pages of the book would fold out and there would be twelve parallel paragraphs, each different but each starting with that enigmatic word "I", thus: "I was given part of the dog's right leg and though I cannot say that it tasted good, it nonetheless sustained me and I could feel a little strength return to my weary body and I wished that the leg had had more meat on it if ..." or "I was not so lucky and I received the dog's bony head, the brains of which had been lost in its killing and the eyes melted away in its roasting, to my famished regret, and I had to content myself with its crispy ears, its rubbery lips and cheeks and its unexpectedly palatable but small tongue, but I should add that though I derived little carnal pleasure from this feast, it gave me sustenance of another kind, for to hold this small, very warm sphere in my hands reminded me of the time when I was little and I slipped away from helping Mother and I went inside the empty church and played with the chalice, much the size of this skull, balancing it on my open hand, throwing it in the air and catching it, knowing that if I broke it there would be hell to pay, but I didn't break it, and this memory brought me comfort and strength, enough to ...," each voice going on to relate the same story in a different way, like some books of the New Testament: how the next morning, with the strength that eating the dog had given them, the group would manage to struggle and stumble the last few dozen miles down the mountain to reach Fatima, where, in thanks for the reprieve, they would assemble in the basilica and sing the praises of God, their faith unshaken, Joao Ribera do Nova's Christ on the Cross now sculptured in that loveliest but most difficult of materials, air. After a few more words on how each had fared since the tragedy, the twelve voices would close with a common word: "Goodbye."

  My idea in splintering the dog's voice into twelve was to introduce democracy to voice. In the absence of faith, of one Voice, what I could do was celebrate voices, first a small one, then twelve, then more, depending on the vagaries of love and childbirth. A hymn to polyphony was my idea.

  The walls of my office became covered with index cards. These cards were the various puzzle pieces of my novel -- twists of plot; stylistic reminders; bits of dialogue; descriptive dashes; words that struck me, around which I would construct a long sentence, perhaps even a scene ("mendicant look"); themes that should not be forgotten; insights that needed elaboration or proper context; and so on. I neatly bordered each card with a different colour -- blue, brown, green, black or nothing, white -- depending on its importance to my story. At first there were just a few jottings stuck in front of my desk, little helpmates to creativity. In time these cards proliferated and became my novel, all it was, all it would be.

  This geographical Talmud grew upwards till it was nearly touching the ceiling and downwards right to the floor. At mid-height flowed a river, the blue cards, with actual sentences and paragraphs from the novel; it started at the light switch to the left of the door with a card bearing the word "Hello!" and ran from there right around my office, like a panorama, until it opened onto the Sea of the Twelve Goodbyes at the doorframe. Above and below the blue cards were the brown ones, directions that were essential in giving an episode its meaning -- the banks of the river -- and just beyond these the green ones -- the fields of good but general ideas. Farther on lay the black cards of less certain value -- less arable, I might say -- though occasionally I took one down and recopied it and gave it a new colour. Finally, on the very edges of my novel, were the plain index cards, as white as snowcaps. Ideas that had fizzled, aborted ch
aracters, deleted incidents -- it was only out of fearful hoarding that I didn't destroy these jottings. Unsure of what I was doing, I was unsure of the value of my words.

  The only interruption in my vista was the window, one landscape breaking in on another. I tended to gaze at this second landscape when I was in search of inspiration and resolve.

  I placed my desk and chair in the centre of my office, clear of any wall, so that I could glide over the topography with ease. Which is what I did week after week, month after month, for hours at a time. With my eyes I would hover ... hover ... hover -- and then swoop down and catch an index card. I would transport it to my desk and work on it, spilling over onto another card, or two, or three, despite my efforts to make my handwriting microscopic. In some places on the wall where I found myself with much to say but little space, the land became hilly and the river broke into rapids and waterfalls.

  I should have taken photographs of my office when my walls were in full bloom. The Artist and Her Studio: A Novel in Twelve Kodachromes.

  The truth was, I had no idea how to write a novel. I was a Doctor Frankenstein who had accumulated an impressive collection of body parts, and I even knew how they would go together, what parts went where, but the secret of life still eluded me. At regular intervals I sensed that an essential act of conception had not taken place, but I don't recall much misery or anxiety over the matter. I was a happy spectator of my own device. I talked out loud, waved my hands, acted out scenes and when a brilliant new idea struck me -- such as a lovely scene in an empty church of a dog watching a girl playing with a chalice -- I captured it like a passing butterfly and cheerfully pinned it to the wall.